Cattle Towns

Gun Violence

The legendary homicide associated with western cattle towns has been much overdrawn by journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and popular historians. In the Kansas cattle towns between 1870 and 1885 (including justifiable killings by the police), only forty-seven adults are known to have died violently—an average of about 11/2 fatalities per cowboy season. Recent scholarly efforts to exaggerate this relatively low body count by transforming it into the criminologists' “per 100,000 population” ratio have proved statistically questionable due to the towns' small populations.

People did not customarily die in a Hollywood-style street duel at the Kansas cattle towns. Fewer than onethird of the victims returned fire. A number were not even armed. Four deaths were accidental shootings. Three victims were women, two of them murdered by domestic partners. Famous “bad men” (the term “gunfighter” was not invented until the 1890s) accounted for few deaths. John Wesley Hardin killed a man who was snoring too loudly in an adjoining hotel room; Wyatt Earp (or another policeman) fatally wounded a carousing cowboy; W. B. (“Bat”) Masterson revenged his brother's murder; John H. (“Doc”) Holliday and Ben Thompson sojourned at Dodge City without incident; J. B. (“Wild Bill”) Hickok killed two men, one—a security guard—by mistake.

In large part, the low cattle town body count resulted from businesspeople's fear of violence, which would certainly deter new middle-class in-migrants. Yet local elites felt it necessary to offer facilities for drinking, gambling, and commercial sex to transient cowboys and cattlemen alike. Their solution was to maintain “good order” by means of tough gun-control laws, multiple police officers, and the (illegal) taxation of gamblers and prostitutes to pay police salaries. Also important [Page 122]was the segregation of brothels and dance halls from the towns' residential areas and main business districts.

Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878.

Bettmann/Corbis; used with permission.

Theoretical Relationship between Frontier Democracy and Frontier Social Change

In part, the theoretical relationship between frontier democracy and social change extends back to the famous 1896 essay by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who emphasized the role of the American frontier in the nation's development. More simply, it reflects the American folk belief that the typical frontier community was sociologically cohesive—a kind of ongoing husking bee or barn raising in which sturdy pioneers coped with the challenges of a hostile environment.

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