Tore Olson

They see the aristocracy and inequality of Europe and they're like, we don't want to be that.

We're the antithesis, though.

If you look at like German-American, Norwegian-American, Hutterite colonies, you know, agricultural colonies, they're like some of the least violent places that you could imagine, of course.

They came after a great deal of violence, which was the military removing native people so that they could settle there.

So they're living in the aftermath of violence.

But yes, there's a lot of very peaceful, homogenous communities across the West.

But there are lots of places where bullets did fly.

Parts of Wyoming and ranching country, the Johnson County War of the 1880s and 1890s.

I mean, those are violent showdowns.

Different parts of Missouri where Jesse James is doing his business.

I'm happy to talk more about him later on.

Parts of Kansas and Texas where people –

Like while Bill Hickok are applying their trade.

Yeah, there was violence, you know, and it's very hard to get like really reliable homicide data from this period just because the bean counters were not all that sophisticated at the time.

But from the numbers that we do have, we can tell that the sort of the most chaotic locations out West were definitely more violent than like New York or Baltimore or Boston at the time.

Like the per capita homicide rate was distinctly higher.

In the most kind of rambunctious frontier towns in the West, in the late 19th century.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Most of that is a complete fantasy in many ways.