The real Old West was nothing like The Theme Park Version (which was originally the creation of 19th-century "dime novels"). Bad guys and anti-heroes wear black hats, good guys and sheriffs wear white hats, shootouts on Main Street occur with the frequency of at least one an hour-with the sun at high noon each time-and everyone drinks sarsaparilla or whiskey. Also home to very lucrative sugar glass and balsa-wood chair industries, judging by the number of bar brawls which occur during a single episode of a typical western series. The Theme Park Version of the Old West is a land of Indians, grizzled prospectors, scenic bluffs, Conestoga wagons, tough, shotgun-toting pioneers and buxom, be-feathered dance-hall girls. It has its own set of specialized subtropes, including a wide assortment of stock character types and its own specialized locations. The Wild West is basically the Theme Park Version or fictionalization of this setting. This setting is home to The Western, a definitively American genre almost as stylized and standardized as Commedia dell'Arte.
Census Bureau's official recognition in 1890 of the end of the frontier. The American Old West was the land west of the Mississippi River roughly in or around the latter half of the nineteenth century specifically we might start what we now think of as the "Wild West" era with the California Gold Rush of 1848 and end it with the U.S. Samuel Fuller, director of three film Westerns
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