32 Facts About Wild West

American frontier, known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last few western territories as states in 1912.

Archetypical Old Wild West period is generally accepted by historians to have occurred between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until the closing of the Frontier by the Census Bureau in 1890.

Wild West set up the American Fur Company in an attempt to break the hold that the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly had over the region.

Letters from early settlers provided information and boosterism to encourage increased migration to the Wild West, helped scattered families stay in touch and provide neutral help, assisted entrepreneurs to find business opportunities, and made possible regular commercial relationships between merchants and the Wild West and wholesalers and factories back east.

Wild West later explored the Red and Arkansas Rivers in Spanish territory, eventually reaching the Rio Grande.

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Wild West displayed a talent for exploration and a genius at self-promotion that gave him the sobriquet of "Pathmarker of the West" and led him to the presidential nomination of the new Republican Party in 1856.

Wild West led a series of expeditions in the 1840s which answered many of the outstanding geographic questions about the little-known region.

Wild West crossed through the Rocky Mountains by five different routes and mapped parts of Oregon and California.

Wild West identified these layers as multiple "frontiers" over three centuries: Native American frontier, French frontier, English frontier, fur-trade frontier, mining frontier, and the logging frontier.

Wild West found that even landless young farmworkers were soon able to obtain their farms.

Texas in its Wild West days attracted men who could shoot straight and possessed the zest for adventure, "for masculine renown, patriotic service, martial glory, and meaningful deaths".

Wild West concludes that senior officials quickly realized the high degree of cleanliness and reliability of the Chinese.

Wild West finds the railroad set different wage rates for whites and Chinese and used the latter in the more menial and dangerous jobs, such as the handling and the pouring of nitroglycerin.

Wild West was aided by other Native tribes with long-standing enmity toward the Navajos, chiefly the Utes.

Historians Katherine Harris and Elliott Wild West write that rural upbringing allowed children to break loose from urban hierarchies of age and gender, promoted family interdependence, and at the end produced children who were more self-reliant, mobile, adaptable, responsible, independent and more in touch with nature than their urban or eastern counterparts.

Wild West nursed victims of an influenza epidemic; this gave her acceptance in the community and the support of the sheriff.

Wild West distinguished two types of crimes: unprofessional and professional.

Wild West states there is a "second Dodge City" that belongs to the popular imagination and thrives as a cultural metaphor for violence, chaos, and depravity.

The single largest cattle ranch in the entire West was owned by American John W Iliff, "cattle king of the Plains", operating in Colorado and Wyoming.

Wild West mobilized public opinion to support Roosevelt's program of setting aside national monuments, national forest reserves, and national parks.

Wild West's real life was a hard one and revolved around two annual roundups, spring and fall, the subsequent drives to market, and the time off in the cattle towns spending his hard-earned money on food, clothing, firearms, gambling, and prostitution.

Wild West sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark along with 45 other men to go explore the new territory.

The Lewis and Clark expedition did take place before the Wild West era, but it was a major event in United States history, and was one of the main reasons the Wild West era began.

The image of a Wild West filled with countless gunfights was a myth based on repeated exaggerations.

Actual gunfights in the Old Wild West were more episodic rather than being a common thing, but when gunfights did occur, the cause for each varied.

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Mythologizing of the Wild West began with minstrel shows and popular music in the 1840s.

Wild West presented the first "Wild West" show in 1883, featuring a recreation of famous battles, expert marksmanship, and dramatic demonstrations of horsemanship by cowboys and natives, as well as sure-shooting Annie Oakley.

Wild West was followed by trick roper Will Rogers, the leading humorist of the 1920s.

Wild West's writings are acclaimed and criticized for realistic fidelity to detail on the one hand and thin literary qualities on the other.

Historians of the American Wild West have written about the mythic Wild West; the west of western literature, art and of people's shared memories.

The "Code of the Wild West" was an unwritten, socially agreed upon set of informal laws shaping the cowboy culture of the Old Wild West.

Wild West compared the effects of the railroad opening up Western lands to urban transportation systems and the automobile, and Western settlers' "land hunger" to poor city residents seeking social status.