[upbeat banjo music]

I'm historian Mark Lee Gardner.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Wild West Support.

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This question is from Quora.

Who is the most dangerous outlaw in the Old West?

Well, there's several candidates.

John Wesley Harden maybe killed as many as two dozen men.

He's the one you might have heard of

that killed a man just for snoring.

He heard a loud snoring through the thin wall in this hotel

and fired several shots and he stopped snoring.

But I just think Jesse and Frank James are a little scarier.

I would vote for them as the most dangerous.

Jesse and Frank had come out of a very vicious,

horrible Civil War.

One of their leaders was called Bloody Bill Anderson,

and he actually hung Union soldiers' scalps

from his bridal and saddle.

And after the war,

because they'd become so numb to that violence,

it just didn't bother them to kill somebody.

And there were lots of innocent victims in their robberies.

You either opened up the safe

or you got shot, and they were serious.

One man who knew them said,

if Jesse said he was gonna kill you,

you could probably talk him out of it.

But if Frank said he was gonna kill you,

he was gonna kill you.

@madeofdope, WTF is a 49er?

Gold is discovered in California in 1848.

The news rushes eastward

and the very next year, 1849 sees hordes, thousands

of potential gold seekers traveling west to California.

And they got named the 49ers.

@butchClazen asks, Tombstone or Wyatt Earp?

Which film did the OK Corral scene best?

I feel like the Wyatt Earp Kevin Costner version

is a little more accurate in that it has the gunfighters

much closer together.

They were literally within a few feet of each other.

The Tombstone movie with Kurt Russell,

it's a very big lot.

And actually that lot where the gunfight occurred,

estimates are as small as 15 feet across.

So it's very tight, very compacted.

One thing that I liked about both films was

that they did pull from the historical dialogue

that was taken down in witness testimony

after the OK Corral gunfight.

That one famous line where Doc Holliday tells one

of the McLaurys, he says, you're a daisy if you do.

Well, that actually was what he spoke at the time.

But the one thing that really stood out to me was

that they have the Earps

and Doc Holliday pulling guns from holsters.

Wyatt Earp pulled his revolver from a coat pocket,

Doc Holliday pulled his revolver from a coat pocket.

It was very common at that time

to have tailors make pistol pockets in your coats.

It said that Wyatt Earp's pocket was actually lined

with canvas to ease a revolver coming out of that pocket

and not catching the hammer on your coat.

User714943 says, please help me make a Wild West playlist.

Well, I'd be happy to, I play lots of Wild West songs.

The cowboys loved all kinds of music, sentimental ballads.

Here we have a couple of cowboy musicians in Texas

and they also like songs about the range.

And we'll do one for you right now.

Hit it, Vance.

♪ As I walked out one morning for pleasure ♪

♪ I spied a cowpuncher a-riding alone ♪

[upbeat banjo music]

♪ His hat was thrown back ♪

♪ And his spurs we're a-jingling ♪

♪ As he approached me a-singing his song ♪

[upbeat banjo music]

♪ Whoopee ti yi yo, get along little dogies ♪

♪ It's your misfortune, none of my own ♪

♪ Whoopee ti yi yo, get along little dogies ♪

♪ For you know Wyoming will be your new home ♪

[upbeat banjo music]

So in that song, you hear the word dogie.

That was an orphaned calf.

An orphaned calf is eating kind of coarse range grass.

And their bellies get extended

and they were called dough bellied or dough guts.

And from that we get the word dogie.

Here's another one for your playlist.

It's 'Old Dan Tucker'.

[upbeat banjo music]

♪ Old Dan Tucker down in town ♪

♪ Riding a goat and leading a hound ♪

♪ The hound gave a howl, the goat gave a jump ♪

♪ Throwing Old Dan a-straddle a stump ♪

♪ Get out the way ♪

♪ Get out the way ♪

♪ Get out the way Old Dan Tucker ♪

♪ He's too late to get his supper ♪

♪ Get out the way ♪

♪ Get out the way ♪

♪ Get out the way Old Dan Tucker ♪

♪ He's too late to get his supper ♪

[upbeat banjo music]

Thank you, Vance. Thank you.

@ChrisJJarratt says, watching a Western the other day,

and they had to check their guns to come into the city.

Made me think,

did the Old West have stricter gun laws than we have now?

They did have very strict gun laws in the towns

or the cities, places like Tombstone,

Wichita, and Dodge City.

These are big cattle towns, they're driving huge herds

of cattle in, the cowboys are getting paid off.

They have guns, it's dangerous.

So these communities had city ordinances preventing

the wearing of guns, preventing having concealed weapons.

Only lawmen were able to carry their guns.

It's a very dangerous occupation for a lawman

to disarm drunken cowboys.

So these cowboys, when they came in with their guns,

they had to check them,

they had to drop them off at a certain locations.

And then when they were leaving town,

they could pick their guns up and take them back with them.

But they could not be wearing firearms

while they were in these city limits.

@leesacks, did Old West saloons have anything else

to drink other than whiskey and beer?

Cowboys must like a fancy drink every once in a while.

All these boom towns, whether it was Dodge City or Deadwood

or Tombstone, they had well-stocked bars.

And we have lots of photographs

and you could see all different types of bottles,

whether it's wine or champagne, brandy, gin.

In 1874, there was a book published,

The Bartender's Guide, that gave you

how to make cordials, juleps.

The more elaborate bars, and there were many,

could just make any drink that you had a hankering for.

Javerthugo asks, what hats were really

most common in the Wild West?

The most famous hat maker actually made

the hats in Pennsylvania.

His name was John B. Stetson.

But he had gone to the West.

He was part of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush in 1859.

But in the 1860s, he developed a hat called the Trail Boss

and it had a flat crown and just a standard wide brim.

But it was very well-made and he developed a reputation.

And I've actually got a real Stetson hat here.

This is a John B. Stetson.

It's got the wide brim, nothing fancy with the crown.

This is called a pencil roll rim here.

This is probably from like the 1920s or 1930s.

They weren't the only ones that made cowboy hats,

but if you were a cowboy

and you had the money, you wanted a Stetson.

Another popular style of hat was the derby,

or what might be called the bowler hat.

There's that famous picture of the Wild Bunch,

the Outlaws, Butch Cassidy,

and some of them are wearing the derby hats.

And if you wore a certain kind of hat,

you might draw attention and get picked on.

There's a story from Tombstone, Arizona,

whenever a dude came in wearing a top hat.

Now a dude is like a newbie, a city slicker,

what have you, Doc Holliday, if they spotted him,

would follow that dude around ringing a dinner bell,

drawing attention.

We've got a dude here, we've got a newbie in town.

The next question is from the AskHistorians subreddit.

When did the Old West officially end?

Just saw Killers of the Flower Moon

and it takes place in the twenties,

but still feels very much like the late 1800s.

Well, that's a great question.

Some people might say the buffalo.

When the buffalo were no longer free-ranging,

when barbed wire fences are stretched across the plains,

there are no longer cattle drives.

That could be the end of the Old West.

But to me it's when the automobiles

takes the place of the horse.

Maybe that's the 1930s or forties,

but when there's no more horses on the streets,

then to me the Old West is over.

Jed Houston wants to know,

how many buffalo roamed this country

before they were slaughtered to near extinction?

Before the horse was introduced to North America

by the Spanish, the estimates go from 28

to 30 million buffalo on the Great Plains.

In the early part of the 19th century,

the robe trade was very popular.

The Indians hunted the buffalo

and the Indian women fully tanned these robes.

They were used in the East and in Europe as lap robes,

but a good robe had to come from a cow or a calf.

It's easier to work the hide.

So that's the breeding population.

If you're just killing cows and calves,

it's kind of a recipe for disaster.

In 1860, a newspaper reported

that probably 800,000 buffalo were slaughtered each year.

There are lots of examples

of passengers on the steam trains shooting at the herds

as they sped down the tracks.

You could see an example of that in film,

in the movie Dead Man with Johnny Depp.

By 1884 then, there's estimated just 324 buffalo

in the United States.

A lot of it was meat hunters.

That's how Buffalo Bill Cody got his name.

He was hunting buffalo

and getting meat for the railroad crews.

And interestingly enough,

Buffalo Bill later starts a Wild West Exhibition.

The same show that featured the famous gun woman

known as Annie Oakley.

@Andydoodle56 says, wait, Annie Oakley was real?

Yes, she was real.

Annie Oakley was the real deal too.

She was an excellent marksman.

She had a partner.

She would look at the mirror, had the gun over her shoulder,

he'd have a cigarette in his lips

and she would shoot off the end of the cigarette.

Seems very dangerous.

Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West Exhibition

traveled really around the world.

One of the big draws for Buffalo Bill Cody's show

was these staged recreations.

Whether it was a buffalo hunt,

whether it was an Indian attack on a wagon train,

a robber's attack on a stage coach, the cavalry.

They got to see Sitting Bull one year.

Sitting Bull was well known as the leader of the Lakotas.

They actually could see this person they read about,

see him in the flesh.

I mean it was quite an experience.

Very, very popular and it went for decades.

@minnownox says,

what do you mean the only authenticated photo

of the real Billy the Kid was only found in 2011?

Well, there is only one authenticated

and it existed a lot before 2011.

It's this here.

This is a tintype that was made at Fort Sumner

of Billy the Kid by a traveling photographer.

We don't know who the photographer was.

And there's something you have to know about tintypes.

Tintypes are reverse images.

And if you look in this image, you would think

that Billy the Kid was left-handed.

In fact, there's a movie with Paul Newman

called The Left Handed Gun.

That's the story of Billy the Kid.

He's called The Left Handed Gun because of this image,

but because we know that tintypes are reverse images,

actually Billy has his pistol on his right hip.

So this is the image corrected the way that it should be.

And actually this is an enlargement of the tintype.

The actual tintype was the size of this tintype.

It's very small.

And the reason it's called a tintype

is because the photograph is actually made on tin.

The emulsion is on a very thin piece of tin,

technical name ferrotype.

And the reason we know that this photo

of Billy the Kid is authentic is

because it was identified as Billy the Kid

in his own lifetime.

It appeared in the Illustrated Police News

while he was still alive.

A few years ago, this actual tintype,

the one that's in this image,

this sold at auction for $2.3 million.

So that had a huge effect

because when a small tintype brings that kind of money,

people are gonna start looking

for other pictures of Billy the Kid.

So in recent years, there have been a lot of photos.

They have some kind of a resemblance to Billy the Kid.

But you just can't identify a photo based on resemblance.

You have to have some kind of provenance

that links it to Billy the Kid.

There's a picture of supposedly Billy the Kid

playing croquet.

These are wanna be images.

There's no connection with that image to Billy the Kid.

@jacymeow asks, did Black cowboys ever exist?

Yes, they did.

In fact, as many as 25% of cowboys

in the Old West were Black.

After the Civil War,

there were a lot of freed African Americans.

They're looking for opportunity.

One place for opportunity is in the American West.

Another outlet for African American men was the US Army,

the Buffalo Soldiers.

The 9th and 10th Cavalry were African American units.

One very famous African American in the West was a lawman.

His name was Bass Reeves.

Bass Reeves was noted for the many gun scrapes

and also the many arrests that he made.

Many people think that he was the inspiration

for the Lone Ranger.

And according to some accounts, he actually worked

with Indian scouts, which might lead to this theory

that he was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger.

@AdsMarketing24, when did branding cattle start?

That's a great question.

Actually, the branding of livestock goes way back

in fact to ancient Egypt.

But as far as North America, when the Spaniards arrive,

they're bringing their cattle and their sheep,

and they're also bringing the ways of running livestock.

And we really have our first cowboys.

They were called the Vaqueros.

This starts this whole cattle culture.

And a lot of the cowboying

that still goes on today can be directly traced

to these Vaqueros and to the Spanish practices.

One of those practices, of course, is branding,

identifying your livestock.

This is really a cool brand

because we know that it's a Mexican or a Spanish brand.

And the reason we know that is that the letters have serifs.

Non-Mexican or Spanish brands

generally don't have the serifs.

The branding iron can get very hot

if you're branding a lot of cattle.

So this is where you would put a wood handle in the end.

The fact that it's not one long handle makes it easier

to transport out on the range.

You've got something you can break down.

@GildedSantiago, why was the 10 gauge shotgun

so popular in the Wild West?

Did they just want things extra super duper dead or what?

Well, they did want things dead.

So if you've heard of the stage coaches,

if you heard of Wells Fargo, the shotgun messenger,

he sat next to the driver and he held a 10 gauge shotgun.

And that's where the phrase comes

that you're riding shotgun.

It was also manufactured with a shorter barrel.

When the gun goes off,

the shot is gonna spread quicker at your target.

It's gonna be very wide.

If you're riding shotgun

and you've got a couple of robbers up there,

you want a big pattern

and hopefully knock 'em outta commission.

There were two other firearms, very popular.

One is the Winchester Repeater.

You might've heard of the Model 1873.

It is a lever action weapon.

So it fires several rounds each time

you work the lever action.

The other weapon that also fired several rounds

is the Colt Single Action Army Revolver.

Sometimes they called the Colt the peacemaker

because that ended any kind of arguments.

It has six chambers.

You tried not to put a bullet in the chamber

underneath the hammer because if the gun dropped

or if you knocked it against something

and the hammer went into the cartridge, it could go off.

So most cowboys, most lawmen,

they rested the hammer on an empty chamber

so that they wouldn't have any kind of accidents.

@weed_mouse asks, how accurate is 'Red Dead Redemption'?

I think it's as accurate as an average to good Western.

One thing that always stands out to me

in that game is the way the men

wear their guns and their holsters.

It's the Hollywood holster rig.

They have the holsters really down on the hips

for the fast draw.

But in the actual Old West,

they had 'em riding up very high.

I mean, it's easier to get on a horse

if you've got the holster up high on your belt.

It seems like there's also a lot of action in a campground.

And a campground was actually kind of a common thing.

If you're just arriving at a locations or town,

well you're gonna be camping on the outside of town

before you get settled in.

That's what the Earps did when they came to Tombstone.

They didn't initially have a place to live.

Ebbakah asks, what was literacy like in the Old West?

Did people on the frontier generally know how

to read and write?

Yes they did.

Maybe you've heard of the one-room schoolhouse,

even the very remote places in the West, they hired teachers

and some of your famous outlaws could read and write.

We have existing letters written

by William H. Bonney, Billy the Kid when he was pleading

for a pardon from the governor.

Jesse James wasn't a good speller or a good writer,

but he could read and write, wrote letters to the newspaper,

loved to see his name in the newspaper.

Some of the dime novels were actually written about outlaws.

There were dozens and dozens

of dime novels about the exploits of Jesse James.

They were complete fiction,

but they were very, very popular.

Some people at the time considered

that they were a bad influence on the youth.

Kinda like rap music a few years ago.

That's a bad influence.

The same with dime novels.

Don't read those dime novels.

It's gonna make you a criminal.

What's interesting about the dime novels,

especially these Jesse James, James Boys,

is that they're heroes.

They're not outlaws, criminals, murderers,

but they've been forced into this life where they have

to kill to survive, but they have a good heart.

So it painted a different picture

and really helped boost this image of the folk hero,

the Robin Hood hero, which was completely bogus.

They did not steal from the rich and give to the poor.

And it created a myth, the myth of the Wild West

that in a way we live with today.

This next question is from Quora.

What did they use for toilet paper in the Old West?

Believe it or not, there was commercially manufactured

toilet paper beginning in the 1850s.

If you're some trading post, hundreds of miles,

you're probably not gonna have a package

of factory-made toilet paper.

You went out back and there was almost always an outhouse.

And in the outhouse would be your supplies

to be used for wiping.

So it could be a dry corn cob,

probably more likely would be a catalog.

So Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward,

and also those pulp novels.

Once you read 'em, they were kind of trashy

and you didn't need to read it again.

And there's a great story involving Wyatt Earp.

So there was a very famous stage robbery near Tombstone

and Wyatt Earp suspected who it was.

And he had noticed part of a dime novel torn in half.

And as they're trailing these stage robbers, he continues

to find a page or two at different points along the trail.

So these stage robbers are clearly using pages

from the pulp novel as their toilet paper.

And that's one way he knew that he was on the right trail.

It was that same novel

that he'd seen back where they were living.

Interesting side fact about outhouses.

So an outhouse wasn't just where you went to the bathroom,

but you also threw refuse or trash.

And archeologists and bottle hunters get old insurance maps

of these various Old Western towns

'cause the outhouses are shown on the maps.

And they'll dig down and find real treasures buried there

where the outhouse used to be.

They're very rich

for learning about how people lived in the 19th century.

Iamthedriving wants to know, if I was in the Old West

and was in standoffs, I wouldn't wait to shoot.

I'd shoot right away.

Why did they wait?

It's literally a contest to shoot the other guy first.

Well, they did not wait.

There were not these Hollywood standoffs

between gunfighters.

Normally these guys are taking pot shots.

They're trying to assassinate or ambush 'em.

If you're dealing with a murderous individual who's adept

at firearms, you're not gonna give him a chance to kill you.

Perfect example is with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Pat Garrett was not gonna give Billy

a chance to gun him down, to draw his gun.

When Billy the Kid steps into the darkened room

at Fort Sumner and says, quien es, who is it?

Pat Garrett recognized his voice

and he opened up, he fired two shots.

The first shot hit Billy in the chest

and outlaw Billy the Kid was no more.

The only time there was actually really a classic standoff

was at the OK Corral.

@Morgansome comments, I would not survive in the Old West.

Pork and beans is just grim.

Well, it wasn't just pork and beans.

There was actually pretty fine dining.

In the boom towns, cattle towns,

they actually had oyster saloons.

In Dodge City in the 1870s,

there was one saloon that advertised fresh oysters daily.

These would be packed in barrels

and actually oysters could last

for a few weeks before they spoiled.

So as long as you had a wagon train or stage coaches,

actually get fresh shipments in each day.

But if you're a cowboy

and you're with the cattle herd out on the range

or driving the cattle from Texas up,

well you've got fresh beef on the hoof

so you can have fresh beef.

But beans were popular

'cause they stored well, I mean they're dry.

If you're on the trail, you want foods

that are gonna last quite a while.

So each cattle drive had a chuck wagon.

The chuck box had flour, dried beans.

The cooks, he's got dutch ovens

where he can actually make biscuits, cornbread.

There was a little bit of variety there

even on a cattle drive.

@Western_Online asks,

who is your favorite Old West gunfighter?

Now that's tough.

I always had liked the look of Wild Bill Hickok

'cause he had this flowing long hair, it's curly.

He was a snappy dresser.

And then he had those two pistols pointing forward,

what they call the cross-draw.

And they're pearl handled or ivory handled.

But I think he's edged out for me by Doc Holliday.

Doc Holliday had a dental degree.

He was a heavy drinker.

He could be very belligerent.

And then he has this great friend,

the greatest lawman in the West, Wyatt Earp.

The reason they're friends is

because Doc Holliday actually saved

Wyatt Earp's life in Dodge City.

Optiplex9000 asks,

what was there to do in a saloon in the Wild West?

Did people just drink?

Was there any food served or activities hosted by the owner?

There were all kinds of things going on in a saloon.

Some saloons of course had eating

establishments connected to them.

They actually had lunch counters.

In the 19th century,

lunch wasn't the standard noon day meal.

If you were having lunch, it meant a snack or a small meal.

In Tombstone, Arizona,

there was a saloon called The Oriental

and it had chandeliers and it had the Brussels carpets.

It had these elaborate carved wooden

back bars with large mirrors.

Some of these saloons actually had a reading area

where they stocked magazines and books

and so you could enjoy that

while you're taking a break from the Faro table.

There were actually brothels

that coexisted in these communities along with saloons

and prostitution was going on.

You often had a situation where a gambler had a girlfriend

or significant other who was a prostitute.

One of the unknown things about Wyatt Earp,

he actually worked in a brothel.

He was a bouncer

and he also might have been a pimp himself for a short time.

He did this in Peoria, Illinois as a young man.

Gracelyy wants to know,

what are some lesser-known facts about the Old West

that might surprise most?

Well, one thing that might surprise most is there actually

was more than one Billy the Kid.

We always think of William H. Bonney,

Henry McCarty, alias the Kid.

There was actually Billy the Kid in Tombstone,

Arizona at the time of the OK Corral.

If you look at the prison records, you'll find a lot

of people that had the nickname or went by Billy the Kid.

Another thing it's not well known,

and actually kind of eerie, involves the outlaw Jesse James.

Jesse James was very superstitious

and he claimed to see a ball of light,

what we might call or refer to as ball lightning.

Some people call it swamp gas.

And they were kind of an omen.

Something big was gonna happen.

He saw this light before the Northfield raid

where the gang was defeated

and driven out of town by the townspeople.

And he also saw it a short time

before he was assassinated by the Ford Brothers.

@chantedx, you ever wonder why the saloon doors

in the Old West were designed the way they were?

I've looked at lots of photos of saloon exteriors,

historic photographs,

and I haven't yet come across one with these swinging doors.

Usually it's just a regular door or large door.

My suspicion is, is that these swinging doors

were very convenient for movie makers

because you can see someone coming in and out.

The swinging door you can see right away.

That's Wyatt Earp, that's Wild Bill Hickok.

So I'm guessing that's kind of a Hollywood thing,

those swinging doors.

Fun fact, some of these Old West characters, figures,

made it out to Hollywood.

And some of these early silent films had these Western

legends, these Western characters on set advising.

In fact, some of these individuals even appeared

in the background scenes of some of these films.

Carl2k1 asks, which Native American tribes were the most

fearsome and formidable foe the US government faced and why?

So there are several nations in the American West.

In the Southwest, we have generally the Apaches.

On the Central Plains,

we have the Cheyennes and Arapahos.

Down here in Texas and the Southern Plains, the Comanches.

And then up here on the Northern Plains,

we have the Crow and the Lakota.

The Crows became allies

of the US government or the military.

But that question, which is the most fearsome

or formidable?

You have to remember, they're all fighting

for their culture, for their life ways, for their people.

Who wouldn't be formidable

or ferocious if you're trying to protect your families?

And that's certainly the case with Crazy Horse

and Sitting Bull.

They refused to sign treaties

and that put them on a collision course

with a man named George Armstrong Custer

and his 7th Cavalry.

Here's another question from Quora.

What went wrong that led to the decimation

of Custer's troops at Little Bighorn?

Well, I think I would phrase that, what went right

for the Lakotas and Cheyennes

who were fighting George Armstrong Custer?

So what went right for them is

that George Armstrong Custer divided his regiment.

He had about 556 fighting men, 30-some officers.

He splits his regiment into three battalions.

He sends one under Captain Benteen off in this direction

to look for more Indians.

He sends the second in command under another battalion,

under Major Marcus Reno, up the valley towards the village.

And so Custer takes five troops in his battalion

and goes across these hills in this direction.

Well, immediately as Reno gets to the village,

these Indians are massing.

He halts his charge, he doesn't charge into the village.

He ends up retreating.

And the thing to keep in mind with this battle is

that these warriors are fighting to protect this village.

It's their wives, it's their mothers, it's their sisters.

And they're also very accomplished,

masterful horseback fighters.

They really know their business

and they have a reason to fight.

And because George Armstrong Custer divided his regiment,

they can attack them piecemeal.

So first they defeat Reno,

force him to retreat to the bluffs.

Then they can concentrate on Custer

over here on Custer Hill and his five companies.

And they decimate all 210 men under Custer's command.

And Custer himself dies with his men on what known today

as Last Stand Hill way over here on a hill

that overlooks this village.

Perfect.

@F1sT, I didn't realize how well-made

Navajo blankets were in the 1800s.

That history of living off the earth

with bare essentials was amazing.

Well it truly was.

And we've got a Navajo blanket right here.

The Navajos were making blankets as early as the 1600s.

They learned to make blankets apparently from

the Pueblo Indians who had long been making blankets.

They're made on a vertical loom.

It's a very tight weave.

The Navajos eventually raised their own sheep

so they could have their own wool.

And it became an industry that exists to this day.

So this is a pipe bag,

but this tells us that the North American Indians

on the plains were involved in a global market economy.

This decoration or glass beads that were made in Italy,

they were transported here in trade with the Plains Indians

for their buffalo robes.

The buffalo robes are being shipped to Europe.

The North American Indians are getting brass kettles,

they're getting firearms.

I mean they're tied into the entire world

and it's reflected in this.

They learned to live off the land.

What nature provided them, they made very good use of,

and at the same time they made it beautiful.

@icowrich asks, when does the Old West start?

And he's got a poll.

So one option here is Lewis and Clark, 1803 to 1806,

the core of discovery.

Lewis and Clark are sent out West by Thomas Jefferson

to really explore the Louisiana Purchase

that they've just acquired from France.

They're looking for a transportation route.

We've got mountains, plains, there's an unexplored country.

Is there a way to get across it?

They're introducing some of these indigenous populations,

these Indian nations to the United States.

Lewis and Clark brought with them peace medals.

The Indians were used to getting peace medals

because of Great Britain, France, and Spain.

And so the United States, well,

we have to have our peace medals to impress these leaders

of these Indian nations as well.

Another is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848,

and that is how the United States acquired from Mexico,

what we now call the American Southwest.

This is the whole chunk of land

that's acquired through that treaty.

So that's another option as the beginning of the West,

or at least according to the poll.

We also have the end of the Civil War.

You have a lot of Civil War veterans that go West,

but we also have here the Transcontinental Railroad.

The Transcontinental Railroad stretches all across

the plains and across the Rocky Mountains.

And it allows a migration of people, passengers,

to take the trains all the way across the country.

In a way, this term you hear, manifest destiny,

that the United States was destined

to expand from ocean to ocean.

The railroad completes that idea, that theory.

So those are all really good suggestions.

I kinda like the end of the Civil War

for that classic period of the Old West.

[upbeat banjo music]

Well, that's all the questions for today.

They were good questions, enjoyed answering 'em.

Thank you for watching Wild West Support.

♪ Turkey in the straw, a ha ha ♪

♪ Turkey in the hay, ey hey hey ♪

[upbeat banjo music]