1876

The invention of the Wild West.

Journalist and historian Wiegand grew up in the 1950s watching Westerns on TV and in the movies, enraptured by cowboys. Not surprisingly, he wanted to be one. That youthful enthusiasm infuses his project of separating fact from the rousing fictions that have been perpetrated about the West and about men such as dapper outlaw Bat Masterson; unlikely law enforcement agent Wyatt Earp; horse thief and actor–turned–Army scout Bill Cody; James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok; Army Col. George Armstrong Custer, brutally massacred; and bank and stagecoach robbers Frank and Jesse James. Focusing on events that occurred in 1876, America’s centennial, Wiegand draws on contemporary newspapers and magazines to create a sense of immediacy and color for his portrayals of the ramshackle towns—Sweetwater, Texas; Dodge City, Kansas; Deadwood, South Dakota—where these men gambled and drank and where their conflicts sometimes erupted into infamous gunfights. But the Wild West, though contributing mightily to America’s hunger for its own mythology, did not define the nation. Wiegand sets his protagonists’ lives in the context of a country peopled by inventors, industrialists, writers, politicians, and entertainers, including Alexander Graham Bell, recent inventor of the telephone; pharmaceutical entrepreneur Eli Lilly; Henry Heinz, promoter of his new product, “catsup”; shameless showman P.T. Barnum; poet Walt Whitman, who eulogized Custer; and Mark Twain, whose Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published at the end of the year. A centennial exhibition in Philadelphia highlighted achievements of the striving nation, but the extravaganza could not hide festering problems, including a protracted economic recession, labor unrest, political corruption, violence against Blacks, and an increasingly strident women’s suffrage movement. Besides offering a historical overview, Wiegand examines the books, movies, and TV shows that turned cowboys and outlaws into legends and the Wild West into “a ‘reality’ that persists, no matter how far removed it is from the facts.”

Lively, entertaining U.S. history.