The history of America is a history of frontiers. Beginning in the early 17th century, what were then the English colonies of North America undertook a steady westward expansion that would eventually create the 50 United States of America as we know them today.
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Westward expansion went into high gear with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, in which the United States acquired some 828,000 square miles of what is today primarily the Midwest states from France.
Of course, France only controlled a tiny fraction of the territory purchased. Most of the lands, at the time, were still controlled by the Native Americans who lived there—what the United States was actually buying were nominal rights to obtain the lands from their current inhabitants, whether via treaty or conquest.
Following the Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson greatly encouraged continued westward expansion, both through philosophy—it was during this time that the idea of “Manifest Destiny” was first put forward—and policy. This unstoppable westward march of “progress”, especially combined with factors like the California gold rush of 1849, gave rise to the mythic period that we usually refer to as the Wild West today.
Pinning down the beginning of the Wild West is difficult, and it varies a bit from place to place. The romance of this time period has been played up in media since contemporaneous accounts, giving rise to the genre of fiction and film known as the Western, a genre rooted as much in myth-building as in history.
But for most people, the Wild West runs from the middle of the 19th century—that aforementioned California gold rush is as good a starting point as any—until the early 1920s. The Wild West is more than a historical period, though, it’s also a place, and a set of ideals.