There Professor Marvel goes again clouding the subject with facts. Trying to live the fantasy gets harder with knowledge and many a man has been happier in ignorance! I?m going to take my whiskey out to the porch and drown my sorrows.
No Need for that my Good Kent!
The main point of my babbling is to debunk the "traveling farmhand photographer" and dispell any fairy stories surrounding the photos.
The Hyperbole and Snake Oil is not surprising considering that the Daily Mail is another Tabloid much like the National Enquirer
The images are valid easily up to 1920ish of the Real West. if one checks into the Art Colonies of Sante Fe and Taos
one finds nearly identical photos right up too ~ 1920
re: The Taos Society of Artists was an organization of visual arts founded in Taos, New Mexico in 1915; it disbanded in 1927
If one looks into the history of the "Indian Country" as the AAA likes to call it, one finds that it was still incredibly
wild, rugged, untamed & etc until well after WW1
The entire Front and Back range of the Rockies - Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona
were accessible only by rail to major metropolitan areas and horse after that. Even after the Tin Lizzy , horses
were preferred due to the lack of infrastructure (roads)
Oklahoma and Texas and the Dakotas were quite open and quite wild for some time. The only available law was the local or county LEO
and whatever vigilance committee the citizens could drum up, or appeal to the governor ( Ie Arizona and Texas Rangers)
or the Fed for one of the very few Fedral Marshalls.
The Huge OIl Boom in Oklahoma and Texas made those places even wilder and crazier. Bass Reeves worked as a LEO OK and AR up
till 1909. Any photos of that time and country differ only in Oil derecks and autos. Take a photo away from the Oil Rigs and you
still see Cowboys and Ranchers just like 1880.
your humble babbler
prof marvel