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.
Well, glad the trash sector has improved in its ways!
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