“As a region of the imagination where boundless activity was the order of the day, the West was vital geography for Doug. Wild and Woolly is a film of the party of ‘hope’, to extrapolate upon Mr. Lewis a bit. To those in the early nineteenth century who ascribed to this doctrine, America had fostered ‘a clear conscience unsullied by the past’. According to this creed America had no past, only a present and a future, only expectation and vision. Lewis points out that the key term in this mortal vocabulary is ‘innocence’.

At the time of Wild and Woolly the West is not really as Fairbanks dream of it; instead it is modern and progressive. Thus, one can argue that Fairbanks’ dream is really nostalgia over a departed past, over a West as it can never be again. The point, then, and this must be emphasized, is that the West was never as our hero in Wild and Woolly dreamed of it. Rather, it is presented as an ideal lifestyle pitted against the stifling environment of the industrial East. Thus, it is not a memory of the past, merely an innocent dream of a better life. The film in its own way is a part of an American tradition that saw America as a vision of innocence and a claim of newness. It is the imagination hungering for freedom, a basic element in the formation of the American West”.

(John C. Tibbetts e James M. Welsh, His Majesty the American. The films of Douglas Fairbanks, sr., cit.)