Inventing The Wild West

Americans were and are fascinated by The Wild West. It all started in the middle of the 19^th Century.

As explorers, fortune seekers, entrepreneurs and those seeking to start a new life the wide open spaces of the mostly unexplored Western United States was a natural draw.

Add in the California and Alaskan gold rushes, the expansion of the railroads, free government settler land, the Civil War and other factors and its only natural that The West would foster romanticism, wonder and stories of danger, excitement and the promise of wealth.

Conflicts with native Americans, robber barons, railroad tycoons, rustlers, cutthroats and other unsavory characters also sweetened the pot.

Folks back East and around the world thrilled at the exploits of real cowboys, wild encounters with Indians, traveling Wild West shows, saloons, train and bank robberies and the rough and tumble life of those who traveled West.

Stories proliferated in dime novels, Wild West shows, heroic exploratory conquests, bloodshed and romanticism.

Nostalgia, folklore and fakelore fed the public’s appetite for excitement and there were those only to happy to contribute to the myth of life in The Wild West.

Newspapers, magazines and cheap novels fed the flame and soon radio, motion pictures and television all contributed to the myth. Marketing executives, publishers, broadcasters and merchandise manufacturers all benefited by perpetuating a vision of The Wild West that was more fiction than fact.

Did you know that at one time Westerns were the most popular movies being produced and at one time almost 40 Western TV series were being broadcast in a short span of years?

Cowboys became heroes while in fact they were hard working, rugged individuals that existed and endured the worst conditions for little pay.

Author Jeremy Agnew and McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers present the truth behind the legend of the West in Inventing The Wild West.

It successfully peels back the myth to present the real Wild West and how media created an idolized picture of life in the West. It provides an insight of how, with a little modification and marketing, The Wild West transformed from a dry and dusty and dangerous region into a haven for heroes and Wild West justice.

Ephesians 4:29Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.