America’s Old West looms large in the imagination – from cowboys and gunslingers to gold rush settlers searching for a fortune, the pioneers of the American frontier have shaped the country’s identity and created cultural references that still resonate today. However, this westward expansion came with devastating consequences for Native American peoples, many of whom were expelled from their ancestral lands, deprived of vital food sources or slaughtered in battle amid the drive to dominate the land and its natural resources.
Click through the gallery to discover the history of America's Old West through historic images...
Just a generation after the eastern colonies had declared their independence, the newly United States made a giant leap westwards. When Napoleon Bonaparte tried to reclaim the territory of La Louisiane – which at that time covered 15 modern-day states from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains – back from Spain, President Thomas Jefferson sent envoys to France to buy back strategic ports in New Orleans and Florida. They returned in 1803 with an even better deal: all 828,000 square miles of Louisiana land for the bargain price of just $15 million (around $407m in today's money).
President Thomas Jefferson commissioned private secretary Meriwether Lewis to chart the ‘new’ territory and seek a route to the Pacific. Lewis instructed his former lieutenant William Clark to assist and in May 1804, a 45-strong ‘Corps of Discovery’ set off along the Missouri River. Along the way, this legendary expedition would encounter more than 50 Native American tribes – including the Shoshone, Mandan, Chinook and Sioux – record hundreds of plant and animal species and create crucial maps of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Lewis and Clark crossed the Continental Divide with the help of French-Canadian interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau and his wife, a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, who had given birth to a son two months before departing. She was a valuable help along the journey and even reunited with her long-lost brother, now Chief Cameahwait of the Shoshone tribe, in a touching moment that was recorded in the captains' daily journals. Despite freezing temperatures and tough terrain, they eventually navigated the Snake and Columbia rivers, reaching the Oregon coast by winter 1805.
Lewis and Clark returned to a heroes’ welcome in Washington DC in late 1806, having travelled more than 8,000 miles (12,875 km) and recorded valuable knowledge of the terrain and its Native American populations. Nearly 15 years later, another expedition led by Stephen Harriman Long would set out to study the Great Plains in more depth, bringing botanists, geologists, zoologists and even an artist along with him to research the region, which they dubbed the ‘Great American Desert’.
The westward expansion of the United States came at the cost of the Native American peoples who had lived on this land for centuries, as Indigenous tribes were compelled to sign treaties relinquishing their territories. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson enshrined this effort into law with the Indian Removal Act, which drove tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands and forced them to resettle in modern-day Oklahoma and Kansas. Thousands of people died along the way, earning the forced relocation the name the Trail of Tears.
Texas was under Mexican control but in 1835, long-standing tensions – and, historians argue, a desire to continue the practice of slavery, which was being abolished in Mexico – bubbled to the surface, lighting the spark for the Texas Revolution. This led to heavy losses at the Battle of the Alamo, which later found its way into popular culture with 1950s Disney TV show Davy Crockett and 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo. Mexican general Santa Anna was ultimately defeated and Texas went on to declare itself a republic in 1836. Within less than 10 years, it had been annexed by the USA and became the 28th state.
While Europeans had been exposed to the deadly smallpox virus for generations, Native American tribes had no such natural resistance, so in 1837, when a steamboat travelled up the Missouri River to the fur-trading post of Fort Clark carrying infected passengers, the Indigenous population had no way to defend themselves. The disease almost wiped out the Mandan people entirely, decimating their numbers from more than 2,000 to just 138, and continued to spread, killing thousands of Pawnee, Assiniboine and Arikara people across the Great Plains.
California’s state capital can trace its roots all the way across the Atlantic, where Swiss-German businessman John Augustus Sutter skipped out on his debts and set sail for the New World, journeying across America and as far as Hawaii and Alaska. But it was in the then-Mexican province of Alta California that he set up Sutter’s Fort as the flagship of New Helvetia, aka New Switzerland (which would later become the city of Sacramento, founded by Sutter's son). Despite appalling conditions for local Indigenous workers, European settlers flocked to work on these fertile ranchlands.
The convoy of settler wagons trundling across the Great Plains is an enduring image in American history, and the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest was a key route for those early pioneers. Fur traders had followed in Lewis and Clark’s footsteps, but it took another 30 years before a missionary party led by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman brought a small group – including women and wagons – to the Willamette Valley. It laid the foundations for the Great Migration of 1843, although it ended in disaster for Whitman and his wife when the local Cayuse people blamed him for an outbreak of measles, resulting in their murders.
While the westward drive came partly out of necessity – the population was booming and so was the need for land and resources – it soon took on a philosophical dimension as the term ‘manifest destiny’ came into vogue. First coined by The Democratic Review in July 1845, it expressed the widely held sentiment that American expansionism was an inevitability. This seemed undeniable by 1848, when the end of the Mexican-American War resulted in major land losses for Mexico and added what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and much of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming to complete the final push west.
Land wasn’t the only reason settlers had for looking to the west. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon church, had its origins in New York, but when Brigham Young became its leader, he sought a new home where followers could practise their faith in freedom. A 148-strong group – mostly men, with a handful of women and children – arrived in a valley in what is now Utah (named after the Indigenous Ute people) on 24 July 1847, and established a new settlement called Great Salt Lake City. It remains a centre for the Mormon faith arranged around Temple Square.
When a worker at the California settlement of New Helvetia, James Marshall, made the chance discovery of a few gold flakes in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in early 1848, little did he know it would spark a ‘gold fever’ that would grip the nation and prompt thousands of young men to move cross-country with the promise of amassing a fortune overnight. The ‘49ers – so-called because the rush took off in 1849 – extracted billions of dollars of gold in just a handful of years, though with devastating consequences for both the Native American population and the California environment. The gold rush extended beyond California to its northern neighbour of Oregon, bringing more people to its shores and prompting a new settlement on the Columbia River.
With newfound wealth comes new opportunity, and the enterprising American spirit took no time in making its mark on the gold rush towns springing up overnight – creating some well-known names still in business today. The brains behind American Express, Wells Fargo expanded from its eastern base to the booming economy of California, transporting mail and money cross-country. And in 1853, Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling a new form of hard-wearing work pants that would hold up to the harsh conditions of the mines – and thus, jeans were born.
While the riches contained in the California hills were starting to dwindle by the late 1850s, there seemed to be almost no end of new resources to uncover elsewhere. In 1858, gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains, bringing as many as 100,000 prospectors to Pike’s Peak Country in Colorado over just three years, and sparking the foundation of what would become the city of Denver. Over in Nevada, the Comstock Lode was the country’s first discovery of silver ore, sparking another mining craze and earning it the nickname the Silver State.
Just as boomtowns came and went, so did the Pony Express mail service, an 18-month wonder that became forever entwined with the romantic ideals of the American West. As a result of the Gold Rush and people moving west, there was a need for more efficient communication and stagecoaches simply couldn’t cut it. Enter the Pony Express, covering a 1,900-mile (2,900km) route from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. It began in April 1860, promising an east-to-west delivery in just 10 days and lasted until the cross-continental telegraph was completed in October 1861, rendering the service obsolete.
Among the many human tragedies that arose from the conflict between American settlers and Indigenous communities was Cynthia Ann Parker, who was a young girl when a group of Comanches raided her Texas home and took her captive. She went on to live peacefully with the Comanche and had three children with the tribe's chief. But 24 years later, in 1860, the Texas Rangers attacked the Comanche and forced Cynthia to return against her will, along with her infant daughter. She was heartbroken at losing her sons – one of whom went on to be the last free Comanche chief – and never recovered.
Should western settlers have easy access to land or would this threaten the large, labour-intensive estates of southern slave-owners? This was hotly debated as America teetered on the brink of Civil War, with an 1860 bill, the Homestead Act, vetoed by pro-South President James Buchanan. But just two years later, with the North-South conflict in full swing, Abraham Lincoln passed the first Homestead Act, which granted land to those who lived on and ‘improved’ at least 160 acres. Within 72 years, homesteads would make up more than 10% of US land, displacing many Native American communities.
Much of the Civil War conflict was concentrated in the Deep South, but its impact was felt far and wide. On 23 October 1864, the Battle of Westport – the largest clash west of the Mississippi – saw more than 30,000 combatants face off in what is now Kansas City. The Confederate forces were defeated with around 1,500 killed or wounded across both sides, marking a turning point in the South’s Missouri offensive and earning this battle the nickname ‘The Gettysburg of the West’.
Alaska had, until this point, been controlled by Russia, its nearest neighbour across the Bering Strait. But in the wake of its Crimean War defeat, Russia offered to sell the land to the United States for the sum of $7.2 million (around $149m in today's money), and the territory changed hands in the 1867 Alaska Purchase. Some decried the land as worthless, calling it ‘Seward’s Folly’ after then-Secretary of State William H Seward – until gold was discovered in the Yukon, making Alaska a crucial gateway. Even so, it would take until 1959 to be recognised as a state in its own right.
With such vast distances to cover, the advent of the railway was a true game-changer in bringing the western states onto an equal footing with the better-connected east. Three main railroad lines came together to form the first transcontinental railroad, which was finally completed on 10 May 1869. Pictured here, Central Pacific Railroad Company president Leland Stanford taps in a ‘golden’ spike to mark the railroad's completion, joining his tracks to the Union Pacific Line at a ceremony in Promontory Summit, Utah – transforming the fortunes of the west forever.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of cattle ranching to the economy of the American West. Along with enormous tracts of land came almost limitless potential to graze huge herds of cattle, but in the wake of the Civil War, ranchers had to drive them to the better-off North to turn a decent profit. That's when the advent of the railroad – meaning livestock could be transported quickly and cheaply – heralded the beginning of a ‘beef bonanza’ that lasted until a drop-off in demand in the 1880s.
The skill of the cowboy was so revered that contests arose between young men keen to prove their worth on a bucking bronco. One of the first documented competitions was held on 4 July 1869 in the town of Deer Trail, Colorado, though rodeo culture really took off in the 1880s, elevated from simple necessity to a flagship sporting and social event. Another important milestone came in 1869, as the 10 December saw Wyoming become the first US territory to grant women the vote, also allowing them to serve as judges, jury members and elected officials.
Between mining for precious metals, grazing livestock and cultivating land for agriculture, America’s expansion wrought havoc on its natural landscapes, but one area was deemed so remarkable it gave rise to a whole new way of protecting and preserving the land. Yellowstone was granted national park status in 1872, drawing on the examples of Yosemite (already a state park) and Hot Springs, a designated reserve in Arkansas, but elevating it to a new national level and enshrining protections for its unique flora and fauna in federal law.
Things were far from rosy for the Native American tribes of the Dakotas, however, as the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes refused to cede the Black Hills to prospectors searching for gold, leading to the Great Sioux War. Its most storied encounter is the Battle of the Little Bighorn – also called Custer’s Last Stand – in 1876, in which the fighters led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse won out over the US cavalry, but were ultimately forced to surrender when faced with starvation. The US Supreme Court later ruled just compensation had not been paid to the Sioux Nation.
Much of the romanticism about the American frontier comes from individuals who attained legendary status – and few were more famous than Buffalo Bill, aka William Frederick Cody. He lived and breathed western culture, having reputedly worked as a Pony Express rider, gold miner, buffalo hunter, army scout and more. He rose to fame with his touring Wild West-themed shows, which also featured fellow icons Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, and even took the tour across the pond to Europe and onto the silver screen in one of the earliest silent films ever made.
Gangs of gunslingers and cattle rustlers roamed from one town to another putting the ‘wild’ into ‘Wild West’, with only the sheriff or agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to put a stop to their antics. Jesse James was certainly one of those outlaws along with his brother, Frank, as they led the James-Younger Gang in a spree of bank, stagecoach and train robberies across the Midwest. They carried on for years until another member of the gang shot Jesse in the back, only adding to his mythic status.
Outlaw fever returned with the exploits of Billy the Kid, a young gunfighter who claimed to have killed 21 men. He began his life of crime as a teen, falling in with fugitives and cattle rustlers, and was accused of several murders that captured press and public attention. He was convicted and sentenced to death but staged a prison break, killing two deputies in his escape, and remained on the run until New Mexico Sheriff Pat Garrett tracked him down for a second time and shot him dead on 14 July 1881, at the age of 21.
Billy the Kid might have gone on to feature in countless pop culture remakes, but even he can’t match the notoriety of the gunfight at the OK Corral, a landmark standoff set in the aptly named town of Tombstone, Arizona. On the afternoon of 26 October 1881, shots rang out between town marshal Virgil Earp, his two brothers and temporary deputies Wyatt and Morgan, and local dentist Doc Holliday, and – on the other side – a gang of bandits known as the Cowboys.
Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers survived to tell the tale, immortalised in books and the classic 1957 film Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Yet the true skirmish took place not at the OK Corral but outside a nearby photography studio, with shots fired from just a few feet apart. The Earps were actually questioned by police on suspicion of unlawful killing – though quickly cleared – but an attempt on Virgil’s life later that year and the killing of Morgan Earp in March 1882 were widely attributed to the Cowboys, sparking an ongoing vendetta.
Despite the mix of European nationalities welcomed to the shores of the United States, the Chinese immigrants who had formed the backbone of labour to build America’s railroads, gold mines and work in the low-wage urban economy faced growing restrictions and racism in the final decades of the 19th century. The government introduced The Chinese Exclusion Act preventing the immigration of Chinese labourers in 1882, as tensions continued, culminating in a riot and massacre of 28 Chinese miners in Wyoming in 1885.
After even more Native American territory was seized following efforts to undermine the sovereignty of Indigenous tribes, a series of land runs set off across the country. The most famous was in Oklahoma in April 1889 when around 50,000 homesteaders thundered off from the starting line to claim their plot of land on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who jumped the gun and set off early were called ‘sooners’, hence the name of the Sooner State.
It’s renowned for its rainfall, but during the hot, dry summer of 1889, this Washington state city went up in flames after an overturned glue pot in a paint factory caught light. With the area’s readily available timber, buildings were largely made of wood, so the fire spread quickly through the streets and wooden boardwalks, burning all afternoon and evening and reducing the city to ash. Though the devastation was huge, Seattle rebuilt rapidly and its population swelled by around a third as a young, eager workforce moved to the city to find work in its reconstruction.
The era of the Old West outlaw was coming to an end by the final decade of the 19th century, but there was still time for one more filmmaker’s favourite. Utah-raised Butch Cassidy – aka Robert LeRoy Parker – was renowned for his meticulously planned escapades and aversion to killing, amassing a ‘Wild Bunch’ of fellow bandits including Harry Longabaugh, the ‘Sundance Kid’. After their crime spree, the pair are said to have fled aboard a steamer bound for Argentina in 1901, going out in a blaze of glory in Bolivia in 1908 – if the movie ending is to be believed, anyway.
The gold rush had been a boom time for the development of the West – and how better to follow it up than with the discovery of liquid gold? Oil was uncovered in Pennsylvania as far back as 1859, but it was the discovery of a hugely productive ‘gusher’ on the Spindletop dome of Beaumont, Texas, in January 1901 (pictured) that truly transformed the fortunes of the state. Spewing out 100,000 barrels a day, it was the beginning of a new era of oil exploration and the making of many a Texas oil baron.
If any development could be said to mark the transition from the time of the Old West to a new age of American history, perhaps it’s the foundation of Sin City itself, formed out of the Nevada desert in 1905. What began as a stop on the railroad track from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City soon earned its own mayor, incorporation as a town and a move to more liberal marriage, divorce and gaming laws that would set the new town on a path to becoming America’s playground.
The deadliest natural disaster in modern American history came just six years into the new century, when the northern California coast was hit by an intense earthquake – since estimated to be around 8.3 on the modern Richter scale – which rippled along nearly 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault in the early hours of 18 April. San Francisco was hit hard by the quake and by a series of devastating fires that followed, together killing more than 3,000 people and leaving the city in ruins.
By the middle of the First World War – long after the advent of the motor car – the idea of a stagecoach robbery might seem almost quaint. Yet the last such reported crime was in 1916 in the rural surroundings of Jarbidge Canyon, Nevada, when three robbers held up a US Post Office mail wagon, shot and killed the driver and escaped with $4,000 in cash (around $115,000 in today's money). They were caught soon after – though the money was never found – and one of the culprits was the first to be convicted based on his bloody handprint, a new technology at the time.
In just over a century, the west of the early 1800s – where Mexico still held huge swathes of territory and Native American tribes held sway over their ancestral lands – had transformed into an almost-unrecognisable array of thriving cities and seemingly endless opportunities for wealth. It came at a cost, but it also shaped the identity of the United States as we know it today, mythologised in the flickering images of spaghetti Westerns and still-familiar names of long-gone icons of the Old West.
Now check out these fascinating 'then and now' images of the Old West...