| Much modern scholarship continues to be driven by the violence present in twentieth-century American culture. Efforts to explore the nature of modern American violence often simply assume it is the result of violence in the past. The purpose of this study is, through the use of quantitative analysis, to critically examine several of the most prominent myths surrounding the American West.; This dissertation has three major goals: first, to apply the statistical methodology employed by leading historians of American violence to a site specifically named as being among the most violent in the entire American West and to determine if the various theories asserting elevated levels crime and violence could be supported by quantitative evidence; second, to shed light upon the weaknesses of this quantitative approach to this particular historical problem; and third, through relating several episodic narratives, the dissertation seeks to offer a qualitative perspective that differs significantly from the mythology of the American West. |
