A Lesson to Be Learned in the Old West Code : Violence: There were shootouts but far fewer cowardly or random killings, scholar Roger McGrath explains.

Either from his book-lined home office or the quiet confines of some public library, Roger McGrath regularly consorts with stage-robbers and scalawags, highwaymen and hangmen, sweaty sodbusters, gunfighters and saucy saloon girls.

Rapid-fire, the local historian can quote from the letters of Black Bart--the infamous San Francisco gentleman-stagecoach robber--as well as discuss the deeds of a young Jesse James, the Earp boys or a host of gunslinging High Noon street duelists.

Sure, they were killers. But McGrath believes the violence was tempered by a code of honor that brought harm and sometimes death mainly to those who deserved it. And with the growing trend of senseless mayhem that has visited Los Angeles and the rest of the nation, he says, the code of the Old West still has something to teach modern men.

At 46, McGrath is an historian with a reputation for passion and insight into the lives and times of frontier men and women--good souls and bad--who peopled the great American West more than a century ago.

For him, these long-gone characters are as real as any modern adventurer. And in his eyes, their accomplishments don’t pale in comparison--even to the deepest-sea diver, mountain climber or astronaut who has walked on the moon.

They’re women such as Nellie Cashman and Belinda Mulrooney, two frontier-era entrepreneurs who mined the Old West like the best of contemporary businessmen, establishing everything from banks to boarding houses both in gold-crazy California and the Yukon.

“Just like thousands of others who came West, these women were adventurous,” McGrath said. “They were courageous and enterprising and honorable--all the traits that helped them settle the West under contrary conditions, making this time the Homeric era of U.S. history.”

The Thousand Oaks academician, a published author who teaches courses in American history at UCLA and Cal State Northridge, has some well-researched yet outspoken opinions about the wanderers who made their western odyssey in the face of disease, wild animals and Indian tribes fighting to protect their land.

For one thing, modern-day society has much to learn from the code of honor established way back then, McGrath says. In that supposedly shoot-’em-up era of seat-of-the-pants justice, the murder of innocent people was a rare occurrence, although it did indeed occur. In short, he says, people had a reason for being killed.

In a detailed study of Aurora and Bodie--two boom-town mining communities in Nevada and California, the author of “Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier” has compared the reasons behind societal bloodshed then and now.

America has become a place where the innocent are killed on a daily basis.

“Today’s criminal preys only on the weak, the old and the female,” he said. “Every day, crimes are committed that just would not be tolerated in places like Aurora and Bodie. People would not just stand by and let these things occur. Justice would have been swift and sure.”

There’s yet another lesson to be learned from those frontier characters: America can arm itself as a way of protection. “One of the things that kept the Old West honest is that people carried firearms and knew how to use them.

“It’s something we should keep in mind today as a deterrent to crime. That solitary woman on a dark street does not have to be vulnerable--if she has a gun that people figure she’s ready to use.”

Interviewed for numerous television histories of the Old West, McGrath is now writing a commentary piece for the academic magazine “Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture” on his theories of the justice in America’s frontier days. His article is entitled “Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead.”

And next spring, he will host a public forum at UCLA on the Old West and will be among several lecturers discussing crime, the role of women, and the Mexican bandido, Tiburcio Vasquez.

McGrath, a taut and muscular former Marine from Pacific Palisades who grew up surfing the local coastline, also fell in love with things past at a young age--a curiosity that has fueled countless hours sorting through dusty manuscripts.

“History is high adventure, especially the study of the American West,” he said. “By studying history, you can live thousands of years, tens of thousands of lifetimes. You can escape to any frontier, any civilization.”

As a historian, McGrath is part gossip, part investigator, part gadfly. When he talks of his characters, it is as though he were an old friend relating tales of a bygone relationship he misses very dearly.

Take Black Bart, one of McGrath’s favorite characters, who lived a double life as a California stagecoach robber as well as a respectable San Francisco speculator known for his snappy wool suits and diamond stick pins.

Whenever the cash ran short, he would head east to the Sierra to rob a hapless stagecoach--a double life that lasted until federal agents tracked Bart back to San Francisco after locating a handkerchief bearing a tell-tale laundry stamp.

For McGrath, Black Bart signifies more than just a colorful western character. Despite his spree of holdups, never once did Bart shoot, rob or molest a stage passenger.

“He was a gentleman,” McGrath said.

In fact, he adds, his research shows that rarely were innocent men, women and children involved in violent crimes back then.

For his 1984 book “Gunfighters,” McGrath pored over the remaining artifacts of the mining town populations--not only visiting the sites but scouring library shelves for diaries, newspapers and letters, jail and court documents.

The book paints a living picture of towns where women were outnumbered 10 to one by men who were “adventurous, entrepreneurial, brave, young, unmarried, intemperate and armed.”

“Everything about these towns should have ended up in a blood bath, but it didn’t,” he said. “Like Black Bart, even the highwaymen treated their victims with the utmost courtesy and respect. In these towns, the violence was limited to saloon battles.

“Those who got hurt were willing participants and many of them asked for what they got.”

These were times of armed vigilantism, when newspapers applauded acts of self-defense and most everyone walked the streets armed and dangerous.

And, unlike today, they were times when women were placed on a public pedestal, McGrath said. Granted, women couldn’t vote, were discouraged from learning and generally viewed as the weaker sex. But, he said, male residents of both Bodie and Aurora were even jailed for swearing in the presence of a woman.

Near the turn of the century a California newspaper asked entrepreneur Nellie Cashman if she ever felt danger going to and from the male-dominated mining camps.

“Bless your soul, no!” she replied. “I never have had a word said to me out of the way. The ‘boys’ would see to it that anyone who ever offered to insult me could never be able to repeat the offense.”

In the developing West, most killings were honorable duels between men who knew the risks of gunplay, McGrath argues. In contrast, today’s street gangs usually choose their prey at weak moments.

Many are splattered by drive-by shootings, shot in the back by bullets that also find innocent bystanders, he says, like the recent case in which a Valley woman was shot to death in front of her 9-year-old son, even after surrendering her valuables to two gunmen.

“Such a crime would have an immediate response in both these old mining towns,” McGrath said, who says he does not advocate modern-day vigilantism. “There would have been an outraged citizenry that would have gotten to the bottom of the matter immediately.”

McGrath attributes the rise and varying types of violence in modern society to two factors: a deterioration of the family core and an absence of a male figure in many inner-city homes.

Over the last 40 years, he says, the murder rate in Los Angeles has risen more than 1,000%--from 81 murders in 1952 to 1,092 in 1992. It’s a statistic that sends him deeper into the past for answers.

McGrath disagrees with current gun legislation and with the President’s new emphasis on creating new, tougher gun laws. “We already have 20,000 gun laws on the books in the United States. It doesn’t make sense.

“They’re all ineffectual. They affect the law-abiding citizen and not the criminals, who don’t obey them in the first place. It’s like outlawing crowbars as a way to fight burglary.”

Instead, McGrath believes in harsher, swifter, sometimes capital punishment as a deterrent to violent crime--like hanging day back in the Old West.

And so there are days when McGrath would prefer to hop inside a time machine and travel back to those days when men died honorably and women had less to fear.

“To be back in the days when the West was won would be to participate in one of the most epic periods in the history of man,” he said. “But then again, there wasn’t much surfing going on back then and that wouldn’t be too much fun.

“That’s one of the things you learn in a study of history, that there’s always going to be trade-offs.”