Big Whiskey, Wyoming and the American West

Most of Unforgiven takes place in Big Whiskey, Wyoming: a small frontier town.

Now, we at Shmoop did our due diligence and looked high and low and, as far as we can tell, Big Whiskey is not a real place. But don't worry, in case you were planning a fanboy roadtrip: there were about a million places in the real American West just like it. (Check out Cody, Wyoming if you want some authentic cowboy goodness.)

But what's Big Whiskey like, you ask?

Like lots of small towns in ye olde Wild West (we'll get to that in just a minute), it's pretty much just one main street with a few shops and not much else. There's a saloon/brothel run by a guy named Skinny, there's a Sheriff's office (complete with a few jail cells), and a few other places

Not too many people live in this small town, and, from the looks of it, it's in the middle of nowhere. There's a train station a short ride away and the town does get enough visitors that eight prostitutes are, um, necessary.

So that's Big Whiskey. But Unforgiven also gives us a glimpse of something bigger: the Wild West. This movie moves us from Kansas to Wyoming on horseback, and this journey is important for a few reasons.

First of all, this trip—even from the northwesterly corner of Kansas to the southeasterly corner of Wyoming, would have taken a while.

Another thing that's important to note about this trip is that it moves from what we define as the Midwest to what we define as the West. Had Will Munny & Co. been making the same trip today, they would have most likely crossed from being in the Central Time Zone to the Mountain Time Zone—a symbolic move. Even today, we associate the Midwest with being homey, full of farms and ranches. We still associate the West with rugged lawlessness.

The third—and most important—aspect of Will Munny's trip? He would have been going from an official state in the U.S.A. (Kansas gained statehood in 1861) to the Territory of Wyoming. Wyoming wouldn't gain statehood until 1890—ten years after Little Bill drew his last breath. This fact definitely underscores the idea that Munny's moving away from the domesticated life of family and farm and into the uncharted wilderness of the Wild West.