Renegado was one of many names for the outlaws of the Wild West, the typical sort of whom was known to Americans such as Mark Twain as a "trap-robber, horse-thief, squaw-man." The term renegado comes from Spanish, as the original renegados of the American West were Mexican banditos; following the Mexican-American War, the Mexican Cession, and the rapid Euro-American settlement of the West, the American renegado was imagined as "a gruff and surly individual who had little use for society’s traditions or laws."