And so much of the territory that we call the "Old West" was new and unknown to prospective settlers after the Civil War. The vague knowledge of the land had boosted settlement; familiarity with the land would produce frustration and discontent.

            II. Time and the "Old West"

Our second way of answering the question--"What was the Old West?"--is time. How old was the Old West? If we believe our fiction by Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour, if we believe our western movies and the television programs that used to fill the airwaves, then we believe that the Old West went on for almost all of American history. This, however, is not the case. The "Old West" was a post-Civil War phenomenon. It lasted a very brief time, roughly from about 1865 to about 1890. For the events that occurred in the short span of less than a person's lifetime, however, the period of time was incredible. During that period from 1865 to about 1890, ten new states entered the Union, and the last of the states in the area--New Mexico and Arizona--would finally enter the Union in 1912 immediately after the turn of the new century. During this brief time span, the days of the Old West, we settled a larger domain than ever before in all of American history put together. Between Jamestown in 1607 and 1865, we peopled about four hundred and seven million acres of land. But between the years immediately following the Civil War and about 1900, we populated over four hundred and thirty thousand million acres of land. We more than doubled the land space of the United States. Also, during these years at least three empires grew, flourished, and declined in the territory that we have defined as the Old West: a mining empire, a cattleman's empire, and a farmer's empire. Finally, during this time period, "we" (white Americans) succeeded in conquering the original inhabitants of the territory. We sent the Native Americans to reservations where we preserved them as a potential national resource in case we could ever figure out any use for them. We established ourselves as the most significant immigrants, if sometimes the most brutal immigrants in all of world history.

Ronald Reagan

               III. Images of the "Old West"

But we also know that we mean something other than just geographical terrain. We mean something other than just a period of twenty-five or thirty years of our national history when we use the phrase "the Old West." We also mean a series of images about ourselves as a people--those images that mark what is distinctive about being American. We think of the "rugged individual," the man, the woman, who pulls himself, herself, up by their own bootstraps. We think of the virtuous yeoman farmer, we think of the steward pioneer, we think of the cattle baron building a financial empire or as perhaps the supreme symbol of the self reliant American. We think of the cowboy, the individual whose life was his to do with as he chose, the man who helped advance the cause of American democracy by battling against cattle barons, by battling against the East Coast businessmen, the eastern monopolists, by standing firm against the encroachments of too much government, too much civilization. We think, in short, of Ronald Reagan and Death Valley Days, Ronald Reagan in a ten gallon hat and chaps, a symbol of the Old West.

Now where did this imagery come from that has so permeated our popular culture? How did our historical imaginations come to be controlled by these images? There are many ways of answering that question, but there are at least two that I think are important for us:

1) Popular culture materials. In the 1870s and 1880s, one of the new genres for a growing reading public was the genre of the dime novel. The leading house that published these dime novels was called Beadle and Adams. They churned out hundreds of titles per year, most of which, early on, were fictionalized, romanticized accounts of the Old West. Dime novels about people like Deadwood Dick, dime novels singing the exploits and praises of a man like Buffalo Bill, tied in with his famous Wild West Show that toured the great cities of the nation. When motion pictures finally became a selling technology in the early years of the twentieth century, among the earliest motion pictures like the Great Train Robbery were pictures set in a fictionalized Old West. And so our popular culture has done much to fasten these images of rugged individualism, the virtuous farmer, the hearty pioneer, in our historical imaginations.

2) Scholarship. Here I would like you to understand something about one of the most famous historians in American history, a man named Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner taught for a period of time in his early career here at the University of Wisconsin. In fact it was in the history department at the University of Wisconsin that Turner published what would become probably his best known and most influential piece, an article entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner delivered this first as a paper at the fledgling American History Association in the year 1893. What Turner discovered in this paper was that a period in American history had come to an end. Turner wrote that the Federal Census of 1890 demonstrated that there was no longer a frontier line in America, a line of continuous settlement moving west, west, west, as had been the case from the eighteenth century on-indeed from the late seventeenth century. Turner therefore wrote that since there was no longer a frontier line moving continuously westward, that a significant portion of American history and the dynamics that had driven settlement and had driven government in America had come to an end.