I grew up in Colorado. That was cowboy territory. The “Wild West”. Like most Americans, my childhood had a backdrop of stories about gunslingers and outlaws, shoot-outs, and the violent anarchy of the Old West. This history has had an incalculable impact on the overall American ethos. Until now, it permeates our language and sense of ourselves. When someone is particularly frank and honest, we say he is a “straight-shooter” or if he is a quick and decisive person, we say he “shoots from the hip”, in reference to the quick-draw gunfighters of the mythical West. We tend to explain away America’s proclivity to violence as a remnant of our rough and rowdy cowboy past; and we turn it into something quaint and endearing.
The problem is, the “Wild West” wasn’t really that wild at all. In fact, it was far more civilized and peaceful than American cities today. Before the US government expanded its authority over the western territories, the people organized themselves, upheld each others’ rights, and by and large, lived peacefully with the Native Americans. Security was often maintained through small citizen militias whose members were regular people, merchants, farmers, miners, and so on. There wasn’t anarchy and chaos. People cooperated with one another, worked together, and built communities.
Things didn’t really become vicious and bloody until the government imposed its presence in the last half of the 19th Century with the war against the Plains Indians, essentially a military operation to support the building of the transcontinental railway. This was one of the earliest and most hideous examples of the triangular interconnection between business, government and the military. And this is when the West became a lawless, violent wasteland: when the government and big business moved in.