Hygiene in the Old West

Just how good were the “good ol days?” Folks on the western frontier led a hardscrabble life. They were wan with fever, gaunt, scrawny and peaked. Their children were sickly and fretful. Vegetables didn’t play a big part in their diet. They dwelled in primitive surroundings with lice, fleas and bedbugs. People settled close to streams and were besieged by flies and gnats by day and mosquitoes by night. Folks didn’t know about such things as spreading germs back then. Families ate b