Muscotah is in the same county that I grew up in, Jackson County, Kansas, so I know that area well. It's probably twenty miles from the town where I grew up.

When I was a kid Muscotah always seemed to me like a magical place, because it was so near to our town but we never went there. The school "leagues". . .the Jackson County Leagues, in which we competed both in Grade School (Grades 1-8) and High School (Grades 9-12) had eight towns: Mayetta, Hoyt, Soldier, Circleville, Delia, Netawaka, Whiting and Denison. (There was also Holton, but we didn't compete against them because they were a bigger town and competed in bigger-town leagues.) Anyway, I knew those 9 towns from the beginning of my memory, and assumed those were the only ones there were. When I was in about the 7th grade, I discovered from the Encyclopedia or some similar source that there were actually three other little towns in the county where I had never been and had never heard of. Muscotah was one of those. This made them seem mystical to me.

What happened to Muscotah was that the railroad didn't go through there. The towns that didn't get on the railroad started dying about 1910, and were almost ghost towns by the time that I became aware of things. They didn't have public schools, mostly (kids were bussed to schools in nearby towns); they had churches and little grocery stores and houses, but didn't have the array of businesses that the other little towns had. (Mayetta, which had a little less than 300 people, had four grocery stores, two and sometimes three cafes, a lumberyard, a bar, two barbershops, three or four gas stations, a cream station, a lumberyard, a grain elevator (which was probably the biggest business in town), a post office, a meat locker/freezer, three churches, a fire station/fire department, a phone company. Mayetta had two banks until the Depression; they died during the depression, but the old bank buildings were still there. We had an old crumbling jail, which was no longer used, but it was still there. All the little towns had businesses like that; some of them had a bakery or a funeral parlor or a bank or an antique store.

Muscotah mostly did not have those things, by the time that I became aware of it. It is actually doing much better now than it was when I first saw it, nearly 60 years ago. As a tribute to Joe Tinker they have painted the town water "tower" as a giant baseball, which they claim is the largest baseball in the world. (Muscotah sets on high ground, so the water tower is only a few feet above ground.) Next to it there is a little park with one-dimensional "statues", don't know what you call them, silhouettes, which are supposed to represent Tinker, Evers and Chance.

Joe Tinker actually moved away from Muscotah when he was 8 or 10 or something, don't know the exact age; my understanding is that he grew up as much in Kansas City as in Muscotah. Wahoo, Nebraska, isn't very far from my old home town, either.

But to get back to your question, about the Old West. . . .my grandfather was born in 1865 in Jackson County, so he would have been about 15 years older than Tinker. Jackson County was very much the Old West at that time. As you probably know (but many of my readers don't) the Wild West basically ended in the mid-1880s, but things don't end suddenly. My father was born in 1907. There were still wagon ruts from settlers headed West that could be seen on the farm where he grew up; they could be seen at least into the 1930s. (There are some that can still be seen today in some places.) He always thought that was part of the Oregon Trail, but it wasn't on what is recognized today as the Oregon Trail; it was more of a side trail. Still, it was there. While Tinker was in Muscotah there would quite certainly have been Native Americans in the area, still living pretty much as they had before the whites came, still hunting wild animals.

As I have mentioned before, George Grantham, who was a generation later (played in the 1920s and 1930s) what you would really call a Wild West background. He grew up in Galena, Kansas, which was a very, very, very rough town, a mining camp. Not really one mining camp; a sort of headquarters for 100 little mining camps that populated the surrounding county.

But Professional Baseball began in 1871; the Old West lasted until the mid-1880s in Kansas, and lasted into the 20th century in places like Montana and New Mexico. There's a lot of overlap between the two. I would assume that there are players whose backgrounds are entirely, completely Wild West.