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The civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was much more peaceful than American cities are today, and the evidence suggests that in fact the Old West was not a very violent place at all. History also reveals that the expanded presence of the U.S. government was the real cause of a culture of violence in the American West.
Sep 29, 2022 · Even when a crime was committed in civilized lands, the outlaw inevitably fled west, seeking anonymity in the Territories, far beyond the reach of judicial institutions. Perhaps this is one reason why our perception of crime and violence in the West is so askew. It’s common lore that the frontier was a violent cauldron of mayhem and murder ...
- Chase Pletts
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Feb 20, 2024 · Violence In The Wild West Billy the Kid. In Wikipedia. By Ben Wittick - Brian Lebel's Old West Show and AuctionFile:Billy the Kid tintype, Fort Sumner, 1879-80.jpg, Public Domain, Wikipedia. The violent reputation that the Wild West holds today often stems from the early years of the era.
Men, money, liquor, and disappointment were a recipe for violence. Fights were frequent, deaths were commonplace, and frontier justice reigned. The notorious mining town of Bodie, California, had twenty-nine murders between 1877 and 1883, which translated to a murder rate higher than any other city at that time, and only one person was ever ...
To appreciate how violent the West was, we need to consider not only the annual homicide rate, but the risk of being murdered over time. For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year, meaning that 0.165 percent of the population was murdered each year—between a fifth and a ...
Feb 5, 2018 · Crime records in the Old West are sketchy, and even where they exist the modern FBI yardstick of measuring homicides rates – the number of homicides per 100,000 residents – can exaggerate ...
violent place: “despite all the mythologizing, violent fatalities in the Old West tended to be rare rather than common.” In a series of reviews and articles written over the past fifteen years, the most recent in Western Historical Quarterly, Dykstra claims that quantitative historians are wrong about the West being “murderous.”
