For cultural influences and their development, see Western.

The term "Old West"

The American frontier moved gradually westward decades after the settlement of the first white immigrants on the Eastern seaboard in the 1600s. The "West" was always the area beyond that boundary. Scholars, however, sometimes refer to the "Old West" as the region of the Ohio and Tennessee valleys during the 18th century, when the frontier was being contested by England, France, and the American colonies. Most often, however, the "American Old West", the "Old West" or "the Great West" is used to describe the area west of the Mississippi River during the 19th century.

Advancing frontier and the Louisiana Purchase

At the beginning of the 19th century, the American frontier was approximately along the Mississippi River, which bisects the continental United States north-to-south from just west of the Great Lakes to the delta near New Orleans. St. Louis, Missouri was the largest town on the frontier, the gateway for travel westward, and a principal trading center for Mississippi River traffic and inland commerce. After the Revolutionary War, the conflict among European powers over the vast American continent and its riches gave way to the new nation of the United States. With peace came an impetus for westward expansion, as veterans returned to areas seen during the war, and land hungry settlers traveled to newly available lands in New York and across the Appalachians.

The new nation began to exercise its power in domestic and foreign affairs. The British had been driven out of the East after the American Revolutionary War but remained in Canada and threatened to expand into the Northwest. The French had left the Ohio Valley but still owned the Louisiana Territory from the Mississippi River west to the Rockies, including the strategic port of New Orleans. New Spain included Florida and the territories from present-day Texas to California along the southern tier and up to what later would be Utah and Colorado.

With a stroke of the pen, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, elected in 1801, more than doubled the size of the United States. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 comprised land which France had acquired from Spain just three years earlier. Napoleon Bonaparte had begun to consider it a liability, since the slave rebellion in Haiti and tropical disease undermined his Caribbean adventures. Robert R. Livingston, American ambassador to France, negotiated the sale with French foreign minister Talleyrand, who stated, “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it”.

The price was $23 million (about $0.04 per acre), including the cost of settling all claims against France by American citizens. The purchase was controversial. Federalists thought that the territory was “a vast wilderness world which will...prove worse than useless to us” and spread the population across an ungovernable land, weakening federal power. But the Jeffersonians thought the territory would help maintain their vision of the ideal republican society, based on agricultural commerce, governed lightly and promoting self-reliance and virtue.