Mary Anne King, age 12, of Sarasota, Florida, for her question:
Was the Old West really like TV westerns?
If you watch a lot of TV westerns you mind assembles a general picture of life in a recent historical era. And you can bet your walking boots that sooner or later you are going to ask some challenging questions about the accuracy of this TV picture of the Old West.
Most of these TV shows are punctuated with flying arrows or banging bullets or both. As a rule, a number of hollering Indians bite the dust and a number of bullet- ¬ridden corpses of rustlers, ranchers and other white settlers pile up in the streets and saloons. If you total up the victims through a week's showing of TV westerns, you would have enough corpses to fill a cemetery. Add to them the roughnecks bruised and broken by sheriffs and upstanding citizens who think it proper to solve all differences of opinion with a punch in the jaw. The surviving characters are reduced to a precious few, mainly women and children.
It is true that a lot of brave pioneers were injured and lost their lives as the west was tamed and settled. But by far the largest percentage of them must have sur¬vived or the settlement of these wide areas in less than a century would have been impossible. Obviously the killing and brutal maiming is overdone and fails to make reasonable sense.
The pioneers of the Old West fenced large tracts of prairies, established thriving herds of ranch cattle, built settled communities, roads and even railroads. This staggering project required time and energy. It is reasonable to suppose that these efforts occupied most of the time of the pioneers and kept many of them busy from sun¬rise to sunset. People busily occupied in this way have little time or energy left for the perpetual high jinks in the usual TV western. These shows rarely give us a true picture of the majority of the solid citizens who did all the work necessary to settle the Old West.
There were, of course, gun fights and Indian raids. There were lawmen too, good ones and bad ones. But solid citizens who buckle down to useful work live by high standards of self discipline and sound rules of character. The majority of the pio¬neers never would have stood for the notion that a bullet or a punch on the nose is the proper way to settle an honest difference of opinion or even a dishonest dispute.
Those busy westerners whom we rarely see on TV really lived very exciting lives, often far more exciting than the bloody bullets and arrows that are supposed to enter¬tain us. Occupying and settling a new territory, building and making it habitable are stirring achievements. The real life pioneers would have loved to share with you the glory and pride of their successful efforts and maybe also hand on the lessons learned from some of their failures. However, if they had to watch our average TV westerns, they might mistake them for barbaric adventures of some alien planet.