One thing about cowboys, they did engage in rowdy behaviour in cities, but this was because of the lack of drinking and socializing during the months spent on ranches or drives. In this way they were like sailors in ports.
Right - this is actually a true thing. What's not true (in the movies) is that the townspeople hated them because of that (and the fact that they're low-class).
@@astrofrk They had no guns to shoot with. Almost universally every frontier town had a "No carrying guns inside town limits" rule in place and enforced by the sheriff and deputies. Since what was going on was pretty much plain old bar fights. Just like today. People get drunk, get in argument over stupid stuff and punches fly. Well town leaders wanted it to stay on punches and not in knifes or specially guns. So under town leaderships authority there was local city order banning carrying weapons in town. Since weapons and drunk cowboys blowing of steam is bad for towns business. Weapons usually meaning firearms and also big knifes. Thus actually there was far less guns IN TOWN in west than people think. Towns folks guns were at home and visitors guns deposited at the sheriff or their lodgings. You didn't like these rules..... One could take a hike, since town sheriff would make you either leave town or render guns. Appear to saloon or other business armed, well most likely the word from towns folk quickly got to sheriff about someone not following towns rules. For example OK corral shooting started over cowboys refusing to deposit their guns while in town as was the towns rule.
My teacher once told me that the "wild west" wasn't very wild, but that whaling and pirates were where you could really find adventure and crazy stories. But when movies/television became a thing, it was WAY cheaper to make a movie on land than one on sea, so they made a lot more movies about the wild west.
@@User-54631 right? the ocean provides an infinite amount of free sailors, boats, ships, sea training and everything else you need and some guy thinks building a town is cheaper?
@@User-54631 Most of those western towns were nothing more than a single wall façade and the indoor scenes were shot in a studio. You really think they built an entire western town with fully functioning buildings for a movie set? On the other hand, you would need fully functioning REAL ships (plural) to be on the water making a movie. The fuel alone would likely cost as much as the fake town made of the cheapest lumber they could find.
Also fun fact, Cowboys weren’t “cool” until after the “end” of the Wild West time. They were viewed as rough, dirty low end blue collar workers. Very akin to the stigma an oilfield worker, construction hand, or plumber has today. (Which is funny because those professions make good money)
doesnt it depend? gladiators could be seen as both kinda low class bruts, but could also be extremely “cool” as well. Things might be a little more multifaceted.
Which is REALLY funny, because I've not once in my entire life heard anybody say ANYTHING about tradesmen in a manner that had something to do with the supposed stigma, EXCEPT from tradesmen themselves claiming it happened... then turn around and spend at least half (and that's not an exaggeration, that's being generous) of their time just shitting all over every profession that isn't blue collar trade work. And yeah, I'm talking first hand experience, I grew up surrounded by tradesmen in my family and most of my friends from high school. Honestly I think the "stigma" about being a tradesman is 98-100% fantasy on the part of the tradesmen who hate their own jobs and developed a work culture that encourages persecution complexes as a result.
@@arkad6329 not anymore. Used to do window installation on the side though, and before that accompanied my father to pretty much all his side jobs for a few years (he's a pipefitter mainly, but he did plenty of window installation, HVAC work, house gutting, plumbing e.t.c on the side. Basically almost full time on the months he had off from the fitters). I also used to do theater set construction, light hanging, e.t.c , which some don't count as a trade but considering all the carpenters and electricians that were doing the same work right alongside me as their full time employment I count that. Learned a lot, mostly from the carpenters. Not enough to go into business doing it myself but enough to actually be useful. Why do you ask?
Fun Fact: Mark Twain moved out West right when the Civil War broke out instead of fighting and dying for the Confederacy, and his flare for embellishing the truth landed him newspaper jobs which eventually led to his amazing story-telling career. So some of the tall tales about the Old West can certainly be laid at his feet.
@@timbuktu8069, that sounds like something Twain would have said, but he wrote that he and some friends privately formed a militia at the outbreak of the war and basically went camping for two weeks, after which some joined the actual Confederate Army while he and most melted away.
Also, there's a false belief about chasing a train in open praire - mostly those attacks happened when train was in station. Bandits would prevent train from moving away, cut off local telegraph wires, and steal whatever is possible.
I’m pretty sure the “Wild West” wasn’t just NM, AZ, and CA. It should be everything west of the Mississippi. Most of the open range was before the Rockies.
@@XCodes Montana had a lot of boomtowns due to mining and the precious metals and gems found here (Butte is one of the more enduring ones. Others have become ghost towns). Battle of the Little Bighorn, trappers like Hugh Glass, the Havre Underground... there's definitely some pretty rich stories to be found.
The regions east of the rockies were decently populated by the end of the civil war as far as I can tell, meaning the typical old west most people think about would have occurred west of the rockies. Driving through this region the reason why is obvious, because no one wanted to fucking live in those places.
@Miles Doyle Bro, who the f-ck would actually read this? This is the comment section, not a place to submit your theology essay. If you want to randomly proselytize, at least make it clear and concise to make it easier for those who want to read that sh-t.
I've always thought of the Wild West as meaning everything between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean from the Civil War to World War I, thus giving the last days of the Wild West a short but hugely significant overlap with the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry.
Makes sense, Wild Bill Hickok was a show man and Tom Mix both grew up wild west. General Patton wore a pearl handle peacemaker for a reason, it was probably the one he used during 1916 on one of the Pancho Villa hunts. The USA of WW1 was much like modern Australia you had some uncurried characters in the waest like in their outback.
@@watchthe1369 “a pearl handle peacemaker”. Don’t you remember he said that “only a New Orleans pimp had a pearl handled pistol”? His were carved Ivory.
There is an excellent debunking of the “Old West” in Gary Wills’ 1987 book Reagan’s America. He talked about the trope of an entire town cowering in fear because two bad guys have come into town. He talked about the strict gun control in towns like Tombstone and the number of marshals, sheriffs, deputies and policeman. And their most difficult job was not stopping outlaws but preventing vigilantism by townspeople willing to hang anyone that looked suspicious. It was a very interesting.
"...about as wild as rural Italy was during this time..." - For those wondering the reasons for the creation of the Spaghetti Western, how the American West could latch on to the imaginations of Italian filmmakers, this is one of them. Another is the fact that for an Italy recovering from a socially-devastating civil war in a politically-charged atmosphere, the post-civil war American West provided an excellent allegory with which to explore contentious topics and themes relevant for contemporary Italian society without having to explicitly confront them. The most well-known reason, however, is because it was dirt cheap to film in Southern Italy and especially Spain and the climate could feasibly pass for the American SW to people who've never actually been there. Additionally, there's an interesting overlap of similar iconography - I mentioned the geography itself earlier but you also have instances like famous Italian historical figure Giuseppe Garibaldi becoming well-known for his overseas exploits and bringing back with him to Italy an appreciation for the serepe, to the point where he was often photographed wearing one. Spaghetti Westerns are an interesting little sub-genre that managed to help reinforce an already-extant trend towards revision of the Western genre and the idealized concept of the 'American West' (or its death, depending on your outlook) completely by accident, but I never really see them come up in long-form analyses of the Western genre and I think that's a bit of a shame, really. There's a surprising amount to unpack there.
Italy was unifying their peninsula into a country after the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century. The USA was unifying the Louisana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the lands aquired after the Mexican-American war & the Gadsden Purchase, plus the Oregon territory into a new country. Both were building their new nationalities at about the same time.
@@SergeantPsycho Oh, 19th century rural Italy (a-la Balkans in this and the previous century, and the one before that too) was absolutely the fitting comparison even without the organized crime. It was wild and rough with the poverty in the South and the Banditism.
The Cowboy and the Gunfighter are 2 very different things. Author Louis Lamour has a list of over 2,000 documented gunfighters who killed close to 15,000 opposing men in gunfights from 1865-1924
I'd be surprised if the gunfight death total were that high. Is that just for The West, or for the whole USA area? 1924 seems a fairly late date date for the 'Wild West' period to. However, even assuming the figures are accurate, that's still only about 250 deaths per year, on average, over a huge area.
@@tannhauser7584 Wyatt Earp was also one of the few people whose life could be toned down in a movie and people would still call it unrealistic. He's basically the gold standard that the stereotypical "hardened gunslinging lawman" was based on. Fun fact: despite getting into many, many gunfights in his life, Wyatt Earp was never once hit by a bullet, to the point where some claimed he was blessed by God to be so lucky.
@@camerapasteurize7215 somewhat unrelated but if you like westerns and Wyatt Earp (pseudo) lore, y’all should check out the show Wynonna Earp - ridiculously underrated show, and so, so good.
There's kind of a slight misconception here; cowboys weren't the ones doing the bravado shooting, those were gunfighters, still pretty rare but there's a difference.
@Man-sp8ns using the term colloquially... led to cowboys being lumped in with gunfighters... which fostered misconceptions that they are the same profession.
What people think of when they hear "Wild West" are stories that mostly didn't happen in the area you highlighted. The "West" covered basically everything west of the Mississippi, and it included fabled "Wild West" towns like Deadwood in South Dakota and Dodge City in Kansas.
Oh, we had giant spider vehicles back then. We just didn't use 'em much because getting replacement parts was a BITCH. We're talking eBay scalper prices, yo!
When ppl think of cowboys from the Wild West, most aren’t picturing the ranchers who raised live stock. I think most are referring to the cattle drivers who led the cattle to market across the vast uncontrolled area between the ranch and where the cattle could be sold and then had to come back with the money and without being killed. That’s a completely different job description.
Seligman was once a booming town near Flagstaff that grew based on advances in travel, making it a very popular resting stop for people traveling from East to West. Too bad this boom in Seligman didn't happen during the Frontier Period, but was rather due to Route 66 in the Mid-20th Century.
It's also worth noting that many towns out west such as Deadwood and Tombstone had a "No firearms policy". If you entered the town you had to turn in any firearms you may have to the local sheriff where they would be kept until you decided to leave.
When I was a college freshman in the state of Kansas, I once asked my American History professor: "Were all those stories about western gunslingers and outlaws true?" He replied :" I assure you, there are more gun play on today's streets of Wichita, KS than there were in the entire West."
I didn't know that! I am from California, and yet, I never thought the bowler hat was the _real_ Wild West hat, and not the famous cowboy hats and ten-gallon hats. Thanks for the info!
That was just the most popular hat around that time tho, right? Although I guess most people would associate that type of hat with the East coast cities and the cowboy hat with the West
I would say West of Missouri (which is already West of the Mississippi). Missouri was somewhat civilized and was the start of the Oregon trail, it was only after leaving Independence (which is in the Western part of the state), you really got into wild territory.
0:30 Wow. This list is almost the same, as the Wild Fields (what is modern Ukraine), with a few differences: 1. No saloons 2. Cossacks vs Crimean Tatars 3. Lawlessness 4. Mass kidnappings and murder Some things dont change much, in spite of passing of centuries...
Great video. I learn so much by watching them. It's amazing how humans would overcome difficult and sometimes tragic events that we don't necessarily see today.
Now I can't get the image out of my head of some Cowboys playing Poker in a Saloon, having polite discussions about the pros and cons of Dialectical Marxism.
Iirc, some of the events attributed to the "wild west" actually occurred in the old "northwest" (Kentucky, Illinois, etc.) Also, a lot of the recent "romance of the west" seems, yes, to be derived from dime novels -- as resurrected through popular movies and, later, television. I still remember the late 50s when that seemed to be the majority of evening programming. For some irony, consider that at least some of this was due to German novelists...one result being that during WWII, German pilots referred to Allied fighters as "Indians."
Imho it is easier: We live on more complicated times and people long for more simple times or at the very least depictions of these. That is why Western movies were a thing and that is why nowadays, with the RDR-franchise and a few others (but RDR 2 obviously being the biggest) it still is a thing. Think about it: It is only you and the piece of land you own and the forces of nature against you. No stupid government bureacrats telling you what to do and what not, what forms you have to fill out and so on. And (personal) justice was simple, if one wronged you, e.g. trespassing on your land, you shoot him. That is atleast at the first glance very alluring. One day, with space colonization and such things, we will have a Wild Frontier again probably. Then we'll enjoy "Mars Western" Movies xD
@@MagiconIce Cowboy Bebop is already a thing. And is similarly unrealistic. Space colonization isn't going to be wild at all. It's way too expensive for that.
when i think of americas i always think of the history we lost, the relations and tehnology of these countries/tribes is really interesting to me and i cant imagine the things we have done to them
If it's any consolation, even the worst indignities heaped on them by the US Government pales compared to the things they did to each other on occasion
I laughed so hard when the bottle of whiskey appeared and the label said “Giacomo Daniele”, the Italian equivalent of Jack Daniels LOL why is it in Italian???
I was always wondering why HM claimed that "Giacomo Daniele" was "Italian for 'please don't sue us'", when it isn't (if Google Translate is to be believed, it's actually closer to "per favore non citarci in giudizio", but that doesn't sound like a brand)! Now, the real question is what you said: why is it in _Italian,_ of all languages? Is it the Spaghetti Westerns?
@@Hand-in-Shot_Productions I think it’s just a reference to Italian spaghetti western and a joke. As I said in an earlier comment, Giacomo is the Italian equivalent of Jack, and Daniele is the Italian equivalent of Daniel. I think HM went for Italian as a homage to Italian spaghetti western. The thing below is clearly a joke… HM is just saying: I got around using the real brand by “translating it to Italian”, so don’t sue us for copyright infringement as we didn’t really use the Jack Daniel’s brand but a made up Italian version of it. The translation you found on Google Translate is correct, but uncommon. Most Italians would say: “Non fateci causa per favore”
Video idea (a bit of an unorthodox one perhaps): how about a video about the "revolution year" 1848? I was reading up about it the other day and I found it fascinating how much happend in that one year.
@@Phil-ui4tm I know what you mean, but I can't stop laughing at the sentence "1848 was when gold was discovered." Before that, the Romans had been trading coins made of tin.
Great video as usual. One little anachronism that it seems most people don't know about: that tumbleweed you've got rolling across in front of the saloon. Tumbleweeds aren't native to North America. They're an invasive species that came from Russia and didn't show up in the west until the late 1880s and didn't become ubiquitous with the American West until the early 20th century.
FWIW, the reason he says "most" saloons had full doors is because some really did not. Those Hollywood-favorite swinging doors were real and provided a modicum of privacy and separation without providing much of a barrier to people moving in and out. They were installed in some saloons that got a lot of business. They had shutter-style doors to lock up, but in some cases, they stayed open 24 hours a day anyway (closing on Sundays). They were most common in warm places like Arizona, which also tend to be where Western films are set. So they're not really a myth, just hardly the norm.
@@makeromaniagreatagain9697 Usually, yes. But the 1st one was freaking people out with radical attacks and bombings of the gov't to the point they allowed J. Edgar Hoover to create the FBI & give it nearly unlimited power to stop the "scare."
not to gripe but the "wild west" stretches much further east than you portray on your map, Kansas and the Dakotas were major hotspots for wildly westernized townships
Considering the vast amount of unsettled land, I can imagine the idea of the West being wild and lawless did stem from a few situations where the townsfolk couldn’t depend on the government at all. So they either had to become vigilantes or just call themselves a lawless state. Leaving lots of people to defend for themselves and earn the cowboy name. Something that was common during any expansion period in the US. I guess the West became more popular due to people being more literate at the time and documenting these cases
I can certainly see how to upper-crust folk back East groups of workers socializing and talking about 'socializing' and trade unions, etc would be considered "lawless, rowdy behavior" - this becoming romanticized in subsequent retelling and embellishments of the West. The US in the late 19th and early 20th century was not exactly an hospitable environment for the Labor Movement.
The first volume of Das Kapital wasn't even translated into English into 1887. The idea that settlers on the Western Frontier were talking about Marx in saloons is total bullshet, and makes me question everything published on this channel.
Chase Vergari That’s the entire point he was trying to make... you seriously didn’t understand it? It’s amazing how dumb people think they are so smart
Probably not so much discussing Marx, but certainly discussing labor and how to organize for better working conditions. The labor movement in the US was quite big and successful until it was clamped down on by jailing and assassinating labor leaders, strikes being broken up by police and army, and such things which created an atmosphere of fear surrounding organizing activities.
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@@chasevergari3669 marx ideas also spread from person to person, and given how many immigrants from Europe came to the US during 1800s it's not that hard to realize that some of their ideas came with them and took root in america.
I don't know why, but almost every map you use of the US in this video and others leaves out the Gadsden purchase. It was purchased in 1854 and should be included in all maps created post-1854
I think the video does a good job at explaining the general background of the west, but I want to clear some things up. First, with saloon doors, the double swinging doors were popular in the Arizona and South African territories because it allowed ventilation. Also, although there was law and order, towns and cities in the West had larger murder rates than many American cities today. Today, the most violent city in America is St. Louis with a murder rate of 65 for every 100,000 residents. During the Wild West, Dodge City had a murder rate of 165 for every 100,000 residents, and Deadwood had a murder rate of 442. Even cities like San Francisco and Denver had higher murder rates than they do today. Entire states would even have murder rates a hundred times higher than they do today. Also, I want to add more information about cowboys. They weren't allowed to drink or gamble during cattle drives, so when they entered cattle towns, like Dodge City, they would drink and gamble, and this would result in many brawls and gun fights. Lawmen, including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, would be overwhelmed with the number of fights, killings, and rules broken during the cattle season. One of them attempted to kill the mayor before being chased down by a posse. Although there were soldiers in the west, it was only a peacetime force of 10,000 soldiers. Since the Western United States is made up of around 2 million squared miles, that's one soldier for every 200 squared miles. The video is right about how dime novels romanticized the west and made it the myth that is portrayed by pop culture. However, although the west was different than how it was portrayed today, we still have to remember that it's called the "Wild" West for a reason.
I don't know how it on earth it feels so incredibly interesting to learn that something everyone thinks is interesting was actually boring and exactly why and how it was boring
I'm glad you picked a time frame because "the West" was a different place depending. I live in rhea Midwest, and remember being surprised when shows I watched about outlaws and the like discussed significant events, and then said "Nebraska", or something, instead of Arizona, California, or anything we think of as west now. Still, a fun video about a very exaggerated time!
The only real problem that I have is with the map. Your boarder for the 'west' is really to far well west. It doesn't include Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, or the Dakotas (plus several other states) All of home had rich histories and seen as important parts of the 'Wild West'
Most of Texas wasn't "the wild west". Just the western third or so. Texas is a bit of a transition state but is considered part of the south. Arizona was the quintessential wild west state but California was a big part of it too.
John "Liver-eating" Johnston(previously Garrison). Wasn't a 'cowboy' necessarily, but he did kill anywhere from ~300-1,300 Native Americans of the Crow tribe and yes, ATE THEIR LIVERS. He later made peace with them and went on to be a marksman for the Union. Then died in "some big southwestern town", California of old age, a liver-thing and Penniless. Very wild.
I like your videos and they're usually very spot-on. That said this one surprised me. I feel like you're overlooking the cattle wars, the mormon wars, and the absurd amount of family feuds, and claim/homestead jumper wars/fueds. In addition I've noticed that many of the books and articles I've seen that try to downplay the violence of the West do not use the real comparative figures one would find in a criminology textbook. They don't tend to describe crimes per capita which is what you do when you try to compare apples to apples. Instead they tend to describe the total amount of crimes per state or city etc and then compare it to other states of the cities even though the total population, population density, and many other factors that influence crime levels are not equal. Moreover, the formal records of crimes in the West were a dumpster fire and in many instances never even written. There are just as many criminologists/anthropologists/historians that think that the West was as violent or more violent than the prevailing image as there are that think it was less so. Also typically your little cartoon people have accurate uniforms, I don't know why you showed American Calvary wearing pointy helmet things. To my knowledge the US military never had anything that looked so Prussian. Lastly as far as people on the frontier discussing Marx/other political thinkers/philosophers, in a saloon/bar/barber shop/general store/etc., that's not likely. The literacy rate amongst the general population in the West was insanely low, most of them did not even have the equivalent of what would constitute a 5th grade education during that era. Of the ones that were educated and literate a great deal of them weren't literate in English, and would not have had much spending money for luxuries like books. Even if they did the books would be in English because of the country they found themselves in so they wouldn't have been useful to them. They may have had a holy text in their own tongue but probably little else. This is because another thing that those dime novels and reporters overlooked was the overwhelming number of immigrants that made up the West. There were really large numbers of Germanic, Slavic, Scandinavian, and non-English Brits (the sort who would have had Welsh/Gaelic/etc. as their first language and minor mounts of English as their second with a low instance of literacy.) In addition to this there's a tremendously large amount of Asians even before the start of the intercontinental railroads. Although predominantly Chinese they're also some Japanese Koreans and even very small amounts of others. All of them would have had the same language and literacy situation as the European immigrants I've described previously. I'm not mentioning the Native American population because you already mentioned them and the writers of the day featured them prominently in the writings. Similarly one could also mention ex slaves or individuals from Latin America but in fact these numbers weren't as numerous during this era as the ones mentioned above and they also often seem to be featured in some of the writings of the day. In short the concept of the American Western town where the population are all literate English speaking white homogenized Americans is absolutely false. There were many communities like that on the East Coast where the articles and dime novels are being sold so to make the world appealing to that customer base it was distorted. In the West, you could be in one small town where 90% of the population spoke German as their first language, and then ride 10 miles down the road and everyone would be speaking Dutch as their first language. Obviously since English was a common denominator everyone focused on learning it but for the majority of the Western period there was a lot of linguistic and culture clash going on. You don't really get the everyone speaks English and is becoming homogenized era until the homesteaders take over, the cowboys are basically dead, and the railroads are everywhere. Basically the post barbed wire era. This is the point where there starts to be large amounts of literacy in English and the kind of "Little House on the Prairie" every town has a schoolhouse and some teacher or churchmarm to teach the children their "letters" and "arithmetic". Of course major cities had higher education levels earlier but were talking about when these things became commonplace for the majority of communities not what some affluent neighborhood in a successful (for the West at least) port town like San Francisco would have had.
As a native of Arizona, it's totally true. We have "wild west" tourist stuff here that has been around since the 1880's. Yes, really! The little bit with the guy holding the "tell your friends" sign wasn't that far off, LOL.
Alan Shields Hamilton South Lanarkshire Scotland Texas , New Mexico & Oklahoma Kansas & Missouri myb Nevada. Prospectors California & Colorado. Miners & farmers Wisconsin Also farmers Wyoming & Nebraska & Vermont. When I here The World Chicago I think of Meat in particular beef As as Sports & Capone A.K.A The Chicago Outfit. New York I Think of The Statue of Liberty & Baseball , Central Park & Friends even though it was actually filmed in L.A. Also when I think of Texas I think of Football or American football as we say aswell as Baseball & in particular Nolen Rayn. Pittsburgh Yellow & Black , rivers & bridges plus The Steelers. Boston Irish Immigration. Philadelphia The Wild East lol A.K.A Eagles fans after they won The Super Bowl. L.A I think of Street Gangs & The Lakers aswell as Collage Football. Keep Safe.
A lot of popular depictions of the west come, strangely enough, from Sengouku Era Japan. Samurai movies were turned into western epics, despite the fact that the chaos and violence of ronin and samurai didn't really match up with the American west
The tumbleweeds and dust blowing through towns was real. I distinctly remember that. Also these towns were so boring and tiny, no wonder people got drunk on days off. Suburbanization and the large influx of people westward has gotten rid of most of these things as did use of planes and cars over trains.
I am from Latin America, I will never forget that a (great) professor from Spain made us see that while Europe was in wars, economic instability and all kinds of problems, the "wild" west was thriving.
And rather easy to craft and pass laws about turning in your guns when you come into town and pick them up when you leave when many towns had a fairly large itinerant population that would roll in every so often to trade in their gold or load the cattle on the trains and had a tendency to get drunk and have been isolated from time to time as well as being as a rule fairly young. Not hard to work in an exception for once you have established yourself as a permanent resident either.
I know this is an old comment, but laws like that were actually *very* uncommon. The example people use is Tombstone, AZ, and the attempted enforcement of said law by Sheriff Virgil Earp and Sheriff Behan resulted in a massive shootout with the Clantons. So there ya go, some supplemental history
I mean its not a lot of the famous events and locals of the Wild West aren’t included as the West in this videos maps. Places like Montana and Nebraska also shaped our notions of the Wild West I’d argue it’s more Wild than he lets on too with conflicts between settlers and American Indians and former Confederates and Bandits all over the place. Yeah some of our ideas were silly and we ignore what day to day life was like in favor of over-sensationalized violence but The West has its reputation for a reason
I mean it was lawless after the Civil War as well as it was still a frontier state starting around the Fort Worth area. It’s kind of weird he didn’t include all of the “Wild” West.
@@swampyskies5491 I mean, shit, I was upset Colorado wasn't in there. If it was, he'd have to address Nikola Tesla and the absolute legend that is Kit Carson and throw his entire theory out the window
Take a break? They're just getting started. No joke, tumbleweeds are a bigger danger than cowboys ever were. RU-vid channel CGP GREY has a video titled "The trouble with tumbleweed".
When people say 🤠, they Specifically meant either Gunslinger or Heroic Bounty Hunter. Also 0:50 male prostitute in wild west... 🤣 that's Overboardly a Way Ahead thinking.
Couple more things about cowboys: 1) Their job was to follow the herd and keep the cattle safe and together. Because there was no way to fence in the land the rancher owned, nor easy way to keep his cattle on his property. Cowboys started to become obsolete with the invention of barbed wire, which was cheaper than hiring a cowboy and you could finally economically fence in all your land. 2) Most of them were black or Hispanic. You're talking about a low paying job where for months at a time you'd be living in a tent following cows, for seasonal labor. The white property owner was in his ranch house with his wife. Being a cowboy was the necessary hard manual labor that no one wanted to do. The entire image of the white cowpoke was started as an advertising campaign by Marlboro and perpetuated by things like John Wayne movies.
The whitewashing of cowboys started a looong time before Marlboro ads: most of the popular 'western' dime novel protagonists were whitewashed versions of guys like Nat Love, Bass Reeves and Bill Picket.
Why do the “central governmental” soldiers (they should just be called the Federal government, as opposed to state government authorities) have German Picklehaub helmets with the spike on top rather than an actual Union soldier uniform or cavalrymen uniform?
From 1872 to 1902 the US Army dress uniform actually included a Pickelhaube-style helmet. It is weird that the guys are in dress uniform but the helmets are in fact period accurate.
What IS kinda bonkers is up here in NW WA, you can occasionally stumble across old mines and prospector cabins waaaay up deep in the mountains. While a lot of the American West has been pretty mightily tamed, there's still serious rugged wilderness up here
My dad would be disappointed to hear this. He always dreamed of what it would have been like to be a cowboy during the wild west because he grew up in the 40s/50s when it was popular.
