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. The cowboys almost disappeared after about thirty years because the land was given by the government to farmers and their families. From 1862 to 1900, more than half a million farmers came to live in the West, where they grew corn andother crops instead of keeping cows. The farms were very lonely, but soon the railways helped to bring people together. In 1869, the railway line from the East met the line from the West in Utah, so it was possible for Americans to travel right across the USA by train