Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [19]
Although she had never shot before, she lived among guns. Her husband owned many and kept one loaded by the bedside. The time had come, she reasoned, to learn how to use those guns and take responsibility for her own safety. “Girls grow up believing that they’re going to be taken care of,” she said, then added softly, “But it just ain’t so.”
Why do we place so much trust in guns to solve our problems? What accounts for the official deference we as a nation afford guns, despite the growing count of dead and wounded and the fact that polls show most of us favor federal regulation of firearms? The belief in guns as tools for self-defense certainly contributes to this national tolerance. So too, obviously, does America’s rural passion for hunting deer and other game. Neither, however, can fully explain how firearms became lodged in the national psyche as objects of almost sacred stature.
A good deal of the answer lies in the frontier West—not the real frontier as experienced by the hundreds of thousands of pioneers and gold-seekers of American history, but the imagined West, conjured over the last century by Hollywood directors, TV producers, nineteenth-century reporters, dime novelists, and the frontier heroes themselves, of a vast plain of violence that only guns could subdue. “What people believe to be true is often as important as reality,” wrote historian W. Eugene Hollon, “and generations of Americans have grown up accepting the idea that the frontier during the closing decades of the nineteenth century represented this country at its most adventurous as well as its most violent.”
Somehow, we came to believe that guns really did win the West. But how was this notion instilled? Where did we lose the thread of history and pick up instead the silken ribbon of myth?
At times, surely, the early frontier lived up to its wild-and-woolly reputation, as when the Indian wars were in full swing, and when competition over the use of land led to bloody range battles such as the April 1892 Johnson County War in northern Wyoming. For the average resident of the frontier, however, life was more often marked by hard work, loneliness, and stupefying boredom. People rarely locked their doors, or for that matter, even bothered to install locks. Burglary was rare, rape close to nonexistent (although rape has always been, and undoubtedly was then, an underreported crime). Frank Prassel, an Old West historian, examined records of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico Territory dating to the court’s opening in 1890 and found that of its first twenty-six cases, twenty-two involved charges of “fornication” and adultery. Prassel observed, “The West’s lawless element obviously had something on its mind other than bank robbery and cattle theft.”
One of the great entertainments was the rare hanging, which attracted spectators from far off. Hangings were festive events at which the condemned man was expected to offer a remark or two. Moments before Jeremiah Bailey was executed in Abilene, Kansas, on January 5, 1872, he told the crowd below, “I am on the scaffold about to be launched into the other world. What has brought me to this? Let me tell you, and let these words ring forever in your ears. It was whiskey and the carrying of firearms. Whiskey and the bearing of pistols have ruined me.”
The proliferation of guns and alcohol throughout the West, with the added incendiary influence of gambling, made for dangerous conditions late on a frontier night, especially in mining towns whose occupants were primarily adventurous young men. According to historian Roger D. McGrath, who studied life in the mining towns of Bodie, California, and Aurora, Nevada, a chance remark, an old grudge, or an ill-advised challenge to another man’s ego could