Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The Old West is an iconic period of American history and full of legendary figures whose names still resonate today, like Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Butch and Sundance, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Bass Reeves, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, the Texas Rangers and many more. Hear all their stories on the Legends of the Old West podcast.
We'll take you to Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City. to the plains, mountains, and deserts for battles between the U.S. Army and Native American warriors, to dark corners for the disaster of the Donner Party, and shining summits for achievements like the Transcontinental Railroad.
We'll go back to the earliest days of explorers and mountain men and head up through notorious Pinkerton agents and gunmen like Tom Horne. Every episode features narrative writing and cinematic music, and there are hundreds of episodes available to binge. I'm Chris Wimmer. Find Legends of the Old West wherever you're listening now.
Here we are, sometime in, say, late 1880s, in a roughshod town on the dry, dusty plains of the American West. Here in this saloon, the bartender slings bourbon shots, gamblers lean over their cards, laughter drifts down from the girls on the balcony, when suddenly, two hard-eyed men square off over a pile of poker chips. One backs away, swaggering through the swinging doors.
The other follows, and a minute later, they're both in the street facing each other at a distance, hands hovering over their holstered guns. This is the Wild West as we often imagine it, the one we think we know. Meanwhile, out there on the edge of town, another drama unfolds. Surveyors hammer stakes into the ground. An engineer studies his maps.
Crews prepare to lay miles of steel railroad track that will skirt past town and punch through the mountains in the distance.
changing everything about this county this whole territory and the people who live here gunfight if it even happens lasts seconds this other violence upon the land itself moves slowly relentlessly more mundane perhaps but far more consequential because once that first locomotive steams through town watch out what happens to the wild west Good day and welcome.
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Chapter 2: What iconic figures defined the Old West?
Go Vols! His works include the award-winning Agrarian Crossings, Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside, and more recently, Red Dead's History, a Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past. Professor Olson, Torrey, nice to meet you. Hey, nice to meet you, Don. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You're very welcome.
Torrey, your book I just mentioned, Red Dead's History, was published in 2024, very recently, and concerns the video game phenomenon known as Red Dead Redemption, which was first released in 2010, then a new version in 2018. I did my research. One of the most successful games ever made has sold an ungodly number of copies, like 82 million or something.
So as a professor of history, how useful do you find video games as a means of teaching modern college students?
Yeah, well, surprisingly useful in part because the general public and students as well. they very often encounter history through pop culture. And I think throughout much of the 20th century, this was through the lens of television, of film, of literature, and so forth.
But in the last 20 years, more and more students and just general people are encountering history on this digital, playable, interactive screen. And that really matters because I don't think that video games necessarily teach all that much history, but they do plant seeds of curiosity and of interest, which are then very ripe for someone like myself to harvest.
To nurture and to use the sort of pre-existing passion and curiosity that students have that they've learned through games as a way of actually getting them to grapple with the usually much more complicated and nuanced history of what actually happened.
Yeah, it's a very engaging medium. I mean, as a person of my generation who didn't grow up with them, pinballs was about as complicated as my gaming was. I look at these modern games and go, oh, my God. It's an amazing world into itself. But how accurate in Red Dead is the picture of the American West? I mean, is it as comic book or, you know, like the movies?
Right. Well, it's a little bit of both. So there's really two core Red Dead Redemption games. Yeah. My book fundamentally looks at the second one, Red Dead Redemption 2, which came out in 2018, as you mentioned. It's set in 1899 in both the West and in the South and in Appalachia. I find that it's a lot more smarter and rich of a game than the first one.
The first one has some strengths, but I really emphasize the second one in part because it's much more popular and it's much more recent. And I think in many ways, the question to ask is not, is it historically accurate? Because the game is fictionalized, right? The names of people and places are all made up.
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Chapter 3: How did the myth of the Wild West compare to reality?
And did it so often end up with people drawing on each other in the street?
Yeah. Most of that is a complete fantasy in many ways. I've spent a lot of time looking at the Red Dead Redemption video games, and in Red Dead 2, Arthur Morgan, the protagonist, the minimum number of people that he kills during his adventure is somewhere around 900. That is an absolutely bizarre overinflation of violence that took place.
I mean, there were outlaws who had committed homicide frequently, but There's only a handful of outlaws that even kill the dozen people, right? So like, you know, looking at someone with hundreds of, I mean, it's just completely bizarre. Nevertheless, right, there are these famous outlaws. I mean, I think Jesse James is a sort of classic example.
But what gets lost in the story of Jesse James is that his bloodshed, his fighting, his bank robberies, they had a lot to do with politics. He is really a leftover from the Civil War rather than this sort of Western antihero. You joked about him, you know, about the villains wearing black.
Well, the James gang would actually sometimes wear all white because they wore the garb of the Ku Klux Klan. Right. They would wear robes to signify their allegiance to southern democratic politics because they're these leftovers from the Civil War. Right. They've been fighting in Missouri against Republican Union oriented U.S. forces. Right. So, you know, politics infuses all of this.
Usually it's Democrats shooting at Republicans and Republicans shooting at Democrats. I mean, this is what is largely true of the outlaws of the West. But, you know, the partisan identity of outlaws is something that never comes through in Hollywood or video games.
I feel a lot of had to come out of Kansas right during the 1850s.
Oh, yeah. Right. I mean, Kansas is a very divided state, just like Missouri, Missouri, even more so in many ways, because Kansas, at least, was squarely within the United States. I mean, Missouri is, too. But yes, I mean, you know, we tend to separate the Civil War from the Western violence of the 1870s and 1880s. But how could that possibly be the case? I mean, this is in the direct aftermath.
And many of the key dilemmas of the Civil War are not resolved by the time of 1865. There's still a lot of stewing animosities about these questions.
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Chapter 4: What role do video games play in teaching history?
Very often the sort of the law, the sheriffs, if you will, were the representatives of Eastern businesses who were coming there to safeguard the extraction of capital, of raw materials back East. And I think here's a classic example is Wild Bill Hickok. Wild Bill Hickok is this peace officer who's working in ranching towns and Mm-hmm.
And Wild Bill Hickok is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican as well, who is trying to protect the institution of industrial capitalism in the West and keep folks from, you know, getting grit in the gears. Particularly cowboys, Texas cowboys, who tended to be Democrats, who were much more hostile toward these big Eastern businesses. And who, you know, were still had gripes about the Civil War.
This is, you know, 10, 15 years later on. So while Bill Hickok, you know, he's he's a Republican who's often shooting at Democratic cowboys, which is quite fascinating.
It's so similar to the Pinkertons, you know, anywhere, how private security was really the police force in so many situations that we assume there was government involved and it wasn't.
Yeah. Well, the Pinkertons is something I love to chat about because they have a very special place in Red Dead Redemption 2. They are the only institution that is not fictionalized in Red Dead 2.
Hmm.
They are called the Pinkertons. That's exactly the same name that they went by in the late 19th century. And this actually got the developer, Rockstar Games, in a bit of trouble because the Pinkerton agency still exists in much reduced format. And they sued Rockstar Games, saying that they were defaming their reputation by portraying them so negatively on the screen.
But of course, the Pinkertons were very real. 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.
Well, here you have the exact intersection we're talking about, because the image of the sheriff, the Gary Cooper in High Noon, even Clint Eastwood and his weird guy who wanders around guy. There are all these moralistic lessons that are being taught in Hollywood, utilizing the canvas of this world, which is so rich and useful for storytelling purposes.
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Chapter 5: How accurate is the depiction of the American West in Red Dead Redemption?
We'll go back to the earliest days of explorers and mountain men and head up through notorious Pinkerton agents and gunmen like Tom Horne. Every episode features narrative writing and cinematic music, and there are hundreds of episodes available to binge. I'm Chris Wimmer. Find Legends of the Old West wherever you're listening now.
We're talking to Tori Olson about the American West and its facts and fictions. How central was violence towards Native Americans in this frontier expansion? Again, we see the cowboys in Indian movies, they're called. All that sort of spectacular violence was not really part of regular life, wasn't it?
Well, you just don't have U.S. Western history if you don't have this violent expropriation and dispossession of native peoples, right? I mean, to make the West the West, meaning that it should be defined in relation to the East, the backbone of the nation, that takes a lot of violence, right? Because native people didn't think of Wyoming or South Dakota, which today is South Dakota, as the West.
They thought of it as the center, right, as their home, right? The Mexicans thought about it as the North. I think it was part of Northern Mexico, of course. So to make, you know, a place like Wyoming or California, the West took a lot of violence, took a lot of, um, you know, a lot of this was achieved at the end point of rifle to be certain.
And of course, you know, this cinematic theme of so-called cowboys and Indians has been reinforced so often, but it was extremely rare that cowboys would be the ones engaged in combat with native peoples. It's really the U S military. The U.S. military is the force that's doing so. By the time the cowboys show up, Native peoples have been largely removed from the picture.
And the story about military encounters between Native peoples, of which there's such tremendous diversity as to how they live, the languages they speak, the cultures they practice, that is a tremendous story that defines many hundreds of years, but really comes to a crescendo in terms of violence and drama in the 1860s and 1870s. I mean, those are the decades when
Frequent battles between native tribes and the government through the military are happening on a regular basis. Has everything to do with the Homestead Act, doesn't it? 1862. It does, though a lot of it precedes it, of course, as well. But certainly the Homestead Act brings a new pressure point of settlers coming at this tremendous rate.
And the settlers often cared little about what kinds of treaties Washington had negotiated with various native groups. They were like, this is good land. We're going to move here. And, you know, not just settlers, but mining companies. And, you know, there's tremendous pressure that results from these new invaders, essentially, right?
Eastern invaders who were coming to claim lands that were not at all theirs and weren't even legally available, whether or not through the Homestead Act.
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