What Would Your Job Have Been In The Wild West?

One of the biggest challenges on the Wild West frontier was educating the local children. A teacher had to be prepared to teach kids how to read and write using little more than a chalkboard and ingenuity. Due to the small number of children in most Old West settlements, children as young as five and as old as fourteen were typically educated by the same teacher in the same one-room schoolhouse. While it was challenging, the teachers were responsible for ensuring that all children were prepared to learn a skill that would earn them money someday in the settlement.

Some say that miners made the Old West what it was. Thousands of miners headed west to explore every promising region in their search for gold. To these many adventurers, no mountain was too high to climb, no canyon too precarious to descend, and no river too difficult to cross. They were a determined lot. However, while not all struck gold, there were many mining jobs to be had throughout the West--mining for coal, copper, iron, oil, and gas--if you were brave enough to weather treacherous conditions and hazards such as mine collapses and robberies.

It's hard to conjure up an image of the Wild West without picturing a saloon's wooden false front, a wide boardwalk flanking the dusty street, a hitching post for horses, and the always present swinging doors brushing against the cowboy as he made his way to the long polished bar in search of a whiskey to wet his parched throat. A saloon owner was responsible for serving everyone from cowboys to sheriffs to outlaws and everything in between as well as breaking up the regular bar fight or lovers' quarrel.

With no laws, no courts, little or no government, and the disadvantage of being miles away from the nearest big city, Wild West towns had to rely on their local sheriff to keep law and order. In addition to breaking up the occasional bar fight or settling a land dispute, Wild West sheriffs were also responsible for hunting down fugitives on the run from the law. A sheriff had to be not only quick with a gun but also brave, as the likelihood of them engaging in a gunfight at any given time was significant.