The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

anachronistic courage in the bourgeoisie 219working for a wage at the time. The western cattle industry was some smallfraction of 2 percent of national income in 1880. After all, beef was not avery large share of the nation’s expenditure—ask yourself how much evenyou in your early twenty-first-century prosperity spend out of your annualincome on the farmer’s share of the proceeds from beef. Only a small partof the beef had seen the Wild West. Corn-fed cattle from Iowa pens, notgrass-fed from Montana open ranges, dominated the industry from 1900 atthe latest. The workers who took care of the grass-fed cattle were buried inthe occupational category at the bottom of the proletariat, farmhands. Theywere proletarians, not aristocrats. They were commonly teenagers, not men.Upwards of a quarter were people of color.The bourgeois real-estate men who governed the cow towns kept theirboys under strict control, by taking their guns away. Gun control is not arecent idea. The actual gunfight at OK Corral, October 26, 1881, for instance,was about Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers, as the law in Tombstone,trying to take away the pistols the McLaurys and Clantons were illegallydisplaying in town.A classic study of the extent of violence in the cow towns of Kansas discoveredthat all the murders 1870–1885 came to a mere one and a half pertown per trading season, and few of these were the outcome of Shane-typeduels. 16 It’s hard to duel with pistols to the death when the city fathers havedisarmed you. Less than a third of gunshot victims in the non-Hollywoodcow towns returned fire. Many were not armed, as for instance the Caldwellwife shot dead in 1884 by her drunken husband. The fictionally terrifyingBat Masterson, for example, killed no one while resident in Dodge City. Thecowboy, like the samurai and the knight and the Homeric hero, is a belatedfiction.“Fiction” does not mean “an utterly pointless fantasy without the slightestreference to the actual world,” at least not in the minds of the male audiencesfor such tales of courage. As Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe observein The Arthurian Handbook, “Medieval storytellers . . . and their audiencesviewed Arthur’s kingdom rather as people now regard the Wild West. ...Like the Wild West, [Arthur’s Britain] was a realm of the imagination,but its creators would have denied that they were simply inventing out ofnothing.” 17The assertion that a fiction is about something that once actually happenedis important to the men who read it, as to the men who read Tom