History: American Old West, United States

End of the Old West
After the eleventh U.S. Census was taken in 1890, the superintendent announced that there was no longer a clear line of advancing settlement, and hence no longer a frontier in the continental United States. However, according to author Samuel Eliot Morison, in 1890, when the frontier was declared "over", there was still thousands of square miles of unsettled land which took another few decades to populate or utilize. In his highly influential Frontier Thesis in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner concluded that the frontier was all but gone. But with the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896, a new frontier was opened up in the vast northern territory. Alaska became known as "the last frontier".
By century's end, the population of the West had reached an average of two people per square mile, which was enough to be considered "settled". Towns and cities began to grow around industrial centers, transportation hubs, and farming areas. In 1880, San Francisco dwarfed all other Western cities with a population of nearly 250,000. Over opposition from mining and timber interests, the federal government began to take steps to preserve and manage the remaining public land and resources, hence exercising more control over the affairs of Westerners.
The mythologizing of the West began with minstrel shows and popular music in the 1840s. During the same period, P. T. Barnum presented Indian chiefs, dances, and other Wild West exhibits in his museums, However, large scale awareness really took off when the dime novel appeared in 1859, the first being Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter. By simplifying reality and grossly exaggerating the truth, the novels captured the public's attention with sensational tales of violence and heroism, and fixed in the public's mind stereotypical images of heroes and villains—courageous cowboys and savage Indians, virtuous lawmen and ruthless outlaws, brave settlers and predatory cattlemen. Millions of copies and thousands of titles were sold. The novels relied on a series of predictable literary formulas appealing to mass tastes and were often written in as little as a few days. The most successful of all dime novels was Edward S. Ellis' Seth Jones (1860). Ned Buntline's stories glamorized Buffalo Bill Cody and Edward L. Wheeler created "Deadwood Dick", "Hurricane Nell", and "Calamity Jane".