10 Most Common Jobs in the American Frontier Era

Imagine someone working on the American Frontier 150 years ago or so, and chances are you’ll picture a farmer tirelessly working his land, or else a cowboy rounding up his livestock (or an outlaw rounding up his ill-gotten gains).

Although it’s certainly true that life in the Frontier Era was a largely pastoral one for many families, who owned, worked, and operated their own farms and homesteads, as communities and eventually small towns and cities began to emerge in the burgeoning West, there were a lot of other jobs and trades involved that helped to make these places what they were. 

FARMERS

Farming was the most common—and perhaps the most important—occupation in Frontier times, with more than half of the entire population of the United States engaged in some form of agricultural work in the latter half of the 19th century. Even by the early 20th century, that figure remained staggeringly high, with the continued settlement of the American West helping to feed and fuel the country’s ever-growing population.

COWBOYS

Cowboy is perhaps the most obvious job on this list, but it’s perhaps also one of the most misunderstood. Far from our modern and fairly romanticized idea of gun-toting, wide-riding horsemen of the Old West, in reality, Frontier cowboys were tireless and hardworking cattle herders who worked tough jobs and long hours, for relatively little pay, in whatever weather they had to. From organizing cattle drives, escorting herds across often vast distances for days at a time, to looking after the land by repairing fences, digging ditches, and clearing rockfalls, cowboys had some of the hardest lives of the time.

RAILROAD WORKERS

As the newly established railroad industry further opened up America’s Western Frontier throughout the 19th century, the number of people employed in clearing the land and laying the tracks required for this burgeoning new network grew enormously quickly. By 1870, there were well over 150,000 railroad workers in the United States—a figure that further increased tenfold over the next 40 years.

MINERS

Coal was a relatively cheap and readily available fuel source in 19th-century America, which helped power the immense industrial expansion that continued throughout the Frontier Era. Coal mining, ultimately, was a hugely important task that kept a great many men employed in America’s West; by the turn of the century, in fact, there were an estimated 300,000 coal miners in the United States. Metals such as copper and iron, as well as gold and silver, were also big business, as were other raw fuels such as oil and gas. At a time when workers’ protections and safety protocols were rather less robust than they are today, however, every one of those workers took their life in their hands every time they went below ground. Machinery accidents, gas explosions, pit collapses, and work-related illnesses such as black lung all conspired to make mining an immensely perilous profession, with some 70,000 miners perishing in the 40 years from 1880 to the 1920s alone.

BUFFALO HUNTERS

America’s millions of wild buffalo provided a ready supply of meat, fur and leather in the period either side of the Civil War, and as a result buffalo hunting became a hugely lucrative yet immensely dangerous occupation for many men along the Frontier. While hunters could earn as much as $3 per hide (equivalent to more than $120 today) for the animals they killed, factors like extreme weather, stampedes, snakes, predators, and clashes with Native Americans made this choice of lifestyle a potentially hugely perilous one. Nonetheless, buffalo were hunted in such extreme numbers that by 1894 only a single wild herd, confined to Yellowstone National Park, remained.

BLACKSMITHS

As new communities emerged along America’s Frontier, so too did the tradesmen needed to supply them with everything they need—including blacksmiths, whitesmiths, gunsmiths, and other metal workers. By 1850, there were a staggering 100,000 blacksmiths working across the United States, supplying everything from horseshoes to agricultural equipment to the communities in which they worked.

LAWMEN

The Old West is infamous for its supposed lawlessness, but the anarchic and crime-riddled picture we often get from movies and television shows is somewhat misleading. Not only were duels, gunfights, bank heists and other armed encounters vanishingly rare, the Frontier also had a vast network of lawmen, from constables to sheriffs and marshals, who kept their towns as safe and as crime-free as possible.

BARKEEPERS

Although the precise number of bars and saloons in operation in the Frontier era is unknown, by the late 1800s there were at least a quarter of a million liquor vendors in the United States—a figure equivalent to nearly twenty times the number of McDonald’s restaurants today. Keeping people fed and watered, ultimately, was a tough yet respected and widely followed profession in the 19th century, and barkeepers and saloonkeepers often emerged as local leaders involved in the organization and maintenance of the community around them.

PROSTITUTES

The sheer number of saloons, bars, and hotels operating in Frontier times led to an equally robust number of women entering the oldest profession, with an estimated 50,000 women engaged in prostitution in the late 19th century (including a staggering 20% of the entire female population of California).

PRINTING

“There is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper,” wrote the French diplomat Alexis De Tocqueville as he toured America in the 1830s—a time when the states west of the Mississippi alone were reportedly publishing a staggering 10,000 periodicals and journals every week. As a result, both printing and the journalism that it supported proved hugely important in the Frontier era, with several of America’s most notable newspapers and newspaper writers emerging at that time.

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