Don Wildman

An engineer studies his maps.

Crews prepare to lay miles of steel railroad track that will skirt past town and punch through the mountains in the distance.

changing everything about this county this whole territory and the people who live here gunfight if it even happens lasts seconds this other violence upon the land itself moves slowly relentlessly more mundane perhaps but far more consequential because once that first locomotive steams through town watch out what happens to the wild west

Good day and welcome.

I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit.

Imagine a place of relentlessly wide-open skies, vast, unforgiving terrain, towns separated by a full day's ride on horseback at least.

This is the fabled American West, as we think we know it.

Epic, lawless, mythic, a land of outlaws and gunslingers, of rugged individualism and frontier justice.

But how much of that all-so-familiar picture is reality, and how much is legend?

Today, we're looking past the myth to consider how wild was the Wild West.

Our guide today is Torrey Olson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Go Vols!

His works include the award-winning Agrarian Crossings, Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S.

and Mexican Countryside, and more recently, Red Dead's History, a Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past.

Professor Olson, Torrey, nice to meet you.

Hey, nice to meet you, Don.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

You're very welcome.

Torrey, your book I just mentioned, Red Dead's History, was published in 2024, very recently, and concerns the video game phenomenon known as Red Dead Redemption, which was first released in 2010, then a new version in 2018.

I did my research.