Tore Olson

However, most of the time they were breaking unions and labor strikes and disputes rather than chasing outlaws.

I mean, they did chase some outlaws to be sure.

But by the 1890s, they're really this sort of hired guns of big business in a sort of industrial setting.

Yeah.

And it gets at that core theme here that many of these larger than life figures are performers themselves, right?

That they are actors representing themselves at the same time that they're engaged in the actual business that they're doing.

And again, Buffalo Bill Cody, I think, is the most sort of prominent example of that paradox.

Well, the railroads were viciously hated by many, many Westerners who knew, you know, Western settlers, whether they were miners or farmers or whatnot.

They knew that they were dependent on the railroads because the railroads were their commercial link to the wider economy.

But they despised the railroads because of their power and because they often felt that they were being taken advantage of by these large corporations.

powerful corporations.

And they were often right because railroads were very frequently known to exercise monopolistic power and to gouge customers and to jack up rates for some customers and reduce them for others.

So, you know, the railroad is a central protagonist in the Western drama, but the railroad, and we have to think of them, they're really Eastern tools of capital extraction.

They are out west because they are funneling the wealth of the plains, of the mountains, of the forests into eastern hands.

The timber is going to make apartment complexes in Brooklyn, New York, for example.

The meat of the plains is going to plates in Boston and Baltimore.

The coal is going to be burned in stoves to keep the Bostonians warm during the bitter winter.

And it's all coming on rail cars.

Right.

I mean, the railroad is the sort of manifestation of industrial capitalism out in the West.