The Frontier

Frontier crime has attracted attentive audiences for decades. Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner enunciated his famous frontier thesis of American history, historians and the reading public have found something fascinating about the bigger than life bad guys of the frontier. Ironically, it may be because the west was so rural and had small towns and cities filled with such prolific writers that its "wild" atmosphere was brought to the attention of Americans and American historians. The journalist, Mark Twain, after all, wrote about the wild times he experienced, making much of the rough atmosphere in mining towns. Yet there is more and less to the white hats black hats version of frontier crime and justice than soap operas and movies would have us believe. On the one hand, the frontier did have high rates of violence; this came with the territory so to speak, for the frontier was populated by young single males, the single demographic group most likely to offend criminal laws. Historically, most areas with weak or conflicted state presence have higher rates of crime, whether in the new world or old.
Finally, the presence of continual conflict with long established Indian people produced, amongst the newcomers, an informally sanctioned target of genocidal violence of a kind which seldom entered the official records or the courts.