The Wild West 365

The Wild West, a thrilling but imprecise concept, with it’s colourful cast of characters such as ‘Buffalo Bill’, General Custer, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid and Sitting Bear, has been ill- served by confining it to the ‘lore of the trans Mississippi United States in the late 1880s’, argues Michael Wallis. In The Wild West 365, a series of vignettes, one for every day of the year for a reason that is unclear, Wallis takes the ‘long view’ of a century from 1830 to 1930 and in a collection of images reminiscent of cigarette cards includes a rich gallery of legendary names and ‘unsung heroes and heroines’, as well as covered wagons, pony expresses, panning for gold and the locations of famous encounters between the incomers and the native Americans, outlaws and the forces of law struggling to establish territory. The Wild West 365 draws mainly on the prodigious collection of ‘Wild West’ imagery collected by Robert McCubbin, founder of the Wild West Association, and while unlikely to rebalance opinions, may well delight and inform those with a nostalgia for the John Wayne world of their youth.