Top 10 Misconceptions About The Wild West
America’s Wild West was a time of cowboys and gunslingers, of the fight for freedom, of westward expansion, the hunt for gold, and the struggle to secure new-found wealth against bank robbers. Unfortunately, a lot of what we think about the Old West comes not from history, but from the romanticized version of those—like Buffalo Bill Cody—that capitalized on the image. The real Wild West was quite different.
10The First Gold Rush Was Not In The West
One of the defining events of the American West is the California Gold Rush of the 1840s and 1850s. The discovery of gold spurred on westward settlement, but America’s first gold rush towns were settled decades earlier, and much farther east.