The history of the American West  is a changing field, which makes sense if you follow the history of the environmental West. That is directly concerned with the changes in landscape from human actions. But the West as history has several interesting dimensions.

First, the West is a place that is hard to accurately plot: Minnesota was way out there in the 1830s. Daniel Boone  made a name for himself leading pioneers West—to Kentucky. St. Jo  was the edge of the earth for most Americans in the 1840s and California was, well, another country entirely, seen only by sailors as a sort of high seas rest stop. California and the Pacific Northwest have their own coastal distinction, and Texas is it's own thing entirely. But all are the West. Count in the Dakotas and the Great Plains, too. And how many of you thought of Nebraska as the West?

Western historians have been arguing for a generation about where the West "begins." One operating consensus is the 100th Meridian , which marks the western reach of moist air. (See also the contentious 98th Meridian .) Westward from there, agriculture relies heavily on irrigation.

After the Civil War, industry in the United States developed rapidly. Corporations, transportation and technologies moved people westward, along with their schemes for getting rich. The West urbanized rather quickly due to the huge migration. The "wide-open spaces" of our national myth is in truth the most urbanized region , and much of the expanse is federally controlled land or possessed by large-scale resource extraction—mining, agriculture, water projects, etc.

The West has experienced the effects of several layers of people and cultures. Effects as real as layers of geography in shaping the region. Humans apparently arrived in the West  between 10,000 and more than 40,000 years ago, following megafauna . These people evolved across the continent; there was a great variety of cultures when Europeans arrived. The West had indigenous empires, French mountain men, British trading outposts, Russian forts, and flourishing Spanish and Mexican colonies. Anglo and African American populations of the United States pressed west from the original colonies. The California Gold Rush  brought the whole dang world to the West. Asian populations crossed the Pacific to the Wild, Wild East.

Many people still imagine the West as a mythic thing, a point in fancy where white men ride tall and silent, women long to serve them, and diverse peoples don't exist unless they're outlaws or corrupt officials. But it ain't so and, frankly, never was. Even Western stories have changed, from simplistic cowboy heroes on the silver screen to the trenchant cowboy fiction of Cormac McCarthy . The West is still in transition because it's a vital, changing place.