Pictured on Left: Tex Parker on "Lady Green" Cheyenne, Wyo. Ralph R. Doubleday, 1919, photographic postcard. Bruce McCarroll Collection of the Bonnie & Frank McCarroll Archives, Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. RC2006.076.116.
Pictured on Right: [Unidentified cowboy on saddle bronc with chutes and trees behind]. Ralph R. Doubleday, circa 1945, safety film negative. Donna Thompson/Ralph R. Doubleday Collection, Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. 2001.014.1.100.
Romanticizing the West
When you think of the American West, what comes to mind?
Is it "a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play"?
Maybe you hear the sounds of cattle drives and the whooping calls of cowboys as they herd the cattle? Could it be that you picture Indigenous tribal communities living amongst untouched natural beauty? Are you imagining yourself at the rodeo, covered in the dust kicked up from the bronc riding, like the two images pictured above? Are the images in your mind sepia colored as you reflect on the past? Or are you instead thinking of the American West as it is today?
Where do these ideas of the American West originate?
The romanticization of the American West is tied to ideas of Manifest Destiny, the “untamed” frontier, cowboy culture, and as a symbol of American freedom, adventure, opportunity, and above all independence. The American West has dominated American popular culture for over a century through literature like dime novels, pulp magazines, and comics, as well as photography, film, and even the traveling Wild West Shows so popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The tabs in this section give brief overviews of the different mechanisms that helped spread ideas of the romanticized American West, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, photography, and film. As you proceed through this guide, ask yourself who is often included in the story of the West? How are different groups of people portrayed in this story of the American West? Who is often not included in these stories?