Yes, the western expansion started when President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, and it ended in the early 20th century when multiple things happened: we put railroads all over the country, so train transportation replaced carriages for the average person; the mass privatization of land and creation barbed wire meant a lot fewer free-range cows and cowboys to herd them; and small towns started turning into cities thanks to the trains mentioned earlier; the age of outlaws ended as federal law enforcement grew (no longer could you commit crimes for decades and move to the next state and be fine, they'd hunt you down); the US decided to ease off battling Indians; WW1 happened so the country was forced to heavily improve it's industry; etc.
If you're doing a Frank Norris-style novel, sure - he used a lot of history in things like The Octopus (about robber barons running railroads). But if you're going for a more cinematic Wild West, historical doesn't really cut it (especially since the "Wild West" runs from about the early 1800s to WWI in North America, and Australia's Wild West era covered a shorter span that overlapped the American one.
I was surprised to find that the movie "Quigley Down Under" is considered not only a Western but one of the too Westerns to come out of Australia, and there was a period of Canadian and Mexican Western movies (one of the coolest "bad idea, horrible budget, and should not be anywhere near as good as it is" movies I've ever seen came out of the Mexican Western phase - Valley of the Gwangi, which pits cowboys against a dinosaur mistakenly called a tyrannosaurus rex but clearly a smaller, nimbler and longer-armed allosaurus).
Forgive the double-posting, but I wanted to counter this by stating we have how many tags that focus on Asian aesthetics? And I ain't from the far east.
Very good point and I agree that Western is too vague. And Historical alone fails to capture gunslinger justice, frontier lawlessness, cattle towns, rail barons, and lone sheriffs. Wild West, now those stories inspire to the imagination frontier settings and the classic Western tropes: gunslingers, frontier towns, lawmen, outlaws, expansion-era conflict, or modern and even fantastical works like The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Valley of the Gwangi. Any time I was in a video store, Wild Westerns had their own section. It is a genre.
FWIW my favorite Western is still Quigley Down Under, which is not even in the American West
Well, I can say that my favorite has been City Slickers and the sequel, so I'd say we are on the same page for being slightly off-themed.
It's either old US setting, or a fictional setting based on the same theme. But as far as audience goes, it is far from Ameri-centric.
