The "Wild West." To Americans today, the image conjures up John Wayne movies, cowboy hats, photos of Indian warriors in full battle regalia. The phrase evokes saloons and frontier streets of Dodge City and Tombstone, bloody gun battles between cowboys and cattle rustlers, and lone horsemen urging their mounts across the deserts and plains.

These are the images of the West to Americans at the very end of the twentieth century, when the actual Wild West is a distant memory. But they were also the images of the West that appealed to Americans at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Wild West was still very much alive. They are the images around which the Wild West show was built. To understand the Wild West show, it is necessary to know something about the history of the...