Reply #14: Actually, some towns were exactly as Hollywood depicts, but they were rare. [View All]

[Xithras]

Towns like Bodie and Tombstone were very real and very violent (Bodie legitimately had a murder every day for more than a year at one point...signifigant for a town of only 7000 people). They were the exception though, and most towns only rarely had those sorts of problems.

As for the landscape, "westerns" tend to get filmed in the deserts or the plains because those environments still exist, but many "western" events of that time happened in places like the San Francisco Bay or in the tree filled Willamette Valley in the Oregon Territory amid the snow and pines.

What you have to remember about "the old west" is that most of the events Hollywood depicts are actually fairly predictable in that situation. Wide open landscapes with no real transportation system, no law enforcement to speak of, and uneducated and poor "government" officials who were easily bribed or threatened. It was an environment that would naturally attract societies worst elements, and cause conflicts between them and those who had moved there to "civilize" the region. Luckily, crime tends to congregate, so the worst elements of the west were largely confined to a few smaller areas (though those areas changed over time). Most people lived in relative peace, and were more worried about their kids catching a virus than a bullet from a vigilante, or from starvation from crop failure.