-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Adam Back wrote:

[Ed Note: Jim Choate wrote:]

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At the height of the range wars there were only 9 murders associated with the conflict, not hundreds as the popular entertainment media and spin-doctor culture would have you believe. Get your fucking facts straight.

I know, that was my point; recall that I said the murder rate was low. The point was there were way less laws, and few were telling their neighbours what they could think.

It's not hard to believe that this was the case in some places and in some times, but a term like the "Wild West" covers a lot of time and territory. For example, in San Francisco in the early 1860s there was a very high murder rate, something like 1000 people were killed in one year and nobody was convicted. (Forgive minor factual errors as I haven't studied this in awhile.) I have also read reports of substantial violence in the mining communities of Nevada and California with minimal enforcement action taken. It seems likely to me that the low murder rate claim has some exceptions, even if we ignore the mutual atrocities between various native groups, Americans, and Mexicans. I would also like to see how pervasive the temperance movement was in the Wild West. By the late nineteenth century my impression is that it was going strong in the Wild West although it possibly hadn't grasped the levers of power yet.

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Face off's at high-noon simply didn't happen and poeple didn't run around having gun fights all the time.

Right!

I'm pretty sure there were gunfights, but that they happened a lot more quickly and a lot less formally than we see on TV. But, I could believe that overall they happened infrequently. Anybody have a reference? I am told that knife fighting was a lot more common than is widely known. A lot of poor runaways showed up to work in various mining towns and they were unable to afford expensive toys like guns. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.htm -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNFu5n5aWtjSmRH/5AQGsoQf7BfsZArO2JaJEGVAw9IzRGEQeykgrkFzc JXmCkT32PmZOA0uhMxPW9cC7ehmijwhr7HOVOKO7j4BlxqXemD4oV5M9/EwQfqzU rFgJJ/GIW5LF7h+HCI8gjsoS0VJtbpDs/d2zsuCOvwM4yXkQ330jwaAfk/iErgYs 3thfm7ZAgYcLJPeeCDc541b+eKAtxvbHoOCp3UTqM3EBws0NpDlD9+A3ZzT1a87e UAUsvesecZyz3e1ZHlqw4L08eHdmaMxtkHE3bDrnfJQA4Ij4HPa1ayMMlJmC1XhR U7PEl8CWC9dSLN2Z6pUpC0pIp3A6zqhISPxDW8nGpUipKwhojicXfQ== =lL5j -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----