There seem to be a lot of superstitions from the age of pirates. I'm running a tabletop game in a setting with pirates, cowboys, etc. I know society was quite a bit more advanced but I suspect superstitions were still a thing. But I don't know any. Things like how pirates had the black spot, the kraken, women on a boat being bad luck, etc.
They don't have to be grounded in reality and as I'm looking for inspiration I don't need the sources to be the absolute best as long as it's pointed out that it isn't the best source.
Thank you!
I have written a book about this, forthcoming in autumn 2023: Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West. Folklorists avoid a term like "superstitions," but in essence, this books addresses your question.
There are at least two problems with providing a concise answer. 1. The West is the largest region of North America; there are many "Wests," each very different from the next. 2. During the nineteenth century, the West tended to have more foreign-born residents than any other region of the continent.
Because of this, everyone brought their own folklore. There was some blending and sharing, and there was some emergence of indigenous traditions, but it was a slowly cooking stew, and it is not possible to describe all-encompassing superstitions for the entire region (or even a specific region) in the West during the nineteenth century.
Your analogy of pirates is an interesting one, and it underscores the problem with then moving to the West. Pirates were a specific occupation group. They may have been of diverse origin, but they were brought together in a confined setting, worked together, and quickly blended each other's traditions into a single body of folklore. This was possible within the confines of this relatively small world.
We see something similar when it comes to mining folklore, but that was only a small slice of the very large picture of folklore in the West.
Here are a few articles I have written on the subject:
The Last Gleam of Sunlight: Mining Folklore on the International Frontier
Lost Mines and the Secret of Getting Rich Quick Folklore
Sex, Murder, and the Myth of the Wild West: How a Soiled Dove Earned a Heart of Gold
Monk, Greeley, Ward, and Twain: The Folkloresque of a Western Legend
Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines
Edit:
Folklorists avoid a term like "superstitions"
This is because the word carries a judgmental tone. Everyone has folklore, but "other people's" traditions are sometimes referred to as superstitions because "their beliefs" are viewed as silly.