The Good Old Days

It’s so easy to romanticize what it would have been like to live in the Old West. I do it daily. I mostly contemplate enacting a bit of frontier justice on today’s lawbreakers, but even that wasn’t as I good as I dream it was. Let’s take a look a rural life in the wild new land. Country life in the post-Civil War era was an unremitting hardship. The farmer and his family toiled fourteen hours a day merely to sustain themselves, primarily on a landscape that lacked the picturesque inspiration of Currier & Ives’ prints. Nor did their endless drudgery reward the farmers with prosperity; during the economic distress of 1870-1900 few small and middle-sized farms produced anything beyond bare subsistence, and many were foreclosed. In place of a neat rose garden, an expanse of muck and manure surrounded the farmhouse, sucking at boots and exuding a pestilential stench that attracted swarms of flies, ticks and worms to amplify the miseries of men, women, children and beasts. Cooking, the kitchen’s major activity, was done in an open hearth fireplace with crooks and arms or, more likely, on an iron stove. Many received severe burns reaching into the hearth to remove their food. People needed a well to get water. For practical purposes the well was dug close to the farmhouse, which itself was close to the barnyard, stable, pigsty, coop and cesspool. With not even a pretense of drainage, the well was thus exposed to all sorts of noxious matter seeping through the ground. Slush from the kitchen, festering matter from privies, and seepage from animal wastes posed a growing danger to the water supply and filled the air with a vile odor. Given all that, I think the good old days were really quite terrible. When I wasn’t crying this weekend over unanswered prayer for my brother, I was taking a more critical look at the time period I so love. I’d trade all the hardship one had to endure back then to see my brother home alive.