From the time America was founded, the West was seen as an almost inexhaustible area of new living space. Just beyond the reach of society, the West offered room to stretch, a better life, and good, free, rich earth to anyone daring enough to claim it. In the early nineteenth century, national leaders predicted it would take five hundred years to populate the vast West. But by the census of 1890, the government declared that the frontier no longer existed.

The West had been settled. Railroads and telegraphs dissected the nation. Farms and cities flourished where Native Americans had hunted buffalo only twenty years earlier. The census declared: "At present the unsettled area has been so broken by isolated bodies of settlements that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."

Modern technology quickly changed the Old West. The...