Through much of the first half of the nineteenth century, relatively few English-speaking Americans considered moving into the vast lands west of the Mississippi River. For some the obstacle was distance; for others it was lack of money; for many more it was the image of much of the Far West, popularized by some early travelers. However, by the end of the Civil War, the West had already become legendary in the eastern states. It was no longer referred to as the "Great American Desert," but as the new "frontier.".
The vast regions of the West had a particular strong romantic appeal to many whites. Such landscapes as the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the basin and plateau region beyond the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Range all helped to enhance the image of the West. All these constituted a landscape of brilliant diversity and spectacular grandeur, different from anything white Americans had encountered before. Painters of the new "Rocky Mountain School" helped to enhance the image of the West by painting pictures of these modern marvels and taking them on tours around the eastern and mid-western states, which attracted enormous crowds.
Even more appealing than the landscape was the rugged, free-spirited lifestyle that many Americans associated with the West. Many Americans started to romanticize, especially, the figure of the cowboy. The image of uncharted territory to the west had always comforted and inspired those who dreamed of starting a new life. Mark Twain gave voice to this romantic vision of the frontier in a series of novels and memoirs. The painter and sculptor Frederic Remington also captured the romance of the West and its image as an alternative to the settled civilization of the East. Theodore Roosevelt also contributed to the public's fascination with the "frontier" when he published a four-volume history, The Winning of the West.
The figure of the cowboy was romanticized by many Americans in the nineteenth-century.