Tell me about cowboys and the wild west. How long was it this period? Are gun duels a myth? Was the use of the revolver really overblown?
Most of the things you see now about the Wild West are pretty overblown. Duels didnt really happen, and neither did massive gang shoot outs. Alot of tons actually had disarmament policies as well, so while it was probably common for people to carry firearms with them the saloon shoot outs and things you see in movies were not.
As for the revolver, they were pretty groundbreaking when they first came out. iirc they really caught on when the texas rangers started using them and loved them.
>>995919
But shoot outs did happen though right, like the ok corral. Where there any others? I love revolvers but I always assumed they must have been like a side arm like the katana meme.
>On July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Missouri, Hickok confronted Davis Tutt in a "quick draw duel". –the first of its kind. Fiction later popularized Hickok's "quick draw gunfight" as typical, but Hickok's is the first one on record to fit the portrayal. During the duel, rather than the face-to-face fast-draw as is commonly shown in movies, the two men faced each other sideways in the historic dueling stance (presenting a smaller target), drawing and aiming their weapons before firing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Wild_Bill%22_Hickok
>>995935
That's fucking awesome
>>995937
Ever heard of Deadwood?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood_(TV_series)
>>995927
They did happen, just not nearly as frequently as we all think.
>Revolvers
Keep in mind that a cowboy is pretty much just an ordinary guy; no soldier or anything. Carrying a longarm is not really an option at most times, whereas a handgun is light, easily accessible, concealable and still provides a large amount of fire power. In the ok corral, the major players carried longarms because they were kitted for a large gunfight; they knew what was coming and so they prepared accordingly.
Also, revolvers are pretty badass, and even in war when soldiers have access to longarms, there are instances where they still choose to use sidearms as a "primary".
>>995942
Yes it ended abruptly
>>995937
Oh, yeh, I might add too that duels before the Wild West were somewhat common (though not "quickdraw duels".
Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel in fact.
>>995889
It wasn't that Wild, first of all. The crime rate was actually among the lowest in US history.
>>995961
https://cjrc.osu.edu/research/interdisciplinary/hvd/homicide-rates-american-west
>>995961
Delete this
>>995942
>>995951
Watch tombstone
>>995965
>homocide rate=/=crime rate
>>995961
Don't ruin the wild west for me like you did Vikings and pirates
>>995973
Last I checked homicide is a crime.
And last I checked having a 1 in 61 chance of being murdered would constitute being a "wild" time.
>>995953
It's worth pointing out that often times duelists were not really trying to kill each other. Most of the time both duelists would survive. Stone cold motherfuckers like Jackson were rare.
Is it true that most Wild West stereotypes we know today were just Buffalo Bill memeing?
Cowboys herded cows, believe it or not
And poor christian settlers didn't have much time for gunfights
Do Americans know European Western movies?
>>996205
10/Marysue
Karl May is fun for kids, but the characters and stories are pretty crap writing when you look too closely.
So I'm not really sure we should show this to the Americans.
Poor men's bushrangers
>>995889
>How long was the period?
Not long at all. It was 1880 to 1910. Which to me is kind of weird that it lasted into the 20th century.
I would have never known this had it not been for Red Dead Redemption.
>>996640
I'd say it started at least two decades earlier.
>>996622
there's a whole body of literature about frontiersmen from not-america
the two i'm most aware of are basically man-and-his-dog stories from south africa and canada.
>white fang
>jock of the bushveld
>>996643
Thats what I thought too. I always thought it would be 1860's onward...but it's not. I actually researched this shit one evening lol. and if you wanna get down to the "real west", it didn't start until 1880's. Bizzare huh?
>>996649
Any reason for that?
I thought it was called the Wild West because of the lawless, not yet annexed swathes of land in the west of the US. The further you go back in history, the more 'wild' land.
Dueling in america predates the old west and many american presidents fought in duels
The most notorious American duel was the Burr–Hamilton duel, in which notable Federalist and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was fatally wounded by his political rival, the sitting Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr. This duel was reenacted in the musical Hamilton to the song "The World Was Wide Enough".
Another American politician, Andrew Jackson, later to serve as a General Officer in the U.S. Army and to become the seventh president, fought two duels, though some legends claim he fought many more. On May 30, 1806, he killed prominent duellist Charles Dickinson, suffering himself from a chest wound which caused him a lifetime of pain. Jackson also reportedly engaged in a bloodless duel with a lawyer and in 1803 came very near dueling with John Sevier. Jackson also engaged in a frontier brawl (not a duel) with Thomas Hart Benton in 1813.
On September 22, 1842, future President Abraham Lincoln, at the time an Illinois state legislator, met to duel with state auditor James Shields, but their seconds intervened and persuaded them against it.[26][27]
>>996648
righto, but bushrangers weren't frontiersmen, they were escaped convicts turned outlaws
>>996654
>The further you go back in history, the more 'wild' land.
Yeah but there were no white people there yet.
>>996640
Really? only 1880?
>>996622
Ned kelly was based
Supposedly in the early 20th century there was a quiet town out west whose only real reason for existing was as a train stop. One day, in a time when the Wild West was considered to be on the way out, some guy shot another guy just as a train pulled up. All the travelers were instantly a combination of wet and erect, and when newspapers put out articles about this last bastion of Western rowdiness tourism skyrocketed.
Now, this being a totally chance occurrence that in no way reflected the nature of this podunk nothing town, the residents realized this wouldn't last if left unattended. So they started staging duels and standoffs at the train station whenever trains rolled up, and they rolled in the dosh.
>>996654
>>996676
Well I can't find the original article I read that night, but I'll give you a summary.
Basically if you want a timeline in general for the "Wild West" you start in early 1600's and move forward to the early 1900's.
This encompasses the exploration period up till settlement.
This is where you get the stories of living on a ranch 50 miles from the nearest neighbor. Or the stories of looking for gold etc.
But if you're talking about the fantasy/movie "Wild West" days, that encompasses only a 30 year stretch near the end of the larger time frame.
The reason for this is simple really. It's when settlements and colonies became communities. It's right before communities became small towns.
It's when there were blocks on dirt roads with drinking establishments. It was a little ahead of law enforcement. But not too far ahead. Most communities had some sort of sheriff who was probably crooked.
By 1912, modernization killed the Wild West.
But in that 30 year period, it was a perfect storm of things that lead to the craziness that would be told over and over again.
Also, there wasn't much Wild West stories happening before 1860. It was after the Civil War that things started to ramp up. Former soldiers turning to robbing banks and fleeing to untamed lands.
But within these next few years these lands would become semi tamed and lead to the epic stories we hear about.
It's kinda like the situation where wild animal attacks increase as man takes over more and more wilderness. As society moved West, these outlaws had to adapt and live within a society that would not tolerate them anymore. This couldn't happen until these towns were established though...which again leads to the 1880's.
I know it's a shitty way to sum up, but that was basically the article.
>>995889
imagine a shitty African country but with white people with revolvers instead of nigger children with ak's
>>995984
Statistics from numerous societies and time periods also show that a high homicide rate correlates with a high rate in other violent crimes like assault or rape.
