While many wear conventional shirts and trousers, alternatives include buckskins and dusters. The male characters typically wear broad-brimmed and high-crowned Stetson hats, neckerchief bandannas, vests, and cowboy boots with spurs. Stories commonly center on the life of a nomadic, male, White American drifter, cowboy or gunfighter who rides a horse and is armed with a revolver and/or a rifle. ( January 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Throughout the history of the genre, it has seen popular revivals and been incorporated into various subgenres.Ĭharacteristics Stories and characters Originating in vaquero heritage and Western fiction, the genre popularized the Western lifestyle, country- Western music, and Western wear globally. Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States. The frontier was commonly referred to as the 'Old West' or the 'Wild West' and depicted in Western media as a sparsely populated hostile region patrolled by cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, and numerous other stock ' gunslinger' characters.

The Western is a genre of fiction set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.

Barnes in Western apparel, as 'Bronco Billy Anderson', from the silent film The Great Train Robbery (1903), the second Western film and the first one shot in the United States PLAY The Great Train Robbery (1903) runtime 00:11:51.

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