Things We Forget About the Wild West

Photo by Xiang Gao on Unsplash

The Wild West is a legendary part of American history, but what was really going on on the frontier?

Let’s just say it wasn’t much like Hollywood portrayed it. Here are a few things about the “Wild West” that we tend to forget.

It Only Lasted About 30 Years

From the shadow cast by the Wild West over American history you would think it lasted a century.

In fact, the era started at the end of the Civil War in 1865, and is generally seen as ending in about 1900 when most of the land was settled and Los Angeles and Seattle were thriving metropolises.

Oh, and that legendary icon, the Pony Express? It ran for a grand total of eighteen months from April 1860 to October 1861.

So many people lived through the entire period.

A Lot of Cowboys Weren’t White

Hollywood shows us entire posses of white cowboys, but linguistics and history tell a different story.

Words such as “rodeo,” “palomino” and “lariat” tell part of the story. “Grulla,” a word for a horse color, even keeps its gendered ending…mares are grulla and male horses are grullo. The first language of many cowboys was Spanish, and Spanish speckles the jargon of the modern west. Estimates say…