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Reviews in American History 31.4 (2003) 554-563



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Body Counts and Murder Rates:
The Contested Statistics of Western Violence

Robert R. Dykstra


Clare V. McKanna, Jr. Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. xii + 148 pp. Notes, select bibliography, and index. $29.95.
David Peterson del Mar. Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. x + 300 pp. Notes, select bibliography, and index. $40.00.

It's the New Western History über alles among Old West historians these days. No longer really new (the rubric dates back at least to 1969), the school continues to take as its founding reference the inadequacies of Frederick Jackson Turner. One of the most egregious, argues Donald Worster, was Turner's excluding from his master narrative the "unsmiling aspects" of frontier life. In contrast, says Worster, the revisionists have exposed a region of scowling turmoil, of raging, often murderous conflict "not only between the races but also between classes, genders, and other groups within white society." As another respected new westernist, Anne M. Butler, recently summarized the consensus: "One almost cannot speak of western history without taking into account the place and power of violence in the heritage of the West." 1

As an expression of this, it is now widely believed that the frontier West experienced interpersonal homicide of Homeric proportions. Once the intellectual property of film director Sam Peckinpah and his imitators, this conviction overtook western historians in the 1980s. 2 An interesting byproduct has been the elevation of Old West action heroes into historiographic respectability. The trailblazer here is Richard Maxwell Brown, for whom western violence was a civil war mobilizing "gunslingers" and "gunfighters." Brown also separates out various frontier characters into "incorporation gunfighters" (e.g., Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp) and "resister gunfighters" (e.g., Billy the Kid, Jesse James)—an odd elaboration, one might say, of the obvious: peace officers differed from bandits. 3 (It also bears repeating that gunfighter andgunslinger are anachronisms not to be found in newspapers and other [End Page 554] writings of the 1870s and 1880s; the former term first appears in 1894, the latter not until 1953. 4 )

Dissenters from the reigning paradigm, although few, have occasionally been heard. 5 Thomas M. Marshal, Lynn I. Perrigo, and Michael N. Canlis contested the portrait of violent, anarchic frontier mining camps drawn by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and other writers. None in early Gilpen County, Colorado, said Perrigo, resembled "a traditional 'Wild West' settlement, with each man a law unto himself." This reviewercontributed the information that Dodge City, Abilene, and the other fabled Kansas cattle towns were only intermittently violent and hardly lawless; they averaged only one and a half adult homicides per cattle-trading season. Harry H. Anderson revealed that literally lawless Deadwood, South Dakota experienced only four killings in its notorious first year. Frank Richard Prassel concluded from his survey of frontier law enforcement that a westerner "probably enjoyed greater security in both person and property than did his contemporary in the urban centers of the East." W. Eugene Hollon agreed, contending that the frontier "was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society is today." 6

More recently John D. Unruh and John Philip Reid remarked on the infrequency of criminal homicides on the Overland Trail. Kevin J. Mullen, Lawrence M. Friedman and Robert V. Percival, and Paul T. Hietter observed the same for San Francisco; Alameda County, California; and Pima County, Arizona. Walter T. Nugent remarked on the general tranquility of the agricultural West, lawlessness being confined to the cattle country, to various mining districts, and to a few smaller venues. 7

The most outspoken challenge to the new western revisionists enlivened the 1999 Western History Association meeting. To a packed house, former Interior Secretary Stuart N. Udall, now a historian of policy issues and the West, spoke for myself and three other panelists. "The organizers of this roundtable," said Udall, "reject outright the current contention that gun violence...

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