Description
The West holds a mythic place in American history, especially with respect to popular images associated with cowboys, gunslingers, cattlemen, miners, frontier settlers, and Native Americans. If you’re familiar with a popular representation (either in film or literature) of the nineteenth-century West, briefly discuss it and what it appears to reveal of the Western experience.
Alternatively, if the prompt above doesn’t appeal to you, discuss either one of the important factors drawing settlers westward or one of the developments that undermined the ability of Native Americans to continue their cultures and traditional ways of life.