Introduction



Let’s start with a trivia question. From which of the Red Dead Redemption games is the following scene plucked?

It is the dead of night. In the borderlands between the American South and West, an outlaw gang has made camp in a farmhouse, laying low after a string of audacious train robberies. Yet their hideout is not as secret as they imagine. Encircling their camp that night are heavily armed agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private police force tasked with arresting or killing the bandits. These gunmen know this is a particularly important mission, as they were given their assignment by the founder of the agency himself, who nurses a particular grudge against these outlaws because they had previously murdered two of his men. “They must pay,” the agency’s chief fumes. “There is no use talking—they must die.”

The Pinkertons’ plan to overtake the gang is elaborate. With the outlaws fast asleep, the agents lob a specially-built incendiary device through a window, giving them both light and the element of surprise. The plan is then to enter stealthily and shoot or arrest the bandits. But things soon go awry. First, it turns out that the gang’s leaders are absent from the farmhouse. Second, at least one outlaw isn’t sleeping when the flare drops through the window—and he leaps up and tosses the strange device into the fireplace. There it explodes in a terrific fireball, ejecting shrapnel that kills the eleven-year-old son of one gangmate and tears an arm off the gang leader’s elderly mother. These were not the intended targets, and now the Pinkertons’ advantage of stealth is lost. Frustrated, embarrassed, and fearing a bloodbath, the agents retreat into the night. The outlaws gloat at besting their adversary. “Pinkerton and his detectives can look for us in hell,” crows the gang’s leader with pride.

If you’re scratching your head to place this particular showdown within the video games, don’t blame your memory—it was a trick question. The scene and its colorful quotes are pulled not from the digital fiction of the Red Dead Redemption series, but from the pages of American history. The outlaws defying capture are the James-Younger gang, led by Jesse and Frank James. Their farmhouse hideout lay in Missouri, their home state. Bloodthirstily hounding the gang was Allan Pinkerton, founder of the private detective bureau bearing his name. And the outlaws’ outwitting of the Pinkertons was one of the great underdog upsets in the history of American crime and punishment.1

Isn’t it startling, though, how this flesh-and-blood encounter sounds as if it were lifted from the narrative of the Red Dead Redemption games? This suggests the pains that Rockstar Games, the developer of the series, took to capture the world of the late 1800s. And indeed, as this book will reveal again and again, the video games frequently excel in showcasing the contours not only of outlaw life but also of American life, across a wide swath of the continent.

But before we neatly equate the James-Younger gang with the van der Linde crew of the video games, let’s consider the inconsistencies and flaws in such a comparison. The Pinkerton raid in Missouri took place during a decade when that agency was known for chasing western outlaws. Yet that decade was not the 1890s but the 1870s; the assault on the James-Youngers came in January 1875. By 1899 or 1911, the chronological settings of the games, the Pinkertons were frying bigger fish. They were breaking strikes at factories and infiltrating labor unions, not hunting bandit gangs. The quarter century that separates the two makes a big difference. Likewise, we shouldn’t imagine the James-Younger outlaws as the mirror images of the crooked, violent, but ultimately sympathetic van der Linde gang. Jesse James and his brood were bad men in every sense of the word. Not only were they remorseless killers, but they also held toxic ideologies. The gang were former pro-slavery guerrillas who had fought for the Confederacy. They were unreconstructed white supremacists, who sometimes donned the uniforms of the Ku Klux Klan during their robberies. They were such obvious villains that they almost make the Pinkertons look like the good guys—and that is no easy task.2

I kick us off with the 1875 Pinkerton raid in Missouri because it gives a representative taste of this book. In the chapters ahead, we will use the fictional characters and plotline of the Red Dead Redemption games to explore some of the thorniest dilemmas of American history between roughly 1865 and 1920. This is the half century following the end of the Civil War, an era that Mark Twain famously called the “Gilded Age.” It appeared, at first glance, to be made of gold, but that glitter was just a thin veneer, and laying below was a rotten core of corruption, inequality, and violence. Whether you’ve sunk months into the games, watched them over someone’s shoulder, or never picked up a controller at all, I hope that the pages ahead reveal the powerful ways that digital games can shed new light on the triumphs and tragedies of the American past.

This raises the question that perhaps motivated you to pick up this book: in the opinion of a professional historian, how accurate and thoughtful are the Red Dead Redemption games—especially the much larger and ambitious second one—in representing turn-of-the-century America? This is not the only question this book seeks to answer, but it is a central one, so we had better address it head-on.

Let’s begin with the positives. In its visual recreation of the natural and built landscape of the 1890s—the architecture, fashion, typefaces, farmland, mountains, and more—Red Dead Redemption II is stunningly on point. Game designers must have painstakingly studied photographs from the period and sought to recreate their aesthetic, and they often succeed.

Likewise, the game admirably captures the human diversity of 1899 America. Though the playable protagonists are white men, this is no monochromatic John Wayne fantasy. In the adventures of the van der Linde gang, we meet women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. We get to know immigrants, politicians, workers, ranchers, bankers, farmers, and field hands. And for the most part, these characters defy stereotype and the pigeonholing so common to the gaming genre. (I have a less optimistic view of the first Red Dead Redemption game, where only white men are granted nuance and complexity.)

But before you leap to the conclusion that I am awarding Red Dead Redemption II an A+ for historical recreation, let’s turn to its shortcomings. When it comes to the less tangible but equally important social and cultural fabric of American life—how people speak, how they understand themselves and their world, what they care about—the game misses the mark more often than not. Particularly problematic is the game’s consistent asynchronicity—in other words, its timing is off. Red Dead Redemption II is a pretty great game about the early 1870s. The problem is, of course, that it’s set in 1899, about thirty years off the mark. Many of its subjects speak volumes about the early 1870s but are nonsensical in 1899. We’ve already learned how the Pinkertons had almost entirely given up hunting western outlaws by the late 1890s. But there’s much more. The Ku Klux Klan, depicted in the game’s southern portion, lay dormant by the time protagonist Arthur Morgan encountered them in the woods. The herds of buffalo that Arthur observes and hunts were nearly extinct by 1899. And open warfare between Native tribes and the U.S. government, which constitutes the game’s violent final chapter, had all but ended by the 1880s.

But the purpose of our journey together is not to catalog how the games misrepresent the past. I’m much more interested in delving into what the games don’t represent in the first place: the backdrop, the setting, the deeper context that explains the action—but which the games couldn’t possibly provide as commercial blockbusters. I’m interested in filling in the gaps, the voids, and the spaces in between.

And the greatest silence concerns the question of violence. Red Dead Redemption II, like most top-selling video games today, is known for its graphic and pervasive bloodshed. One gaming website estimated that the minimum number of people killed by Arthur Morgan, even under an “honorable” playthrough style, lies somewhere near nine hundred. (Only a handful of historic outlaws even killed a dozen people.) But if the games wildly exaggerate the body count, they underscore an undeniable truth: that the American West, Deep South, and Appalachia of the late nineteenth century were unusually violent places.3

On the video game screen, violence erupts either randomly or because of personal factors. Grudges, rivalries, or the individual pursuit of wealth quicken the trigger finger. As in countless Hollywood westerns, bullets fly during robberies, poker matches, or with an overabundance of whiskey. Yet in late-nineteenth-century America, violence was usually not random or unpredictable. Nor was it a distraction from the defining political and social issues of the day. Instead, it was intimately wound up with them. Gilded Age bloodshed resulted primarily from two unanswered questions, which will come up again and again in this book. First, would the United States live up to its recent constitutional commitment to racial equality? With the Civil War, the founding documents of the American nation were revised to permit men of color into the halls of power and governance. Yet words on paper were not the same as deeds and actions, and the half-fulfilled promise of equality spurred tremendous violence.

But that was only part of the puzzle. Americans answered a second question with their rifles and revolvers: what power would a rising capitalist elite wield over common people? After the Civil War, the nation witnessed the burgeoning might of a new corporate class whose wealth was unprecedented. These oil magnates, railroad barons, meatpacking tycoons, and steel titans sought to remake the nation in their image, reorienting lives and landscapes to serve their urban, industrial vision. Yet millions of Americans resented and resisted this project, through strikes, theft, arson, terrorism, and—yes—homicide. Therefore, in this book I hope to show that violence, long seen as the most toxic element in digital gaming culture, might in fact open a window to better understanding the defining features of modern American history.

Ultimately, my aim is not to condemn or denounce the Red Dead Redemption games for their inaccuracy or lack of complexity. I had too much fun playing them to do so. Neither is it my goal to celebrate them for their historical sensitivity and elevate them to the status of educational tool. Without accompaniment, they’re not. Instead, the following chapters will use the games’ incomplete content alongside the enthusiasm they’ve created in millions of gamers to guide our exploration of the past.

The Red Dead universe is vast, encompassing a range of titles including Red Dead Revolver (2004), the original Red Dead Redemption (2010), Red Dead Redemption II (2018), and its accompanying multiplayer game Red Dead Online. It’s best that I clarify which this book will and will not emphasize. Red Dead Revolver is a fairly mindless action game and won’t be mentioned again. The first Redemption game is, like its sequel, a dense and complex open-world game, set in the U.S. West and northern Mexico in 1911. But it favors sensationalism and stereotype over seriousness, and almost everything it does well is done better by its 2018 follow-up. Similarly, the multiplayer Red Dead Online won’t get much of the spotlight, as its historical representations are thinner. This is really a book about Red Dead Redemption II’s single-player story. It’s the most recent, most played, most beloved, most decorated, and by far the most historically sensitive game of the bunch. It’s ranked in the top ten best video games of all time by IGN, the world’s most-read gaming outlet—and for good reason.4

The structure of this book follows the narrative of Red Dead Redemption II. It is divided into three geographic parts, which map onto the basic storyline of the game. We will follow the van der Linde gang’s perilous journey through the America of 1899, beginning with their trek out of the mountains and into the plains of the Great West; then into the flat, steamy landscape of the Deep South and its central city Saint Denis (New Orleans); and finally we will flee alongside them into the mountains of southern Appalachia, where our journey comes to its conclusion. Regrettably, I won’t dwell much on the game’s Caribbean chapter, as it departs too radically from our U.S. foundation.

If you’re a diehard gamer, I hope this book provides you with the ammunition you need to prove to your partner or parents that you aren’t in fact wasting your life behind that screen but instead are learning big things. (Well, you aren’t wasting all of it.) If you’re someone otherwise averse to studying history because of bad experiences in middle or high school, I hope this book gives you an appreciation of the past not as a dull collection of names, dates, presidents, and wars but as a living, breathing thing. Perhaps you’ll also realize that today’s towering social dilemmas of race, class, inequality, and political division are the products of this history, and that the past weighs heavily upon us as we look toward the future. If you’re a professional historian, I hope this book forces an acknowledgment that video games can be powerful tools in teaching serious historical content and should no longer be ignored or written off. No matter who you are, I hope that engaging with the history in this book will make future playthroughs of the Red Dead Redemption games more, not less, fun—and infinitely richer and more rewarding.



1 The Idea of the West

Red Dead Redemption II traverses vast swaths of North America’s geography. It follows the journey of the van der Linde gang through the cotton fields of the Deep South, through the coal-mining towns of southern Appalachia, through the sugar cane plantations of a Caribbean island, and, of course, across the wind-blown prairies and snowy mountains of the West. But in every advertisement for the game and in nearly every media review of it, only one of those regions claims the spotlight. Rockstar Games’ promotional materials promise a game about “the end of the Wild West era.” Gaming websites do the same, with IGN describing the game as a “sprawling Western tale.” GameSpot titled their review “Wild Wild West,” while PC Gamer’s review headline boasted that “the old west feels brand new again.”1

This near-universal decision to foreground the game’s western-ness was not inevitable. Of the ninety-six main story missions in Red Dead Redemption II (by my count), only a thin majority of fifty-one take place in a western setting, while forty-five are set in the Deep South, Appalachia, or the Caribbean. Why then is the game almost exclusively classified as a western? It is due to the simple fact that in American popular culture, there are no established genres called “southerns,” “Appalachians,” or “Caribbeans.” But for more than a century, there have been a jaw-dropping preponderance of “western” films, TV series, comics, novels, and, of course, games. Both the producers and reviewers of Rockstar’s game knew that of all the regions it showcases, only one is a deep-rooted genre and a national obsession.2

At the heart of Red Dead Redemption II’s western narrative is a familiar story. From the splash screen text that opens the single-player adventure—“by 1899 … the West had mostly been tamed”—the game declares its intention of showcasing a fading West, an “Old” West giving way to a “New” West. Throughout their journey, almost every member of the van der Linde gang waxes nostalgic about the era of unbounded western possibility that they believed was then coming to an end. Early on, we hear Arthur Morgan, our rugged and stoic protagonist, lament the onslaught of “more and more civilization” and his yearning to “get back in the open country, or the West, or what’s left of it, and even that ain’t the way I remember it.” The ending of an era—that is the basic story of the game. As it turns out, it’s also one of the oldest stories Americans have told about the West. For well over a century, Americans have marveled at the supposed “wildness” of the West while also worrying that it was rapidly coming to an end, uncertain what this closing might mean for the American character.

Does such a narrative make sense? This chapter explores the American obsession with the West. Together, we’ll try to answer: what exactly is the West? Why have people been fascinated by it for so long, yet so quick to declare its supposed closing or waning? These dilemmas cut right to the heart of American culture and might shed light on the strange nation that the game seeks to capture.

First off: what’s in a name? We rarely question geographic containers like “the West.” Folks might dispute the precise boundaries of their West—Is the Mississippi River or the edge of the Great Plains the eastern boundary? Do coastal cities like Los Angeles or Seattle truly belong?—but few would challenge the idea that there is a wide swath of land that should be called “the West.” After all, it’s the western half of North America, right? Actually, not so simple. When we name a place by a geographical direction, we unconsciously communicate our own bias and positionality. Whether we know it or not, we are implicitly signaling a center that we are placing our subject in relation to. In other words, directional names are not neutral.

Consider a parallel example. If you grew up in the United States, you were almost certainly raised to think about “the South” as a particular corner of the country, known for its sweet tea, drawling speech, and hospitality, and one roughly filling in the geographic triangle between Texas, Florida, and Virginia. As a result, most Americans would raise an eyebrow if a foreign tourist walked up and asked whether California or Arizona was in “the South.” Of course not, Americans would chuckle; those states are in the West. Yet the tourist would insist that those states are in the southern half of the United States, and they would be undeniably right. And the tourist might wonder: why is it that these strange Americans say “South” when they really mean “Southeast”? What facilitates this bizarre logic is the subconscious assumption among most Americans that the Eastern Seaboard is the backbone of the nation, and that all directional indicators stem from that.

Similarly, when we call a place like Montana or Kansas “the West,” we are implicitly signaling that our point of reference is the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and that those places should be understood in relation to it. And perhaps that makes natural sense in the twenty-first century, but historically, it holds little water. During most of the past five centuries, to think of the land west of the Mississippi River as “the West” would have been nonsensical.

Instead, that swath of land had been known by a range of alternate directional names, each communicating a different spatial relationship. For several centuries under Spanish colonial and then Mexican national control, our region of study would have been called “the North”—the upper frontier of either New Spain or Mexico. The point of reference here would have been Mexico City, the administrative heart of the Spanish and Mexican states, not Washington, D.C. Then, to the French, whose colonial reach extended well past the Mississippi River but whose base of operations was in modern-day Canada, perhaps our region would be called “the South.” Or to the thousands of Chinese immigrants who entered our region, it was perhaps “the East,” a distant land across the Pacific Ocean.

But the most important directional identifier, and one that is too often forgotten nowadays, is that for the millions of Indigenous Americans who inhabited this territory before and after European contact, their home was neither “north,” “south,” “east,” nor “west”—it was “the center.” They did not define themselves in relation to some distant central power but to their own institutions, whether they were Lakota, Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, or other. For centuries, diverse Native peoples were the ones who called the shots in this region. They called their homelands by many names, but “the West” sure wasn’t one of them.

The very first inklings of a “West” only began in 1803, when the French sold their Louisiana Territory to the young United States for the bargain-basement price of $15 million. (Napoleon only agreed to this deal because enslaved Haitians had recently revolted and won their independence, and the French no longer needed North American lands to feed the crown jewel of its Caribbean empire.) Now, with the stroke of a pen, much of the Great Plains and current-day Midwest fell under formal U.S. jurisdiction. However, on the ground, Native people still dominated the region. Most were unaware of the newly expanded maps in Washington, and those who learned of the new boundaries knew they were just lines on paper, representing wishful thinking rather than reality.

American claims to their “West” were further bolstered in the 1840s. First, the British government ceded control of the Oregon Territory to the U.S. Then the Americans fought a nasty, invasive war against their southern neighbor from 1846 to 1848, which resulted in the carving off of around 55 percent of Mexico’s national domain. From this point on, Americans would talk about “the West” in roughly the same terms and language that we use today. But the capture of this territory within U.S. boundaries did not immediately reorient the life of the region toward the dictates and demands of the Eastern Seaboard. For many decades following the 1840s, this area remained “the center,” inhabited and controlled primarily by Native nations. It would only be over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century that “the West” came to eclipse other directional identities, truly coming into the orbit of the Eastern Seaboard.

“The West” had to be made, and it had to displace rival cartographies—accomplished at the business end of a gun barrel, with the spilling of a great deal of blood. And it was made fairly recently, about a century and a half ago.

Yet here’s a strange quirk. For nearly as long as Americans have been discussing and debating “the West,” they have obsessively foregrounded one dilemma: that the sun was setting upon it, not just literally but metaphorically. Americans worried that the unique wildness of the West was rapidly fading, that its raw grittiness was being smoothed out, and that the consequences of the West’s taming would be far-reaching and not all positive.

We can see this narrative in the very first “Western”: a 1902 novel titled The Virginian by Harvard-educated writer Owen Wister, which tells the story of an eastern transplant on the 1870s Wyoming range. With a smoking revolver in hand, the Virginia-born protagonist takes on cattle rustlers and lawlessness, helping to establish business-friendly order and progress on the range, after which he retires his six-gun and settles down for a life of peace in a tamed West. This enormously influential book inspired many imitators and spin-offs in the decades to come. In classic mid-twentieth-century films like The Magnificent Seven (1960) or The Wild Bunch (1969), the gunslinger heroes are fish out of water, pushed aside by the steamroller of capitalist modernity. And of course, in both Red Dead Redemption games, the van der Linde gang represents the last gasp of lawlessness that was being contained by the Pinkertons, Washington, and the U.S. Army. Same basic story, different iterations.

But the original blueprint of a fading Wild West is even older than The Virginian. Indeed, if we want to find the “ground zero” moment for this obsession, we would look to 1893, just a few years before Arthur Morgan begins his adventure. We would need to time-warp to one of the grandest spectacles in American history: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. There, among the sparkle and the fireworks, the oohs and aahs, was born the lasting Western myth that gives the basic shape to Red Dead Redemption II.

In late-nineteenth-century America and Europe, what drew massive crowds was not sporting events, films, or concerts but the series of world’s fairs hosted in cities like London (1851), Philadelphia (1876), and Paris (1889). In these elaborately staged expositions, millions of fairgoers flocked to see inventors and hucksters showcase the wonders of the modern era, from the light bulb to the telephone to the Eiffel Tower. And perhaps no fair was more grandiose than Chicago’s 1893 exposition, which ran from May to October. The timing was symbolic. It was meant to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

To suit the momentous occasion, Chicago constructed a vast fairground almost two square miles in size, filled it with ornate white plaster buildings, and promised a star-studded lineup of unveilings and demonstrations. The Ferris wheel made its debut amid the lights of the exposition, alongside the zipper, Wrigley’s gum, and Cracker Jack popcorn. The Pabst brewery won a blue ribbon in the fair’s beer contest, which they still haven’t quit boasting about. The exposition sold a whopping 27.5 million tickets, which would be impressive by any measure, but even more jaw-dropping when you consider that the U.S. population was just over 60 million at the time. Hoping to see what all the fuss was about, Americans from every corner of the nation thronged Chicago, alongside millions of foreign visitors.3

Given its striking popularity, it’s not surprising that the fair would make a lasting impact on American culture. Yet it was not the Cracker Jacks or Ferris wheel that would leave the biggest dent. Instead, the greatest impact would come with a buttoned-up event that few fairgoers paid much attention to at the time: a conference of professional historians. That July, the American Historical Association, a professional organization founded just a decade earlier, hosted their annual meeting in Chicago, timed to coincide with the fair. Over a few days, a group of self-important white men lectured and discussed the meaning of the American past. And though most of the proceedings of the conference have been consigned to the dustbin of history, one presentation would have vast reverberations. Late on the afternoon of July 12th, Frederick Jackson Turner, a relatively unknown and rather nervous mustachioed junior professor in his early thirties from the University of Wisconsin, took his place at the lectern and delivered an address titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The lecture was brief and the room was hardly crowded, with just over thirty attendees. Yet in time, it would come to be known by millions.4

Turner’s argument that afternoon was rather blunt. What defined the American experiment, he declared, was not the North-South conflict over slavery or the transplanting of European institutions, as some of his colleagues had argued. Instead, it was the nation’s perpetual westward expansion. The backbone of the American character, Turner argued, was born from the recurring cycles of a people taming the empty wilderness as they marched west. Americans were a people in motion, relentlessly transforming a rugged, primitive frontier of “free land”—his words—into settled, productive civilization. And this process, more than any other in Turner’s view, had given Americans their unique identity. It had made them both individualistic and egalitarian, averse to the social hierarchies of Europe with its dukes and earls lording over the unwashed masses. It had made Americans hardy, entrepreneurial, and more committed to democracy than any other people. Turner’s argument, at its essence, was that the frontier is what made America great. It was a feel-good, back-patting assertion, and one that would only make sense to white, English-speaking men. To Native peoples or Spaniards or African Americans (or even white women!), the heroic tale of brave pioneer patriarchs single-handedly taming a vacant frontier would have been laughable. In the 1893 lecture hall where the argument debuted, though, none were present to laugh.5

But Turner had not come to Chicago solely to applaud Americans for their unique greatness. He came with a dire warning. The frontier experience, which had so decisively made Americans who they were, was then rapidly coming to an end. Spurring this belief was a brief declaration made three years earlier in the 1890 decennial U.S. Census report: that for centuries “the country had a frontier of settlement, but at the present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” Those words, Turner declared ominously, “mark the closing of a great historic movement.” As he understood it, the relentless pace of white settlement had, by 1890, put the final nail in the frontier’s coffin. Population densities had risen enough to warrant “civilization” and eastern institutions had taken root. For Turner, this was a grave prognosis. For if Americans had gained their independent, free-spirited, and egalitarian identity through the frontiering process, what would become of them after its end? What would make America great in its absence?6


Copyright © 2024 by Tore C. Olsson