Tore Olson

I mean, yes, you could shoot a bison and sell the hide or sell the fat or something like that.

But very often they're just left to rot because they want to remove them, to remove the foundation of native life and also to make way for cattle in their place.

And there come the cowboys.

Right.

Because the cowboys are, you know, the employees of these massive corporate enterprises.

Exactly.

Yeah, right.

Absolutely.

Because capitalism is this boom and bust phenomenon, right?

People surge into a place, extract all the wealth and then nothing left and they leave and they move elsewhere.

And, you know, this continues into the 20th century.

I mean, there's a uranium rush, a copper rush.

You know, there's all these mineral rushes that take place in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s.

This is supposedly long after the quote unquote Wild West is over.

But you have some of the same conditions being created.

This is why I'm allergic to the over declarations of, you know, the Old West and New West.

Like when does this actually change?

A lot of the phenomena keep going much later than you might imagine.

So maybe, maybe the 21st century, there's still such a thing as a wild West, I guess.

I mean, pretty wild towns, the boom towns, you bring together a lot of, you know, unaffiliated young men who are there for a quick profit and they're better armed today than they were in the 1880s.