Hi, I'm Gene Chatsky. You may know me as the host of the Her Money podcast or the financial editor of NBC's Today Show for 25 years.

Today, I'd personally like to invite you to join my women-led investing club. It's called Investing Fix with two Xs.

We walk through current market trends, teach investing fundamentals, and build a real

portfolio together. Plus, your first month is absolutely free. So come check us out at

investing fix.com. We'd love to have you. When did the old west begin? And when exactly did the Old West come to an end?

This is a great question that I've probably spent way too much time contemplating, but unfortunately,

I don't think there's an answer. In all actuality, the Old West or the Wild West, whatever you

want to call it, it's really more of a concept than a defined historical time period.

For me, just as a very fast and loose definition, I oftentimes think of the old West as

being everything that occurred west of the Mississippi River during the 19th century.

That covers the mountain men, the wagon trains, the Indian Wars, the Cowboys, all that good stuff.

But like I said, that's a very loose definition. Truth is, people have been migrating West and living on the frontier pretty

much ever since the Pilgrims first arrived. I mean, at one point, Ohio was considered the frontier.

And if you think about it, there's not a lot of difference between Daniel Boone hunting in the

forest of Pennsylvania in the 1750s and Jim Bridger trapping for Beaver in Montana in the 1830s.

They were both operating in what was then considered the frontier, completely self-reliant,

cut off from so-called civilization, and surrounded by indigenous tribes who may not have always been that friendly.

I think for most people, though, if you were to randomly ask like 100 people on the street, what do they envision when they think about the Old West?

99% of the time, they're going to say cowboys.

And if that's the case, then we're talking about a very, very brief period, just a little

over 20 years. The long-range cattle drives didn't start in earnest until after the Civil War,

and by the late 1880s, they were pretty much the thing of the past. Did Cowboys exist prior to the Civil

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