I’m going to guess this cowgirl just busted her bare-chested (but chaps-wearing) boyfriend out of a Mexican jail.
Yippee-ki-yay! The Western is a uniquely American form of cinema and literature taking its plot, characters, and setting from the American Old West in the years 1850 to 1900. Cowboys (and cowgirls) ride horses, bear rifles and revolvers, and often live a nomadic life drifting through small towns, ranches, saloons, and military forts in the arid, dry landscapes west of the Rio Grande. Common themes are pursuing justice, solving crimes, or searching for treasure or missing loved ones. Westerns were popular up to the 1960s, but fell out of favor as America catapulted itself into the space age. In recent years, there’s been a resurgence as classic plots are refreshed for a more cynical and irreverent age. Steampunk, for example, draws as much from Old West style and technology as from Victorian Age England; the terribly written, but sumptuously art directed, Will Smith movie Wild Wild West, with its giant steam-powered tarantula and floofy dance-hall costumes for the villain’s henchwomen, was a seminal influence.
If you’re writing a Western but are stumped for names, here’s some you can use.
Wild West Names
| COWBOYS AND COWGIRLS
Irma Wells Pearl King Frank Hawk Chicken Dinner Katie Johnny Ten Feathers Samuel Savage Whiskey Emmeline One-Shot Hezekiah Henry Carver Hank Laplante Two Dollar Kitty Birdie McClancy Rusty Savage Dutch McMurphy |
TOWNS AND SETTLEMENTS
Gypsy Well Cokeville Antelope Path Horsehead City Devil’s Mile Sunday Skillet Junction Cowboy Coffee Pronghorn Nose Dog Path Black Hawk Township Buzzard Foot White Horse City Gringo Pueblo Mule Spirit |
PLACES
Happy Papoose Ridge Chinaman Flats Red Elk Falls The Devil’s Frying Pan Thunderbird Spring Blackbird Summit Twenty Mile Canyon Iron Ore Gully Fool’s Gold Mesa The Axe Handle Trail Rattlesnake Heaven Mormon Ford Quagmire Spring White Antelope Valley |
