About the Wild West we still live in
Life is cheap in the good ole’ US of A isn’t it? Far cheaper than civilised old Scotland. Well, it’s an interesting debate, there are nasty characters everywhere. And many factors come into play, not least the simple truth that more people equals more violence.
But if you ever want to test the theory, perhaps add some credence to it, and have a good laugh into the bargain, then it is worth taking a trip to the famous Boot Hill Cemetery in the old Wild West town of Tombstone.
It is filled with memorials to cowboys, gamblers and prostitutes with names that could only have come straight from the rough tough pioneering west – Three Fingered Jack Dunlop, Curly Bill Brocius, The Kansas Kid, Indian Bill, Six-Shooter Jim, and Dutch Annie, the ‘Queen of the Red Light District’ – their bodies all lie buried in this tiny graveyard in southern Arizona.
This is the America we learned about in the Cowboy and Indian movies of our childhood. And consider the fate of poor old George Johnson, whose crime was being in Tombstone at the wrong time. His grave marker reads:
Here Lies George Johnson, Hanged by Mistake 1882.
He was right, we was Wrong,
But We strung him Up and now he’s Gone.
Ah well, tough luck George, that’s the way justice was meted out in Tombstone when the old town was in its heyday. A year before the unfortunate Johnson was hanged, the notorious Gunfight at the Ok Corral had taken place in Tombstone. It was the haunt of gunslingers and outlaws, dubbed “The Town too Tough to Die”.
Not far from the hapless George Johnson’s grave is another headstone indicating that death in Tombstone was not so much a reason for grieving, rather an excuse for a bit of harmless banter. The victim this time was a Wells Fargo station agent called Lester Moore and his marker reads:
Here Lies Lester Moore,
Four Slugs from a 44
No Les
No More.
Moore was only a young man, as were most of those who found their way to the cemetery, one of many Boothills throughout America and so called because cowboys who were taken there had “died with their boots on”.
Tombstone was built round a silver mine in the late 1800s and at one time there were 110 saloons plus dance halls, gambling halls and brothels to serve a population of 14,000. Nowadays it is a tourist trap for visitors like me who fancy a stroll down Wild West memory lane.
The Gunfight at the OK Corral is performed several times a day in the town’s main street, Big Nose Kate’s Saloon serves food and drink, and the notorious Bird Cage Theatre still stands. It is a bit of a disappointment to discover that the gunfight didn’t exactly happen in the corral but on a nearby patch of land, but never let the facts stand in the way of a good story and all that.
Hollywood never does. The most popular movie version of the gunfight story starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas has the ‘good guys’, Wyatt Earp, his brother Morgan and Doc Holliday gunning down the vicious outlaws Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton. But on the streets of Tombstone they insist that the men who died had their hands in the air and were surrendering when the fatal shots were fired.
And just in case you don’t believe them go to Boothill and find their grave. It states: Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone 1881.
So why am I linking the meanest town in the Wild West with the argument that human life in 21st century America may be perceived as cheap?
Wyatt Earp, the thoroughly dubious character at the centre of the OK Corral incident, didn’t die until 1929. My father had been born two years earlier. This is not ancient history we are talking about. These are people who roamed the United States in the relatively recent past.
The heyday of the American outlaw may have been the mid to late 1800s – Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, John Wesley Hardin to name a few. But fast forward to the 1920s, 30s and beyond and you will find Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly and Baby-Face Nelson, not to mention the Chicago gangsters under Al Capone.
The modus operandi may have changed but the end result was the same.
I remember having a chat a few years ago with an American guy about various aspects of US life. At one point he nodded and said, “There’s still a bit of the Wild West in this country yet.” I’m beginning to think he’s right.