One common misconception about the Old West was if it was violent or nonviolent. Because cowboys, Indians, railroad workers, settlers, and soldiers played out their disputes on the Great Plains. Which led to different beliefs if the West was violent or not. So was The Old West really violent? The Old West was located on the Great Plains (The Great American Dessert). It was anything West of Mississippi and was between the early 1860s and 1890s. There were Plain Indians and new players who resided in the West. Violence can be linked to murder. The West was not violent, the violence was blown out of proportion , because a small part of the West was violent because of certain circumstance.
The skirmish Indian Wars were dramatically less …show more content…
A statement by Samuel Bowles, a reporter for the Springfield Republican in 1868 states that “One or two men and a few women were encamped on alkali plains.” and with very few people here and in the railroad towns the isolation of the few violent people demonstrates how blown out of proportion it would be to state that all of the West was violent. Alkali is salt and you can't grow anything on salt, meaning these people were living on barren land, surrounded by only each other, and alcohol, so violence was to be expected. The little violence that was concentrated in those isolated places was quite insignificant actually for the vast amount of other people in the West. In the Time-Life Books by the Townsmen, made in 1975 a document can be found called the Green River City Ordinances, made by Joseph Binns, president of the Transcontinental Railroad’s Board of Trustees, in 1978 it states “That it shall be unlawful for any person to carry concealed weapons of any kinds within the corporate limits of said city.” This shows the townsmen were at least attempting to implement laws preventing the workers on the Transcontinental Railroad from being violent. Cowboys, often depicted violent by the media weren’t actually as wild. In a graph from Cattle Towns, made by Robert R. Dykstra in 1968, it is shown that over a span of sixteen years only
The skirmish Indian Wars were dramatically less …show more content…
A statement by Samuel Bowles, a reporter for the Springfield Republican in 1868 states that “One or two men and a few women were encamped on alkali plains.” and with very few people here and in the railroad towns the isolation of the few violent people demonstrates how blown out of proportion it would be to state that all of the West was violent. Alkali is salt and you can't grow anything on salt, meaning these people were living on barren land, surrounded by only each other, and alcohol, so violence was to be expected. The little violence that was concentrated in those isolated places was quite insignificant actually for the vast amount of other people in the West. In the Time-Life Books by the Townsmen, made in 1975 a document can be found called the Green River City Ordinances, made by Joseph Binns, president of the Transcontinental Railroad’s Board of Trustees, in 1978 it states “That it shall be unlawful for any person to carry concealed weapons of any kinds within the corporate limits of said city.” This shows the townsmen were at least attempting to implement laws preventing the workers on the Transcontinental Railroad from being violent. Cowboys, often depicted violent by the media weren’t actually as wild. In a graph from Cattle Towns, made by Robert R. Dykstra in 1968, it is shown that over a span of sixteen years only