Old West

Old West

The Old West, also known as the Wild West or the American Frontier, was a period from the early 19th century to the early 20th century, when the western part of North America was colonized. The adventures of Western cowboys, settlers, outlaws, indigenous Americans and other luck-seekers have been romanticized by countless books and motion pictures. Much of the scenery and various elements of the ways of life depicted in Westerns can still be seen today.

| | | | United States historical travel topics:<br>Indigenous nations → Pre-Civil War → Civil War → Old West → Industrialization → Postwar<br>African-American history • Mexican American history • Presidents |

Understand

As the first English settlers landed in New England in the 17th century, they developed the concept of the Western frontier. The British Crown tried to keep settlers east of the Appalachians, to avoid conflict with France and the Native Americans, and to prevent the colonies from becoming too powerful. As the United States became independent, settlers began to move to "the west", the land which later became states like Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. Napoleon's France sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, and motivated the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Coast. In the 1830s, the United States government asserted the Manifest Destiny, the idea that the USA should expand all the way to the Pacific coast, without regard to Indians or other nations.

While Christian missionaries had settled in the West since colonial times, and small parties of "mountain men" came from the 1810s, larger settler expeditions came with the Oregon Trail from the 1830s. The 1840s Mexican-American War allowed the United States to annex the southwestern territories, which saw a new wave of settlers with the 1849 gold rush in California.

Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Until the mid-19th century, very few settlers reached the Great Plains, partly because Southern politicians opposed settlement policies.

While many settlers went west via wagon train (and more often than not parts of their party died en route) people with more money and/or less cargo usually opted for a ship down to either Nicaragua (see Ruta del Tránsito) or Panama and a short overland trip in one of these countries before heading North on the Pacific side. Illustrious figures of the 19th century traveled these routes, among them Mark Twain (Nicaragua) and Ulysses S. Grant (Panama), who both wrote about their respective trips.

See also: In the footsteps of explorers

The Golden Age

The Golden Age of the West is usually held to have lasted from the American Civil War to the admission of most western states into the union around 1890.

As the Civil War began in 1861, the northern states came to control the Congress, which could pass resolutions to colonize the western territories. The southern resistance against "internal improvements" as well as wrangling over the exact route (and the potential benefits associated with it) were the main things keeping the US from building a transcontinental railroad. When the Southern Democrats left Congress, the radical and progressive Republicans took the opportunity to authorize building of a transcontinental railroad, which was completed by a "golden spike", at Promontory Summit near Corinne, Utah, in May of 1869, less than four years after the war ended.

While most early settlers were young men, the female minority in the West had a wide range of professions, including prostitutes, teachers, entertainers, saloon owners, and in a few cases outlaws. Many found more freedom and fortune than in the east and south, usually marrying well. At least since 1900, rodeos featured both cowboys and cowgirls, and the western territories and states allowed women to vote decades before the 19th amendment of the Constitution ensured female suffrage across the United States in 1919 – approved in Congress with the vote of Jeannette Rankin of Montana. Today, the Western equestrian tradition is increasingly carried on by women.

The West provided the country with raw materials for the industrialization of the United States, and extensive farming and ranching which made American fast food possible. Colonization hit North American wildlife hard; hunters killed tens of millions of wild buffalo that were sacred to many Indian tribes and served as sources of meat, skins and other products; taking their number down to a few hundred. Carnivores such as cougars and wolves were exterminated from many parts of the countries. From the 1880s, the government set up national parks and natural reserves around the West. The environmentalist movement gained strength in the 1960s (with the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day established in 1970), and has helped many animal and plant species to recover. The buffalo in particular also owes its survival to the initiative of private citizens in addition to government efforts.

Mexico

See also: Mexican American history

The Spanish Empire claimed most of western North America. Today's Mexico, California and New Mexico were among the first parts of mainland North America to be settled by Europeans. Spanish Mexico also included Texas and today's southwestern United States, but few Hispanics settled in most of those territories.

The 1810s Napoleonic Wars set off an independence movement in Spanish colonies, in 1821 creating an independent Mexican state. For the first half of the 19th century, the Catholic Church, strongmen called caudillos, and landowners descending from the Spanish conquistadors held most of the land and power in the country, with the majority being poor.

As the Mexican government had little authority in Texas, many slave owning English-speakers settled there in blatant violation of Mexican laws, and the 1836 Texas Revolution led to an independent Republic of Texas. The United States annexation of Texas in 1845 sparked the 1846–48 Mexican-American War, after which the United States established claims on Texas, and annexed the southwestern territories. In the end, Mexico lost nearly half of its land area. Settlers arrived from Europe and the eastern US, acquiring their own farmstead, usually at the expense of the Hispanic and indigenous population. As the policy towards the Indians had become slightly more humane, and the southwestern lands were of less use for farming, the Southwest has the highest proportion of Indian reservations in the United States.

Mexico south of the Rio Grande was not as much of a frontier, as most arable land was already settled. From the 1850s, Mexico saw the rise of modern institutions, with religious freedom, public education and health initiatives; especially during the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, from 1876 to 1911, in a period known as the Porfiriato. Most of the population remained poor, and the desire for land and wealth redistribution was a background to the 1910 Revolution, against yet another attempt by Díaz to get reelected. The Revolution, which went on for ten years, became entangled with World War I, and formed the background to some Western movies, particularly "Spaghetti Westerns" which are often cynical and morally grey. Some participants in the Mexican Revolution such as Pancho Villa cultivated their own "Western movie star" image and even starred in movies ("as themselves") to raise funds for their revolutionary exploits. Villa would lead the last military attack on the mainland U.S. to date in 1916 when he attacked Columbus, New Mexico.

Canada

Western Canada was the last part of North America to be charted and settled by European colonists. From the 17th century, the Canadian Prairies were dominated by the Métis people, who are of mixed European and First Nations descent. While the prairies of the United States are connected to the Mississippi river system, the Canadian Prairies' rivers drain to the Arctic Ocean, and were therefore less useful for transportation. Also, the soil was heavy and required machinery to be farmed.

British Columbia could not be reached overland until the construction of a railroad. The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1857 was the first major wave of settlement. The Colony of British Columbia was founded the following year.

The Dominion Lands Act was made in 1872 to encourage settlement, and the North-West Mounted Police was formed in 1873. The Canadian government was concerned that too many settlers from the United States would claim land, and lead a secession from Canada. Unrest in the West culminated with the 1885 Northwest Rebellion. The same year, the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, and settlement of the Prairies began in earnest.

White settlers were even fewer in northern Canada; most of them being trappers, traders, and naturalists. The Klondike Gold Rush, which began in 1896, was the first major immigration wave, with around 100,000 people attempting to reach the Yukon territory; around the same number as northern Canada's total population today. 30,000 of these settled in Dawson City. The Gold Rush also made the necessity of actually drawing the exact boundaries more apparent as prior to that the U.S. and the British/Canadians had often left borders in the inhospitable wilderness deliberately ambiguous to avoid conflict.

The First Nations and Métis remain as a significant part of the population of western and northern Canada.

Ethnic history of the West

A big part of the process of "taming" the West involved invading Indian territory, massacring Indians and corralling the remainder into reservations. However, many Indians were not murdered or killed in wars, so the West to this day is the area of the United States with the largest Native American population. Many Native Americans (a term used interchangeably with "American Indians"), like the cowboys, are ranchers, and there are quite a few reservations that can be visited today, especially in Western and Rocky Mountain states. See also Trail of Tears.

While most settlers were of European descent, Germans were the largest ethnic group; however, much of their heritage faded away due to the anti-German sentiment of the World Wars. Many African-American freedmen moved West to escape racism in the South. There was also a small population of Latinos present in those territories that were previously part of Mexico, as well as a number of Native American tribes, of which the Navajo are today the most numerous. East Asian immigrants, most of them Chinese, took part in construction and mining, often under harsh conditions. Although Chinese laborers played a significant role in building the transcontinental railroad, their presence caused a lot of resentment among the white majority. This resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act being passed in 1882, which prohibited all ethnic Chinese from entering the U.S., and forbade those already present in the U.S. from ever obtaining U.S. citizenship. The restrictions on Chinese immigration would only be relaxed in 1943, and would only be completely abolished with the 1965 reform of immigration law that abolished racist policies in one of the moves to guarantee civil rights in the U.S.

The end of an era

Land held by the United States which was not yet part of any state was organized as territories. A territory or part of a territory with enough white people and infrastructure (usually in the form of railroads, telegraph lines and livestock fences) could gain statehood, implying that the land was no longer part of the Wild West. The free-range livestock ranging which was iconic to the Wild West and cowboy lifestyle, became marginalized as most farmland was enclosed by barbed-wire fences. Cattle drives from the plains to market towns remained into the early 20th century, and was replaced by livestock trains, and later on, a more localized meatpacking industry. The last contiguous territories to gain statehood were Oklahoma in 1907 and New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, marking the end of the Old West era. In the following decades, the Rocky Mountains were traversed by paved roads such as the Lincoln Highway and Route 66.

Alaska is nicknamed The Last Frontier; the territory was purchased from the Russian Empire in 1867 and became a state only in 1959. With much of the state remaining as seemingly untouched wilderness, America's westernmost state still keeps the Western spirit alive. Others might say that the American space program is the new frontier. Curiously enough, the (very dubious) legal basis of "lunar real estate" which is sold as a novelty item rests on the "Homestead Act" which the U.S. enacted to encourage settlement of the Old West.

Western fiction and legacy

Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull. The late 19th century is the setting of most Western fiction, a genre as old as the West itself. Western fiction has shaped the national identity of the United States, with the cowboy as an iconic hero character. While many Westerners were indeed cowboys, their lives were hardly as glamorous as in the novels or movies. The iconic "Boss of the Plains" hat by Stetson was designed in 1865, and did not see widespread use until the end of the 19th century. Dime novels from the 1860s and later often took place in the West, rodeos and roadshows such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West romanticized the Western lifestyle while it still existed in real life, and The Great Train Robbery, considered the first Western film (and arguably the first film ever with a plot) was recorded in 1903.

As the West had been tamed in the early 20th century and Hollywood came to dominate the motion picture industry, Western fiction expressed nostalgia for the older generations. Western feature films became an established genre with Stagecoach in 1939, which was the breakthrough of John Wayne, one of the genre's most iconic actors. Up to the 1950s, most major characters in these films were white English-speaking men, omitting the ethnic diversity of the real West. "Revisionist Western" fiction from the 1960s and later years gives more recognition to non-white and female Westerners.

Since the United States has had immigration from most of the world's nations, with a peak in the late 19th century, the Old West is a relatable historical setting around the world. While myth making about the West is as old as the old west itself, many countries outside the US have even more far fetched myths of the old west going back to popular authors such as Karl May who is still a household name in Germany despite writing most of his work before ever setting foot in the US.

Euro-Western films, wholly or partially recorded in Europe, have been successful, especially the Italian "Spaghetti Westerns" with classics such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. The "Kraut Western" started with movies based on Karl May's work (shot – fittingly – in what is now Croatia, mostly in Plitvice Lakes National Park) made by West Germany and later the "DEFA Indianerfilm" made by East Germany with a much more positive portrayal of Native Americans than otherwise common in Westerns – in part with the Cold War intention of subtly or not-so-subtly portraying the American ruling classes negatively. Vilhelm Moberg's Emigrants series, written in 1949 to 1959 about Swedish settlers in 19th century Minnesota, is a cornerstone in Swedish literary canon. The Belgian cartoon Lucky Luke, which both celebrates and lampoons Western tropes, has been published since 1949, and is one of the best-selling European cartoons ever.

The Western genre has been marginal since the 1970s, as the last generations who grew up in the Old West had passed away, and the "Frontier Myth" has increasingly been called into question. 21st century western fiction still remains diverse; celebrating the western legacy with feature films such as The Hateful Eight, challenging its norms as in Brokeback Mountain, or re-interpreting it such as in the Westworld science-fiction series.

Even works set in the contemporary West (such as Easy Rider, Breaking Bad and Kill Bill), and in fantasy universes (such as Star Wars), use typical Western tropes. The "Frontier Myth" which some see as the conditio sine qua non for "straight" Westerns broke down in the 1970s as a widely held societal narrative and ever since the Western genre has been on a soul-searching quest with some arguing that science fiction has supplanted the place the Western once had in American narrative culture. Certainly many science fiction works have a Western "feel" to them or are outright crossovers like Firefly.

Posterity's image of the West as a place of adventure and freedom makes it a gratifying setting for video games. Oregon Trail is an educational classic, and some well-known 21st century game titles are Gun, Red Dead Redemption, Hard West and the Fallout series.

See

See also: Living history museums#United States

There are many art museums in the Western and Mountain States that show a large number of Western paintings and sculptures. This is a particular style of Romantic art that developed in the 19th century and tends to emphasize the wide open spaces and long vistas typical of the terrain, along with heroic portrayals of white and sometimes Indian men. In the 20th century, probably the most famous painter associated with the West is Georgia O'Keefe, who spent a lot of time in Taos and Abiquiu, New Mexico and worked in a new modernist style distinct from the Romantic style described above but also showcasing the endless mesas of New Mexico in her landscapes (she was also known for flower paintings, etc.). Ansel Adams is one of the most famous Western photographers.

The Denver Art Museum has an entire wing of Western paintings.

The West has many ghost towns, abandoned due to disasters, or depletion of natural resources.

Early history

Golden Age (from Civil War to 1890)

Monument Valley, well-known from Western films.

Canada

Ghost Town Trail

  • Begin in Tombstone on Gleeson Rd, which becomes a graded dirt road. The Gleeson Cemetery 📍 will be on your left, a short distance before the townsite. Remains of Gleeson, 31.732502°, -109.829605°. include a saloon, schoolhouse, hospital, and newly restored jail.
  • Head north to Courtland 📍 on N Gleeson-Pearce Rd, aka Ghost Town Trail, which has just a couple of ruined structures remaining.
  • Go further on to Pearce 📍 with two structures on the National Register of Historic Places: the Old Pearce General Store and Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church.
  • From here continue on Hwy 191 to see Cochise and the historic Cochise Hotel 📍.

Itineraries

See also