This is the best book ever written on the Old West. I’m tempted to say the best book ever edited on the Old West, because it consists primarily of contemporary documents, mostly newspaper reports but also letters and court transcripts — but the truth is that the documents are so well-selected and the terse commentary is so trenchant and learned, that it feels more composed than compiled.

Almost everything written about the Old West has been fancied up and glamorized, even in the memoirs of people who helped make the history of the West. There has been an irresistible urge to feed the mythology that folks back east and later generations seemed to love and need so much.

Why the West Was Wild is a record of the way it really was — harder, darker and way more surreal than the myths have allowed. Somewhat narrowly focused, it’s organized as a series of biographies of notable figures from the cow town years in Kansas — the late 1860s to the late 1880s — but those were the years and the region in which much of the mythology of the West was born.

Although it has the form of an encyclopedia or biographical dictionary, it reads like a collection of riveting short stories about a place and time we only think we know.

It’s still in print, from the University of Oklahoma Press.

Click on the images above to enlarge.

Chief was the last mount on the rolls of the U. S. Cavalry, officially eliminated as a branch of the U. S. Army in 1942. He spent his twilight years at Fort Riley, Kansas and died in 1968.

The McClellan saddle he’s wearing saw epic service, too.  It was the standard-issue U. S. Cavalry saddle from shortly after the Civil War to the end of the arm’s existence.  Hollywood bought up hundreds of surplus McClellans over the years, for use in Westerns featuring cavalry.  In the 19th Century, the leather of the saddle was black, changed to brown in the 20th Century.  The brown version is always seen in Hollywood films — a minor historical inaccuracy considering Hollywood’s scrupulousness about getting the style of the cavalry saddle right.

Click on the image to enlarge.

. . . the 19th-Century way!

Click on the image to enlarge.

Saloons in the Old West were not the ornate Victorian establishments often depicted in Hollywood movies. That’s The Long Branch above, a famous saloon in Dodge City, Kansas during the years of the great cattle drives. A bar might have, like The Long Branch, an ornate carved bar with a big mirror and perhaps a painting of a naked woman behind it, but otherwise it was just a kind of shed with some tables and chairs in it.  Often it was no more than a tent with bar furnishings set up inside.

Bars in the Old West sometimes offered music and dancing but almost never had stages for entertainers to perform on. Dance halls were very similar, only with more floor space for the dancing, and they also often occupied tents.  Below is the Varieties dance hall in Dodge City:

Dance hall girls were not tricked out ornately either, like the saloon entertainers in Hollywood Westerns, and they didn’t perform as solo dancers or in chorus lines. They danced with the men in the hall, usually while negotiating other services to be performed back where they lived, in boarding houses or tents in a separate part of town, to which prostitution was relegated.

Above is Squirrel Tooth Alice, a famous dance hall girl in Dodge City during the cow town years, in a formal portrait probably used for advertising purposes.  She had a gap between her two front teeth and liked to keep prairie dogs as pets — thus her moniker.  The Alice I can’t explain — her real name was Libby Thompson.

For the most part, prostitution was not legal in the Old West but it was taxed in the form of “fines”, which was really just a system of licensing.  Many towns received the bulk of their income from fines for prostitution — they literally couldn’t afford to run the ladies off.

Surprisingly, saloons and dance halls in the Old West offered a rather sophisticated variety of spirits, freighted in from back east and even from abroad.  Fine Bourbons and French wines could be had in the bars of towns of almost any size — any place where a gambler or cowboy or drummer with some coin in his pockets might turn up.  Ice was also freighted in so that the saloons could serve cold beer.

Men of the Old West might not have cared much what a bar looked like, but they wanted the finest liquor they could afford in their glasses.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Behind these rustic facades lurked a world of sin and temptation for cowboys just paid off after a long drive from Texas.

Longhorn cattle were so plentiful in south Texas that they weren’t worth a plug nickel locally. If you could get them up to the railheads in Kansas, where they could be shipped north and east, they were worth a small fortune. And so the trail driver, the classic cowboy, was born.

He was the guy who drove the longhorns north, took his wages and usually blew them in the notorious cow towns. His rowdy ways led also to the emergence of the legendary marshals who worked the cow towns, men like Wyatt Earp, who gained his reputation as a shootist, a gunslinger, wrangling high-spirited trail drivers in Kansas.

The era of the epic trail drives was brief, lasting less than 20 years — it ended when the railroads finally pushed their lines south into Texas cattle country — but it gave rise to an American mythology that is still with us today.

Click on the first two images to enlarge.

It might not look like much but it had everything you really needed in a town — a restaurant, The Grant House, serving antelope steak every Sunday, and a saloon, but those establishments have long since closed down.

Shakespeare is a ghost town now.

Click on the image to enlarge.

U. S. Marshals and Deputy Marshals, 1892.