For those who haven’t seen the movie, John Wayne plays J.B. Books, a dying man with a notorious past as a gunfighter throughout the old West, and in establishing this the first part of the movie runs through several of his exploits from decades earlier, using footage from earlier John Wayne movies. Books has cancer, and has come to Carson City to live out his remaining weeks.
In one scene, a saloon owner regrets the news that Books is terminally ill because, so he says, he could have taken him. A customer responds, “My ass!” and is told he can either leave immediately or be killed. He angrily stalks toward the exit, but just as he gets there he turns and fires on the owner, missing. The owner fires back and kills him.
Did this sort of thing still go on in 1901? It was the 20th century. The people in town have electricity and indoor plumbing, a few even have cars. At this point in history I thought this type of gratuitous gun violence was a thing in the past. Oh, of course there was plenty of gun violence in the 20th century too, but usually this was ancillary to some other crime being committed or attempted.
Gratuitous violence in places that serve alcohol never really goes out of style. Even today, many places that serve alcohol employ bouncers or have to call on the police when their customers grow rowdy and violent. Surprisingly this includes Chuck E. Cheese restaurants and saloons were no different. One of the arguments prohibitionist made was that these places were violent dens of sins and vices and it wasn’t just hyperbole.
I don’t know if the violence seems accurate for Carson City in 1901. But if you go through newspapers you’ll inevitably find something similar happening in other places around the same time period. People drinking and then getting into fights which may or may not involve firearms.
The movie may have shown that (I don’t remember, it’s been too long) but it is unlikely to have been true in 1901. It was 1925 until half the homes in America had electricity, and most of the half that didn’t was probably rural or exurban. I don’t think the case was much different for indoor plumbing (depending on whether you mean piped cold water only, or include piped hot water and a flush toilet). My father, in the 1920’s and 30’s, had neither.
The wild west wasn’t as violent as the movies portrayed, it had some acute flare-ups of violence but the casual violence portrayed would not be typical. And 1901 was mostly past conflicts with Native Americans or
At the time Carson was near the nadir of population as mining moved on, so it wasn’t a boomtown with tons of roughnecks. The population rebounded but it’s very sleepy.
In architecture school, I was taught that Carson City and the immediate surrounding area was very affluent by Western standards. That “Back East” there was plenty of money from industries besides beef, but out toward the West large accumulations of money came exclusively from mining interests. (Oil was barely an industry then, and cattle was significant but split amongst too many individuals.)
Because of the silver mines, Carson City had more Victorian Homes than any other place West of the Mississippi River. What is more, Victorian homes in the West were even more expensive than their Eastern equivalents because the materials had to be delivered to these far reaches by horse drawn wagons and a lot of the filigreed details were only manufactured back east and would often be damaged during transit because they were fragile and had to go a long, long way.
One of the wealthiest mines in the Western United States was Bodie in the Eastern Sierra. Although they generated a lot of wealth, very little of it was held locally. The owners took the profits out of the area and even went out of their way to control access to the town (they also owned the only delivery wagons and the only stage coach which was allowed into the town). That town was exclusively made of small, humble homes – and for the Chinese, only a tent city about a quarter of a mile away.
Again, too much background to say that most of the western United States looked like the Ponderosa at best and like two room sheds most commonly. But in Carson City alone there were more elegant homes than in entire states of the west. The professor was asked about the rowdy nature of the west and said that the large investment in the town did have a civilizing influence but it was not a cure-all by any stretch of the imagination. He pointed out that Tombstone, Arizona was also briefly affluent but that it did not last long enough to impact architecture (still way more shacks and sheds than fine Victorian homes – if any at all) and that Tombstone did have a much higher murder rate than Carson City. When I did have occasion to visit Carson City, I was shocked at the number of older buildings of substance (I had always kind of suspected the professor of being an elitist know it all who trusted his own voice more than any other, but in this case he seemed to be quite correct).
Forgot to mention earlier that in places like Boston and New York there was so much more modern comfort and even technology than there was even two steps out of New England. When Kansas was a wild, wide open territory, eastern cities had been civilized cities for a century or more. Philadelphia was another city with more wealth, more architecture, more substance than whole swaths of the west. The nation really was two different countries back then just by access to technology. (Fans of Firefly might recognize a similarity to the divide between the central planets and the remote colonies on moons and the like.)
Nitpick: That wasn’t the saloon owner, but the resident faro dealer. Either an employee or an independent contractor. Probably the latter with the "take’ split between him and the house.
Yes, this is what I’ve heard as well. Incidents like the OK Corral shootout and Wild Bill Hickok getting shot while playing poker were exceptions, not daily or weekly occurrences. Things like shootout duels at high noon were pure fiction.
The Old West was sensationalized and mythologized beginning in its own time, as dime store novels about exaggerated exploits out west became popular east of the Mississippi. By the 1940s and 50s, as Western movies and TV shows became popular, the fictional iconography and ‘code’ of the Old West was further crystallized.
The iconic Cowboy, for example- heroic and proud, high in the saddle, wearing a Stetson hat and always carrying his holstered 6-shooters: Cowboys were actually low-paid workers on the ranches outside of towns; they wore wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces, but the iconic Stetson style hat didn’t exist until sometime in the very late 19th or early 20th century. The wide-brimmed hats real cowboys wore weren’t nearly as cool-looking. It was far from a glamorous job to be a cowboy.
In town, bowlers were the most widely worn hat. And I’m pretty sure I’ve read that many, if not most towns. had a policy that guns had to be checked in at the city limits, precisely to avoid drunks shooting up their saloons.
It really depended on exactly where you were; for example as much as Texas is thought of as some sort of epicenter of the “Old West” or “Wild West”, most of the eastern half of the state (basically along and east of where I-35 is) had been civilized for decades by that point, and by the early 1880s, had stuff like railroads, telephones, universities, electric lighting, opera houses, and all the other trappings of civilization.
It was in the relatively sparsely populated part of the state west of where I-35 is today, and south of San Antonio where the “Old West” kind of stuff happened, like the buffalo hunting, wars vs. the Native Americans (mostly Comanche), cattle drives, etc…
According to this link, CC had electricity as early as the 1880s. This wasn’t so unusual given its location in a mining region. Mine operators found electrification extremely useful for running stamping mills and other equipment, so they were very early adopters. Utilities were established providing electricity to not only the mills, but the local towns as well.
In the movie you can see electric lights and ceiling fans at the Metropole Saloon, as well as in another scene where Books turns on a table lamp. (Or turns it off, whichever it was.)
Speaking of hats, I love the way Ron Howard’s character wears a cloth cap, a look which we more typically associate with large cities in the early 20th century.
IIRC what I’ve read in various places, citizens of small Western towns did their best to dress like anyone else in the Victorian era, with suits, ties, hats, etc. Few people bellied up to the bar wearing cowboy gear and Levi’s with three inch cuffs, as sometimes seen in old TV shows and movies.
It bears mentioning that the “wars” against Native American tribes were usually based on trumped up fictions of Native predations on white settlers. They were basically just in the way of land grabs. The Comanche Nation was one of the last to be subdued, defending their homeland ferociously for as long as possible. As with most Native tribes, they were subdued more by disease than anything else.
Only a very minute fraction of the posters here have a good understanding of how much violence there actually was in the old West because our beliefs are dominated by all the Westerns we have seen rather than the few weeks we studied the old West in high school… But undoubtedly vastly more people died of accidents where they was only totally inadequate medical care many hours or days away than from violence.
I know… but the post I was replying to was saying that the West was mostly shacks and undeveloped, and I was saying that it was really dependent on where you were- places like say… Galveston or Carson City were definitely pretty sophisticated by the era of “The Shootist”, while others were still not much different than they were in 1850.
The question is would the violence in one scene of The Shootist seem accurate for Carson City in 1901–and I’d counter that it’d be reasonably accurate in any bar in America at any time, including now. Essentially what happens in this scene is one man (the faro dealer) threatens another, the threatened man walks away, then decides to try and shoot the dealer, the dealer out shots him and kills him. Shootings in bars still happen literally to this day. If it was a scene that showed some 20 man shoot out hat goes on for 30 minutes between two rival outlaw gangs…I would understand OP, but the nature of this shooting is such that it’s typical of gun violence…just about anywhere in the country even in modern times?
Now the shoot-out at the end of the film, in which Wayne’s character basically schedules his own suicide by arranging for three men with nefarious intents towards him to meet him at the (emptied) saloon in the middle of the day? That the “Town Marshal” does nothing about? Yeah, there’s no way that goes down in 1901. For one Carson City wasn’t patrolled by a lone Old West “Town Marshal”, they had a professional Sheriff’s department then for Ormsby County (which is essentially just Carson City.)