Actually Path, before they got the horse the Indians "hunted" buffalo by stampeding a whole herd off a cliff.
And the reason the Mountain men kept moving Westward was because they were trapping out the beaver as they went.
As for crime, do I have to point out that train and bank robbery were both invented in the West.
Tom, I think bank robbery started during the civil war. The St. Albans, Vermont, raid of three banks, by a band of confederates led by Bennett Young was on Oct 19, 1864.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Albans_RaidThere was also the June 8, 1864 theft of $60,000 from Farmers Bank in Mt. Sterling, KY by Morgan's Raiders.
http://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com/2011/07/mt-sterling-important-military-base.html June 8, 1864 – CS John Hunt Morgan with 600 of his men captured Mt. Sterling. and 150US soldiers. CSA forces under Gen. John H. Morgan, while on his last raid through Kentucky, attacked the Union camp at Mount Sterling under Capt. Edward Barlow and captured the town. Morgan's forces took 380 prisoners and material. Interview with a gentleman who was with Morgan's command, "They next made a dash on Mount Sterling, and captured four hundred of the enemy and large supplies of military and medical stores." Leaving a force here under Col. H. L. Giltner, Morgan moved west with his 2nd Brigade.
Later, at night, several of Morgan's men went to the house of J. O. Miller, cashier of the Farmer's Bank, took the vault key from him and robbed the bank of $60,000. The money was never recovered.
And this from wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_robberyThe first bank robbery in the United States is often claimed to have taken place at the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri, on 13 February 1866 when several men believed to be members of the James-Younger Gang shot a 19-year-old student and escaped with $60,000. This is also claimed (including by the museum established at the bank where it happened) as the first bank robbery in daylight in peacetime,[7] to distinguish it from robberies such as that from the banks at St Albans, Vermont more than a year earlier which were perpetrated by Confederate soldiers and which some historians consider to be not robberies proper but acts of war.[8]
However, twenty-five months earlier, just before noon on 15 December 1863 a man walked into a bank in Middlesex County, Massachusetts and shot the 17-year-old bookkeeper and stole $3,000 in large bills and a further $2,000 in small bills. The directors of the bank offered a $6,000 reward for the arrest of the murderer.[9]
An even earlier alleged bank robbery is known to have occurred, but details are few. According to The New York Times, the first bank robbery in United States history took place on 19 March 1831, when the City Bank of New York lost $245,000, but the exact method is not clear so it cannot be confirmed that this was a robbery and not a burglary
Also found this interesting tidbit.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-non-existent-frontier-bank-robbery/