Life in the Old West

In his excellent reference work, “Dictionary of the American West,” writer Winfred Blevins has an interesting section in the introduction on Indian Pidgin English, a language of convenience which he says bridged a communications gap and traveled via explorers, traders, and mountain men across the entire continent.

Blevins makes an interesting point that this mishmash of terms came about mostly from efforts by the many Indian language groups “to learn or develop words that would work, starting a pidgin language, with expressions like big medicine, big water, big talk. … In time, with lots of Indians using it, whites learning it and translators adopting it, Indian Pidgin English became a kind of language.”

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Most sources I’ve read suggest that “gunfighter,” and “gunman” were terms used in the later days of the Old West (probably after the 1870s or ’80s) for someone who was also known as a “shootist,” or in our post-Western movie times, the guy who had the pistol and wasn’t afraid or hesitant to use it.

According to Winfred Blevins’ highly useful “Dictionary of the American West” (to which I’ve referred here before), “gunfighter” and “gunmen” as well as “gunfight” and “gunfighting” all came along in the late 1800s — and there was never any distinction made between “gunfighter” as the sort of good guy or “gunman” as the bad guy. Blevins suggests that such terms almost always referred to pistols rather than long guns, i.e., rifles.

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To speak of some pre-European “Native American lifestyle” is more myth than reality, when it comes to the cultures and allegiances of the many ethnic groups which inhabited North America before the Spanish, British, French, and other European colonizers came here.

In reality, Indian (the preferred terminology within most Native American ethnic groups even today) bands and tribal groups were as diverse and fragmented in their culture and their alliances with each other as were any of the nations of Europe. The Iroquois Confederacy of the Northeast was a major exception to this. The five original “nations” or tribal groups which made up that alliance (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) — joined by a sixth (Tuscarora) in 1720 — were a major exception. In those regions we generally refer to as the Old West (the Plains and the Southwest), there were some 30 distinct cultural/linguistic Indian groups at the time of earliest contact by Europeans. In Mexico, Central America, and South America there were many, many more.

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An ancient group of Indians (Native Americans) who had a great impact on the history of the Old West, specifically in the Southwestern region of the U.S., was the Anasazi. They were ancestors of more well-known, modern tribal groups as the Zuni and Hopi. The Anasazi created the captivating Pueblo dwellings such as Mesa Verde and Kayenta.

The word “Anasazi” itself is a Navajo term that means “the ancient ones,” and researches say these people lived in what is now known as the Four Corners Region (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah boundaries come together) until about seven or eight centuries ago. Archaeology is sketch, and written records are non-existent, about where these cliff dwellers may have originated. And all that’s known about their departure from that region into the Rio Grande Valley near the end of the 1200s — where they became the ancestors of the Zuni and Hopi tribes — is that it may have come about because of extended drought or pressure from their enemies. (One source tells us that contemporary Pueblo groups object to the name “Anasazi” because it is a word from their longtime “enemies,” the Navajos.)

Read more on Many Southwest tribal groups descended from Anasazi ‘cliff dwellers’…

“Float gold” or “floated gold” livened up life in the Old West with the ability to turn any man or woman rich — or turn any man or woman into a pauper. As the name implies, it was gold which had washed (floated) down from the mines in mountains into the streams and creeks. Mining float gold was done by “placer mining”: Using dredges, pans, sluices and other hydraulic methods to separate the grains and nuggets of gold from the sand and gravel along and inside of streams and rivers throughout the West.

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Belt buckles are a relatively modern invention, and Western style or cowboy style belt buckles blended utility with the desire to show off or “fancy up” things and dress for going out on the town. The utility of a belt and buckle was that it plain and simply cinched up the pants, while offering a convenient place to tuck in a sidearm, or wear a holster. The showmanship or dress-up aspect came about as silversmiths and other metal workers found ways to shape, carve, and engrave pictures and symbols into the buckle, turning it into a fancy ornament, a piece of acceptably “manly” jewelry for cowboys and others in the Old West.

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