The Wild West — sometimes called by the more subdued name of the Old West — is the star of many romanticized American stories. Tales of rebellious bands of outlaws, small-town sheriffs, and brave cowboys have made indelible marks on the cultural landscape, from spaghetti Western films to country music ballads. A well-made cowboy hat is an instantly recognizable symbol of ruggedness. One of the most popular video games of all time is about the Oregon Trail. Old-timey celebrities of the era are still household names — among them Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, and Billy the Kid.
The stories below go deeper, from unsung heroes to forgotten tragedies. Which famous mail delivery service was a flash in the pan? What iconic American animal was almost driven to complete extinction? What stomach-churning flavors could you expect to find in an Old West saloon?
Here are six interesting facts you may not know about the Wild West.
Most people didn’t use the Pony Express
The Pony Express mail service — which used horses and riders in a continuous relay to deliver mail — is one of the most iconic operations of the era, but it wasn’t part of everyday life for most people in the Old West. The service was expensive (around $130 in today’s dollars for just a half ounce of mail), and there were cheaper alternatives, like mail sent by stagecoach or ship. Most of the clientele were big businesses, newspapers, and government entities, who all regularly dealt with time-sensitive documents. Even those dispatches were printed on tissue-thin paper to save money, though.
The Pony Express also wasn’t around for that long. It lasted just a year and a half, between April 1860 and October 1861, when the Western Union Transcontinental Telegraph Line introduced a safer, much faster, more reliable way to deliver urgent messages. Still, for its brief existence, the Express bridged an important communications gap, delivering around 35,000 pieces of mail overall.
Some gold rush prospectors sailed around South America to get to the West
When you picture the pioneers and prospectors of the Old West, you probably imagine long journeys by stagecoach, horse, or wagon train. But at the beginning of the California Gold Rush, before major trails were established, travelers from the American East Coast actually had a harder time getting to California than those seeking their fortunes from China and Australia. While the latter enjoyed travel on well-worn trade routes to reach California, most early American Forty-Niners took an arduous 17,000-mile-long sea voyage all the way around Cape Horn, very near the southern edge of South America. It’s a dangerous patch of ocean to sail through, and was even more treacherous if the ship took a shortcut through the narrow Strait of Magellan. The full voyage often took five months to complete (and could take up to eight months). All told, around 40,000 travelers arrived in California by sea in 1849, most via what’s now known as San Francisco.
Cowboys were more diverse than portrayed by movies
The image of the gunslinging, freewheeling cowboy — strictly, a man on horseback that drives cattle to and from pasture — is burned into the American cultural experience, but it’s missing a few historic truths. For example: As many as one out of four cowboys in the Wild West were Black.
When wealthy American enslavers moved to Texas (first part of Spain, then Mexico) in the early 1800s to start cattle ranches, they brought enslaved people with them in droves. Even in 1825, when Texas was still part of anti-slavery Mexico, enslaved folks made up around 25% of the settler population. These ranch owners, many of whom eventually fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, relied on slave labor to keep their cattle contained. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 made slavery illegal (Texas had joined the U.S. in 1845), these ranchers started having a lot of trouble with runaway cattle.
Recently freed Black Americans who had been enslaved on cattle ranches were highly skilled in wrangling, and suddenly, paid cowboys were in extremely high demand — so many of them took up the cowboy trade. While they faced high levels of discriminationat the ranches, in towns, and on the plains alike, they forged tight bonds with their white and Mexican colleagues in cowboy crews.
Old West whiskey wasn’t very good
High-end whiskey brands often use Old West imagery to sell their products, but if they were really selling what the cowboys drank, you’d definitely want to save your money. Absent copyright laws and regulation, the quality of “whiskey” varied wildly from saloon to saloon. Something labeled as an aged, straight Kentucky bourbon could actually just be neutral grain alcohol, often distilled from low-grade molasses, re-distilled with a variety of additives that could include burnt sugar, glycerine, prune juice, iodine, tobacco, or even sulfuric acid. Of course, good whiskey existed — but the Wild West is not known for being particularly refined.
In the late 19th century, whiskey producers that did not want their name slapped on bottles of boozy tobacco juice made some attempts to self-regulate, and separating real bourbon from the fake stuff led to the “bottled in bond” label that manufacturers still use today. More labeling laws came with the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act.
One outlaw left poetry after robberies
In his ordinary life, Charles Boles was a well-dressed businessman, sporting a silky white mustache and living in luxury. But he didn’t earn his fortune in the mining business, as he claimed to his San Francisco social circles. In reality, he was robbing stagecoaches, which he took up in middle age. He may have ripped his moniker, Black Bart, from the pages of a thriller about, appropriately, a stagecoach robber, focusing exclusively on Wells Fargo routes — and covering up his well-groomed visage with flour sacks.
Keeping with the literary theme, he wrote poetry to leave behind at the scene, although he did so in only two of at least 28 suspected robberies. “I’ve labored long and hard for bread/For honor and for riches,” reads his best-known one, “But on my corns too long you’ve tred/You fine haired Sons of B****s.”
His gentlemanly life would ultimately be his undoing. During his last robbery in 1883, he was injured and attempted to flee the scene. In the process, he dropped a handkerchief marked with the number he was supposed to use to pick up his laundry, which Pinkerton detectives used to trace him. Ultimately, he was convicted of just one robbery, and served four years in San Quentin before slipping into obscurity.
Buffaloes were nearly driven to extinction
In the mid-19th century, the wild bison — popularly known as buffalo — population was still in the tens of millions; by the end of the 19th century, it had dropped to only around 300. But it wasn’t just increased hunting that spelled the doom of this once-wild species.
During this era of rapid westward expansion, the American government ratified around 400 treaties with Plains Indians… only to break the vast majority of them during the fervor of the gold rush, the aggressive pursuit of Manifest Destiny, and railroad construction. These Indigenous tribes, including the Lakota and the Sioux, had become fiercely protective of their land, and the United States government began attempting to confine them to reservations through a storm of military conflicts. Some government officials started promoting mass destruction of buffalo as a way to leave tribes starving and desperate. The craze quickly spread from the military to private companies and citizens. Trappers and adventurers slaughtered the animals by the thousands. Trains would even stop to let passengers shoot bison from the windows. Some notorious buffalo hunters became celebrities — for example, Buffalo Bill, notorious for his anti-Native American sentiment at the time, got his name from his bison body count.
The damage had been done, both to Indigenous tribes and the wild buffalo population. However, those 300 buffalo were hiding out in Yellowstone National Park, and Congress voted to protect them on park lands. Today, the vast majority of bison are bred as livestock, but thousands of wild buffalo still make their home in Yellowstone.
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