What is it about The West of America? The Importance of the West in America

What is it about the west? Why is country music listened to in every corner, region, city, small town, and house across the United States? Why does every child at one point dream of being a cowboy or a misunderstood outlaw? Why is it that at a turbulent point in life every man has stated at least once in his life “screw it, if it doesn’t work ill just move out to a ranch on my own and live off grid”? Why is it that still today that foreign countries still refer to an American at times as a cowboy? Wait, how did Americans even get the reputation of a bunch of cowboys and outlaws?

Jeffrey Horn explains.

A Cowboy with the description ‘A King of The Plains’ . Source: Public domain, Postcard commercialized by Raphael Tuck & Sons, available here.

The matter of the West if curious. The reality of the history of the cowboy does not originate in the United States nor were they ever figures of glory and lifestyle. Cowboys were originally hired hands on ranches known as Vaqueros. The Vaqueros were known as experts of roping and herding, being trained from a young age to perfect the skills. By the 1700s the Vaqueros had expanded across Mexico, the American West, and into South America reaching as far as Argentina. As settlers expanded west into the new frontier, collaboration efforts with the Vaqueros became more and more common leading to adaptation into American ranch and farming life in the west. Which brings us back to the point of this - how did this collaboration and eventual takeover by the American way become our stereotype across the world and longed for identity at home? It makes no sense…

The original 13 Colonies had a 100-year (or more) head start on creating solidified personalities, stereotypes, and identities for colonists and eventual Americans that stemmed from the east coast. As we know these cities and historical towns do have their own strong personalities from the people of blue collar people of Boston who think the vowel O is pronounced like A and A is pronounced like H, to the hardnosed people of New York City, the loud and passionate people of Philadelphia, all the way down to the party and glamor people of Miami. But these personalities do a hard stop at the surrounding suburban neighborhoods outside the major cities. None of them extend past, no one from the middle of Oklahoma says “If all else fails I wanna be a New Yorker”. Although, if I lived in Oklahoma I would probably say that, but as a kid from Jersey I might be slightly biased. Regardless, the fascination of the wild west still sits in every American's mind, past and present.

Origins

Anyway, back to the Vaqueros, or well, the end of them. As the clash of cultures continued the idea of the cowboy began to take its own independent form and solidify into American culture completely detaching from its original Mexican roots. The image of the American Cowboy kept the same big curved hat, bandana, boots with spurs, and leather coat. But what completely erased the Vaquero Mexican roots was the profession change of the American Cowboy, both in the fantasized and real West. Now that the Mexican influence was completely Americanized and taken out, the American Cowboy needed a better profession then a ranch hand and it needed to have a cooler presence then just a guy who showed up to work.

But what? What could America give this physical, yet mostly mythical, icon to make it uniquely its own? Perhaps bear arms? The American Cowboy was depicted with and given guns to add to his image, much more than just some rope. The change to a more violent image came from the American idea that the settlers were in constant danger and needed to be ready to fight off any Native Americans or any other threat at a moment's notice. But who's surprised? We moved onto ancient native territories and took all their resources and just simply claimed it American? That does however bring up an interesting debate of was it a necessary evil to allow progress and societal evolution to occur or is it so completely wrong what the colonists and settlers did and we should feel bad and revert to how it was?

But again, not the point here. Another aspect that the new American Cowboy took away from the Vaquero origins was the idea of traveling together. The new image of the Cowboy was a lone ranger, a lone wolf, or a “one-man wolf pack” like Zach Galifianakis explained the roof of a casino in Las Vegas (part of the American west). This image of a lone cowboy triggered the fantasy or idea that he was running from a past that was haunting him from afar. Whether it was a girl he loved and lost, violent things he had done to get by that he no regretted, or simply not being able to find peace by staying put the American Cowboy never stayed in one spot for very long.

Appeal

Now that the origins of the American Cowboy are out of the way, how does this appeal to people? To be alone in the American West, which is essentially a desert, traveling on a horse with no name that you bought from an old guy in a trailer park for $20, if you wanted to stay true to the spirit of being a cowboy of course. To then be moving from place to place with no stability, doing some odd jobs to maintain at least a minimal cash flow, no contact with friends or family, and again traveling through desolate lands and potentially volatile weather. Especially if all you've known is the complete opposite, it can't be a solution to a life plan. Although, to escape the congestion of the northeast states or the skyrocketing prices and taxes of the west coast or even the extreme humidity and heat from the south and simply travel through near untouched lands and explore the national parks. Escape from the stresses of life, social media trends, buying the right clothing brands, keeping up with the latest technology, and running into every single person you know from high school at the bar wouldn’t be such a bad way to live, would never be able to keep up as much with my beloved New York sports teams or Florida Gators but they suck most of the time anyway so I wouldn’t miss much. Something to consider.

This draw to a simpler and/or easier way of life was originally a great selling point to the colonists that were tired of being confined to the original 13 colonies. So much so that at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the United States saw an increase of population by almost 2 million people. And by 1840, nearly 40% of the population of the infant United States of America lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, which once served as a hard stop and great divide from the rest of the unknown “New World lands”. What about in today’s America, you may ask? Well just like that “it was never a phase” emo lifestyle, Americans are still moving into the mid-west at growing rates. According to the U.S. News, of the top 25 fastest-growing places in the United States more than 50% of the places listed are located in western states such as Texas, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho (Cabral, 2025). But why? What is it about the west that makes it such an attractive place to live in? Your “next-door neighbor” is most likely over a mile away. However, you can buy that large property for less than you can buy a one bedroom shack on the Jersey Shore. Not to mention less or zero taxes on certain things whether it be property, food, or clothing. Although there are different levels of freedom living in the wild west today than at its initial discovery, the trends stay. Quiet, solitude if you choose, and seemingly more freedom to live as you like in, The Land of the Free.

Country music

However, the biggest influence and draw to life outside of the modern hustle and bustle is the grip that country music has on almost every American. Country music is found in every corner of the United States and has infiltrated almost every single person's music taste to some extent, and some of it is definitely intriguing. There will be at least one song that comes on and paints the picture of a green pasture, a cold beer, a sunset in the distance, and your wife and dog on either side of you that prompts a thought of “ah, that’s nice.” or at any BBQ in the summer you will find yourself singing and/or dancing to a song that is focused on the glory days of younger years or the old glory of the younger and simpler USA. Sometimes country music just hits the perfect musical vibe you're looking for, or triggers an emotion from a memory long gone. Perhaps it is not so absurd that everyone has at least one country music song on their playlist no matter if you live in the most suburban, urban, or rural place, and perhaps it’s a connector for us all that we do not see, or maybe it really is just a stereotype of America that we cannot outrun. Country music may also be the United States’ most prominent none-materialistic export (unofficially). Thinking about it, the biggest star in the world right now is Taylor Swift who was, or is depending on how you look at it, a country music super star. Before Taylor Swift though, global icons including Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson dominated around the world and shared the American way of life and music sound outside the borders of the fifty states.

Western movies

Another massive American export that goes hand and hand with country music is Western movies. For nearly fifty years American western movies dominated the emerging cinema scene. Starting out with everyone's favorite pre-WWI entertainment source, silent movies, and to be specific the widely recognized first silent film to embody the “western narrative” was Edwin S. Porter’s eleven minute silent film called The Great Train Robbery was released in 1903. It was short but captivated audiences enough to make it an iconic part of cinematic history (Gioia, 2026, 1). Fast forward now to post-WWI with a longer addition of a silent western film that was released at the height of the Roaring Twenties, which of course was famously balanced out by Prohibition which also brought balance to the force, I mean decade, anyway. The movie was released in 1923 by James Cruz and depicted life traveling the west in a wagon, the hardships of traveling into the unknown, and living off the land. The film was called, The Covered Wagon and was a major step for cinema and westerns alike in the United States (Whiteman, 2019, 1).

For the next thirty years westerns were the top movie genre in the United States, and it was not long before European countries wanted in on the action. With Europe recovering financially and physically from the fallout of WWII, film makers realized that it would be cheaper to make the movies in their own countries rather than traveling to America and working through Hollywood. With this new idea all boots, steeds, and wagons started to point east beyond the Atlantic Ocean and find their new home on the boot-shaped peninsula of the Mediterranean, Italy. Spaghetti Westerns, as they were called affectionately, or derogatory sometimes, became immensely popular during the 1960s (Abreu, 2025, 1) and featured the greatest cowboy seen on screen, Clint Eastwood. The stand out strand of the large spaghetti pot was The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and its iconic theme music. The integration of the Spaghetti Western movies into the world puts the final nail in the coffin in why the cowboy theme and stereotype surrounds the United States today.

It is possible America will never outgrow the stereotype of a bunch of cowboys and outlaws and it seems entirely possible that Americans will never stop fantasizing about the American West and continue to yearn for a quiet life living off the land. Somethings are so ingrained in the fabric of a being that it would be impossible to strip it out completely and we will wonder forever, what is it about the west?

 What do you think of cowboys and the American West? Let us know below.

References

●      Abreu, R. (2025, Feb 4). https://www.walkerart.org/reader/covered-wagon-photos-arapaho-wind-river-whiteman/.StudioBinder. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-spaghetti-western-definition/

●      Cabral, A. (2025). 25 fastest-growing places in the United States. U.S. News & World Report.https://www.usnews.com

●      Davis, D. B. (1954). Ten-Gallon Hero. American Quarterly, 6(2), 111–125. https://doi.org/10.2307/3031207

●      Gioia, T. (2026, June 6). The 50 Essential Western Films. The Honest Broker. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-50-essential-western-films

●      Whiteman, M. (2019, Feb 14). The (Un)Covered Wagon: An Arapaho Filmmaker Unpacks the Complexities of an Early Western. Walker Reader. https://www.walkerart.org/reader/covered-wagon-photos-arapaho-wind-river-whiteman/

Modern American Gun Culture and the American Frontier

With the most citizen-owned firearms of any nation in the world and a higher-than-average rate of gun-related deaths, America stands out from every other developed Western nation. Here, Greg Hickey argues that this American gun culture exists because American history is unique - no other nation has experienced such rapid expansion or enjoyed so large a frontier as the United States did shortly after its independence. Stemming from the American frontier of the nineteenth century, guns have become enmeshed with America in a relationship that persists through the new frontiers of the twenty-first century.

1890s painting of cowboys: The Herd Quitter by C.M. Russell.

Guns in America

United States citizens own a total of 393,347,000 firearms. India—a country with four times as many people as the U.S—is a distant second with 71,101,000 civilian-owned firearms. Americans own 120.5 firearms per 100 people, meaning that, on average, every American owns more than one gun. The tiny Falkland Islands ranks second with 62.1 firearms per 100 people, just over half the rate in the United States.

Gun safety advocates cite high gun ownership as a significant factor in the above-average rate of gun deaths in America. In 2019, this figure stood at 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people, more than eight times higher than the rate in Canada and almost 100 times higher than in the United Kingdom. The question is how and why modern gun culture became so pervasive in America compared to other developed Western nations.

The Right to Bear Arms

There are three countries in the world with the right to own firearms enshrined in their constitutions: the United States, Guatemala, and Mexico. All three are relatively new nations. The U.S. gained its independence from Great Britain in 1783; Guatemala and Mexico got theirs from Spain in 1821.

Of course, firearms were present in the Americas from the moment the first European settlers arrived in the fifteenth century. These weapons played a major role in the wars of colonization and independence fought on the continent. In contrast, Europeans did not use guns to conquer Europe. Nations fought wars against each other, yet the European nations we know today are descendants of ancient Europeans: Romans, Gauls, Franks, Normans, Slavs. But Europeans did use guns to conquer the Americas.

Thus, the post-indigenous histories of the United States, Guatemala, and Mexico are comprised entirely by the history of firearms. The Europeans who settled in these regions brought guns. Their descendants who severed ties with the colonial powers fought with guns. And their descendants living in newly independent nations inherited those guns and acquired new ones. Yet despite the historical and legislative parallels, gun ownership in the United States far exceeds that of Guatemala and Mexico.

Independence and Its Aftermath

When the Mexican War of Independence began in 1810, the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from modern-day California to the isthmus of Panama (including Guatemala) and covered what would become the southwestern United States. The Spanish had conquered most of southern Mexico by 1525. By 1536, they had overtaken Jalisco and other regions on the Pacific coast. By the eighteenth century, they had established colonies in present-day Louisiana, Texas, and California. In other words, Spaniards had thoroughly permeated the land that would become Mexico and Guatemala by those nations gained independence.

By contrast, the United States in 1783 consisted of the original thirteen colonies on the Atlantic Ocean plus territory stretching west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes. In 1803, the U.S. nearly doubled in size with the completion of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas. One year later, Americans agreed to divide the Oregon Country with the British along the border of present-day Canada. And in 1848, following the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded territory that would become the southwestern United States. In the 65 years since it became a nation, the territory owned by the United States effectively tripled in size.

No other nation in the world faced a comparable situation. Mexico, thanks to the aforementioned Mexican-American War, lost a considerable amount of territory shortly after its independence.

Canada became a nation in 1867 with the union of the British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada. Three years later, Canada acquired Rupert’s Land, a northern wilderness territory that made up most of present-day Canada, from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The HBC had acquired the land, which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and north to the Arctic Circle, under a charter from England in 1670, and had exclusive rights to colonize and trade in the territory. Unlike America, the vast majority of Canadian land was under British control when Canada became a nation.

Likewise, the British had colonized practically all of Australia by 1832, well before Australian independence in 1901. In another contrast to America, neither Canada nor Australia fought a war to gain independence. Instead, Britain willingly ceded control of these overseas territories to local governance.

The American Frontier

Consequently, the early history of the United States proved unique in comparison to other nations in the world. And this early history has directly influenced modern gun culture. Americans fought a war with guns to gain their independence. They subsequently acquired territories that tripled the nation in size, some of which involved more fighting with guns. The eastern Americans then pushed west into new territories, hunting and protecting themselves and driving away understandably hostile Native Americans with guns. From Lewis and Clark to the Oregon Trail to the Wild West, westward expansion claimed a defining chapter in American history, and this expansion was made possible by individual citizens with guns.

Whether as a cause or effect, the American firearms industry took off in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1776, George Washington ordered the establishment of the Springfield Armory in Springfield Massachusetts. In 1816, the U.S. government hired Eliphalet Remington’s Remington Arms Company to produce flintlock rifles. And in 1836, Samuel Colt patented his Single Action Army Revolver, also known as the Colt 45 or “the gun that won the west.” Americans needed guns, and gunmakers provided new models to fit their needs.

The Second Amendment

In 1791, the existing state legislatures ratified the U.S. Bill of Rights containing ten amendments to the Constitution. In particular, Amendment II states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This Second Amendment has provided legal support for private gun ownership in the 230 years since ratification.

Yet the Second Amendment does not capture the spirit in which early Americans used their guns. Guns did not rise to cultural prominence in the hands of New England militiamen sitting at home and protecting their farmland. Rather, guns captivated the American imagination on the frontier, in the hands of pioneers and explorers and cowboys and outlaws.

By the 1870s, guns were so prevalent in the American West that some towns started cracking down on armed citizens. The first law passed in Dodge City, Kansas was an 1878 ban on carrying guns in town. The infamous 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral occurred when a group of cowboys defied the Earp brothers’ orders to turn over their weapons in accordance with a Tombstone, Arizona law requiring all town visitors to disarm upon arrival. American gun culture and the American gun control movement both began on the American frontier.

The New American Frontier

Not every American frontier town followed the examples of Dodge City and Tombstone. In many places, the American West remained a lawless territory governed by individualism and determination. In the words of Matt Jancer in his Smithsonian article “Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West”:

“As the West developed, towns pushed this mythos of the West as their founding ideology. Lax gun laws were just a part of an individualistic streak that manifested itself with the explosion in popularity of concealed carry licenses and the broader acceptance of openly carrying firearms (open-carry laws) that require no permit.”

This individualistic frontier mythos remained well after Americans settled all the nation’s territories. It spawned an entire genre of film and literature. John F. Kennedy invoked the frontier ideal when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, stating, “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier,” beyond which were “the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” Six years later, the television series Star Trek echoed Kennedy with an opening monologue that began, “Space… the final frontier.”

In short, the American ideal is inextricably linked with determined, productive individuals pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers in science, technology, space, society and human rights. This ideal extends from the time when American settlers set out into the physical frontier of a new nation. And this historical frontier is inextricably linked with guns. Modern American gun culture and American ideals of liberty, individualism and self-determination derive from the same historical events—events that were unique to the formation of America. The eighteenth-century pioneer, the Old West outlaw and sheriff, and the ambitious tech entrepreneur are all operating on the same fundamental principle.

The True Origin of Modern American Gun Culture

Thus, American gun culture is not an outgrowth of the Second Amendment or the mark of a particularly warlike nation. Instead, America’s fascination with guns stems from the circumstances surrounding the country’s early history—circumstances that set the United States apart. No other country matches America in firearms ownership because no other country began with its citizens venturing out into a massive frontier in the same way - armed with their ambition and wits and firearms. American gun culture is so widespread because guns played an essential role in the events that defined America.

Author Biography

Greg Hickey is a forensic firearms examiner and the author of Parabellum, a novel about American gun culture and a fictional mass shooting at a beach in Chicago.

Find more of his work at greghickeywrites.com.