welcome to chapter 17 part 2. chapter 17 as i said before still concerns itself with the west we first part talked about the indian wars now we're going to talk much more about what happened when the indian wars were done it is considered the wild west and one of the reasons of all the outlaw gangs jesse james being one of the most famous ones he is brother frank their cousins the younger brothers came out of southwest missouri they were with the confederate gorillas con quantrells raiders there's some debate whether they were really confederates or just robbing people but they did not get a pardon when the war was over so they turned to being outlaws they robbed they may have been the first train robbers they robbed a lot of banks in missouri kansas jesse actually hid out in kentucky and then he'd come back across with his gang and rob banks this is jesse as a young man this is four of the guys who tended to ride with him what did jesse in is they decided to get ambitious and they drove up to southern minnesota to the town of northfield northfield was a thriving town there was some mining and ranching and a lot of money flowing through james gang learned that a particular day the two banks in town would have a lot of cash to pay people in those days you got paid in cash so they rode into town about eight ten of them the townsfolk were suspicious when they went into two banks a gunshot rang out jesse killed a reluctant teller everybody not everybody the men in town grabbed their guns and shot the james gang the doll rags jesse and frank got away some people died the younger brothers were all captured and that kind of shows what happens in those days when you tried to rob a bank in a well-organized town full of union veterans from the civil war who had their guns there were other gangs out west not as organized the dueling gang the dalton gang unlike today's inner city gangs where you all belong to a gang and that's it western gangs people belong to them robson banks went off on their own spent money joined somebody else rustled cattle spent the money joined somebody else robbed the stagecoach they didn't stay with one particular gang they were aided by the fact that towns did not connect via telegraph and it's not until the telegraph starts really getting universal out west and towns are connected to towns or connected to towns that lawmen are beginning to be able to coordinate and put a crimp in a lot of this action the other thing in the wild west were the cattle drives when the texas boys came home from the civil war after four years they found the cattle had been doing what cattle do making more cattle and there were just hundreds if not hundreds tens of thousands of cattle running around the north is becoming prosperous there is a boom during this time after the civil war industries are building people are making money and when people make money they want to eat well and steak cost a lot of money so there's a demand for more steak and texas had all the steak on the hoof you can see the various trails the first one went up to sedalia missouri but as the railroads moved west the kansas pacific and the santa fe each would have a town as they build the town move on build the town move on abilene for one year was the cattle town then ellsworth then dodge city then the trains moved on each spring ellsworth abilene or dodge would send riders down to south texas with pamphlets come to my town to sell your cattle so from about 1866 into the mid-1880s almost 20 years ranchers would gather up cattle in the spring and head north generally up the chisholm trail or the western trail to one of these three cities they'd sell the cattle and they'd ride back home do it all over again the next year from this you get the chuck wagon chili use of uh spicy peppers the image of the cowboys we know it today with the broad brimmed hat and the chaps on their pants come from this time by the way almost everything the american cowboy had the rope work the saddle horn the broad-brimmed hat the chaps the spurs all came from the mexican vicaros who had been in texas working cattle long before it became part of the united states now with this cattle drives as they would come in they in weeks to get here the guy's dirty dusty they got money and guys who are single with money get drunk and blow it off and to control this you had to have law enforcement now he wasn't marshall or sheriff of dodge as a lot of tv shows and movies make but he was one of the constables they generally left the cowboys alone unless they came across the tracks then him told him they had to take off their guns if they were drunk instead of shooting them because you don't want to offend the customer the wyatt perfected and others did too the i technique of walking up to the cowboy talking to him distracting then pulling your pistol smashing it over his head knocking him out dragging him in trail into jail waking up finding the dollar and kicking him loose and why it got a small piece of that dollar so the constables made money by being constables and they also made money by arresting drunk cowboys now when the trail herds were done and it was the end of summer the constables were all let go and wyatt went off and did other stuff but this is how a western cattle town worked you had marshals a town sheriff or town marshall constables to keep control in the proper part but what happened on the wrong side of the tracks they didn't really care about one other thing of note is that dodge city is still a cattle town many times in america whatever historically was the cause of the formation of the town can remain the cause dodge city today is still a cattle town only instead of cattle drives on the east and west ends of the town are ginormous cattle feed lots they bring the cattle in feed them up get them fat put them on the train ship them out to get slaughtered dog city is still a cattle town chris wyatt's also most famous for the gunfighted okay corral the reason why it is more famous than any other lawmen for general public is he was young when all this was going on we we tend to think you know everything's old then but he wasn't that old when he started this process he was a young man and then the early 1920 22 time frame somewhere in there wyatt earp as an older man made his way into hollywood trying to make some money by selling his story and he sold it to a man named john ford a very young famous now director john ford who made a movie about wyatt wyatt met a guy they wrote an autobiography not completely truthful and off goes the legend we are about five movies now on wyatt earp in two or three books about every fifth sixth year somebody writes another book about wyatt earp and the gunfighted okay corral what also is not talked much about are african-americans in the west there were african-americans in the west a goodly number now one of the more famous ones was a man named love nat nat love who was an expert marksman and an expert horseman you can look him up and read about him he even wrote a biography he said of course who knows how true this is he knew a lot of the famous people he might have there was less prejudice in the west in those days not saying there wasn't some but there was less because a lot of cowboys were black or hispanic the 10th and 9th calvary units were in the west and they were african-american farmers and ranchers could be african-american so there was a significant number and of course because nobody's perfect there were african-american outlaws the most famous group of african americans were farmers and that love may have been individually more famous but the group known as exo dusters were freed slaves who wanted out of the south they organized themselves with money moved out into kansas and became farmers there were so many they created two separate towns and did a lot of took up the land around the towns recently one of them just celebrated some big anniversary that ends in zeroes and he was 150 years of the town being settled so the exo is from exodus the uh people jewish people who were slaves in egypt leaving egypt that's where you get the ex of dust and then the exit dusters is because they headed out into the plains where things were dusty the exodusters freed slaves ex-slaves organized by family units moving out to kansas to become farmers so farming cattle are bringing people to the so is mining now mining starts with the prospector these are you know individual guys uh some of you have been in california a long time and there's kids you know about the the panning for gold up in the sierra nevada's that's what prospectors did they ran around ran around they explored creeks with their pants looking for traces of gold or minerals if it's in the creek bed going upstream they can figure out where the gold's coming from stake a claim dig up the material crush it separate out the gold and that's how you make your money occasionally these individuals would find a rich seam of gold but most prospectors never got rich if they found a really good seam and the seam is like in granite there's a crack and that crack is full of the gold ore as it goes into the hillside it takes money to mine anything with the mine gold in these days or silver ore it takes money to dig the shaft by dynamite put up the wood so the roof doesn't collapse on you money for the track for the ore carts money to build a stamp meal to crush it so a lot of rich minds were discovered by prospectors but then they would sell out for in the end not really that much money but a lot at the time you know 500 to a couple thousand dollars to a large company or a corporation who would come in with equipment and make the money the money in gold is being made by large companies and or corporations not necessarily the prospectors but every time there is a big strike a large fine everybody runs in and you get a boom town saloon keepers gamblers hotels paid female companionship run-ins put up tents start building up buildings and as long as the gold keeps pouring out people keep pouring in sometimes the gold ran out real quick and people just pick up and leave almost within three two days of each other and you then have a ghost town there are several ghost towns in the the western united states where this happens people realized up that's the end of the gold pick up and leave now this kind of mining in boom town leads to a lot of clear cutting of forests you need wood somebody brings in a steam engine they've got water from the creek they start up sawmills they chop down a bunch of trees they put up these buildings and everybody leaves and of course the hillsides now no longer have trees it rains and all that stuff washes away and we have barren hillsides as i said large companies and corporations are the ones who make the money the most famous way that people what's going on maybe even better here the government started with the central pacific and union pacific all the way along their right of way they got five mile sections of land on alternate sides of the track kind of like a checkerboard they own land on this side of the track then this side of the track then that side of the track and back south back north back south is like a checkerboard they own alternating land now the land in between that wasn't owned by the railroads was owned by the government the concept was the railroads to make more money would sell the land along the railroad to farmers who could ship stuff on the rail and as the railroad went along farmers would come in and also buy up the government land and so a lot of this railroads here and up here actually in topeka santa fe i think the atlantic pacific all got these land grants so they're getting federal aid to build the land and for every mile and every bond that they issued the government guaranteed it so there was a lot of federal aid to railroads building out west and that's part of the big myth the big myth of the west is the rugged individualistic man who goes out conquers the land tames it has a wife and four kids but the reality is the government had a whole lot to do with the west for cattle ranching the government claimed a lot of land what the owners did is they would buy up the water holes and then they didn't buy any other land and they just grazed for free in government land you can't do that anymore but you could then so you controlled the water you grazed on government land railroads got government handouts some large mining concessions got government handouts the land itself was free from the government if you try to farm on it so the government really helped the west a lot and the big myth of the rugged individualistic cowboy calverman prospector has only some truth in it why do we believe what we believe about the west because of buffalo bill cody william buffalo bill cody who did lead a life that was very exciting a lot of different things did a lot of what he's they said he did indian fighter scout for the army buffalo hunter he ended up becoming so famous they made a play about him he heard about it he was out in the kansas nebraska area shooting buffalo for the union pacific he went to chicago to see the play introduced himself to the the guy who wrote the play who hired buffalo bill to play himself much of the play was false bill made so much money he put together what we call a circus he called it the wild west show and he took it all over to big cities in the midwest and the east a couple times he took it all the way over to europe england france germany he had native americans with feathered you know stagecoaches being held up by black bart calvary charges against the indians wagons forming in a circle to beat off indian attacks which by the way there is no recorded incident ever of a wagon train circling the wagons to fight off an indian attack indians didn't attack the wagons they attacked the extra horse herd and cattle to steal the meat they could use and eat and so europe gets their impression of the west from buffalo bills wild west show with annie oakley calamity gene real people trick writers at one time it's hard to find evidence so take this with a grain of salt frank james as frank james worked for wild west show late in his career by the way frank james was arrested jesse was killed by a gang member frank was arrested served time and straightened out he did take tickets there's not sure if he actually did anything else but he did work for the wild west show sitting bull and other indian chiefs work for the wild west show and so the image he portrayed which is the image the easterners wanted to see is the image the europeans got and so that's the image you see in movies most movies don't really show it the way it is or was some writers tried to do that owen whister the book called the virginian but mostly what we get nowadays is from the artwork of charles russell and frederick remington there's an arrow in this buffalo probably from the first guy it's still running around it gored the horse got the native on the ground trampled on him the other natives come along to kill him and finish him off this is the buffalo hunt the pony express individual riders you could get this is the first way to get mail to california fast they would ride so many miles change horses ride so many miles change riders and off they go rain sleet snow dodging indians the pony express this is at a wage station where one guy's finished up you see the sweat on the horse it's exhausted and the next guy's taking off this here it's hard to tell but he's roped a steer but now his cinch is breaking and he's about to fall off the saddle in the middle of all these wild cattle these are all painted by charles russell who lived in the west in the late 1800s 1890s in montana and saw cowboys at work or this one was donated to teddy roosevelt by remington and usually up until president obama it was always in the west wing from teddy roosevelt on as i said until obama he took it out so this is the west we've got farmers coming in with federal aid the homestead act the timber act the desert land act we had miners coming in cutting trees down looking for gold silver lead copper fortunes are made by large corporations there's the comstock load it was a mountain basically a silver ore near south of reno near carson city nevada made a couple of family fortunes they still haven't spent at all copper was found obvious i shouldn't say obviously a bump in montana near butte the anaconda copper deposits of course now what's out there in eastern montana the bakken oil fields now they're pulling oil out of the oil shale up there in montana so the west has been a place where americans have gone to start over to make money to get wealthy