In the gritty Western "Godless" on Netflix, a tiny New Mexican town has been devastated by a mass casualty event in the local mine, a woman, twice-widowed, tries to raise her son on unyielding land, and a band of 30 outlaws roams the region hunting for a traitor.

We turned to Steven Aron, professor of history at UCLA, to walk us through the real and mythic frontier, using the Netflix miniseries as our point of reference.