The Real "Wild West"

The Wild West most of us inherited is a marketing campaign. The cowboy in the lighter hat, the noble sheriff, the high-noon duel in a dusty street — those came out of dime novels, traveling shows, and ghostwritten biographies, often produced while the events themselves were still unfolding. The actual frontier was something else. It was a continent-sized arena of fraud, racial terror, corruption, hired killing, and government-protected theft, and the men we now call legends had a direct hand in selling us a version of it that left almost all of that out.In this episode we walk out into th...