The term Wild West refers to the frontier society of 19th-century USA. Around the masculine, saloon-bar world of the gold rushes and the cowboy cattle-drives of Texas, California, and the largely unsettled western territories there early developed a mythology. Bandits such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James were romanticised, as were General Custer and his 'last stand'. An early perpetrator of the myth was Edward Z. C. Judson, who, under the pseudonym Ned Buntline, wrote penny (dime) novels romanticising the exploits of his friend W. F. Cody as 'Buffalo Bill'. The latter in turn organised 'Wild West Shows' from 1883 onwards, which included the appearance of the Indian Chief Sitting Bull and which travelled as far afield as Europe.
There is no evidence that the West was much less law-abiding than the rest of the USA. Nonetheless, the 'Wild West' was no purposeless myth; it suggested an arena in which individuals struggled to make order out of chaos and to progress through individual effort and moral worth. The North American continent had had a succession of 'Wests', as its frontiers receded, and that known as the Wild West was the last. It disappeared after 1890, with the end of Indian hostilities, the decline of the long-distance cattle drives, the building of the railways, and the steady growth of population. Research Wild West
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Research Wild West