Don Wildman

But also, I've never really seen how it works in terms of people settling in the West.

You know, there must be these surges of people that go out in response to these things.

But there must be also criminals who go looking for to exploit this world when things are hurting back home.

Let's step away for a moment.

And when we return, we'll talk a little more about those outlaws and the authorities on their trail.

Hello, we're back speaking with professor and author Tori Olson about the for real of the American West.

The outlaws, those glowering villains riding in black, slinging their guns and shots of bourbon.

How much crime was really being committed out there?

And did it so often end up with people drawing on each other in the street?

I feel a lot of had to come out of Kansas right during the 1850s.

Yeah, there was.

I mean, these ex-Confederate guerrillas are really what we're talking about here.

And they're they're basically carrying on this war, certainly in Jesse James's case, but but also in the techniques that they've learned, you know, cavalrymen and so forth.

Sure.

Of how to operate this way.

Boy, it's just a breeding ground for that kind of mentality and that sort of alienation also, which would find a home in in such wild worlds as outside out there.

Yeah, but it's also centered around, as you say before, the hot pockets of...

You know, ongoing wealth or at least discovery of wealth, those mining communities down in the southwest, you know, Texas on over New Mexico, what becomes New Mexico and Arizona.

Those are places where silver is being mined and so forth.

And, you know, this becomes its own little magnet for so much commerce, but also criminality, I imagine.