"The Wild West is the the American founding myth. At least for some Americans."
Thats what historian Frederick Jackson Turner said. "The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier."
I am not sure that "democracy" is the right word. "Culture" is what Turner was talking about. He was talking about a culture formed on the American frontier in the states of the Great Planes which supported the form of government the Founding Fathers envisioned, a Republic.
Later, in 1931, historian Walter Prescott Webb, in his book The Great Planes, presented another thesis about the Wild West.
http://www2.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his1302/webb.html
"Thus, when Anglo-Americans hit the Great Plains in the process of westward expansion across the continent they faced a formidable barrier - an institutional chasm. As Webb states: "For two centuries American pioneers had been working out a technique for the utilization of the humid regions east of the Mississippi River. They had found solutions for their problems and were conquering the frontier at a steadily accelerating rate. Then in the early nineteenth century they crossed the Mississippi and came out on the Great Plains, an environment with which they had had no experience. The result was a complete though temporary breakdown of the machinery and ways of pioneering."
"The single-shot, manually reloaded Kentucky long rifle gave way to the Colt revolver and the Winchester carbine, much more efficient in battles on the open plains.
Forest-based cattle raising gave way to the open-range cattle drives and then to the closed-range cattle industry of ranching. Anglo-Americans incorporated much of the vaquero techniques of Mexico in order to raise cattle successfully on the Plains.
The Plains remained unfenced and open until the advent of barbed wire which was applicable to the needs of those on the Plains."
Life on the Great Planes changed the personality traits of Americans who lived there - and it changed their culture. Walter Prescott Webb claimed that the great distances and sparse population of the West encouraged self-reliance. The Great Planes, 1931.
Webb also said of the settler and cowboy on the great planes that "When he made that perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual: He made a better copy for news-writers, artist and cartoonist" (The Great Planes, 1931, p. 245)
Webb even said that people on the Great Plains were "lawless." Many people on the Western frontier were more unconventional than those who stayed back East. A few people in the Great Plains of the 19th and early 20th centuries were outlaws, but what Walter Prescott Webb meant by the Western people being "lawless" was that they, as a culture then, were more independent and self-reliant, and
non-conformist. They were also more resourceful than the Eastern city dwellers.
