Wild West: definition, dates and history

The Wild West refers to the American West during its settlement by colonists, from the great expeditions of the early 19th century through to the closing of the “frontier” around 1890. In the narrower sense associated with Westerns and cowboys, it mainly refers to the years from 1860 to 1890: the territories west of the Mississippi, from the Great Plains to the Pacific.

Behind the phrase that instantly brings to mind a saloon, a hat and a horse is a much more specific and much harsher history than the one we see in films. Here are the key dates, places and real people, and what this era left behind in the way we dress.

Where does the expression “Wild West” come from?

“Far West” is an English expression that literally means “distant west”. For Americans in the late 18th century, the West began just beyond the Appalachians: Ohio and Kentucky were frontier lands at the time. As settlers moved further west, the term shifted to ever more distant regions, until by the 19th century it referred to everything beyond the Mississippi.

In French, the expression was simply borrowed as it was. It is written as “Far West”, “far-west” or, less commonly, “farwest” as one word. The hybrid version “far ouest” exists in speech and in a few titles, but it never replaced the original. By extension, “it’s the Wild West” is used to describe a place or industry where everyone makes their own rules.

Today, Americans are more likely to use two other expressions. Old West or American Old West refers to the historical period. Wild West emphasises the violence and legend: the expression owes much to Buffalo Bill’s touring show, launched in 1883 as Buffalo Bill's Wild West. In short, the Far West is primarily a place; the Wild West is mostly an image.

The key dates in the settlement of the American West

There is no official start or end date. American historians place the Western “frontier” across a period from 1803 to 1912, but the cowboy era most people have in mind is concentrated in the three decades after the Civil War (1861–1865). This table covers the key milestones.

Date	Event	Why it matters
1803	The Louisiana Purchase from Napoleonic France, for $15 million	The area of the United States doubles overnight, reaching the Rocky Mountains
May 1804 – Sep. 1806	The expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark	First recorded overland route to the Pacific, reached in November 1805
1843 – 1860s	The Oregon Trail: the “great migration” of 1843 (700 to 1,000 people), followed by peak traffic between 1846 and 1869	About 400,000 emigrants travel around 3,500 km by wagon
1845	Journalist John L. O'Sullivan writes about “Manifest Destiny”	Westward expansion becomes a political doctrine
24 January 1848	James Marshall finds gold at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma, California	The Gold Rush begins: around 300,000 people arrive, including the “forty-niners” of 1849
20 May 1862	Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act	160 acres (about 65 hectares) offered to anyone who farms the land for five years
1866–1867	The first major cattle drives leave Texas; Abilene, Kansas, becomes a railhead in 1867	The Chisholm Trail and the golden age of the cowboy begin
10 May 1869	The rail lines meet at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory	The first transcontinental railway, linking the East Coast with California
25–26 June 1876	The Battle of the Little Bighorn, Montana Territory	Custer is defeated by Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho forces
26 October 1881	The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory	Thirty seconds of gunfire that would become a legend
1883	Buffalo Bill’s first “Wild West” show	The Wild West becomes a spectacle before it has even come to an end
Winter 1886–1887	A catastrophic winter on the northern plains	Hundreds of thousands of cattle die and open-range ranching collapses
29 December 1890	The Wounded Knee Massacre, South Dakota	The end of the Indian Wars on the Plains
1890–1893	The 1890 census finds no longer any discernible frontier line; Frederick Jackson Turner develops his “frontier thesis” on 12 July 1893	The end of the Wild West becomes an accepted fact
1912	New Mexico (6 January) and Arizona (14 February) become states	The 48 contiguous states are complete

From the Louisiana Purchase to the Gold Rush

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson buys the vast Louisiana Territory from France. It has little to do with the present-day state: it covers the entire Missouri River basin. He immediately sends Lewis and Clark to explore it. They set off on 14 May 1804, see the Pacific in November 1805 and return to St Louis on 23 September 1806.

In the 1840s, the first wagon trains leave Independence, Missouri, for Oregon. In 1845, John L. O'Sullivan writes in the Democratic Review that Americans have a “manifest destiny” to expand across the continent. Three years later, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill sparks the California Gold Rush, which draws around 300,000 people between 1848 and 1855.

The railway, cattle and the end of the frontier

After the Civil War, everything speeds up. The Homestead Act of 1862 draws entire families to the Plains, the railway links the two oceans in 1869, and Texas ranchers realise that cattle worth a few dollars in Texas can fetch much more in the East. In 1867, entrepreneur Joseph McCoy sets up stockyards in Abilene, on the Kansas Pacific line: the great cattle drives are under way.

Historians use two markers to identify the end of the Wild West. The first is symbolic: in 1890, the Census Bureau announces that settlements in the West are now so scattered that a frontier line can no longer be drawn. The second is administrative: in 1912, with Arizona and New Mexico, there are no remaining continental territories that have yet to become states.

The states and towns of the Wild West

The Wild West was never an official entity with defined borders. It refers to the territories conquered west of the Mississippi during the 19th century, which today make up around twenty states. The best-known areas fall into three broad regions.

The Great Plains: Texas, Oklahoma (then known as “Indian Territory”), Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. Cattle country, trail drives and bison.
The Rockies and deserts: Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico. Gold and silver mines, ranches and Indigenous reservations.
The Pacific Coast: California, Oregon and Washington. The final destination of the pioneer trails.

Every Wild West town had its own purpose. Cattle towns like Abilene, followed by Wichita and Dodge City in Kansas, relied on the arrival of herds and loading them onto trains. Mining towns like Tombstone in Arizona and Deadwood in Dakota sprang up around a deposit in a matter of months and could empty just as quickly. If you want to visit these places today, our Western road trip across the United States sets out the itinerary and what to wear at each stop.

What cowboy life was really like in the Wild West

Cowboys on horseback driving a herd of Texas longhorns through the dust

The cowboy is the direct descendant of the vaquero, the cattle herder of northern Mexico. The English word cowboy is, in fact, a translation of vaquero (from vaca, meaning “cow”). English-speaking ranchers who arrived in Texas learned the trade from vaqueros and borrowed much of their vocabulary from them.

Lasso comes from lazo, and lariat from la reata, a braided leather rope.
Chaps is short for chaparreras, the leather leggings that protected riders from scrub.
Bronco means “rough, wild” in Spanish, hence an unbroken horse; mustang comes from mesteño, meaning an unowned horse.
Rodeo first referred to rounding up cattle (from rodear, “to surround”) before becoming a sport.
Buckaroo is an English corruption of vaquero.

Who were cowboys, really?

Cowboys in Westerns are almost all white. The reality was more diverse. According to estimates cited by the Library of Congress, including those of historian Kenneth Porter, of the roughly 35,000 cowboys working during the great cattle-drive era, 6,000 to 9,000 were Black. In Texas, as many as one in four cowboys was African American, often formerly enslaved. Mexican vaqueros and cowboys of Mexican descent also made up a significant part of the crews, especially in the Southwest.

A hard, poorly paid job

A cowboy often started work at 12 or 13 and earned about one dollar a day, with food and accommodation provided when he was at the ranch. On the trail, a crew of around ten men would drive an average of 3,000 head of cattle. The animals travelled about 24 km a day to avoid losing weight, so the roughly 1,600 km Chisholm Trail could take up to two months.

The days were long, the nights short (men took turns guarding the herd), and the dangers real: storms, flooded rivers and stampedes. The golden age did not last long. Barbed wire spread through the 1880s, closing off open pastures, and the winter of 1886–1887 killed hundreds of thousands of cattle on the northern plains. By the 1890s, railways had reached the ranches and there was no longer any need for long drives to Kansas.

Indigenous peoples and the disappearance of the bison

The Wild West was not an empty land. The Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Apache, Arapaho, Navajo and dozens of other Nations lived there. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had already forcibly relocated many peoples from the East to areas west of the Mississippi. As settlers pushed further west, treaties were made and broken, and the Indian Wars spread across much of the century.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, on 25 and 26 June 1876, was the best-known victory of the Plains peoples: Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, inspired by Sitting Bull and led in particular by Crazy Horse, wiped out part of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The US Army suffered 268 deaths. Fourteen years later, on 29 December 1890, that same 7th Cavalry killed between 150 and 300 Lakota people, including many women and children, at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The disappearance of the bison was as devastating as the fighting. Estimates vary considerably, but before the 19th century there were tens of millions of bison in North America (up to 60 million according to some estimates). Commercial hide hunting surged from 1872–1873: in that winter alone, more than 1.5 million bison were shipped east by rail. By the late 1880s, only around a thousand remained, according to naturalist William Hornaday. Deprived of their main resource, the Plains peoples had little choice but to move to reservations.

Outlaws, sheriffs and a showman who became legends

Dusty street in a Wild West mining town, with a saloon and wooden shopfronts

The Wild West produced its own heroes early on, often embellished during their lifetimes by the press and penny dreadfuls (dime novels), which first appeared in 1859. Their real lives were often short and far less glorious than their legends.

Billy the Kid (Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney): shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett on 14 July 1881 at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Jesse James (1847–1882): a former Confederate soldier who became a bank and train robber, shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford, a member of his gang, on 3 April 1882 in St Joseph, Missouri.
Wyatt Earp (1848–1929): a lawman who faced the Clanton and McLaury brothers in Tombstone alongside his brothers Virgil and Morgan and his friend Doc Holliday. He died in Los Angeles in 1929, having spent time with Western actors in the hope that they would tell his story.
Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary, 1852–1903): she settled in Deadwood in 1876, helped build her own legend, then appeared as a storyteller in Buffalo Bill’s show from 1893.
Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody, 1846–1917): a scout and bison hunter, he created Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883, featuring battle reenactments, sharpshooters such as Annie Oakley and real Plains warriors. The show toured Europe eight times and set up in Paris during the 1889 World's Fair.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral sums up the gap between fact and myth. On 26 October 1881, it did not take place in the corral itself, but on a narrow lot nearby, close to Fremont Street. Around thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds, killing three men (Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury), yet the event inspired dozens of films.

Myth and reality in the Wild West

The Wild West of Western films is a heavily compressed version of history. Face-to-face gunfights at high noon were rare, and towns such as Dodge City and Tombstone banned the carrying of guns in their streets (in fact, Ike Clanton was arrested shortly before the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral for breaking this rule). Most pioneers were farming families, not gunslingers. The image of the solitary white cowboy erased vaqueros, Black cowboys and the women who ran ranches.

By contrast, violence against Indigenous peoples was long played down or presented backwards. The myth was being built while history was still unfolding: Buffalo Bill was staging the Wild West from 1883, seven years before Wounded Knee, and popular novels turned outlaws into living Robin Hoods.

The Wild West on screen

Cinema inherited this myth from the very beginning. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, already told the story of a train holdup in twelve minutes. John Ford made John Wayne a star with Stagecoach in 1939, and Sergio Leone reinvented the genre in Italy with Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968. Today, it is mainly TV series that keep the spirit alive, with their actors bringing Western style back into fashion. We cover this in our article on celebrities and Western style, from Yellowstone to TikTok.

What Western fashion owes to the Wild West

Felt cowboy hat, leather cowboy boots, Western belt with buckle and bandana resting on a saddle

Almost every piece of Western clothing began as a practical answer to a need in the 19th-century West. The style came later, with rodeos, cinema and country singers. To follow this evolution from the trail to the catwalk, read our history of cowboy fashion, from ranch to runway.

The hat: from the “Boss of the Plains” to the Stetson

In 1865, John B. Stetson returned from a trip West, founded his company in Philadelphia and made the “Boss of the Plains”: a lightweight, waterproof felt hat with a straight crown, rounded corners and a wide, flat brim, designed to protect against sun and rain. It is the ancestor of all cowboy hats, whose crowns were later shaped and brims turned up at the sides.

Boots: a heel designed for the stirrup

Cowboy boots have tall shafts to protect the calves from chafing and scrub, a narrow toe to slip into the stirrup, and a heel to stop the foot from sliding through. You’ll find these same features in our cowboy boots, with more detailed leatherwork and stitching than a work boot.

Belt, vest, bandana and bolo tie

The rest of the outfit follows the same practical logic. The cowboy belt with its large buckle is partly inspired by rodeo, where buckles are awarded as trophies. A vest provided pockets that a shirt didn’t have without restricting arm movement in the saddle: a men’s cowboy vest still has that fitted cut. A bandana could be pulled up over the nose to block dust stirred up by the herd, which is why a cowboy bandana remains a staple of Western outfits. The bolo tie is the only later addition: this cord, held with a decorative slide, dates from the mid-20th century but has become an emblem of the American Southwest, to the point that it is Arizona’s official necktie.

Shop our cowboy boots →

Shop our cowboy hats →

Wild West FAQ

What is the Wild West?

The Wild West is the American West during its 19th-century settlement: the territories west of the Mississippi, from the Great Plains to the Pacific. The English expression “Far West” means “distant west”. By extension, it also refers to the era of cowboys, pioneers and the Indian Wars.

When was the Wild West era?

In the broad sense, it stretches from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to around 1890, when the census noted the disappearance of the frontier, or even to 1912, when the last states were created. The cowboy era itself was shorter: from 1866–1867, when the first major cattle drives began, to the late 1880s.

What is the difference between the Far West and the Wild West?

Far West focuses on geography: it is the distant West, the region. Wild West emphasises lawlessness, violence and legend. The term was popularised by the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, created in 1883.

Which states made up the Wild West?

There is no official list, but the term includes states that grew out of the Western territories: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington. Arizona and New Mexico were the last to be admitted, in 1912.

When did the Wild West end?

The most commonly cited marker is 1890: the Census Bureau announced that there was no longer a frontier line, the same year as the Wounded Knee Massacre. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner made this the starting point of his famous frontier thesis. Some historians extend the period to 1912.

Why do people say “Far West” in French?

French borrowed the American expression without translating it, just as it did with “cowboy” and “western”. The literal translation, “distant west”, never caught on, and “far ouest” remains uncommon. It is written as Far West, far-west or sometimes farwest.