How did the settlers of the Old West really know what time it was? Did they keep a record of about the hours and minutes? And whose “time” was considered the “right” time in the many small towns and farms scattered throughout the American West?

Industrialized nations rely on keeping track of time and doing it accurately. Today’s atomic clocks that track time in millionths of a second are testament to this. Even today’s cheap wristwatches available from local “Big Box” stores are accurate to within a few seconds a year. But have you ever wondered how someone living in Wyoming, Nebraska, California, or Colorado would have known what time it was in 1855?

Clocks and watches were certainly readily available to most Westerners. Watches that would be recognizable to modern people had been around for several centuries prior to 1855. People living anywhere in the US would have had watches, probably wind-up pocket watches to take time with them, and watches from long box pendulum in their homes.

So the question was who kept the “master clock”, who knew what the local time was. And, more importantly, in what “time zone” was a given city or farm located during the 1850s in the West? How was it possible for people to clarify those things?

If you guessed that timing and things like time zones were in great disarray at the beginning of the period that we think of as the “Old West”, you guessed right. The timing and things like time zones were pretty casual. In a fascinating book on everyday life in the Old West written by a British author in the 1950s, “The Look of the Old West,” time zones never really came into being in the East or the West until railways grew in size. influence, spread throughout the country and worked to standardize time. In fact, according to British writer William Foster-Harris, the nation followed agreed local time until the influence of the railroad finally standardized time zones in 1883. The federal government approved its established time zone soon after.

But in our 1855 setting, local time was generally based on marking “noon,” the time when the sun was directly overhead and cast no shadow or was the shortest observed shadow of the day. Some communities marked noon by dropping a large ball from a clock tower, or by firing a cannon, or sometimes by having a centrally located clock tower ring the occasion with a loud bell. People with watches in their homes or pocket watches adjust their time accordingly. And, in many western cities, there was a local jeweler who would be happy to put the watch on you.

Time zones were so disorganized in the 1850s, however, that a trip out of town meant shifting your time by about a minute for every nine or ten miles east or west.

For better or for worse, the railroads settled and shaped the West in multiple ways, even creating time zones, thus making sure everyone knew what time it was.