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The assumption that violence has more often than not been a central reality about Frontier life has long been popular. How we see the violence, though, and whether or not the violence is heroic or just meaningless and tragic has depended on just who is writing the screenplays or doing the research.

This latter point was made recently by William Handley in his book Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West. Handley notes that violence has always been an inherent part of literature and film about the West. The difference between the modern variety of violence, and the older variety, however, is that while newer descriptions of violence in the West are intended to highlight the victimization of a wide variety of groups, the violence of earlier authors like Willa Cather and Zane Grey was intended to illustrate the necessity of violence in establishing civilization in a wild and untamed land.

Of course, with the rise of Post-modernism in the 1960"s, traditional rationales for the settlement of the West lost almost all of theirdefenders. The last thirty years or so have been bad decades for the reputation of the West.

Thus, while the explanations for the violence changes over the decades, the assumption that violence was the general modus operandi of settlers on the Frontier remained in full force. Yet, since at least the 1970"s, research has indicated that both camps may have been wrong about violence in the West. Excluding the Indian wars of the mid to late 19^th century which were lopsided affairs conducted by the United States government, we find that the allegedly inherent violence of the West was not noticeably any greater than that of points east.

Historian Richard Shenkman largely attributes this to the legacy of those reliably-violent Western films. "Many more people have died in Hollywood Westerns than ever died on the real Frontier�[i]n the real Dodge City, for example, there were just five killings in 1878, the most homicidal year in the little town"s Frontier history: scarcely enough to sustain a typical two-hour movie."

Shenkman was basing this comment on Historian W. Eugene Hollon"s research in which he notes that in many places like Dodge City, tales of violence were actually accentuated to appeal to the tourist trade in the latter years of the Frontier. This is not difficult to understand considering the movement made popular by promoters of the "West cure," a fad (much promoted by proto-yuppie Theodore Roosevelt) that claimed that a period of hunting and tough travel out West would make men more masculine.

Hollon reached these conclusions in 1976 with the publication of Frontier Violence: Another Look in which he examined a number of statistical indicators in order to determine the true level of violence in the American West. Historians have been working to refute his conclusions ever since, although the results have been less than conclusive. Adding to Hollon"s thesis in 1983, Robert Dykstra published Cattle Towns which included an examination of the violence in Kansas cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita, and Caldwell. In novels and on the silver screen, these towns became known for their shootouts. But, as Dykstra tells us, the reality was quite different. These cattle towns had an economic interest in ensuring as little violence as possible�and they delivered.

More recently, we find Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by Michael Bellesiles (the now infamous author of Arming America) which contains a number of essays by authors further examining the disappointing reality that the West was actually quite a bit more boring than the movies led us to believe. Indeed, taken together, this body of research leaves us with a West that hardly lives up to the reputation of the Wild West.

As with Dodge City, the excitement in the Old West in general has been much overstated. All the big cattle towns of Kansas combined saw a total of 45 murders during the period of 1870-1885. Dodge City alone saw 15 people die violently from 1876�1885�an average of 1.5 per year. Deadwood, South Dakota and Tombstone, Arizona (home of the O.K. Corral), during their worst years of violence saw four and five murders respectively. Vigilante violence appears to not have been much worse.

According to Dykstra and Richard M. Brown, while the Kansas code gave mayors the power to call a vigilante group from all the men in the town who ranged in ages from 18�50, it seems, at least in Kansas, that it was rarely done. In a span of 38 years, Kansas had only 19 vigilante movements that accounted for 18 deaths. In addition, between 1876 and 1886, no one was lynched or hanged illegally in Dodge City.

Given the money to be made by exploiting the exciting reputation of the Frontier, it should not surprise us that Dodge City was hardly alone in manufacturing tales of blazing guns to attract men seeking adventure. Towns like Tombstone, Abilene and Deadwood all played up their supposed histories of Frontier violence. On closer inspection, though, the records are not nearly as exciting. (For more, see "The Not So Wild Wild West" by Terry Anderson.)

If the movies and novels about the West are so unreliable then, what can we learn from documented cases about real life violence in the West? Certainly, a case that would have to jump out at us as the quintessential blood feud in the West would be the Lincoln County war of 1878�81. As the name implies, this unpleasantness was quite disruptive to southern New Mexico, and produced quite its share of corpses. But even then, we find a body count intolerably low by Hollywood standards.

Like many similar feuds on the Frontier, the Lincoln County War began as a land dispute that turned violent following a variety of unsavory actions taken by government authorities. The war was touched off by a legal dispute between established cattlemen L.G. Murphy and J.J. Dolan who used their connections with US officials in the area as well as with the Army at Fort Stanton, to secure economic control over the cattle and merchant economies of Lincoln county. In 1877, Alexander McSween and John Tunstall, along with competing cattleman John Chisum, began to challenge the control of Murphy and Dolan as well as the favoritism they had long been receiving from territorial officials.

In turn, after being harassed and arrested at the request of a US attorney, McSween was eventually legally out-maneuvered by Murphy and Dolan as they continued to call in government favors in order to ruin their new competition. Sheriff William Brady received a court order to seize property belonging to both McSween and his partner Tunstall, but on the way to the Tunstall ranch, the Sheriff"s posse gunned down Tunstall in cold blood after he had surrendered his gun, setting off the most violent part of the war.

Present at Tunstall"s murder was a young man Tunstall had recently taken under his wing, William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. The Kid swore to avenge Tunstall"s death, and by 1881, after a gunfight at McSween"s home (where the Army was brought in against McSween and his men, and Mcsween"s house was burned to the ground by the Sheriff"s men), Sheriff Brady, several deputies, McSween, and at least 6 of his men we killed including Billy the Kid.

Yet, when the smoke cleared from this unusually violent conflagration, the legend remains far more violent than the reality. After all, authorities have only been able to prove that Billy the Kid, generally regarded as the most blood-soaked participant in the Lincoln County war, killed 3 people. Most agree that he could have killed as many as three or four more people, but considering the circumstances, it is difficult to ascertain how The Kid managed to gain a reputation as a "psychopathic killer" or how stories began to circulate of how he had "killed 21 men by the time he was 21."

Much of the confusion was due, as Richard Shenkman indicates, to American movies. Films that depict the Lincoln County War like Chisum (1970) (which portrays Billy as a rather sympathetic character), and Young Guns (1988) (which makes Billy look a bit more crazy), play up the violence for obvious reasons. However, even considering the rather alarming body count (by contemporary as well as modern standards), events like the Lincoln County war were hardly everyday occurrences, and in the end, those involved were corrupt officials and cowboys who didn"t much care for having their friends gunned down by unscrupulous Sheriff"s deputies.

How this translates into the Frontier being essentially uncivilized and coming apart at the seams remains to be seen. For its part at least, Chisum did portray the struggle of the individual against the state and against outlaws, and does celebrate the self-reliant man. But the violence of the West contained in Chisum and in hundreds of pictures like it, has helped to burn an image of an inherently violent Frontier into the minds of Americans. And in recent decades, this image has now been turned from glorifying nationalism on the Frontier, to a new one of showing�almost exclusively�the Frontier"s horrors.