What Did People in the Wild West Actually Do All Day?

A steer was worth about four dollars in Texas and about forty in Kansas. It was the same animal. The only difference was where it was standing, and eight hundred miles of grass sat in between. This video is one full day inside that gap. You are on night watch, singing to twelve hundred cattle at three in the morning so they do not get up and run. Then the pot, the coffee, the horse you do not own, ten miles of dust, the river that drowns men who cannot swim, and the town at the end of it that was built specifically to take your wages off you. No duels at noon. Those were mostly invented by dime novelists while the frontier was still open. What was actually there was a wage job, done by very young men, a quarter to a third of them Black, Mexican American, or Native, working for corporations that were sometimes owned by investors in Scotland who had never seen a cow. Plus the women whose work held the whole thing up, the children who were labor from the moment they could carry something, and the gun ordinances that the movies never mention. SOURCES Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (1968), via Smithsonian Magazine — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun... Texas State Historical Association, Chisholm Trail — https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entrie... Texas State Historical Association, Big Die-Up — https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entrie... Kansas Historical Society, Chisholm Trail — https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansapedia/c... Kansas Historical Society, Cowtowns — https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansapedia/c... National Park Service, The Chuckwagon — https://www.nps.gov/places/the-chuckwagon.htm Bill of Rights Institute, Cowboys and Cattle Drives — https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/c... Oklahoma Historical Society, African Americans and the Cattle Industry — https://www.okhistory.org/learn/cowhands3 Digital History, University of Houston, Housework in Late 19th Century America — https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_di... South Dakota State Historical Society, Homesteading — https://history.sd.gov/museum/docs/Homeste... Colorado Encyclopedia, The Great Die Up — https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/g... HistoryNet, When Dodge City Was Really Wild — https://www.historynet.com/when-dodge-city... Legends of America, Old West Gunfights — https://www.legendsofamerica.com/old-west-...