When did the wild west end and why do people always portray it anachronistically in fiction? I always see people claim that the actual wild west stuff occurred during or before the civil war and things like OK Corral were famous because the west wasn't really wild by the time it happened in 1880.

>>17817807 (OP)
I would say it’s probably from around post Mexican-American War to around 1900, maybe 1910s depending on where you were.

>>17817807 (OP)
When we're brothels and prostitution shut down? There's your answer

>>17817807 (OP)
The Homestead Act was repealed in 1976.

>>17817807 (OP)
> Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
> 3 KIA and 3 wounded
> this was considered something so special back in the day it went on to inspire myths, books and movies for decades to come

>>17817942
It's due to how later it was, not much happened in or after 1880 and because Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp were there

>>17817954
> It's due to how later it was,
because we all know that gun fights stopped after the 1880s

>>17817962
the whole
>wild west
mythos was that it was supposed to be some exciting super violent place with no law and gunfights galore and if by 1881 a gun fight that lasted 30 second and only killed 3 people was the last major event, it wasn't that violent and lawless.
even now you have lawmakers saying dangerous things will be "like the wild west" or "wild west pimp style"

Wyatt Earp and Jesse James are famous figures kind of at the 'end' of the old west or wild west.
Rail has recently connected the coasts and the automobile and automatic pistols would soon start to replace the horse and revolver

>>17817807 (OP)
>he hasn't taken the "The Wild West never ended" pill
Ngmi

>>17817807 (OP)
Post-Civil War for sure, best to probably end it 1919, when the "Great Excitement" died down and most of the formerly spanish regions had been... ethnically rearranged.

It was wild because a lot of the people disenfranchised from the war went west and that included gangs. People moved west to find peace, love, happiness, leaving behind their economically collapsed urban centers full of coolies and negroes to try and find salvation in the west. Immigrants of all types descending upon the west to get rich fast only to realize they were retarded, maybe falling into a life of crime themselves.

The Mayor of San Fransico at the turn of the 20th century would extort money out of local businesses to operate in his city, for example, which is why they don't have any passenger rail anymore

>>17819110
oh he was also jewish

Texas was the Wild West all the way to WW2 with bandits and bank robberies happening almost on a weekly basis.

Heh…m-more like the mild west amirite?

>>17819187
I for one enjoy the Italian romanticization of the US west

>>17819053
>that episode of wild west tech that involved George S Patton (yeah that one) hunting mexican bandits in New Mexico using a colt 1911 and a Ford Model T.

>>17819085
>>17819101
fugg, I should have linked you too see>>17819387

>>17817904
Brothels existed in old mining towns well into the 20th century and legal brothels have been in parts of Nevada for a while so it never really ended.

>>17819516
Brothels were built along railroad tracks and settlers viewed the encroaching railroads as a delivery system for degeneracy and resource extraction

1890 is the usual benchmark for the closing of the frontier. Railroads crisscrossed the west, Indians had been driven onto reservations, most of the notorious gangs and gunfighters were dead, in prison or retired, and all of the good land was homesteaded.

>>17819522
Makes sense. Railroads were built to mining areas to haul away the loot and miners needed sex. The west had a Madonna/whore dichotomy with the wimminfolk. Hookers or schoolmarms, tough cowgirls or fragile Victorian flowers—but women had a lot more rights than their eastern sisters, maybe because there were so few of them. Western states were the first to give women the vote.