Don Wildman

It was really under the Romans.

The Romans kind of popularized the idea because of their marches north into the Germanic territories and Gallic and all that.

That became a frontier area.

for them.

And that, that has been carried forth that there's always this area that you just was very dangerous, but full of promise and, and off we will go.

And that becomes inevitably glamorized and, and mysterious, you know, it becomes a mysterious thing in the West around 1880.

What was the average settlement on the expanse?

Like, are we, you know, the, the image again, I'm, I'm really the guy here talking about these archetypal things.

Um,

The image is the saloon, the sheriff's office, the main street with a few homes on it and so forth, and the stables.

How typical was that?

And was there some sort of guide to building a town in those days?

It's amazing how, you know, how much, at least in our memory, the poets and the writers of that time period were really grappling with this major, these major themes of what American America meant.

you know, for better or worse, and certainly in its cruel form, you know, chasing people off their lands eventually.

But in terms of the manifest destiny and freedom and republicanism and all the things that were coming up in the 19th century, coming out of certainly the age of revolution, which is earlier, it's amazing how broad stroke they were getting with this stuff.

And the frontier and the American West, it figures centrally into that, doesn't it?

God forbid we end up like those Europeans.

How common was the violence in these frontier towns?

Again, it depends where you look, right?

One of the things that's most enlightening in this podcast series of how many times you talk about economic emergencies in the 19th century, you know, major panics and so forth, and how much that really intersects with political events, certainly.