How Violent Was the Wild West?

The distortion of looking at the past through a modern lens.

In 1980 there were 515 homicides in Miami. That means if you were one of the city’s 1.5 million residents, your odds of being murdered was 1 in 3,058. It was, statistically, the most dangerous place to live in America.

But if you’d lived in Dodge City 100 years earlier, in 1880, your odds of being murdered would have been 1 in 996. Today, frontier Dodge would have the highest homicide rate on earth, 300 times higher than 1980s Miami.

And even still, historians are pretty evenly divided on whether Dodge City, and the American Frontier, was horrifically dangerous or not very dangerous at all.

The side you pick depends heavily on how you choose to view the past — as it was, or as it looks through the lens of modernity.

First let’s take a logical look at the cultural influences that may have contributed to the astronomical homicide rates.

The demographics of desperation

Owning land was the predominant goal of early Americans. Land ownership was the promise that brought most early Europeans to America in the first place — and the reason that anywhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of European immigrants to the thirteen colonies before…