“Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” Sam Colt’s original invention was the five-shot patent Colt, but in the 1840s he met Texas Ranger Samuel Walker and they changed the design to six shots. The Walker Colt became a Western legend.

I hope little kids never stop dressing up like cowboys. It’s been a couple of decades since my own children were small, so by now, the two-foot buckaroo might well be extinct. Dressing like a cowboy, being a cowboy, was money because this childhood recreation came with accessories: a good hat, some sort of weapon – nothing like a sagging gun belt hanging right alongside your diaper – a vest proudly displaying a sheriff’s a badge, a kerchief around your neck and a loyal steed, maybe on a stick or maybe you would just throw a saddle on the Golden Retriever. Thinking about the Wild West, reading about the Wild West, still makes me say “yee-haw.”

There’s something about being out on the range. Photographer Paul Strand said, “This something we call America lives not so much in political institutions as in its rocks and skies and seas.” One of the reasons the American West was so wild was because of the nature of its early white inhabitants. They were initially almost all male, men with no fear of the unknown, men willing to wear the same clothes for weeks or months at a time. Dealing in generalities, these would have been men with nothing going for them, or at least nothing promising enough to prevent a guy from lighting out at a moment’s notice. So no prospects to speak of, probably poor, every possession comfortably fitting in a saddlebag, and oh ya, there’s a good chance our Wild Westerner was a fugitive from the law. Kill a guy in Richmond with a hot poker? Good time to go West. And why not, the price was right. In 1824 Mexico opened Texas to white settlers. For about $30 you could get 4,428 acres. Mexico did this in part to use the white settlers as a shield between the Mexicans and the Comanche. After the Civil War, soldiers from both sides were in search of a new start. According to the Homestead Act of 1860, as long as you never took up arms against the Union, you could go West, agree to stay a while and receive 160 acres free.

The men who would become cowboys, a designation we seem to give all men of the West in the nineteenth century, had little idea what they were in for or much about the journey and the physical landscape. In 1850 there were just 9,000 miles of railroad track in the U.S.  By 1900, there would be 192,556 miles of track. But no cowboy worth his chaps would ride west on the train, so for most, it was time to hit the trail. Originally called the Platte River Road that moved northwest through Kansas, the Oregon Trail was named in the 1840s and spanned 2,100 miles. A settler would jump off from St. Joe or Independence, Missouri, and travel on to the Willamette Valley through five western states: Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. The epic wilderness left its imprint on the first generation of Westerners. On June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant, protecting for the first time land that would be secured for the future. Lincoln never saw Yosemite, hearing of its magnificence was sufficient. Author Terry Tempest Williams said, “Our public lands…make each one of us land rich. It is our inheritance as citizens of a country called America.”

There was a lot to worry about. Natural barriers, transportation, hungry animals, the land’s rightful owners and staking your claim (and making it stick). But it turns out the most formidable cowboy job hazard was the anger and violence all around them, the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality of their countrymen, without which we would have never had such famous five-year-old quotes as, “Stick ’em up!” and “Bang-bang, I got you!” Bob and Charlie Ford shot Jesse James at point-blank range on April 3, 1882. They were members of Jesse’s gang, but they made a deal with the governor of Missouri.

Cowboy movies taught us the cowboy code: Never sit in a saloon with your back to the door, don’t steal another dude’s horse, look out for the throwin’ blade in the vest pocket, make sure your holstered six-shooter sits on an empty chamber, “that sheriff’s star don’t make you right,”  tip your hat to a lady and call her ma’am. Still, some had their own code. John Wesley Hardin (who I previously only knew as the title of a Bob Dylan record) claimed to have killed 42 men, but a more agreed-upon number is something like 27 – all notched before he was 25. Getting gunned down in a dusty street shootout or knifed in a dicey poker game wasn’t the only way men met their destiny in the Wild West. On March 6, 1836, 183 defenders died at The Alamo. Six hundred Mexicans were killed or wounded. Little more than 30 days later, Sam Houston, indeed remembering The Alamo, would wipe out the victors, 1,500 Mexicans in all, at San Jacinto.

Between protecting one’s honor, stirring up trouble in the saloons and dance halls and riding the range, most cowboys weren’t spending much time down on the farm. From 1853 to 1929 over 150,000 eastern urban poor children were placed out to western families (the kids needed to flee urban crime and poverty, and the westerners needed farm hands), through organizations like the New England Home for Little Wanderers. Talk about a win-win: crops in the field and little Future Farmers of America whistling while they worked in the Wild West. Maybe they were whistling patriotic tunes. “Hail, Columbia,” music composed in 1789 and arranged with lyrics in 1798, was used in the United States as a de facto national anthem for most of the nineteenth century (Columbia was a poetic name for the U.S. from colonial days). It lost popularity after World War I and was replaced by “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1931. The march is now the U.S. Vice President’s song. In the movie The Searchers, in classic Duke fashion, John Wayne utters the phrase “that’ll be the day” at various pivotal moments. It was the motivation for Buddy Holly’s early rock & roll hit “That’ll Be the Day.” The legend of the West is far-reaching.