Quantifying the wild west: The problematic statistics of frontier violence

Western Historical Quarterly

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 321-347

  Dykstra, Robert R ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 75949126248     PISSN: 00433810     EISSN: 19398603     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/whq/40.3.321     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York, 2005), 63. These lines also appear in the recent filmed version of the novel
2. Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Mens Penitentiaries ("LJrbana, 1997), 1
3. Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier (Berkeley, 1984), 261-71
4. For an intelligent update see Harold J. Weiss, Jr., "Overdosing and Underestimating: A Look at a Violent and Not-So-Violent American West," Quarterly of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History 27 (April-June 2003): 54-63
5. Donald Worster, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence, 1991), 16, 21
6. Yardena Rand, Wild Open Spaces: Why We Love Westerns (Manville, RI, 2005), 40-1. "Factual" for many viewers seems to hinge on firearms portrayals. "My interest in Westerns waned in the 60s/70s-I started picking up the hardware errors," wrote one of Rand's informants. "Then there was Clint [Eastwood] in Unforgiven. Wow, it was like getting hit with a brick to wake you up! My favorite part was the authentic and varied guns. A Smith and Wesson Schofield? Whoever used an S&W in a Western movie before?"
7. See Rand, Wild Open Spaces, 41. The writer was aged sixty-four, but virtually identical enthusiasm about the sidearm carried by a leading character was expressed to me by a recent college graduate soon after release of the movie
8. Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, (New York, 1927-30), 3:15-6
9. Harvey Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America, 2nd ed. (New York, 1962), 73, 75
10. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 3rd ed. (New York, 1967), 678
11. Billington, Westward Expansion, 4th ed. (New York, 1974), 587
12. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992)
13. For a thoughtful discussion of Slotkin's thesis and the issues it raises see Stephen Mennell, The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 136-41
14. The relationship between history and the cinema has attracted a large and growing literature in which professional historians have usefully participated. The scholarly consensus is that a historical film need not actually be burdened by "mere accuracy" so long as its portrayal honestly reflects larger historical truth. Unfortunately, this criterion is subjective to the point of being slippery. For overviews
15. see Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence, 2002)
16. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, UK, 2006)
17. For a reasoned take on western history's role see Alexandra Keller, "Historical Discourse and American Identity in Westerns since the Reagan Era," in Hollywood's West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor (Lexington, KY, 2005), 239- 60
18. The quote is from Peter C. Rollins, "Film and History: Our Media Environment as a New Frontier," in Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, ed. Richard Francavigila and Jerry Rodnitsky (College Station, 2007), 8
19. Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York, 2000), 317-22
20. Francis Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (Boston, 1870), 1. A reviewer in one of America's most prestigious monthly publications lavished praise that was virtually transcendental: "We had reason indeed to be glad that one capable of seeing the grotesque-ness of that strange life had his lot cast in it. The revolver-echoing canon, the embattled diggings, the lawless flat, and the immoral bar might well have been believed secure from notice
21. [But] here we have them in literature not overpainted, but given with all their natural colors and textures, and all their wildness and strangeness of place." See Atlantic Monthly 25 (May : 633)
22. Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, 1872), 339, 343-5
23. For help in evaluating Twain's comments see the homicide data in Ronald M. James, The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (Reno, 1998), 168
24. For the most elaborate expression of the "gunfighter culture" concept, see volume three of Robert K. DeArment's Deadly Dozen: Twelve Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West (forthcoming)
25. Richard Irving Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years' Personal Experience among the Red Men of the Great West (Hartford, 1882), 622. Dodge also quotes "a notorious bully," apparently Wichita's J.E. Ledford, who in 1871 exchanged shots with a posse and was mortally wounded. Ledford thought (incorrectly) that he had killed Deputy U.S. Marshal Jack Bridges. "I am perfectly willing to die," he said, "when I know I take along with me the best pistol-shot on this frontier."
26. For the Ledford fight, see Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell, Why the West Was Wild (Topeka, 1963), 45
27. Although I had greatly enjoyed this film when it first appeared, as a western historian in later years I grew skeptical of its central theme. I expressed this skepticism at a conference in which its famous director, Henry King, defended the film's historical veracity quite angrily. For a brief description of this encounter see Evelyn Bachman, "Myth Shot Down at Film Fete," Boise Idaho Statesman, 30 June 1976, sec. B, p. 27
28. Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, KY, 1978), 75-99, 120-8
29. Bill Brown, "Reading the West: Cultural and Historical Background," in Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns, ed. Bill Brown (Boston, 1997), 14-30, 34
30. "Homicide Calendar for California, for the Year 1854," San Francisco Daily California Chronicle, 30 December 1854
31. Thomas J. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana (Virginia City, 1866), 22. I thank Kevin J. Mullen for providing me a copy of the California article
32. For the repetition of Dimsdale's statistics by respected historians, see Frederick Allen, A Decent Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes (Norman, 2004), 372
33. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York, 1902)
34. Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days (Boston, 1903)
35. For early examples of Log of a Cowboy being taken as nonfiction see Wilson M. Hudson, Andy Adams: His Life and Writings (Dallas, 1964), 102, 104-7. I have personally encountered the belief as recently as 2006
36. Perhaps it was this common misapprehension that caused Larry McMurtry to feel free to borrow heavily from Adams in plotting his own trail-driving Western, Lonesome Dove (New York, 1985), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize
37. See especially the startling similarity of McMurtry's chapter 89 with Log of a Cowboy, chapter 5
38. George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies, rev. ed. (New York, 1973), 47-59
39. William K. Everson, The Hollywood Western (New York, 1992), 26-7
40. Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley, 1975). In comparison to Wright's work, most books on Westerns soon come to seem tediously repetitive, even the most respected differing from one another mainly according to the films selected as favorites
41. Everson, The Hollywood Western, 54
42. Ford County Globe Dodge City, 18 March 1879
43. T.S. Jones quoted in Topeka Capital, 6 August 1910
44. "old cowman" quoted in Stuart N. Lake, "Straight-Shooting Dodge," Saturday Evening Post, 8 March 1930, p. 24
45. The writer's purported as-told-to book was Stuart Lake, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (Boston, 1931)
46. For sharply differing views toward it, compare Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life behind the Legend (New York, 1997), 342 ("Lake was more right than wrong"), with Allen Barra, Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends (New York, 1998), 10 ("Lake wrote a terrific novel")
47. "The Seven Able Gun Fighters from Kansas City," Kansas City Star, 13 January 1918
48. Arthur Chapman, "The Men Who Tamed the Cow-Towns," Outing 45 (November 1904): 138
49. "The Man Who Put Goodness into the 'Wickedest Town,'" Literary Digest, 22 August 1925, p. 46
50. Fred E. Sutton, as told to A.B. Macdonald, "Fill Your Hand," Saturday Evening Post, 10 April 1926, p. 15
51. William MacLeod Raine, "Dodge," Liberty, 19 May 1928, p. 12
52. Lynn I. Perrigo, "Law and Order in Early Colorado Mining Camps," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (June 1941): 41-62. The quote is from 61-2
53. Harry H. Anderson, "Deadwood, South Dakota: An Effort at Stability," Montana The Magazine of Western History 20 (January 1970): 40-7
54. Kevin J. Mullen to Robert Dykstra, 18 March 2008, in author's possession and Allen, A Decent Orderly Lynching, 9, 117
55. Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York, 1968), 144. I wrote that Dodge City's adult homicides totaled fifteen in number. In the last several years, however, two additional homicides have come to light, raising the cattle town's killings to seventeen
56. Helen Huntington Smith, The War on Powder River: The History of an Insurrection (New York, 1966), 204, 208, 212, 222
57. Robert M. Utley, High Noon at Lincoln County: Violence on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque, 1987), 49, 58, 61, 64, 72, 76, 94, 102, 104, 114, 133, 155, 218n34
58. C.L. Sonnichsen, I'll Die before I Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas (New York, 1962), 24-33, 50-94, 169-84, 209-19
59. Quoted in Leon Metz, John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas (El Paso, 1996), 114
60. Robert Dykstra, review of Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes
61. Roger McGrath, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 481 (September 1985): 189-90
62. Richard H. Steckel, "Big Social Science History," Social Science History 31 (Spring 2007): 27-8
63. The FBI's annual report for recent years is available on the Internet. For the 2006 city-by-city data see FBI, Crime in the United States 2006, table 6 ("Crime in the United States by Metropolitan Statistical Area"), http://www.fbi.gov/ucr.cius2006 (accessed 16 March 2008). My consideration of MSAs excludes those of Puerto Rico, a geographical outlier like Guam or American Samoa
64. FBI, Crime in the United States-1980: Uniform Crime Reports (Washington, DC, 1981), 74
65. James Buchanan Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford, 1977), 36, 39
66. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 98-9, 271-2, 301n133
67. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes, 253-5
68. Clare V. McKanna, Jr., Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West, 1880-1920 (Tucson, 1997), 39, 41
69. John Boessenecker, Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Lawmen, and Vigilantes (New York, 1999), 323. I have found it helpful to readers to report homicide rates carried out to one decimal so as to differentiate them from ordinary cardinal numbers. Where other authors have not followed this useful practice I have added ".0" to each reported rate. I have done the same for confidence intervals (see below)
70. The serious literature on handguns is large and often technical. For the basics, see Robert A. Rinker, Understanding Firearm Ballistics, 6th ed. (Clarksville, IN, 2005)
71. Still very informative and interesting is Julian S. Hatcher, Textbook of Pistols and Revolvers: Their Ammunition, Ballistics, and Use (Plantersville, SC, 1935)
72. The traditionalist case for the old.45 Colt revolver is made by Elmer Keith in two books: Sixguns: The Standard Reference Work (Harrisburg, 1955), 288
73. Hell, I was There! (Los Angeles, 1979), 302-3
74. For the vastly improved (and improving) ability of modern emergency room personnel to treat gunshot wounds successfully, see Anthony R. Harris et al., "Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault, 1960-1999," Homicide Studies 6 (May 2002): 128-66
75. One might argue that the use by some criminals of automatic shoulder weapons, as against nineteenth century Colts and Winchesters, can be seen as in some measure redressing the imbalance-that is, we have better emergency care today, but also a more lethal type of weapon available for misuse. I thank John McClymer for offering this observation
76. For the Miami data see note 32 above. A number of social scientists have deplored scholars' contrasting of metropolitan murder rates with those for tiny rural venues. See Brian Wiersema, Colin Loftin, and David McDowell, "A Comparison of Supplementary Homicide Reports and National Vital Statistics System Homicide Estimates for U.S. Counties," Homicide Studies 4 (November 2000): 325-8
77. See also, William Alex Pridemore's complaint that not enough has been done to address "the problem of extreme values resulting from just a few homicides in a small county." Alex Pridemore, "A Cautionary Note on Using County-Level Crime and Homicide Data," Homicide Studies 9 (August 2005): 266n5
78. Robert Boyer, quoted in Wendell Rawls, Jr., "Crime Termed 'Berserk' in Miami," New York Times, 23 December 1980, sec. A, p. 1
79. For Dade County's official response to the crisis, see the following articles all in the Miami Herald: "Metro Commission Recognizes Anti-Crime Leadership Group," 21 December 1980, "Neighbors" sec., p. 5
80. Elizabeth Willson, "Ordinance Pressures Violent Bars," "Neighbors" sec., pp. 26-7
81. "3 Suspects Charged in Restaurant Killings," 23 December 1980, sec. A, p. 4
82. Eston Melton, "State Funds Sought for Crime War," 24 December 1980, sec. B, p. 2
83. Dodge City Times, 20 November 1880 and 11, 18, 25 December 1880 and Dodge City Ford County Globe, 23 November 1880, 21 December 1880, 4 January 1881, 12 April 1881
84. FBI, Crime in the United States-1980, 73
85. John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (New York, 1994), 332-3
86. Such criticisms have impelled the FBI to insert a cautionary preamble to their online listings. "Each year when Crime in the United States is published," it warns, "many entities-news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation-use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents." The statement closes by imploring users not to compare "statistical data of individual reporting units." See http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/about/variables- affecting-crime. html (accessed 16 March 2008)
87. Clare V. McKanna, Jr., Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California (Reno, 2002), 7-8
88. Eric Monkkonen, review of Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California
89. Clare V. McKanna, in Pacific Historical Review 72 (August 2003): 447
90. Eric H. Monkkonen, "Homicide in Los Angeles, 1827-2002," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36 (Autumn 2005): 171
91. Robert Dykstra to Eric Monkkonen and Monkkonen to Dykstra, 20 March 2004, in author's possession. It was reported in one of Monkkonen's posthumously published articles that I had estimated "an overall homicide rate of 14.4 per 100,000 for the West" (italics added). That was a regrettable error for which he personally was not responsible. See Eric Monkkonen, "Western Homicide: The Case of Los Angeles, 1830-1870," Pacific Historical Review 74 (November 2005): 610n10
92. Thomas J. Noel, review of Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes, by McGrath, in American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 230
93. Works Projects Administration, Kansas: A Guide to the Sunflower State (New York, 1939), 360
94. Bess Allen Donaldson, Prairie Girl: Memoirs of the Midwest (Galesburg, IL, 1971), 96-7
95. Velma Barrett and Hazel Oliver, Odessa: City of Dreams (San Antonio, 1952), 3-5
96. Arthur Coffman, An Illustrated History of Palo Alto (Palo Alto, CA, 1969), 20
97. Walter T. Nugent, "Frontiers and Empires in the Late-Nineteenth Century," Western Historical Quarterly 20 (November 1989): 393-408
98. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (Durham, 2006), 231-3
99. Robert J. Tórrez, Myth of the Hanging Tree: Stories of Crime and Punishment in Territorial New Mexico (Albuquerque, 2008), 159-62
100. Stephen J. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 1859-1919 (Boulder, 2002), 173. In 1882 the Chicago Tribune began publishing an annual inventory of lynchings and in 1919 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) followed suit with a listing reaching back to 1889
101. A meticulously revised inventory for the Deep South is the basis for Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, 1995)
102. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Champaign, 2004), 162-72
103. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 90-1
104. Donaldson, Prairie Girl, 103-5
105. Randolph Roth, "Guns, Murder, and Probability: How Can We Decide which Figures to Trust? " Reviews in American History 35 (June 20 07): 165-6, 168-75
106. "A very wide interval may indicate that more data should be collected before anything very definite can be said about the parameter. The wider the confidence interval, the less the precision." See Valerie J. Easton and John H. McColl, "Confidence Intervals," www.cas.lancs.ac.uk/glossary-v1.1/confint.html (accessed 28 October 2006)
107. Roth's formula is: π = p +/- 2.58 √ (p(1-p))/n. As he explains, "Here, π stands for the real, but unknown homicide rate; 'p' stands for the ratio of the number of homicides to the number of persons at risk in Oregon, 1850-65-114 divided by 373,964 (the average adult population times 16 years); 'n' stands for the number of persons at risk-again, for Oregon, 373,964
108. " See Roth, "Guns, Murder, and Probability," 167. The author should also have noted that the figure 2.58 is a "t value," which requires the formula to provide a 99 percent chance that the "estimated" homicide rate is correct. See table 5 ("t Critical Points") in Thomas H. Wonnacott and Ronald J. Wonnacott, Introductory Statistics for Business and Economics, 4th ed. (New York, 1990), 775
109. A far simpler means of devising confidence intervals is to let the Internet do the work. My own computations in this essay have relied on www.physics.csbsju.edu/cgi-bin/stats/cstats (accessed 11 November 2008)
110. Confidence interval spreads calculated from Roth, "Guns, Murder, and Probability," table 2, p. 172, by subtracting the Lower Rate figures from the corresponding Upper Rate. The Average Population of each of the three counties is listed in Roth's table 1, p. 171. It should be noted that the author's Population at Risk calculations of table 1 are an unnecessary elaboration; yearly rates for his counties are most easily computed by transforming his Homicides listings into yearly averages and using his Average Population figures as denominators
111. Confidence interval spreads calculated from Roth, "Guns, Murder, and Probability," tables 1 and 2
112. Population figures from Joseph C.G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in I860 (Washington, DC, 1864), 28-32 and California homicide data from Criminal Justice Research Center, Historical Violence Database, files for Los Angeles (author Eric Monkkonen), for San Francisco (author Kevin Mullen), and for Trans-Mississippi West, data set 2 (author Clare V. McKanna, Jr.), http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/usa.html (accessed 1 April 2008)
113. Roth's judgment of San Francisco County's size is embedded in a phrase referring to all his California data: "There is every probability-despite the small size of each county individually-that [the sample counties] were very homicidal."
114. See Roth, "Guns, Murder, and Probability," 170 (italics added)
115. These remarks were conveyed to me verbally at a session titled "Not the Usual Suspects: New Perspectives on 'the Criminal,' " Social Science History Association annual meeting, 25 October 2008, Miami. A major figure in historical homicide studies who does devote substantial attention to the small-venue problem, however, is Kevin J. Mullen. See Mullen, Dangerous Strangers: Minority Newcomers and Criminal Violence in the Urban West, 1850-2000 (New York, 2005), 31-2, 78, 84, 105
116. While white males suffered incarceration in roughly the same proportion of the population in the trans-Mississippi West (64.0 percent) as in the United States as a whole (68.4 percent), white women made up only 33.7 percent of western female convicts as against 63.1 percent nationwide. (The figures are for 1904, the earliest available.)
117. See Robert R. Dykstra, "Violence, Gender, and Methodology in the 'New' Western History," Reviews in American History 27 (March 1999): 84-5
118. Giles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866-1884 (Columbus, 2000), 22-3. The San Francisco rate was calculated from Criminal Justice Research Center, Historical Violence Database online. (See note 57.)
119. My guess is that (at least before plot boredom set in) most viewer negativity toward Deadwood rose from its ferocious, hour-after-hour barrage of sexual profanity. Judging from personal conversations and postings on the H-Net Web site, even historians reacted in puzzlement about the nineteenth-century's use of such words. (Helpful in this regard is Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, rev. ed. [London, 1998].) In any event, one doubts that profane insults were in such strenuous use among males with easy access to firearms. In Adams's The Log of a Cowboy, gun-toting Texans address one another with elaborate verbal courtesy, and Owen Wister's main character inaugurates the iconic low-decibel threat later immortalized in popular culture. "When you call me that," he says, objecting to being termed a son-of-a-bitch, "Smile! " See Wister, The Virginian, 36
120. For the actual executions over which Bullock presided see Helena Daily Herald, 13 August 1875
121. Helena Daily Independent, 29 October 1875. That Bullock never had to kill anyone in his years as a sheriff and deputy U.S. marshal is certified in Kenneth C. Kellar, Seth Bullock: Frontier Marshal (Aberdeen, 1972), 109. Hickok's last lethal encounter occurred in Kansas in 1871. See Miller and Snell, Why the West Was Wild, 201-3
122. Amanda Ann Klein, " 'The Horse Doesn't Get a Credit': The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwoods Opening Credits," in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London, 2006), 100
123. Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, 2nd ed. (Norman, 1974), 47, 76, 144, 147, 157, 196-7
124. Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp, 24, 122-3, 227, 234-5, 238
125. Robert K. DeArment, Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend Norman, 1979), 62-6
126. I count as plausibly documented Hardin's killings of Major Holshousen, Benjamin Bradley, one Judge Moore, Jim Smalley, one Bideno, Charles Couger, Green Paramore, and J.B. Morgan. The same goes for seven criminal homicides in which he probably collaborated: three Mexican cowboys, Jack Helm, Charles Webb, and two Pinkerton Detective Agency stringers. See Metz, John Wesley Hardin, 14, 20-1, 32, 43, 60, 69-70, 74-5, 106, 111, 138-9, 162, 172, 205
127. Richard C. Marohn, The Last Gunfighter: John Wesley Hardin (College Station, 1995), 300, offers a handy guide to Hardin's claimed killings, although the author's "Total 42 men killed" overstates the number by one
128. "Fifty Years a Policeman," in The Trail Drivers of Texas, ed. J. Marvin Hunter (Nashville, 1925), 825-8