American frontier

Gold is where you find it, they say.

But in the Old West, there was gold where nobody could find it, in a lost gold mine.

Until United States Marshal Wild Bill Hickok and his deputy Jingles went to a birthday party at Walt Mason's ranch and stumbled into...

The Secret of the Hard Luck Mine.

So do that, won't you? Okay, now let's listen.

For over 20 years following the Civil War, the hard-case gentry of the Old West kept their eyes open for a chance to gun down United States Marshal Wild Bill Hickok.

One of the deadliest plots against the Marshal's life was hatched by the blacksmith at Salt River City one day as he stood staring into the dancing flames of his forge fire.

Yep, that's the way to get rid of that dad-blame marshal and them other two to boot.

Now, let's listen.

The only disguise used by most of the bad men of the Old West in their stick-ups was a handkerchief mask pulled up just below the eyes.

But one clever owl hoot went the rest one better and confounded all the efforts of the sheriff of Steep Rock, Arizona to capture him.

It was after five daring daylight holdups that United States Marshal Wild Bill Hickok and his big deputy Jingles were called into the search for the two-faced horny toad.

Water.

In the dry and desolate regions of the Old West, water was a prize more precious than gold, for without it, the land itself would die of thirst.

In the town of San Vallejo, a strange war of the wastelands was fought.

A war for water.

So we see characters like Frenzy who have this type of power set where it's the super strength that seems very much determined by her kind of own will.

I do want to spend just a minute, and we're going to go longer into this in my Rawhide Kid trial, but if we go back to classic Hollywood Western tropes, the Wild West becomes like a whole playable land where we have such an enormous genre of American fiction in movies, television shows, Broadway musicals, music, and every genre you can think about, including comics.

And in the midst of that, we love to play with gender.

We're going to talk about this with Rawhide Kid, who's a little bit more of an effeminate cowboy gunslinger, but we have this template of kind of the girl who's a little bit butch.

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check yep yeah we're good we're fucking it's sounds really good right now guys awesome the wild wild west The Wild Wild West.

Do you guys remember when they had the, this was like the best McDonald's.

The best McDonald's toy ever was, they had like the sunglasses that Will Smith wore in the Wild Wild West.

Damn.

Were they silver? I think it was the Inspector McGadget.

I'm undercover.

I'm a FBI.

You really couldn't replicate this.

I don't think there's nowhere in the Old West for them to odyssey the Lonesome Dove.

Yeah.

You know, like.

The experience displayed the railroad construction camp that would have been present in Abilene around the 1880s.

The interactive demonstration and hands-on activities allowed audiences to imagine what it would have been like to be building the railroad in the time of the Old West.

Phillips says that the era of the Western frontier is as important for children to know the history of as other major societies.

I have kind of a theory that there are, in human history, you've got certain societies that did something special.

You had the British Empire, the High Renaissance in France and Italy.

In the U.S., we had the Western Frontier.

Phillips believes that those living in the time of the Old West recognized its significance in the midst of it.

If you read some of the stories by people like Jay Wright Moore and Charles Goodnight that were here when it was the Old West, some of them who were not that educated still recognized that this is something special and it's going away.