Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's

best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korton. When we think of the Wild West, I think that many of us think of

gun slingers, bar fights and cowboys riding across wide open plains.

But was life on the American frontier really anything like the movies?

In today's Everything You Wanted to Know episode, we're putting your Questions on the subject to Karen Jones,

Professor of Environmental and Cultural History at the University of Kent.

Karen is an expert on the American West and her books include

calamity the many lives of calamity Jane which was published by Yale University

press earlier this year. Asking the questions was our production editor, Spencer Misson.

Now, Karen, I quite like to start with quite a wide-ranging question, but one which has showed

up on quite a lot of our internet search queries.

And that is what was the Wild West?

Can you define it?

When are we talking about?

Which areas of the North American continent did the Wild West cover?

That's actually a really good question and it's one that on one level is deceptively easy to answer

if we think about dates and we think about places.

But then when we start thinking about the meaning of the World West and its imagined presence,

things get a much more complicated and much more fuzzy.

So I'll start with the easy bits and then I'll mess it up and make it complicated because history always does that when you study it. So when people typically talk about the American West, they're talking about areas

west of the Mississippi River. So that's one definition to use that river as the marker.

So it's a huge territory of land, 2 million square miles also of territory.

...