HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-09-13T09:46:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too?
items: 13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West
items: Billy the Kid: the Wild West's most wanted gunslinger
items: The battle of Little Bighorn: what happened at 'Custer's last stand'?
items: Annie Oakley: the most famous sharpshooter in America
items: Emma Dabiri’s hidden histories: The Harder They Fall
items: From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves
items: From the real Calamity Jane to 'Madam Moustache': pioneer women of the Wild West
items: The Wild West: everything you wanted to know
items: How wild was the Wild West?

These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too?
type: item
date: 2025-09-13T09:45:40.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Historian Karen Jones reveals how barbed wire and other surprising inventions transformed the frontier, reshaping the lives of settlers, as well as the land and its peoples
encoded: Grit and gunfights. Cowboys riding under a relentless sun. Native Americans resisting conquest. Sheriffs and outlaws squaring off in dusty towns. These images of adventure and high drama still shape how we imagine the American 19th-century West – the so-called Wild West – as a place shaped by individual courage and personal struggle. And without such determination, the frontier might never have pushed so far. But what’s often forgotten is how profoundly the American frontier was reshaped by forces less dramatic than shootouts. As the industrial revolution swept across the 19th-century world, it was technological change that transformed the frontier more decisively than any single battle. “There are three inventions that come to mind when I think about what the technological transformations were; the objects that won the Old West and helped the expansion westward,” explains historian Karen Jones on the HistoryExtra podcast. Together, they opened the prairie to Euro-American settlement – and at the same time hastened the destruction of the old West forever. Barbed wire: fencing in the Wild West Before the 1860s, the American West was an open range. Cattle and wild bison roamed freely across grasslands that stretched for hundreds of miles. With timber a scarce resource, and the impracticality of stone walls on the plains, fencing land in was an incredibly difficult task. That changed in 1867, when Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire. This invention suddenly, Jones says, “transforms the parcelling up of the west in a cheap and effective way.” Read more | 13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West Barbed wire was simple: two twisted strands of wire with sharp barbs at intervals. But its impact was revolutionary. For the first time, settlers could cheaply fence land, excluding rivals and protecting crops from wandering cattle. Ranchers used it to control their herds; homesteaders used it to secure farms. Conflict quickly f…

GettyImages-1430467094-552139c-e1757621352439.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West
type: item
date: 2024-12-30T05:00:13.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Evergreen
subject: Historical people
description: Saddle up and discover the most famous cowboys who shaped the American Frontier, exploring how their stories intertwined with the broader history of the Wild West
encoded: Through the lens of idealised romanticism, the Old West continues to capture the imagination as a wild and untamed frontier ready to be harnessed by those with the determination, courage and grit required to endure it. And despite the dangers – from an unforgiving terrain to the pervading lawlessness – there were great opportunities for a handful of big personalities to make a name for themselves. They robbed banks and stagecoaches, proved their speed and skill with a pistol in a gunfight, and embraced the chaos and change of an era marked by clashes between incoming settlers and Native Americans, farmers and businessman, the past and the future. They are some of the most famous figures in American history: cowboys. What was a cowboy? Symbols of the Wild West, cowboys could be all things, from frontiersmen, ranchers, farmers, wranglers, marshals and, of course, outlaws. It was an identity as much as it was an outright occupation. Beyond the bluster of the ubiquitous anti-heroes of Hollywood movies, their real-life stories provide insight into the broader forces underlying the expansion of the American frontier. Through their deeds, we can see the land disputes, the end of indigenous sovereignty, the rise of the railroad, and the slow march of federal law into a space once thought to be uncontrollable. 13 famous cowboys from the American Wild West Billy the Kid Jesse James Wyatt Earp Butch Cassidy Calamity Jane Wild Bill Hickok Doc Holliday Bass Reeves Belle Starr Black Bart John Wesley Hardin Bill Doolin Charles Goodnight Billy the Kid c1859–1881 Is there any name that evokes the outlaws of the Wild West more than Billy the Kid? Born Henry McCarty, the gunslinger was an orphan by his early teens and quickly turned to crime to survive. He went by a number of aliases, including William H Bonney and Kid Antrim (the latter a reference to his slight build and youthful features), before making his first recorded killing in 1877 at the age of 17. But it would be his involv…

GettyImages-2695540-81730bf-e1734995136132.jpg
width: 619
height: 412

Billy the Kid: the Wild West's most wanted gunslinger
type: item
date: 2023-01-18T13:35:03.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Historical people
description: His lawless days only lasted four years, but he is still remembered as perhaps the most notorious outlaw of the Wild West. Jonny Wilkes asks whether he deserves his ruthless reputation
encoded: Atkins’ saloon is a typical crusty den of hard drinking and hard gambling in Arizona territory, where locals belch and grunt away their evenings after a day toiling on ranches or at the nearby military fort of Camp Grant. It’s where young ranch hand and small-time horse-and-saddle thief Henry Antrim – who could be no older than 16 or 17 – often rides with his wages jangling in his pockets in the hopes of getting lucky at poker. It is a parched and dusty 17 August 1877 when ‘Kid Antrim’ steps inside old George Atkins’ place, but his usually friendly and cheerful mood sours when he spots Frank ‘Windy’ Cahill, the big, burly blacksmith who has taken to picking on him for his youthful, scrawny looks. Windy takes particular pleasure in throwing the Kid to the floor, calling him names and smacking him around in front of everybody. Trouble erupts when Windy calls Antrim a “pimp”, before he gets violent when called a “son of a bitch” in return. He wrestles his much smaller opponent to the ground, pinning him down with his knees, and gleefully slaps the boy in the face. But the Kid has been humiliated for the last time. He squirms and frees his arm, reaches for his .45 pistol and sticks the barrel into the bully’s gut. Onlookers hear a “deafening roar”, then see Windy slump over as his shirt reddens with blood. The Kid leaps to his feet and bolts, stealing a prized horse to make his escape. It takes a day for Windy to die. Read more | How wild was the Wild West? Despite being found guilty of a “criminal and unjustifiable” killing, Antrim hightails it all the way to New Mexico so never faces arrest, jail time and possibly worse. Instead, the shooting of Windy Cahill marks the explosive start of his short but spectacular life as an outlaw – under the moniker Billy the Kid. Why is Billy the Kid famous? In a time of lawlessness and celebrity criminals, Billy the Kid’s notoriety towers over other train-robbing, pistol-twirling, posse-evading bandits of the Wild West. He appealed …

GettyImages-515581872-2c00fb1-e1674046244519.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

The battle of Little Bighorn: what happened at 'Custer's last stand'?
type: item
date: 2022-06-24T14:05:56.000Z
creator: Julian Humphrys
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse’s defeat of the flamboyant Colonel George Custer at the Little Bighorn has become one of the most famous and controversial episodes in American military victory. Historian Julian Humphrys tells the story…
encoded: People in Washington were getting ready for a party. It was 4 July 1876 – the centenary of the birth of the USA – but news arrived that day that brought the celebrations to a halt. The US Army had suffered a devastating defeat in Montana at the hands of the Lakota Sioux and their Cheyenne allies. The Lakota called their victory the Battle of the Greasy Grass, but it would go down in history as the Battle of the Little Bighorn – or simply Custer’s Last Stand. Faced with a volatile situation following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the US authorities decided to force the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne to the reservations set aside for them. Colonel John Gibbon would head east from Fort Ellis in Montana, General George Crook would strike north from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming and General Alfred Terry would head west along the Yellowstone River from Fort Abraham in Dakota. The 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lt Col George Armstrong Custer, made up the bulk of Terry’s 900 men. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/10/101d.GettyImages-514877098-cac6656.jpg" width="825" height="1024" alt="Photo of George Custer and his scouts" title="General George A. Custer and some of his scouts in Montana territory. The man standing by the tent door is thought to be Curly, recorded as the only survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn where Custer's entire command was wiped out by the allied Indian tribes under Sitting Bull on June 26, 1876. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)" /> The government troops only had a sketchy idea of where their enemies were and had also underestimated their strength, which they reckoned to be no more than 1,000 warriors. But they had failed to take into account the fact that large numbers of warriors had left the reservations and joined Sitting Bull and his supporters. In fact, their main concern was that their enemies would scatter before they could be dealt with. But, encouraged by one of Sitting Bull’s visions that foretol…

GettyImages3091550-7c4ba42.jpg
width: 3710
height: 2607

Annie Oakley: the most famous sharpshooter in America
type: item
date: 2022-05-02T05:05:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Historical people
description: From humble beginnings to performing for Queen Victoria, sharpshooter Annie Oakley's life was nothing short of extraordinary. BBC History Revealed examines how a self-taught crack shot from rural Ohio became one of the most recognisable figures of the Old West – and an advocate for female empowerment
encoded: It’s a long way from log-cabin poverty in rural Ohio to being the toast of Europe and performing in front of well-nourished heads of state. But it’s a journey that Phoebe Ann Mosey – better known as sharpshooter Annie Oakley – took in her stride, deftly combining the roles of world-famous entertainer and firm advocate of women’s rights. Born in 1860 on a small farm in western Ohio, Annie and her family were plunged into hard times after her father died when she was just six years old. The eldest of her six siblings then contracted fatal tuberculosis, forcing Annie’s mother to sell the family cow to cover the funeral expenses. By the age of ten, to ease the burden at home, Annie found herself living with another family. Read more | How the Wild West was spun “All went well for a month,” she later wrote. “Then the work began to stack up. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, got breakfast, milked the cows, fed the calves, the pigs, pumped water for the cattle, fed the chickens, rocked the baby to sleep, weeded the garden, picked wild blackberries, got dinner after digging the potatoes for dinner and picking the vegetables.” Annie referred to this family as ‘the wolves’. “I was held prisoner. They wrote all the letters to my mother telling her that I was happy and going to school.” Returning home Eventually, Annie escaped and returned to her family, for whom she set about providing. Her hunting and trapping skills meant she could produce an unending supply of meat and game to a local grocer, who in turn supplied hotels and restaurants across the state. So lucrative was this arrangement, at least comparatively, that Annie, at just 15, was able to pay off the mortgage on the family home. Her growing reputation for the way she handled a gun led to a life-changing encounter in 1875 while visiting one of her sisters near Cincinnati. A local hotelier knew of the teenager’s talents and organised a competition between her and a professional exhibition shooter called Frank B…

GettyImages-146117887-2-023aac6.jpg
width: 3724
height: 2522

Emma Dabiri’s hidden histories: The Harder They Fall
type: item
date: 2022-01-05T14:31:37.000Z
creator: Emma Dabiri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Column
description: "The film doesn’t engage with one of the main drivers behind the violence," writes Emma Dabiri
encoded: The recent Netflix movie The Harder They Fall – a black western, a rarity in the genre – tells a story featuring real-life characters including Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill. Westerns almost universally depict cowboys and outlaws as white men, yet historians estimate that about 25 per cent were in fact African-Americans – including some of the most accomplished. Set in an almost entirely black context and starring black actors such as Idris Elba and LaKeith Stanfield, the film doesn’t show the mixed ethnicity of the historical figures behind the main characters – many of whom had mixed African, European and Native American ancestry – nor the multi-“racial” society in which they lived. Read more | From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves As such, the film doesn’t engage with one of the main drivers behind the violent rampage it references: the imminent absorption of Indian Territory into the ever-expanding US. In the summer of 1895, in the Indian Territory that would shortly become the state of Oklahoma, a group of five teenage boys engaged in a two-week bout of robbery, rape and murder. Their leader, Rufus Buck, was – like most of the gang – of mixed African and Creek Indian heritage. Their attacks appalled local white settlers, Native Americans and African-American freedmen alike. On the podcast: Historian Tony Warner discusses some of the real historical figures depicted in the Netflix western The Harder They Fall Historians argue that the undoubtedly chilling and brutal violence wasn’t entirely random. By 1895, white people outnumbered Native Americans in Indian Territory, and the US government was rapidly absorbing that land for white settlement. Buck apparently harboured fantasies that his gang’s violence would incite a Native American uprising that would overrun the white settlers and eventually reclaim the whole territory. The author Leonce Gaiter, who has written extensively about Rufus Buck, says that “His dre…

HEX Voices EmmaDabiri-c263ba9.jpg
width: 621
height: 413

From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves
type: item
date: 2021-12-26T10:05:38.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Feared by felons and revered by his colleagues, Bass Reeves broke free from slavery to become one of the most successful lawmen in America’s Wild West. Now immortalised as a character in a new BBC One series, Nige Tassell explores Reeves’ incredible life story
encoded: It didn’t seem an unusual altercation among off-duty Confederate soldiers during the early days of the American Civil War. An after-dark card game, a sense of injustice or cheating, a swift dispensing of physical retaliation. It happened often and regularly. But this particular disagreement was unlike any other. It occurred between slave and ‘master’. The contretemps was brutal and speedy; the enslaved man, Bass Reeves, battered the man he’d been forced to accompany into battle – George R Reeves, the future speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. As Bass’ daughter Alice would later recall, her father “laid him out cold with his fist and then made a run for the Indian Territory north across the Red River”. For the next few years, Bass Reeves was the runaway slave looking over his shoulder. But the abolition of slavery, brought about by the resolution of the Civil War, would open doors for Reeves, ushering him towards a journey on which he would become a gun-toting public servant of the highest order. He would make history as a pioneering African-American US deputy marshal operating west of the Mississippi River, and one of the most feared lawmen charged with apprehending dangerous miscreants across the American West during the 19th century. He became known the ‘Invincible Marshal’. Some believe his life and times were the basis for the fictional Lone Ranger. Who was Bass Reeves? That Bass Reeves would become such a dedicated and celebrated lawman wasn’t abundantly obvious from his early life. He was born into slavery in Arkansas in 1838, his family working in servitude for George Reeves’ father, the state legislator William Reeves. When Reeves the elder moved to northern Texas, he took his enslaved people with him, among them eight-year-old Bass. At first, the youngster worked as a water boy before graduating to being a field hand. His skill with horses and mules then led to him becoming a blacksmith’s assistant. Read more | How wild was the Wild West? After p…

R2CNGX-e3a41c2-e1640172324986.jpg
width: 620
height: 414

From the real Calamity Jane to 'Madam Moustache': pioneer women of the Wild West
type: item
date: 2021-02-15T12:00:37.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: The adage “Go west, young man”, reputedly popularised by New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley, conjures a vivid impression of the 19th-century American frontier as a place of masculine action and opportunity. But this wasn't necessarily the whole picture. Here, Karen R Jones reveals why the 19th-century American frontier story needs to be rewritten with an expanded cast of tough, enterprising women who flouted gender norms – from the real 'Calamity Jane' to a gambling entrepreneur known as ‘Madame Moustache’...
encoded: In 1854, a card sharp from the east of the United States, going by the name Dumont – possibly from New Orleans – arrived in the gold-mining town of Nevada, California. Having found success as a professional gambler in San Francisco, this entrepreneur of the American West opened a gambling parlour in this new location that, by all accounts, was highly profitable. But the settlement dwindled and Dumont moved on, spending time in Utah, Idaho and Arizona, testing the waters of brothel management in various spots during the 1860s. In 1872, in Nevada, Dumont was double-crossed by a partner, losing everything. So this inveterate gambler came to the table again, latterly in the gold-mining town of Bodie, California. In 1879, after a disastrous loss, the game was up. On 8 September, Dumont’s body was found outside town, having apparently taken a morphine overdose. What makes this tale of frontier life unusual is that the protagonist was a woman: Eleanor Dumont, later known as ‘Madame Moustache’ and probably born Simone Jules around 1829. The adage “Go west, young man”, reputedly popularised by New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley, conjures a vivid impression of the 19th-century American frontier as a place of masculine action and opportunity. As portrayed in cowboy movies – think John Wayne, Clint Eastwood – this world of tough-talking, gun-toting macho swagger has often been seen as the exclusive domain of men. But, as recent research (and Dumont’s Women stretched the limits of convention, changing their costume, habits and daily activities to fit the needs of the trail story) has shown, this was also a place of women’s agency, social latitudes and the stretching of established gender boundaries. As such, the history of ‘how the West was won’ (or lost) was much more variegated than the vision presented in traditional historical readings and countless Hollywood westerns. As a place of new starts, economic possibility and social freedom, in the 19th-century the American We…

How-women-won-the-West-1-8908b3c.jpg
width: 1024
height: 683

The Wild West: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2020-11-15T12:19:57.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Victorian
subject: Period
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: Was the American west really as wild as the movies suggest? Karen Jones responds to listener questions about frontier life
encoded: Historian and author Karen Jones responds to listener questions and popular search queries about the mass movement of settlers into the American west, from the hardships of homesteading and the violence of frontier life to Hollywood’s obsession with the grizzled gunslinger. Explore more episodes in our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series

Podcast-Karen-Jones-Web-large-1aa46f0.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

How wild was the Wild West?
type: item
date: 2019-07-01T11:00:10.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Historical people
description: Tales of a lawless frontier are ingrained in American culture, but, as Pat Kinsella explores for BBC History Revealed, the West had to be tamed
encoded: The most famous shootout in the history of the Wild West – the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona – lasted just 30 seconds. In that half-a-minute of mayhem and murder at around 3pm on 26 October 1881, three outlaws from a gang known as the ‘Cowboys’ were shot dead when they faced off against the Earp brothers and their friend Doc Holliday. That the brief and bloody shooting happened isn’t in doubt. But the real gunfight little resembled the way it has been portrayed in numerous films and books. Aside from the brevity of the action, the shooters were extremely close together, standing about six feet apart when the exchange of bullets began. It hadn’t been prearranged, almost all of the 30 shots were fired from handguns, and it didn’t even happen at the OK Corral, but in a vacant lot on the side of a photography studio nearby. The dead Cowboys have been largely greyed out of the collective memory of the event, reduced to anonymous villains when compared to town marshal Virgil Earp and his deputies. But in the aftermath, and amidst a swell of sympathy in Tombstone for the dead, the Earps and Holliday were arrested on charges of murdering brothers Tom and Frank McLaury and 19-year-old Billy Clanton as they tried to surrender. They were put on trial and spent time behind bars before ultimately being acquitted. In the grand scheme of things, the gunfight was a minor, albeit lethal, scuffle. It was borne from a simmering feud involving ageold themes – jealousy, power, money, mistrust and machismo – which, in the febrile booze-and bullet-filled atmosphere of the time, got out of hand. That year, 1881, was one of the wildest 12 months in the American Old West, at least as big-name shootouts go. Three months before the OK Corral, on 14 July, Sheriff Pat Garret gunned down Billy the Kid, while earlier, in April, the ‘Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight’ had taken place in the infamously lawless town of El Paso, Texas. Annie Oakley: the most famous sharpshooter in A…

45.-GettyImages-96822881-298e236-e1566312233726.jpg
width: 1024
height: 576