6 Misconceptions About the Wild West

Thanks to Hollywood Westerns, old jokes and anecdotes, and childhood picture books and posters, chances are that many of us have quite a stylized and misleading image of the Wild West in our minds.

As a result, the Wild West is associated with lawlessness, near constant violence, dusty towns filled with gun-toting, and Stetson-wearing cowboys. But just how much of this image is true—and how much of what we think we know about the Wild West is nothing more than widely held misconceptions?

1. FIGHTING WITH NATIVE AMERICANS WAS COMMONPLACE
2. THE WILD WEST GREW FROM AMERICA’S FIRST GOLD RUSH
3. BANK ROBBERIES WERE AN EVERYDAY OCCURRENCE
4. COWBOYS WERE FOREVER FIGHTING DUELS
5. IT WAS A MAN’S WORLD
6. COWBOYS WORE STETSONS

FIGHTING WITH NATIVE AMERICANS WAS COMMONPLACE

A major plot point of many a Hollywood Western is often the near-constant conflict between cowboys and Western settlers and the Native Americans onto whose land the new communities were encroaching. In reality, although clashes and tension between the two groups certainly took place, as a day-to-day occurrence they were remarkably rare—and in fact, cohabitation, cooperation, and even good business dealings were all just as common between the two. Cowboys and other Western settlers typically knew to steer clear of any hostile groups in the local area, while the Native Americans often likewise kept their distance and interacted with the new arrivals only if they had something they wanted to exchange. Later in the Wild West era, many Native people even took employment on ranches and farms owned by non-Natives.

THE WILD WEST GREW FROM AMERICA’S FIRST GOLD RUSH

The California Gold Rush of the mid 1800s certainly led to an immense expansion of America’s West—and eventually led to the Wild West heyday of characters like Jesse James and Doc Holliday—but the idea that this was America’s first Gold Rush is provably untrue. In fact, that event took place almost fifty years earlier and at the other end of the country: a 12-year-old boy named Conrad Reed found a 17-pound nugget of gold in the Little Meadow Creek, in rural North Carolina, way back in 1799.

BANK ROBBERIES WERE AN EVERYDAY OCCURRENCE

Another popular plot point in lots of Wild West movies is an audacious and often deadly gun-toting bank heist. But research into the banking activities of the late 19th century’s Frontier period found that in the four decades from 1860–1900, scarcely a dozen bank robberies were recorded (and two of those were by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alone).

COWBOYS WERE FOREVER FIGHTING DUELS

Not only were bank heists not quite as frequent in the West as the movies would have us believe, but the classic turn-and-shoot duels of Hollywood Westerns were also staggeringly uncommon, with only a handful of occurrences known to have taken place (and chiefly among high-profile characters like Wild Bill Hickok). Although dueling had long been a means of settling disputes—and had been brought to America from Europe, where, by the 19th century, it was already falling out of social favor—most gunfights in the West were less organized, more spontaneous, and far more shambolic as a result. Poor marksmanship (and a desire to see honor restored, rather than landing a murder charge) also made the few dueling gunfights that did take place not quite as deadly as we might assume.

IT WAS A MAN’S WORLD

Aside from a handful of famous outliers, like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, it’s easy to imagine the Wild West as an exclusively man’s world. While it’s certainly true men remained largely in control, taking on many ruling, law-making, and government roles, with the West set apart from the stricter Victorian conventions of America’s East, many women out West found that they were afforded greater freedom to live less traditional, domestic lives. As a result, there were female pioneers, prospectors, business owners, entertainers, and traders, and states west of the Mississippi were often at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement. In 1869, for instance, Wyoming Territory became the first state or territory in America to grant women the right to vote without any kind of legal, economic, or marital restrictions.

COWBOYS WORE STETSONS

The legendary eponymous inventor of the Stetson, John B. Stetson, wasn’t even born until 1830, and it wasn’t until 1865 that he founded his now-famous Stetson Company of hat-makers in Philadelphia. Although Stetson’s factory was in Pennsylvania, the time he had spent with cowboys in the West in the early 1800s led him to want to improve the mishmash of ill-suited and ill-equipped headgear that was common there at the time. As a result, the broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat he designed—which shielded the wearer from the sun, while keeping the top of their head relatively cool—proved hugely popular, and thanks to advances in the postal and mail order services in the 19th century, quickly became the most popular hat in America’s West; iconic characters including Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley are known to have worn them. But the era of the Wild West was already several decades old by the time Stetson even opened his hat factory in 1865, and so the notion that all Western cowboys wore his particular style of hat is somewhat misguided. So if not Stetsons, then what did they wear? Well, anything they could get their hands on, often—but rounded bowler hats or derbies were often particularly popular, as their smooth shape made them less likely to be blown off while riding.

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