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 until the closing of the “frontier” around 1890. In the narrower sense associated with Westerns and cowboys, it usually means 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 a saloon, a hat and a horse to mind is a history far more specific—and far harsher—than the one shown in movies. Here are the key dates, places and real-life figures, along with what this era left behind in the way we dress.

Where the phrase “Wild West” comes from

“Wild West” is an English expression meaning just what it says: a wild 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 farther west, the term shifted to increasingly distant regions, until in the 19th century it came to mean everything west of the Mississippi.

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

Today, Americans more often use two other expressions. Old West or American Old West refers to the historical era. Wild West emphasizes violence and legend: the phrase owes much to Buffalo Bill’s touring show, which launched in 1883 under the name Buffalo Bill's Wild West. In short, the Old West is first and foremost a place and an era; the Wild West is mostly an image.

Key dates in the settlement of the American West

There’s no official start or end date. American historians place the Western “frontier” between 1803 and 1912, but the cowboy era—the one most people picture—centres on about 30 years after the Civil War (1861–1865). This table covers the essential milestones.

Date	Event	Why it matters
1803	The United States buys Louisiana from Napoleon’s France for $15 million	The country’s land area doubles overnight, reaching the Rockies
May 1804 – September 1806	Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition	First known overland route to the Pacific, reached in November 1805
1843 – 1860s	Oregon Trail: the “Great Migration” of 1843 (700 to 1,000 people), followed by a peak in traffic between 1846 and 1869	About 400,000 emigrants travel some 3,500 km (2,175 mi) by wagon
1845	Journalist John L. O'Sullivan writes about “Manifest Destiny”	Westward expansion becomes a political doctrine
January 24, 1848	James Marshall finds gold at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma, California	Gold Rush: the “forty-niners” arrive in 1849, with about 300,000 newcomers
May 20, 1862	Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act	160 acres (about 65 hectares) offered to anyone who farms the land for five years
1866–1867	First major cattle drives from Texas; Abilene, Kansas, becomes a railhead in 1867	The Chisholm Trail and the cowboy’s golden age begin
May 10, 1869	The rail lines meet at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory	First transcontinental railway, linking the East Coast to California
June 25–26, 1876	Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory	Custer’s defeat by Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho forces
October 26, 1881	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 show before it has even ended
Winter 1886–1887	Devastating winter on the Northern Plains	Hundreds of thousands of cattle die, bringing open-range ranching to a collapse
December 29, 1890	Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota	End of the Indian Wars on the Plains
1890–1893	The 1890 census finds no longer a frontier line; on July 12, 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presents his “frontier thesis”	The end of the Wild West becomes widely accepted
1912	New Mexico (January 6) and Arizona (February 14) 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 of Louisiana: it covers the entire Missouri River basin. He immediately sends Lewis and Clark to explore it. They set out on May 14, 1804, see the Pacific in November 1805 and return to St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

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

Railways, cattle and the end of the frontier

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

Historians point to two markers when dating the end of the Wild West. The first is symbolic: in 1890, the Census Bureau announces that settlement in the West is now so scattered that no frontier line can be drawn. The second is administrative: in 1912, with Arizona and New Mexico, there are no longer any continental territories that aren’t states.

Wild West states and towns

The Wild West was never an official region with defined borders. It refers to the territories conquered west of the Mississippi in the 19th century, which now make up about 20 states. The most iconic states fall into three broad regions.

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

Every Wild West town had its purpose. Cattle towns like Abilene, then Wichita and Dodge City in Kansas, depended on arriving herds and loading cattle onto trains. Mining towns like Tombstone, Arizona, and Deadwood, Dakota, sprang up around a vein of ore in a matter of months and sometimes emptied just as quickly. If you’d like to visit these places today, our Western road trip across the United States lays out the route and what to wear at every stop.

What life was really like for Wild West cowboys

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

The cowboy is the direct successor of the vaquero, a cattle herder from 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, leather leggings that protected the legs from brush.
Bronco means “rough, wild” in Spanish, hence an untrained horse; mustang comes from mesteño, meaning an unclaimed horse.
Rodeo first referred to rounding up cattle (from rodear, “to surround”) before becoming a sport.
Buckaroo is an English-language alteration of vaquero.

Who the cowboys really were

Cowboys in Westerns are almost all white. The reality was more varied. According to estimates cited by the Library of Congress, including those of historian Kenneth Porter, of roughly 35,000 cowboys during the era of the great cattle drives, 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 share of the crews, especially in the Southwest.

A tough, low-paid job

A cowboy often started at 12 or 13 and earned about $1 a day, with food and lodging when working at a ranch. On the trail, a crew of about 10 men would drive an average of 3,000 head of cattle. To keep from losing weight, the animals travelled about 24 km (15 mi) a day: the roughly 1,600 km (1,000 mi) Chisholm Trail could take up to two months to cover.

The days were long and the nights short (the herd had to be guarded in shifts), and the dangers were real: thunderstorms, swollen rivers and stampedes. The golden age didn’t last long. Barbed wire, which spread in the 1880s, closed off open grazing land, and the winter of 1886–1887 killed hundreds of thousands of cattle on the Northern Plains. By the 1890s, railways had reached ranches, and there was no longer a reason for long drives to Kansas.

Indigenous peoples and the disappearance of the bison

The Wild West wasn’t 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 lands west of the Mississippi. As settlers pushed farther west, treaties were made and broken, and the Indian Wars spread across much of the century.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, on June 25 and 26, 1876, was the Plains peoples’ most famous victory: Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, inspired by Sitting Bull and led in part by Crazy Horse, wiped out part of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The U.S. Army suffered 268 deaths. Fourteen years later, on December 29, 1890, that same 7th Cavalry killed between 150 and 300 Lakota, 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 widely, but there were tens of millions of bison in North America before the 19th century (up to 60 million by some estimates). Commercial hide hunting exploded from 1872–1873 onward: that winter, more than 1.5 million bison were shipped east by train. By the late 1880s, only about 1,000 remained, according to naturalist William Hornaday. Deprived of their main resource, the Plains peoples were left with no choice but the reserves.

Outlaws, sheriffs and a showman who became legends

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

The Wild West produced its own heroes early on, often embellished during their lifetimes by the press and 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 by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Jesse James (1847–1882): former Confederate soldier turned bank and train robber, shot in the head by Robert Ford, a member of his gang, on April 3, 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, after spending time with Western actors in hopes they’d tell his story.
Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary, 1852–1903): settled in Deadwood in 1876, helped build her own legend, then performed as a storyteller in Buffalo Bill’s show from 1893 onward.
Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody, 1846–1917): scout and bison hunter, he created Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883, featuring re-enactments of battles, sharpshooters like Annie Oakley and real Plains warriors. The show toured Europe eight times and came to Paris during the 1889 World's Fair.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral neatly sums up the gap between fact and myth. On October 26, 1881, it didn’t happen inside the corral itself, but on a narrow lot nearby, off Fremont Street. About 30 shots in 30 seconds, three dead (Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury)—and dozens of films made about it afterwards.

Myth and reality of the Wild West

The Wild West in Westerns is a condensed version of history. Face-to-face showdowns at high noon were rare, and towns like Dodge City and Tombstone banned carrying guns in the 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 lone white cowboy erased vaqueros, Black cowboys and women who ran ranches.

By contrast, violence against Indigenous peoples was long minimized or portrayed backwards. The myth took shape as history was unfolding: Buffalo Bill was staging the Wild West by 1883, seven years before Wounded Knee, and popular novels turned outlaws into Robin Hood figures while they were still alive.

The Wild West on screen

Cinema inherited this myth from its earliest days. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, already told the story of a train robbery in 12 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, TV series are doing most of the work to keep the spirit alive, and their actors are bringing Western style back into fashion: we explore 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 arranged on a saddle

Almost every piece of Western wear started out as a practical necessity in the 19th-century West. The style came later, with rodeos, movies and country singers. To follow this evolution from trail to runway, read our history of cowboy fashion, from ranch to runway.

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

In 1865, after returning from a trip to the West, John B. Stetson founded his company in Philadelphia and made the “Boss of the Plains”: a lightweight, waterproof felt hat with a straight crown and rounded corners, plus a wide, flat brim, designed to protect against sun and rain. It’s the forerunner of every cowboy hat, whose crown was later creased and brim turned up at the sides.

Boots: a heel designed for the stirrup

A cowboy boot has a tall shaft to protect the calf from chafing and brush, a narrow toe to slide into the stirrup and a heel that keeps the foot from slipping through. You’ll find these same features in our cowboy boots, with more detailed leather and stitching than you’d see on a work boot.

Belt, vest, bandana and bolo tie

The rest of the outfit follows the same logic. The cowboy belt with its big buckle owes some of its origins to rodeo, where buckles are awarded as trophies. A vest offered pockets a shirt didn’t have, without restricting the arms 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 kicked up by the herd, which is why the cowboy bandana remains a Western staple. The bolo tie is the only later addition: this cord with a decorative slide dates to the mid-20th century, but it became an emblem of the American Southwest—so much so that it’s Arizona’s official necktie.

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Wild West FAQ

What is the Wild West?

The Wild West is the American West during its settlement in the 19th century: the territories west of the Mississippi, from the Great Plains to the Pacific. The phrase refers to the western frontier. By extension, it also describes the era of cowboys, pioneers and the Indian Wars.

When was the Wild West era?

In the broad sense, it ran from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to around 1890, when the census found that the frontier had disappeared—or 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’s the difference between the Old West and the Wild West?

Old West emphasizes the historical period and region. Wild West puts the focus on lawlessness, violence and legend. The term was popularized by the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which began in 1883.

Which states made up the Wild West?

There’s no official list, but the region generally includes states that grew out of 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 join, 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 it the starting point of his famous frontier thesis. Some historians extend the era to 1912.

Why do people say “Far West” in French?

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