Tony Robinson's Wild West

How the West Was Won (1x2)

Air date: Dec 15, 2015

This episode focuses on two of Tony's obsessions from his childhood love of Westerns - cowboys and gun slinging outlaws. It also asks the question, who were the real winners of the West? Tony starts by looking at the birth and relatively short life of the cowboy in American culture (they arrive post-Civil War in 1865 and are becoming redundant before the end of the century) and then focus on the lives of the famous outlaws, including Calamity Jane, Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok. He also tells the story of the civilising of the West and the arrival of thousands of farmers who gradually took over the land and created the mid-Western mindset of modern rural America.