Wild West

28 September 2026

The phrase Wild West usually refers to the American frontier, and it conjures up mythic images of gunslingers, cattle rustlers, Indian raids, and the dead-eyed lawmen who eventually tamed the region and made it habitable for civilized folks. The period most often evoked by the phrase is the late nineteenth-century, between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the official declaration that the frontier had been closed in 1890. Of course, that myth was not reality, and the phrase was in use decades before that period.

Wild West is a simple, open compound. The earliest appearances of the phrase are not as a fixed phrase but rather just an alliterative colocation of the two words. The earliest use that I have found is in an 1823 travel narrative throughout the United States by a W. Faux. The passage in question is a discussion Nathan Boone, the son of the frontiersman Daniel Boone:

He was the first white man in Old Kentucky, and the wide wild west is full of his licks. A flourishing settlement always rises wherever he has once squatted, and whenever any settlers begin to approach near his location, he quits it for ever, and moves on further west; and the place, which he thus abandons, is called Boon’s [sic] Lick.

And there is this poem that appeared in the Pennsylvanian on 10 July 1824. It was composed for a Fourth of July campaign event for Andrew Jackson’s first bid for the presidency. The wild west here is a reference to the bayous of Louisiana in 1814:

Far in the wild west our clarion sounded,
   The groans of the foe to our charges replied;
The plains of New Orleans Old England astounded,
   The modern-built rampart so lower’d her pride:
             Those on that eventful day,
            Who outliv’d the bloody fray,
     Think of Old Hick’ry with fear and with awe;
             Loud should Columbia, then,
             Ring through her farthest glen,
     Huzza for the Chieftain! Huzza! Huzza!

A few years later Wild West starts to be used as a fixed phrase. Here’s an example from the Connecticut Mirror on 29 October 1831:

“Yes, sir,” replied Whistler, and mounted his horse but so unskillfully (for he was as ignorant of horsemanship as his brethren of the wild west) that Charles thought “every body must see the Indian now,” when a new alarm reached him.

And there is this transcript of a convention in South Carolina published in Washington, DC’s Daily National Intelligencer on 18 March 1833

This little State, in the mere panoply of courage and high principles, has foiled the swaggering giant of the Union. Thirty thousand Carolinians have not only AWED the wild west into respect,—COMPELLED Pennsylvania stodility into something like sense—N. York corruption into something like decency—Yankee rapacity into a sort of image of honesty; but all this has been loftily and steadily done, in the face of 17,000—what shall we call them? What epithet is of a shame wide, lasting and deep enough, for the betrayers of the liberties of their own country—the instigators of merciless slaughter—the contrivers of irretrievable servitude, against our own struggling State?

Sources:

Baker, John. “Antedating of ‘Wild West.’” ADS-L, 4 March 2010. https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2010-March/097193.html

“Dauphin Cavalry.” Pennsylvanian (Harrisburg), 10 July 1824, 3/2. Newspapers.com.

Faux, W. Memorable Days in America. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823, 230–31. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Lighter, Jonathan. “Antedating of ‘Wild West.’” ADS-L, 9 August 2026. https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2026-August/169835.html

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1986, s.v. Wild West, n.

Sedgwick, Miss. “Berkeley Jail.” Connecticut Mirror (Hartford), 29 October 1831, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Wild West.’” ADS-L, 9 August 2026. https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2026-August/169834.html

“Washington.” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 18 March 1833, 3/1. Newspapers.com.