The Wild West

The "Wild West" — also called the Old West — names a particular time and place: the vast lands west of the Mississippi River, in the years roughly between 1865 and 1895. The American Civil War had just ended, and the United States turned its full energy westward, toward a frontier that seemed, to the settlers, almost endless.

Two laws lit the fuse. The Homestead Act of 1862 promised any citizen 160 acres of public land, almost for free, if they would live on it and farm it for five years. And the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, suddenly linked the eastern cities to the Pacific coast. Together they pulled hundreds of thousands of people west: farmers, miners, ex-soldiers, freed slaves, and immigrants from every corner of Europe and beyond, all chasing land, gold, or simply a fresh start.

It was a land of cattle and grass. Huge herds were driven north from Texas to the new railroad towns, where they could be loaded onto trains and sold in the east. Along these cattle drives rode the cowboys — and for thirty years, on this fast-changing edge of the map, the legend of the Wild West was born.

On a frontier that was often genuinely lawless, some men became famous for living outside the law altogether. Jesse James and his brother Frank, former Confederate fighters, robbed their first bank in 1866 and went on to hold up banks, stagecoaches and trains across the Midwest for sixteen years. To some, the James gang were dangerous killers; to others, a kind of Robin Hood who stood up to the powerful railroads and banks. In 1882 Jesse was shot dead in his own home by Robert Ford, a young gang member tempted by the bounty on his head.

Further south, a young man named Henry McCarty — better known as Billy the Kid — drifted through New Mexico, breaking out of jail more than once and reportedly killing several men before he was twenty-one. In 1881 the lawman Pat Garrett, who had set out to track him down, finally caught up with him at Fort Sumner and gunned him down in the dark.

These outlaws ran off with fortunes, but rarely kept them, and almost none died of old age. Their lives were short, violent, and — even while they lived — already turning into stories that newspapers stretched far beyond the truth.

Where there were outlaws, there were lawmen — though the line between the two was often blurred. The most famous of all was Wyatt Earp. In 1879 he and his brothers arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, a booming silver town, and took on jobs keeping the law. They soon fell into a bitter feud with a loose group of local cattle rustlers and outlaws known as "the Cowboys."

On 26 October 1881 the quarrel finally boiled over. Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday walked down to confront the Clanton and McLaury men near the O.K. Corral. The most famous gunfight in American history then lasted around thirty seconds. About thirty shots were fired. Three of the Cowboys — Billy Clanton and the two McLaury brothers — were killed; two of the Earps and Holliday were wounded. Wyatt Earp walked away untouched, and into legend.

The reality of frontier law was less glamorous. Most towns, in fact, had strict gun laws and made visitors hand over their weapons on arrival. Violence was bad for business, and disputes were far more often settled with fists, or in court, than in a showdown in the street. The famous gunfight was the exception, not the rule — but it was the exception that everyone chose to remember.

The Wild West was already becoming a show while it was still happening. Cheap "dime novels" turned real outlaws and lawmen into giants. From 1883, Buffalo Bill Cody toured America and Europe with his "Wild West" show, with real cowboys, sharpshooters and staged battles — selling the frontier back to the world as spectacle. Later, Hollywood would do the same on a far larger scale, and the cowboy became one of the most powerful symbols of America itself.

But the romance hides a heavy cost. The land that settlers claimed as "empty" was not empty at all. It was the home of Native American nations — the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Apache, the Comanche and many others. As railroads and homesteaders pushed west, the great buffalo herds the Plains nations depended on were hunted almost to extinction, and a long series of wars and broken treaties drove the survivors onto reservations. In 1890, US soldiers killed up to 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee — a massacre often taken to mark the end of the frontier era.

That same year, 1890, the US census declared that the frontier line no longer existed: the West had been settled. The "Wild West" had lasted barely a single generation. Yet its legend has never crumbled. More than a century later, its outlaws, lawmen and cowboys still ride through our films and imaginations — a saga in which the glory and the cost have always been told together, whether we choose to hear both or not.