In 1924, nearly four decades after Geronimo laid down his arms, a cowboy was killed in southwestern New Mexico. The men who did it were Apaches, a small contingent who had refused the reservation and vanished into the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico rather than submit. After the killing, they pushed west into Arizona’s Cochise County, stole mules and horses, and slipped back across the border into the mountains where they would remain, raiding when it suited them. The year matters here.
This was not 1870. It was 1924, and the United States Census Bureau had officially declared the frontier extinct thirty-four years earlier. When the Old West began and when it ended is a question with no settled answer, because the Old West was never really a defined period at all. It was a concept, a shifting idea that moved west with every generation.
People had been living on the frontier since the first pilgrims arrived; at one point Ohio was the frontier. There is little real difference between Daniel Boone hunting in the Pennsylvania woods in the 1750s and Jim Bridger trapping beaver in Montana in the 1830s. Both men operated in what their contemporaries called the frontier, self-reliant, cut off from civilization, surrounded by indigenous tribes who might or might not be friendly. Ask a hundred people on the street what they picture when they think of the Old West, and ninety-nine of them will say cowboys.
If that is the definition, then the Old West was a very brief period indeed, a little over twenty years. The long-range cattle drives did not begin in earnest until after the Civil War, and by the late 1880s they were largely finished. Cowboys existed before the war, of course. Mexican vaqueros went back to the sixteenth century.
Texas ranchers drove herds to Louisiana and Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s, and later did the same as far west as California to feed the prospectors. In 1853, a man drove a herd of Texas longhorns all the way to New York City, which remains the longest cattle drive in American history. But it was only after the Civil War, when a surplus of cattle in Texas met a high demand for beef in the North, that the cowboy as we now imagine him came into being. The Louisiana Purchase is arguably a better starting point, at least for people of European descent.
That was when westward expansion kicked into overdrive: first the mountain men, then the explorers, then the migrants and wagon trains. But there is also a strong argument that it began much earlier, with the introduction of the horse. Nothing is more iconic to the Old West than a mounted plains warrior, a Lakota or Cheyenne dressed in finery, feathers in his hair, paint on his pony. Yet the tribes now synonymous with the Old West did not acquire horses until the early to mid-1700s.
Five hundred years ago, there was not a single Comanche living in what is now Texas. The Cheyenne were in Minnesota farming rice. The Pawnee lived in the lower Mississippi Valley, the Crow in modern-day Ohio, and the Lakota and Arapaho were still near the Great Lakes. Only with horses could they push west onto the prairie and chase bison, displacing tribes that were less numerous or not as well armed.
At roughly the same time they acquired horses, they also began trading for firearms. The combination transformed the western half of the continent. So when did the Wild West really begin? It depends on what is meant by the term.
If it means cowboys like those in Lonesome Dove or Open Range, it started after 1865. If it means frontiersmen like John Colter and Hugh Glass, it goes back to 1806. If it means when things truly started changing, the introduction of the horse in the early eighteenth century is the marker. The end is slightly easier, though still not definitive.
Some point to 1890, the year the U. S. Census Bureau famously declared the frontier extinct. The bureau’s report read: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.
In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc. , it cannot therefore any longer have a place in the census reports. ” That same year saw the massacre at Wounded Knee, the last major clash between the indigenous peoples and the U. S.
Army. The buffalo were gone. The West was dotted with barbed wire and railroad tracks. The natives were on reservations, or what was left of them.
But certain areas remained wild long after 1890. John Wesley Hardin was killed in El Paso a full five years after the Census Bureau declared the frontier a thing of the past. His killer, John Selman, was himself gunned down in that same city in 1896. The man who killed Selman, George Scarborough, made it to 1900 before being shot while investigating horse theft in Arizona.
Deacon Jim Miller was still assassinating people in Oklahoma up to 1909, and when he was caught, a mob dragged him from jail and strung him up in the rafters of a nearby livery stable. In 1909, criminals were still being lynched by vigilantes. That is pretty wild west. The last Apache raid on U.
S. soil came in 1924. After Geronimo surrendered in 1886, a small group of Apaches refused the reservation and drifted south into New Mexico and then into the Sierra Madres, where they remained for at least four decades. They left the safety of the mountains occasionally to conduct raids, as in 1924 when they killed that cowboy in southwestern New Mexico, stole mules and horses in Cochise County, and fled back south of the border.
A few years later, the same band murdered the wife and child of a Mexican rancher named Francisco Fimbres. Fimbres led an expedition into the mountains to wipe them out. He and his men killed and scalped the adults they found, mostly women, and placed the children up for adoption. The last of those children was still alive in the 1970s.
There was another Apache named Jason Betzinez, who rode with Geronimo as a young man. He lived a long life and published a book a year before his death in 1959 titled I Fought with Geronimo. According to him, there were still free and wild Apaches living in Mexico as late as the 1950s. How true that is, nobody can say for certain, but it illustrates just how wild certain areas remained long after the so-called Wild West was declared dead.
Dodge City and Tombstone may have been tamed by the turn of the century, but stagecoach robberies were still occurring as late as 1916, and a wrong turn south of the border in the 1920s or 1930s carried a very real chance of getting scalped. The question of when the Old West began and ended resembles the debate over what constitutes a western movie. Everyone can agree that Tombstone, 3:10 to Yuma, and The Searchers are westerns. But what about Quigley Down Under, which takes place in Australia?
What about neo-westerns like No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water? Are The Last of the Mohicans or Blazing Saddles westerns, or are they something else? Is Legends of the Fall a western, and if so, what about A River Runs Through It, which takes place in roughly the same era and location? Some people, including the author Steven Pressfield, argue that samurai movies and even post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max should be classified as westerns.
Pressfield defines a western as any story involving a solitary man or a hero with a code. That may or may not be the right way to look at it, but it is one way. The Old West is more of an idea than a defined period or location. One listener asked about John Miller, another man who claimed late in life to be Billy the Kid, much like Brushy Bill Roberts.
Miller pointed to coincidences: he was not left-handed, though everyone thought Billy was; he did not appear in the historical record until his own wedding a couple of months after Billy was supposedly shot; and he had a gunshot wound at that wedding. The evidence against Miller, however, is substantial. Much of it comes from second- or third-hand accounts. One man, Herman Teelienberg, claimed he arrived in New Mexico as a teenager in 1869 and became acquainted with Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, and that Pat Garrett shot the wrong man.
The problem: while Teelienberg did immigrate from Germany as a teenager, it was in 1884, not 1869. He was not even in North America when the historical Billy the Kid was allegedly killed. Miller also repeated claims that were clearly taken from books, such as the story that Billy killed his first man at age twelve after the man insulted his mother. That claim appears in The Saga of Billy the Kid, published in 1926, in George W.
Coe’s Frontier Fighter, and in Pat Garrett’s own The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Thanks to diligent research and greater access to records, it is now known that nothing of the sort ever occurred. Billy never killed anyone at age twelve. Fraudsters like Miller and Brushy Bill would take details from popular books and present them as insider knowledge.
Miller also claimed his mother was a Comanche and that his wife was Charlie Bowdre’s widow; neither was true. The historical evidence, by contrast, is overwhelming. Dozens of people identified by name saw Billy’s dead body at Fort Sumner in 1881. There was a coroner’s inquest, a public wake, and a public funeral.
Not a single person present on July 14, 1881 ever claimed Garrett killed the wrong man or that Billy escaped. And Billy the Kid was never seen again. The evidence for Miller is rumors and vague stories about scars and small hands. History is not binary, and new discoveries could change the picture, but as things stand, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the Kid being killed by Pat Garrett.
It is not even close. Another listener asked about Jeff Milton, suggesting he be added to a list of top gunfighters. Milton had eight confirmed kills, the last in 1900 with Three-Finger Jack Dunlap. He was overlooked and skilled with a firearm.
The agreement was quick: Milton was the real deal, and worth covering in depth someday. The question of when the Old West ended may never have a definitive answer. What is certain is that the wildness lingered in pockets long after the maps were filled in, and the concept itself refuses to stay dead.
