The West -" home on the range where the deer and the antelope play; where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day."" The romantic idea of the land west of the hundredth meridian has often inspired songs and poetry, like this one, about idyllic condi...

For more than a century, Albert Bierstadt's sweeping canvases of snow-capped mountain ranges, radiant sunsets, colorful Indian tribes, and buffalo roaming the plains have captured the public imagination with a Romantic vision of a vast and beautiful continent waiting to be seen, explored, and conqu...

Western films are the major defining genre of the American film industry - a nostalgic eulogy to the early days of the expansive, untamed American frontier and the borderline between civilization and the wilderness. They are one of the oldest, most enduring and flexible genres and one of the most ch...

During the 1850's,pioneers in the Great Plains reported that the land was good for ranching and farming, despite low rainfalls. Soon after the Civil war, ex-soldiers headed for the West looking for a living in mining, farming, or ranching. The development of the transcontinental railroad, in 1869, a...