Pretty much since the day we stepped foot on North American soil and Pocahontas sang "Colors of the Wind," white settlers had been itching to push farther and farther west. 

Why?

• Many folks did it to try to their luck at mining gold in California. 
• Some moved west to escape religious persecution.
• Some just wanted the opportunity to have their own piece of land to live, work, and die on. 

But you couldn't just just hop on I-80 and drive from Cleveland to Sacramento in a couple of days. Try weeks or months in a covered wagon or pushing a handcart. Often these expeditions ended in death, and in the most extreme case, cannibalism. 

As the country continued to push west through the second half of the 19th century, America began to grow into its new role as a continental empire. And we needed to start acting like it. Because between 1850 and 1912, 17 new western states had joined the Union and hundreds of thousands of settlers had flocked to these new regions. 

Isolated as it was for a while, the West still faced the same issues as the North and the South, in terms of getting established and all that. What was the stance on slavery going to be as we expanded farther and farther west? Just like in the other parts of the country, it would turn out that this decision had the biggest impact on America's immediate future.

Issues aside, though, the federal government improved in leaps and bounds to facilitate this western movement in several ways.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railways Act, and the Morrill Education Act. All three used public lands to achieve national goals: western migration, the construction of a transcontinental railroad, and the development of state colleges. 

Efforts to preserve the West's natural conditions increased, too. The Sierra Club was formed in 1892 to protect America's wilderness areas and the National Park Service was created in 1916 to manage the nation's parks and ensure that they be left "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."¹

In the end, we still hold on to our western mythology and culture, but these developments changed the face of the West by making it more accessible to the rest of the country.

In 1890, an American census report declared the West "closed." The West was won, folks.

In the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, wannabe cowgirl Debra Winger exults as she leaves the bar with John Travolta, "I got me a real cowboy."

Americans have been obsessed with "real cowboys" for more than a century. Some credit Owen Wister's 1992 classic The Virginian with launching this national fascination with the West and with "Westerns." 

But in truth, Americans have celebrated the breadth of their frontier, the beauties of nature, and the virtues acquired there for much longer. During the 1840s, transcendentalists held that truth and knowledge were best discovered in nature. Henry David Thoreau preached that an individual's most authentic self could be realized only through a close relationship with the natural world.

The aura cast around the ruggedly independent cowboy and the self-driven pioneer reveals that our fascination with the frontier has not diminished. If anything, we've constructed an even more elaborate mythology about the West—about the hearty individualists who conquered it, the titanic battles fought against the forces of nature, and between the various groups that laid claim to this vast space. 

Most consistently, we've celebrated the self-sufficiency and heroism supposedly bred in the West. The West is consistently portrayed as a land where "men are truly men," where authority is resented, and even assistance is usually declined.

But did you know that during the 19th century, the federal government played a more active role in subsidizing the West than in any other region of the country? 

And yet, despite all the government assistance, two-thirds of all homesteaders failed within the first five years. Massive corporations and conglomerates dominated many western territories and states, even in their infancy. And within the political insurrections of the West, small farmers and common laborers pleaded for more government support. 

Between the mythology and reality of America's western past, there are considerable gaps. But if you'd be so kind as to mozy on down this here Shmoop trail, you might figure out where these gaps lie.