To a European, nothing is more exotic than this term, which evokes the landscapes of the American West, complete with roaming cowboys and Indians. Thanks to the cinema, this is still true at the end of the twentieth century, but the legend was created in the Gilded Age, when it arose out of real clashes, sometimes of epic proportions. The opening of the West, which had been started before the Civil War, resumed with renewed vigor thanks to the railroad, and in one generation new states were carved out of these vast spaces. Their native inhabitants, rounded up and placed into reservations, gave way to pioneers, miners, ranchers, and farmers. French witnesses to these changes were impressed by the American achievement, yet nostalgic about the passing of the old order.

Ever since the sixteenth century, the Indians had been part of the collective imagination of the Western world; by the early nineteenth century the dreams of Europeans were shaped by Leatherstocking and the other heroes of James Fenimore Cooper. In France, the considerable success of the works of Gustave Aimard perpetuated notions of the romantic and rugged American West until the 1870s. The French were therefore bound to be passionately interested in the fate of the Indians, who in those years experienced, even more than the blacks, their absolute nadir, despite their fierce struggle, from Little Big Horn in 1876 to Wounded Knee fourteen years later.