During the nineteenth century, more and more people went to live in the West. Most of us have seen the 'Wild West' in films and on television, and so we think that it was full of cowboys and fighting. But in fact there were very few cowboys - no more than 40,000 - and real cowboys did not shoot each other very often. They were hard-working men, and at least a quarter of them were black or Mexican. They took cows from Texas up to the railway towns in Kansas and Missouri to be killed for meat. From there, the meat was sent to the East and sold.