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- [00:00]
Don Wildman
Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland. There is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe to bring the Past Alive
- [00:32]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [00:40]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [00:44]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [00:53]
Stephen
That's right.
- [00:53]
Don Wildman
Hei hei.
- [00:54]
Stephen
So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [00:58]
Hayden
And along the way we'll do character, Deep Div, Magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [01:05]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:18]
Don Wildman
Here we are sometime in, say, late 1880s in a rough, shod town on the dry, dusty plains of the American West. Here in the saloon, the bartender slings bourbon shots. Gamblers lean over their cards. Laughter drifts down from the girls on the balcony when suddenly two hard eyed men square off over a pile of poker chips. One backs away, swaggering through the swinging doors. The other follows, and a minute later they're both in the street, facing each other at a distance, hands hovering over their holstered guns. This is the Wild west as we often imagine it. The one we think we know. Meanwhile, out there on the edge of town, another drama unfolds. Surveyors hammer stakes into the ground, an engineer studies his maps. Crews prepare to lay miles of steel railroad track that will skirt past town and punch through the mountains in the distance, changing everything about this county, this whole territory, and the people who live here. Gunfight, if it even happens, lasts seconds. This other violence upon the land itself moves slowly, relentlessly. More mundane perhaps, but far more consequential, because once that first locomotive steams through town, watch out what happens to the Wild West? Good day and welcome. I'm Don Wildman and this is American History. Hit Imagine a place of relentlessly wide open skies, vast, unforgiving terrain. Towns separated by a full day's ride on horseback at least this is the fabled American west as we think we know it. Epic, lawless, mythic, A land of outlaws and gunslingers, of rugged individualism and frontier justice. But how much of that all so familiar picture is reality? And how much is legend? Today we're looking past the myth to consider how wild was the Wild West? Our guide today is Torre Olson, Associate professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Govals. His works include the award winning Agrarian Crossings, Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, and more recently, Red Dead's History, A Video Game, An Obsession and America's Violent Past. Professor Olson Torrey, nice to meet you.
- [03:58]
Torrey Olson
Hey, nice to meet you, Don. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
- [04:02]
Don Wildman
You're very welcome, Tory. Your book I just mentioned, Red Dead's History, was published in 2024, very recently and concerns the video game phenomenon known as Red Dead Redemption, which was first released in 2010, then a new version, 2018. I did my research. One of the most successful games ever made has sold an ungodly number of copies, like 82 million or something. So, as a professor of history, how useful do you find video games as a means of teaching modern college students?
- [04:34]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, well, surprisingly useful in part because the general public and students as well, they very often encounter history through pop culture. And I think throughout much of the 20th century this was through the lens of television, of film, of literature and so forth. But in the last 20 years, more and more students, and just general people are encountering history on this digital, playable interactive screen. And that really matters because I don't think that video games necessarily teach all that much history, but they do plant seeds of curiosity and of interest which are then very ripe for someone like myself to harvest to, to nurture and to use the sort of pre existing passion and, and curiosity that students have that they've learned through games as a way of actually getting them to grapple with the usually much more complicated and nuanced history of, of what actually happened.
- [05:39]
Don Wildman
Yeah, it's very engaging medium. I mean, as a person, my generation who didn't grow up with them, who pinballs was about as complicated as my gaming was. I look at these modern games and go, oh my gosh, it's an amazing world unto itself. But how accurate in Red Dead is the picture of the American West? I mean, is it as comic book or like the movies?
- [06:02]
Torrey Olson
Right. Well, it's a little bit of both. So there's really two core Red Dead Redemption games and my book fundamentally looks at the second one, red Dead Redemption 2, which came out in 2018, as you mentioned, it's set in 1899 in both the west and in the south and in Appalachia. And I find that it's a lot more smarter and rich of a game than the first one. The first one has some strengths, but I really emphasize the second one in part because it's much more popular and it's much more recent. And I think in many ways the question to ask is not, is it historically accurate? Because the game is fictionalized, right? The names of people and places are all made up. It's very hard to compare it kind of a one to one comparison to, you know, Wyoming or Louisiana in that same time period, because, you know, stuff is made up. I think the question we need to ask, is it historically thoughtful? And to me, historically thoughtful means something a little differently. Not does it recreate the sort of, you know, granular details of everyday life, but does it engage some of the big questions and dilemmas that Americans actually cared and thought about in the time period? And I actually do find red Dead Redemption 2 to be a historically thoughtful game in the sense that it engages a lot of the core dilemmas that, you know, are really transforming American life. I mean, the role of big corporations, the role of railroads, the cattle ranching industry as a transformer of space and of politics, the role of gunslingers. But thinking of gunslingers is beyond just the mythology that Hollywood has given us. So I actually think that, you know, on the whole, the accuracy is often suffering. You know, there's. The timing is way off. I mean, Red Dead 2 is set in 1899, but it really is a game about subjects that took place in the early 1870s. So it's like, you know, 30 years off or so. But I think there's a lot to work with in Red Dead 2.
- [08:04]
Don Wildman
To be sure, it's a mashup in many ways. But what I find interesting is by choosing 1899, they're really talking about the transition moment or transitional era of when the west really becomes part of, you know, linked with the railroad and so forth. And industry is moving out there. And it's really the that same Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid kind of theme of, you know, the melancholy we've lost this Garden of Eden kind of feeling. But.
- [08:30]
Torrey Olson
And indeed, if there's a single documented historical episode that inspired Red Dead 2, it probably is Butch Cassidy's Hole in the Wall Gang.
- [08:38]
Don Wildman
Yeah, exactly. Only my favorite movie of all time. So I want to talk though, about Americans idea of this era. It takes about two centuries of American west immigrant settlement for this sort of romanticized and glamorized stylized idea of the West. Through all these dime store novels and widescreen movies, it's always been a story of good versus evil played out on the plains. So let's reassess this history with this conversation. If I was a non hero, average Joe, you know, not a character in a video game or a movie post Civil War and I decided to go west, what would I have experienced out there? Is there a kind of typical baseline there?
- [09:22]
Torrey Olson
Not really. There's so much diversity depending on where you go, right. If you move to a farming community in South Dakota, let's say everyone around you are Norwegian immigrants, you're going to see a very different place than if you move to a mining town and in Colorado or California or to a ranching town in Kansas or Texas or a place like that. So huge chunks of the west were quite sleepy and boring and very nonviolent to be sure. But of course there were sort of hot zones, pockets where there was a great deal of chaos and, you know, lots of strangers encountering each other in this high pressure scenarios. And it's true that those pockets, places like Abilene, Kansas, Greeley, Colorado, that could be quite violent because there's a lot of sort of colliding forces coming together and a lot of alcohol and tension and, you know, potential profits to be made.
- [10:24]
Don Wildman
I guess this has a lot to do with Manifest Destiny. But who coined the, the term Wild West?
- [10:30]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know if there's a single originator who we can give credit to or blame too, for this, but the term, you know, starts to become frequently used by the 1870s and 1880s. So it's in the very moment that, you know, so many westerns are set, fictional westerns, that this, this concept is arising. And I would, I would probably give credit in part to Buffalo Bill Cody, William Cody, who's this paradoxical guy who's one week he's, you know, in Wyoming, you know, fighting native peoples or, you know, engaged in violent conflict. And then the next week he's in New York on stage performing about it to, you know, gleeful audiences who are eager to swallow up this sort of western mythology. So it is, you know, this mythology is being created at the very moment that the history is actually taking place, which is a very interesting paradox.
- [11:24]
Don Wildman
And it's really. The term is the frontier. And the frontier changes so much as the nation expands. But even the idea, I Asked myself this, and I went looking for where did frontier even become a notion to certainly white people? It was really under the Romans. The Romans kind of popularized the idea because of their marches north into the Germanic territories and Gallic and all that. That became a frontier area for them. And that has been carried forth. That there's always this area that just was very dangerous, but full of promise and off we will go. And that becomes inevitably glamorized and mysterious. It becomes a mysterious thing in the West. Around 1880, what was the average settlement on the Expanse like? Are we, you know, the, the image again, I'm, I'm really the guy here talking about these archetypal things. The image is the saloon, the sheriff's office, the main street with a few, you know, homes on it and so forth, and the, the stables. How typical was that? And was there some sort of guide to, to building a town in those days?
- [12:23]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, I mean, certainly there's outpost settlements. You know, I think Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, what's today South Dakota, is a sort of, you know, iconic place, but really they exist because there's big industries going on. Right. So for Deadwood example, there's gold mining that's drawing lots of people there. Often it was ranching, agriculture, but large scale ranching undertakings. And I think what's absent in so many of the mythical representations of these sleepy frontier towns is, is capitalism, and in particularly industrial capitalism. Because so much of Western history is about Eastern power interests trying to flex their muscles and take control of landscapes and materials and people as well in this region. And so much of the violence that defined the west in the late 19th century was actually violence about capitalism and violence about politics. And, you know, that doesn't show up in the John Wayne version of American Western history.
- [13:24]
Don Wildman
Tell me about a figure named Frederick Jackson Turner.
- [13:27]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, well, I don't think there's any single individual who does more to popularize this sort of significance of the frontier as the sort of backbone of American history and also popularize this notion of the west as this thing that's closing, that's, that's beginning to wane, that is you know, being tamed and domesticated and civilized. So Frederick Jackson Turner is this historian, and usually historians, he's a history professor. Usually they don't have vast impact on American culture in the same way that this guy does. But in 1893, at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which was this huge fair held in Chicago in 1893, it was meant to celebrate the 400 year anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the Americas. And he gives this address and basically says, you know, the frontier is what defines the American character. It's what makes Americans this process of taming what he called empty land. They weren't actually empty at all, but that's how he imagined them. That this really defined the American character, that it made Americans kind of democratic, like small d democratic. They made them egalitarian, made them individualistic, and made them different from Europe. But then he warns folks as well that, hey, you know, that world is coming to an end, the frontier is closing. And, and he's really anxious about it, you know, because if he, if he sees the frontier as like what made America great in that period, then he's very worried that something's going to come to an end. So in many ways, like in dozens of western films and certainly in red Dead Redemption 2, which is very much a game about the sort of closing quote unquote of the frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner should be in the credits. Like he should be given, you know, credit for coining a lot of this mythology. The problem is that it's really mythology. It's not really history. It's just even the idea of an Old west and a New West. I'm not convinced that there's such a neat distinction that there's like a neat perforation mark between one and the other.
- [15:30]
Don Wildman
It's amazing how, you know, how much, at least in our memory, the poets and the writers of that time period were really grappling with this major, these major themes of what American America meant, you know, for better or worse, and certainly in its cruel form, you know, chasing people off their lands eventually. But in terms of the manifest destiny and freedom and Republicanism and all the things that were coming up in the 19th century, coming out of certainly the age of revolution, which is earlier. It's amazing how broad stroke they were getting with this stuff. And the frontier and the American west, it figures centrally into that, doesn't it?
- [16:08]
Torrey Olson
Absolutely. I really think that when Easterners and most of the folks writing this are Easterners right in the US from New York or from Washington or Boston or something, when they look at the west, what they're really doing is looking into a mirror and trying to figure out something about themselves. And indeed, so much of the fantasy about the west is really about Eastern anxieties more than anything. For example, let's take Teddy Roosevelt, right? Teddy Roosevelt's one of these, you know, well known chroniclers of the West. He writes this multi book series called the Winning of the West. He was obsessed with, you know, going out to the Dakotas, ranching, riding on horseback and all this sort of stuff. Well, a lot of the reason why has to do with his anxieties of what life was like back home, which is New York. Right. He's a wealthy New Yorker. He's living at a moment when industrialization is redefining American cities, when people are moving off of farms and moving into factories or offices. For him, very much offices, because he comes from this well to do background. And they're doing work that's super different than what they'd grown up with. Right. They're not performing muscular tasks on a farm anymore. They're balancing checkbooks. They are, you know, looking at accounting ledgers. They are typing letters. And for. For Roosevelt, this made him really anxious because he believed that this was affecting American manhood. He believed that office life, that industrial urban life was emasculating men, that it was basically removing their masculine prowess. And that made him very nervous. Right. So he sees the west as this safety valve that can restore this fading American, you know, masculinity or grandiosity or whatever. So when he's looking at South Dakota, he's really just seeing a mirror inverse of New York City, which is really important to note.
- [17:54]
Don Wildman
God forbid we end up like those Europeans.
- [17:58]
Torrey Olson
That's right. Many Americans were very anxious about that. Right. Because they really saw, you know, especially white, well, to do Americans, they look at Europe and they're trying to define themselves in opposition to that, to be certain. Right. They see the aristocracy and inequality of Europe and they're like, we don't want to be that. We are the antithesis.
- [18:15]
Don Wildman
How common was the violence in these frontier towns?
- [18:19]
Torrey Olson
Again, it depends where you look, right. If you look at, like, German American, Norwegian American, Hutterite colonies, you know, on the agricultural colonies, they're like some of the least violent places that you could imagine. Of course, you know, they came after a great deal of violence, which was the military removing native people so that they could settle there. So they're living in the aftermath of violence. But yes, there's a lot of very, you know, peaceful, homogenous communities across the West. But there are lots of places where bullets did fly. Parts of Wyoming and ranching country, the Johnson county war of the 1880s and 1890s. I mean, those are violent showdowns. Different parts of Missouri where Jesse James is doing his business. I'm happy to talk more about him later on. Parts of Kansas and Texas where people like Wild Bill Hickok are Plying their trade. Yeah, there was violence, you know, and it's very hard to get, like, really reliable homicide data from this period just because the bean counters were not all that sophisticated at the time. But from the numbers that we do have, we can tell that the sort of the most chaotic locations out west were definitely more violent than, like, New York or Baltimore or Boston at the time. Like, the per capita homicide rate was distinctly higher in the most kind of rambunctious frontier towns in the west in the, you know, late 19th century.
- [19:45]
Don Wildman
One of the things that's most enlightening in this podcast series of how many times you talk about economic emergencies in the 19th century, you know, major panics and so forth, and how much that really intersects with political events, certainly. But also, I've never really seen how it works in terms of people settlement in the West. You know, there must be these surges of people that go out in response to these things, but there must be also criminals who go looking for to exploit this world when things are hurting back home.
- [20:14]
Torrey Olson
Yeah.
- [20:15]
Don Wildman
Let's step away for a moment, and when we return, we'll talk a little more about those outlaws and the authorities on their trail.
- [20:25]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fanfellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [20:33]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [20:37]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Matthew Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [20:46]
Stephen
That's right.
- [20:47]
Don Wildman
Hei, hei.
- [20:47]
Stephen
So each week, you'll get my unfiltered, raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [20:51]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [20:58]
Stephen
News flash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:05]
Dan Snow
Hi there. I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's history podcast. I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you want to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history, with details I can guarantee you never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Aquitaine Roll the most powerful, powerful women in the medieval world as she goes on crusade to the holy land. With 300 handmaidens in tow, she leads her own army.
- [21:45]
Hayden
Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.
- [21:47]
Dan Snow
And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's history.
- [22:10]
Don Wildman
Hello, we're back speaking with professor and author Tori Olson about the for real of the American West. Probably the outlaws, those glowering villains riding in black, slinging their guns and shots of bourbon. How much crime was really being committed out there and, and did it so often end up with people drawing on each other in the street?
- [22:31]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, most of that is a complete fantasy in many ways. You know, I've spent a lot of time looking at the Red Dead redemption video games. And In Red Dead 2, Arthur Morgan, the protagonist, the minimum number of people that he kills during his adventure is somewhere around 900. Okay, that is an absolutely bizarre overinflation of violence that took place. Right. I mean there were outlaws who, you know, had, you know, committed homicide frequently, but there's, there's only a handful of outlaws that even kill the dozen people. Right. So like, you know, looking at someone with hundreds of. I mean, it's just completely bizarre. Nevertheless, right. There are these famous outlaws. I mean, I think Jesse James is a sort of classic example. But what gets lost in the story of Jesse James is that his bloodshed, his fighting, his bank robberies, they had a lot to do with politics. He is really a leftover from the Civil War rather than this sort of western anti hero. You joked about him, you know, about the villains wearing black. Well, the James gang would actually sometimes wear all white because they wore the garb of the Ku Klux Klan.
- [23:43]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [23:44]
Torrey Olson
They would wear robes to signify their allegiance to Southern Democratic politics because they're these leftovers from the Civil War, Right. They'd been fighting in Missouri against a Republican union oriented US forces. So, you know, politics infuses all of this. Usually it's Democrats shooting at Republicans and Republicans shooting at Democrats. I mean, this is what is largely true of the outlaws of the West. But you know, the partisan identity of outlaws is something that never comes through in Hollywood or video games.
- [24:15]
Don Wildman
A lot have had to come out of Kansas, right. During the 1850s.
- [24:19]
Torrey Olson
Oh yeah, right. I mean, Kansas is very divided states, just like Missouri. Missouri even more so in many ways because Kansas at least was squarely within the United States. I mean, Missouri is too. But yes, I mean, you know, we tend to separate the Civil War from the western violence of the 1870s and 1880s. But how could that possibly be the case? I mean this is in the direct aftermath and many of the key dilemmas of the Civil War are not resolved by the time of 1865. There's still a lot of stewing animosities about these questions.
- [24:50]
Don Wildman
Yeah, there was a. I mean these ex Confederate guerrillas are really what we're talking about here. And they're, they're basically carrying on this war, certainly in Jesse James's case, but, but also in the techniques that they've learned, you know, cavalrymen and so forth.
- [25:02]
Torrey Olson
Sure.
- [25:02]
Don Wildman
Of how to operate this way. Boy, it's just a breeding ground for that kind of mentality and that sort of alienation also which would find a home in, in such wild worlds as outside out there.
- [25:14]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, a lot of them are former guerrillas. Right. I mean form who'd been practicing unconventional warfare in, you know, these sorts of semi military environments.
- [25:25]
Don Wildman
Yeah, but it's also centered around, as you say before, the hot pockets of, you know, ongoing wealth or at least discovery of wealth. Those mining communities down in the southwest, you know, Texas, on over New Mexico, what becomes New Mexico and Arizona, those are places where silver is being mined and so forth. And you know, this becomes its own little magnet for so much commerce, but also criminality, I imagine.
- [25:49]
Torrey Olson
Right. Yeah. I mean one of the most famous explosions of western violence is in a small town called Ludlow in Colorado in the nineteen teens, in nineteen fourteen actually. But this is not an more than a dozen people are killed in this explosion of violence around a mining town. But this is not a sort of moment of western violence that usually makes it into Hollywood because this is about a strike. This is about a labor conflict between the Rockefeller families owned mining company and then a really diverse group of miners who are, who are on strike. And you know, we tend to suck the politics and unionism out of the western history story. But it was a huge part of it.
- [26:34]
Don Wildman
How much of the law, the institution of the law, the sheriff, the deputies, all that, how much is that real and was it part of a structure that I'm not aware of in terms of how they plant this system in these new territories?
- [26:48]
Torrey Olson
Well, yeah, so it depends whether you know, this is a territory or a state. There's you know, a formal transition between those that's very significant. Very often the sort of the law. The sheriffs, if you will, were the representatives of eastern businesses who were coming there to safeguard the extraction of capital of raw materials back east And I think here a classic example is Wild Bill Hickok. Wild Bill Hickok is this peace officer who's working in ranching towns, who is there to basically protect the interests of the meatpacking corporations, the railroads, the banks, which are almost all eastern in origin, or at least Chicago in origin, either Chicago or eastern cities. And they're almost all Republican. And Wild Bill Hickok is a dyed in the wool Republican as well, who is trying to protect the institution of industrial capitalism in the west and keep folks from, you know, getting grit in the gears. Particularly cowboys, Texas cowboys, who tended to be Democrats who were much more hostile toward these big eastern businesses and who, you know, were still had gripes about the Civil War. This is, you know, 10, 15 years later on. So Wild Bill Hickok, you know, he's. He's this Republican who's often shooting at Democratic cowboys, which is quite fascinating.
- [28:12]
Don Wildman
It's so similar to the Pinkertons, you know, anywhere how private security was really the police force in so many situations that we assume there was government involved and it wasn't.
- [28:23]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, well, the Pinkertons is something I love to chat about because they have a very special place in Red Dead Redemption 2. They are the only institution that is not fictionalized. In Red Dead 2. They are called the Pinkertons. That's exactly the same name that they went by in the late 19th century. And this actually got the developer Rockstar Games in a bit of trouble because the Pinkerton agency still exists in much reduced format. And they sued Rockstar Games saying that they were, you know, defaming their reputation by portraying them so negatively on the screen. But of course, the Pinkertons were very real. However, most of the time they were breaking unions in labor strikes and disputes rather than chasing outlaws. I mean, they did chase some outlaws, to be sure, but by the 1890s, they're really this sort of hired guns of big business in a sort of industrial setting.
- [29:18]
Don Wildman
Well, here you have the exact intersection we're talking about, because the image of the sheriff, the Gary Cooper and High Noon, even Clint Eastwood and his weird, you know, guy who wanders around. Guy. There are all these moralistic lessons that are being taught, you know, in Hollywood, utilizing the canvas of this world, which is so rich and useful for storytelling purposes, when in fact, I mean, in Clint Eastwood's case, it's an Italian director shooting in Italy. You know, it's that far away from reality. It's amazing. You know, who I love is Wyatt Earp, you know, famous, of course, from the Tombstone shootout. But he's the deputy U.S. marshal in Tombstone, Arizona. Famous in 1881 for that. But he goes on, he has this amazing career afterwards where he ends up in boxing and all sorts of things. Just this amazing longer career than we ever give. Give notice to. But it's it. He was kind of typical, I would imagine, of these law enforcement officers out there who come from different backgrounds, who are there for different purposes. And certainly it's not as ordered and, you know, routine and operation as we see in the movies again, or Gunsmoke on tv.
- [30:25]
Torrey Olson
Yeah. And it gets at that core theme here that many of these larger than life figures are performers themselves, Right. That they are actors representing themselves at the same time that they're engaged in the actual business that they're doing. And again, Buffalo Bill Cody, I think, is the most sort of prominent example of that paradox.
- [30:43]
Don Wildman
Another character in all of this is the railroad. Once the railroad comes out, it changes the whole story. I guess you could go even before that is the barbed wire fence. You know, like these. These technological achievements or advances that absolutely change the landscape, never mind the function of these lands. And we're not even talking about Native Americans and how that's complicating the situation as well. But the railroad comes and it becomes its. Its own sort of villain in a way. Although, of course, it's not. It certainly is portrayed that way in so many movies, isn't it?
- [31:16]
Torrey Olson
Well, the railroads were viciously hated by many, many Westerners who knew, you know, Western settlers, whether they were miners or farmers or whatnot, they knew that they were dependent on the railroads because the railroads were their commercial link to the wider economy. But they despised the railroads because of their power and because they often felt that they were being taken advantage of by these large, powerful corporations. And they were often right because railroads were very frequently known to exercise monopolistic power and to gouge customers and to jack up rates for some customers and reduce them for others. So, you know, the railroad is a central protagonist in the Western drama, but the railroad, and we have to think of them, they're really Eastern tools of capital extraction. They are out west because they are funneling the wealth of the plains, of the mountains, of the forests to into Eastern hands, right? The timber is going to make apartment complexes in Brooklyn, New York, for example. The meat of the planes is going to plates in Boston and Baltimore. The coal is going to be burned in stoves to keep, you know, the Bostonians warm during the bitter winter. And it's all coming on rail cars, right? I mean, the railroad is this sort of manifestation of industrial capitalism out in the West.
- [32:35]
Don Wildman
Yeah. There's a couple anecdotes, historical anecdotes that fascinate me. First of all, the. I mean, talk about dividing the nation. You really have the Northern railroad, the Central railroad, and the Southern Railroad, and they kind of divide the country up that way. Most people don't realize that's where those interstates come from. You know, you can drive on Route 80 going across. You can drive these major courses, intercourses there, and they're all tracing that same old route that those original railroads are there and still are.
- [33:02]
Torrey Olson
Well, once you blow up a mountain, you don't want to do it again.
- [33:05]
Don Wildman
That's right. The other thing that fascinated me, and I was just out in San Francisco talking to friends of mine who are living there now, and they are staring at Alcatraz, and I said, you know, Alcatraz was this old, you know, military brig, but it was the Union's fear of losing the gold that was in the mint in San Francisco, which they couldn't get back east until the railroad came, that caused the need for creating Alcatraz as a fort. That was the first impulse to do that.
- [33:31]
Torrey Olson
Yeah. Well, San Francisco is a huge railroad town, though I think it's less acknowledged nowadays. I mean, Stanford University, for example, it's founded by Leland Stanford, who's this railroad tycoon of the 1860s and 70s who was also widely despised in his time for all sorts of unscrupulous business practices.
- [33:50]
Don Wildman
When we come back, we'll discuss the major costs and consequences of this continental expansion across the west, the main drivers, and the primary victims.
- [34:03]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy, ho, and welcome to Fantasy fanfellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [34:11]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [34:15]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before.
- [34:23]
Stephen
That's right.
- [34:24]
Don Wildman
Hey.
- [34:24]
Stephen
Hey. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [34:28]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [34:36]
Stephen
News flash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find fantasy fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:43]
Dan Snow
Hi, there. I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you want to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history, with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmades Maidens in
- [35:21]
Hayden
tow, she leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.
- [35:24]
Dan Snow
And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's history.
- [35:47]
Don Wildman
We're talking to Tori Olson about the American west and its facts and fictions. How central was violence towards Native Americans in this frontier expansion? Again, we see the cowboys and Indian movies, they're called. All that sort of spectacular violence was not really part of regular life, wasn't it?
- [36:07]
Torrey Olson
Well, you just don't have US Western history if you don't have this violent expropriation and dispossession of native peoples, right? I mean, to make the west the. The west, meaning that it should be defined in relation to the east, the backbone of the nation. That takes a lot of violence, right? Because Native people didn't think of Wyoming or South Dakota, what's today South Dakota, as the west. They thought of as the center, right? As their home. The Mexicans thought about it as the North. It was part of Northern Mexico, of course. So to make, you know, a place like Wyoming or California, the west took a lot of violence, took a lot of, um, you know, a lot of this was achieved at the end point of rifle, to be certain. And of course, you know, this cinematic theme of so called cowboys and Indians has been reinforced so often, but it was extremely rare that cowboys would be the ones engaged in combat with native peoples. It's really the US Military. The US Military is the force that's doing so. By the time the cowboys show up, native peoples have been largely removed from the picture. And the story about military encounters between native peoples of, of which there's such tremendous diversity as to how they live, the languages they speak, the cultures they practice. That is a tremendous story that defines many hundreds of years, but really comes to a crescendo in terms of violence and drama. In the 1860s and 1870s. I mean, those are the decades when frequent battles between native tribes and the government through the military are happening on a regular basis.
- [37:38]
Don Wildman
Has everything to do with the Homestead act, doesn't it? 1862.
- [37:41]
Torrey Olson
It does, though a lot of it precedes it, of course, as well. But certainly the Homestead act brings a new pressure point of settlers coming at this tremendous rate. And the settlers often cared little about what kinds of treaties Washington had negotiated with various native groups. They were like, this is good land we're going to move here. And, you know, not just settlers, but mining companies. And, you know, there's tremendous pressure that results from these new invaders, essentially. Right. Eastern invaders, who are coming to claim lands that were not at all theirs and weren't even legally available, whether or not through the Homestead Act.
- [38:15]
Don Wildman
Tell me how the great hunts of these bison. I mean, it was such a. An amazing visual that people back east got. Where did that figure into this?
- [38:24]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, yeah, this is something I care about a lot, because in red Dead Redemption 2, the kind of most popular western video game ever made, bison hunting is a central part of the game as well. But we really need to think of the bison hunts as an ecological struggle for dominance on the plains, because bison are this, you know, large ruminant, meaning that they have stomachs that can digest grass well. And native peoples had depended on the bison for quite some time, especially in the 1700s and 1800s, on bison herds to sustain themselves. But when white settlers come in, they want to replace the bison with another ruminant, this being, of course, the cow. And they don't see these two as. As being able to share the plains together. So the hunt for the bison by white, both the military, by private hunters, and by corporations really has to do with clearing the. The plains of the bison so that cattle can. Can. Can graze there instead. And this meant that, you know, people would shoot bison not for economical purposes. I mean, yes, you could shoot a bison and sell the hide or sell the fat or something like that, but very often there's left to rot because they want to remove them, remove the foundation of native life and also to make way for cattle in their place.
- [39:40]
Don Wildman
The connectivity of these things historically just gives me chills because you end up with this. This whole chain reaction where, yeah, you're getting rid of the bus bubble now you've cleared the ranch lines for cattle. Then the railroad's coming out. The railroad comes out, Chicago develops. Chicago gets supercharged by refrigerator cars later on, which suddenly the demand for meat increases as a result of that efficiency. It's an amazing. And there come the cowboys and then. Cowboys. Yeah, exactly.
- [40:10]
Torrey Olson
Right. Because the cowboys are the employees of these massive corporate enterprises.
- [40:15]
Don Wildman
Exactly. Add to that. And then of course, more and more railroad expansion as lands are more and more exploited. Add to that the mining booms which are all over the place. Colorado, my goodness, all over to this day, still discovering gold.
- [40:29]
Torrey Olson
Yeah.
- [40:29]
Don Wildman
And of course, down in Arizona. This is the essence of these ghost towns, these boom and bust places, isn't it?
- [40:35]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, right, absolutely. Because capitalism is this boom and bust phenomenon. Right. People surge into a place, extract all the wealth and then the nothing left and they leave and they move elsewhere. And you know, this continues into the 20th century. I mean, there's a uranium rush, a copper rush, you know, there's all these mineral rushes that take place in 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. This is supposedly long after the quote unquote, Wild west is over. But you have some of the same conditions being created. This is why I'm allergic to the over declarations of, you know, the Old west and New West. Like when, when does this actually change it? A lot of the phenomena keep going much later than you might imagine.
- [41:15]
Don Wildman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were doing a TV show up in, I guess it was northwest Colorado, Cripple Creek, and we were doing a gold story up there. And man, we had to go out there to get this story, first of all. And then we end up at this enormous gold mine which was owned by a South African gold company. And they're bleeding the ground, leaching the ground with, with chemicals to get the rest of that gold out. And every day they were producing a button of gold they called it, which was worth a million dollars. You could hold it in your hand every single day still to this day. I mean, it's always been about this out west so much, so many rich minerals, it's just harder to get.
- [41:51]
Torrey Olson
So maybe, maybe the 21st century, there's still such a thing as a wild West. I guess we've been pretty wild in the boomtowns. You bring together a lot of, you know, unaffiliated young men who, who are there for a quick profit and they're better armed today than they were in the 1880s. I promise you that The American rates of gun ownership are much higher today than they were back then. So, you know, I agree.
- [42:18]
Don Wildman
The larger story of this frontier exploitation and the violence there is really an economic tale. I mean, it's industrial level capitalism.
- [42:26]
Torrey Olson
It really is.
- [42:27]
Don Wildman
It brought violence to an otherwise peaceful frontier. Certainly with the Native Americans for the Most part, it's really the effect of the Industrial Revolution as so much as in the 19th century. And for that it required land and resources. That kind of wraps up the idea in a little paragraph, doesn't it?
- [42:44]
Torrey Olson
Yeah. And, you know, that's why it doesn't fit into the mythological version, because Easterners were looking to the west and wanting an escape. They wanted a safety valve away from their capitalist troubles in the, you know, on the coast, on the Eastern coast. So therefore they, you know, suck that reality out of the retelling of it. They remove and sort of scrub away the ways that industrial capitalism was also transforming the west in just the same sorts of ways.
- [43:10]
Don Wildman
And then you find it so useful in the storytelling of Hollywood and in books and so forth, you know, how these. These ideas of manhood ought to be reframed with every generation. The idea of America, you know, in the Vietnam age was so much in question in the 70s. Suddenly you're seeing Clint Eastwood all over the place, you know, coming into towns and str. Straightening things out. The west has always been that canvas upon which to cast paint the picture of America as we would idealize it, as we wish it was.
- [43:40]
Torrey Olson
Yeah. I mean, think about how many politicians have used that Western iconography of the cowboy to supercharge their campaigns all the way from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. This is like a very predictable move to play in the political range.
- [43:58]
Don Wildman
Yeah. And now you can play a game about it. Right. That's the idea of Red Dead.
- [44:02]
Torrey Olson
That's right. Yeah. Except I really do think that the Red Dead redemption games are actually smarter depictions of the west than, you know, the classic John Wayne films of the 1950s and 60s. Because they really. First off, there's no good guys. I mean, everyone is pretty bad in these games. There's no black and white morality tale in the same way that, you know, the John Wayne films depicted. And native peoples have much more of a complex and central role in the games as opposed to, you know, the sort of mythology of those of those classic Westerns where native peoples are really seen as less than human or just, you know, sort of props on the side before, you know, us white settlers arrive.
- [44:45]
Don Wildman
The story really can be summed up in on our end, really, where the violence. The idea of the violence comes from. And it really wasn't from those Lone Gunmen, it wasn't from the Native Americans. It was really about the coordinated expansion of the US Government and private enterprise working together to claim land, extract those resources, suppress resistance. But that's A story that's very hard to romanticize. So instead we turn that all on its head and make characters and archetypes out of all of that.
- [45:14]
Torrey Olson
Yeah, it's so fascinating. Right? So some of these hotspots when it comes to violence, like Tombstone, for example, Deadwood, for example, I can promise you that the city leaders at that time, in the 1870s, 80s and 90s, they hated the fact that these places were known for violence. They were deeply ashamed of this violence. There was nothing sensational or they took no pride in it whatsoever. They knew it was going to keep visitors away, you know, like this was going to scare people off. It's only once time passes that, you know, this becomes covered in dust and safely placed behind glass that towns are able to sort of, you know, promote their violent history as a tourism attraction. You know, now today, tons of people flock to Deadwood and Tombstone just to see the recreations of those shootouts. That was not the case at the time. I mean, you know, city leaders were deeply embarrassed by this. And, you know, maybe the same will happen for more recent explosions of violence. For example, like Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s was a really violent place. You know, crack cocaine epidemic, LAPDs. You know, this was something that many Americans were deeply, you know, anxious and ashamed about as well. It's not something, not a feel good story. Maybe a hundred years from now you'll get tours of, you know, of gunslingers in 1980s Los Angeles. I mean, it's hard to imagine, but history and nostalgia has a way of permeating and, you know, rebranding the past into something very different than it was at the time.
- [46:38]
Don Wildman
It's going to be hard to make the frontier of space ever seem as romantic as the frontier of the American West. So I think we're going nowhere. We're going to only keep making movies. What's your favorite American movie? American west movie?
- [46:52]
Torrey Olson
Good question. You know, I'm really more of a television guy because I like the long form of it. I really like the HBO series Deadwood, which is, you know, about 20 years old at this point. But that's a. That's a. That's the one I come back to all the time. But really, I play more video games than I watch movies nowadays.
- [47:09]
Don Wildman
Butch Cassidy was mine. I think I'm going to replace it by True Grit with Jeff Bridges. I love that depiction because of the ordinariness of life in their epic journey. You get the sort of grit and boredom of that lifestyle that was really so much of the world that they were living in Torrey C. Olson is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of, most recently, a book we discussed at length here, red Dead's History, A Video Game, An Obsession and America's Violent Past. Read that book side by side by playing the game. It looks like a lot of fun. What's on the New Horizons?
- [47:45]
Torrey Olson
Tory oh, I'm doing a new class at the moment that looks at US history since 1980 through the lens of the Grand Theft Auto video games. So turning to more recent history and another video games exploration of that past, which has been a lot of fun.
- [48:01]
Don Wildman
I love it. Thank you so much.
- [48:04]
Torrey Olson
Thanks for having me, Don. It was great chatting.
- [48:08]
Don Wildman
Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.