Ron the Yarn Spinner

 

The Streets of Laredo

Or maybe Laramie, Tombstone or ……

                                Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty was a madame on the radio prequel, but not on TV. 

Close your eyes and imagine you hear the muffled  snorts, sighs, whinnys, nickers, grunts, of horses, and squeaks from buggy seats, wagons, and carts. But the sound that dins in your ears is that of simultaneous conversations, many of them, – not all in English - coupled with the unmistakable loud clang of a blacksmith’s  hammer forming new shoes for Old Dollar. Weather beaten wooden buildings are in your vista, a feed store, telegraph office, a barber, the smithy and other businesses.  Then there is the must have saloon – maybe two. You can faintly hear the out-of-tune honky-tonk piano. It’s “Oh, Suzanna.”

This is the center of “main street” in fact the only street and you can almost feel the wind as it whistles between these not-so-high rises of commerce, driving spritely tumbleweeds across the way. It’s the  quintessential town of the early west, when  men were men and women were glad of it.  Cowboys roped, wrangled and rounded-up.  But something’s missing. Homes. Where are the houses where town folks live?

Homes  in many Old West towns were located on the main street but at one end or at the other - as you came into “Dodge” or  Got Out  because the good ladies did not want to live cheek-to-cheek with the prostitutes, thugs,   gamblers, or the drunks.  Towns in the old west were quite a bit more “ambitious”  than what has been portrayed in movies and television.  Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty was a madame on the radio prequel, but not on TV. And then there was the dust.

The women in the town fought a daily battle with dust - when the rain came, mud. Businessmen did as well, and you found more of each in the center of town because of commerce. The town street in the old west was a horrible  mess – much worse than you might think.

Mixed in with the dirt, there would be manure, animal urine, tobacco spit, carcasses of dead animals, blood, and general refuse. It reeked on hot days. There were no trash cans. To address the mess, people were encouraged to take their refuse to the town  dump and business owners tried to clean up the area out front. Saloons had  a swamper,  someone who would empty spittoons, sweep the floor, mop up blood and do what he could on the street outside. A hotel in Tombstone hired someone just for this job and provided a room for him – in the basement. ( I wonder why.) Over time the situation improved with better sanitation. An old west  lawman’s pledge to “Clean up this town” might have had dual meanings back then. Public servants were conscripted  for  clean-up tasks as well. In some towns when the town marshal was not busy tossing villains in the hoosegow, engaging in gunfights or collecting taxes, he justified his salary by collecting road apples.

No  _hit.