The Myth of the Well-Armed Cowboy
Those of us who grew up on westerns (I’m dating myself) carry a picture in our heads of frontier towns: dusty streets, swinging saloon doors, every man with a six-shooter on his hip, and gunfights settling scores at high noon.
It’s a romantic picture in its own way, and it’s almost entirely the product of magazine writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were later picked up by Hollywood and serialized TV. But the people who actually lived in these towns knew the truth.
Wichita, Dodge City, and Tombstone all required visitors to check their guns with the marshal or hotel management when they rode in; they were gun-free zones, to paraphrase the NRA slur. The gunfight at the OK Corral was simply a dispute over those gun laws.
This week’s chapter is about how these myths got built and why. In the 1870s and 1880s, America had just finished a brutal civil war and was still finishing up a continent-wide genocidal campaign to steal land from Native Americans. The “outlaws” who famously roamed the West were mostly former Confederate soldiers, many who’d committed mass atrocities or were wanted for crimes like murder and rape. Jesse and Frank James, for example, had ridden with the bushwhackers who massacred the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas.
The dime novels and the Saturday Evening Post turned them into tragic heroes while Samuel Colt made a fortune pushing cheap revolvers. This was an era when “social Darwinism” was widely accepted, holding white men to be the pinnacle of evolution and justifying brutality against both enslaved Africans and American Indians. Herber Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” gave a patina of respectability to it all, but at core it was pure racist brutality.
And what came out of all of this myth-making was Americans thinking of the gun as a symbol associated with manhood and “freedom” rather than a simple tool designed to kill animals and other people. And we’re still living with it.
From The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, Chapter 13
The Myth of the Well-Armed Cowboy
Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check. —Signs posted throughout Wichita, Kansas, in 1873 and typical of other Wild West towns of the era
The now-romanticized cowboys of the Old West were, along with enslaved Africans and Native Americans, the earliest victims of unregulated capitalism in America.
America was first settled in a big way by the British East India Company’s subsidiary the Virginia Company, at Jamestown (named after King James, the largest holder of stock in the corporation) in 1607. The land/state claimed by the company was named Virginia, after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I, who, in 1600, signed the charter of the world’s first modern-style limited-liability corporation (the East India Company).
By the time of the American Revolution, the influence of the company and its subsidiaries had extended so far across the colonies that small businesses were loudly complaining that it was nearly impossible for small or midsized companies to exist.