The Wild West : A fourth dimension when outlaw roamed the plains , every sheriff was a sure shot and gun battle filled improvised burying ground with the innocent and guilty alike .
Except that it was n’t . As it turns out , this exciting period in American history was n’t as rife with murderous debauchery as Western movies and pulpy novels would have us believe .
During a 15 - year period in the tardy 1880s , there was an average of onlythree murders a yearin Abilene , Caldwell , Dodge City , Ellsworth and Wichita — the five Kansas cities that served as important railroad stops . This was far lower than murder rates in the eastern cities of New York , Baltimore or Boston at the time . ( The city with the most murder of the five was Dodge City , which had 17 over nine year , less than two murders per twelvemonth . )
Bank heist were a rarity ( abouteight bank robberieswere recorded in the Wild West from 1859 to 1900 ) and most mass did n’t expect around a wet six - shooter . In fact , few people carried sidearms at all . Many westerly towns , such Dodge City , proscribe the carrying of firearmsaltogether .
Then what of the whiskey - imbibition , gun - slinging , murderous days of yore ?
There were pocket of fierceness , says Wild West historianJonita Mullins , but even these “ tended to be sensationalized by the wardrobe and dime bag novel of the day . ”
Outlaws , for example , would take resort in the Cherokee Nation spanning function of Oklahoma and Arkansas , where the “ hills were filled with caves and hollers , and were double-dyed hideaway for criminal gangs , ” Mullins says .
Resulting halt attack led to a sobering statistic . More lawmen were killed within a 50 - mi ( 80 - km ) radius of Muskogee than anywhere W of the Mississippi River during the frontier epoch , Mullins suppose .
Even so , a typical frontier town of the 1880s was probable to be less tearing than many metropolis today — you ’d just never know it by the way murder rate are often calculated . In fact , the digest of homicide rates during the Wild West - geological era may be one of the longest - turn tail tilt among statisticians .
Historian Robert R. Dykstra has exploredthe problem of take apart frontier statistic , observe that the small populations of many circa 1880 Wild West towns skew the murder rates . Dykstra exact that if the 1880 murder rate of Dodge City , Kansas , were compared to a large city 100 years afterwards , Dodge City would appear to have been more violent — even if the large city had far more murders . For model , in 1880 Dodge City , one someone out of 996 was killed .
However , 100 years subsequently in Miami , 515 people out of 1.5 million were killed . Although more people were bump off in Miami , statistically speaking the city has a lower homicide charge per unit — just 32.7 , compared to the 100.4 of Dodge City in the 1880s .
But if Dodge City ’s 1880 murder rateiscompared with one of the largest cities in the U.S. 100 year later , the small frontier Ithiel Town will always depend bad . It ’s like compare Malus pumila to Orange River , and then kill all the plums . In the terminal , doing so results in an high-flown slaying rate for cities with small population . It ’s also contributed to the image of Wild West towns as anarchic outlier where dead bodies stack up in the streets .
