He served in the Wisconsin Senate (1862 & 1863) and State Assembly (1859), representing Green County.
In December 1847, he purchased the Elyria Courier from John H. Faxon, and operated it as a Whig partisan paper for two years.
During the 1848 presidential race, however, he refused to endorse the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, and instead supported the Free Soil nominee, former president Martin Van Buren.
[2] West was quite active with the Republican Party in the 1850s, and worked as a "political assistant" to the publisher of the Monroe Sentinel for the 1860 presidential election.
[8] He was then the Republican nominee for Wisconsin State Assembly in Green County's 2nd (Southern) district in 1858, and subsequently the Republican nominee for Wisconsin Senate in the 24th Senate district (all of Green County) in 1861.
[9] He did not run for re-election to the Senate in 1863, and in 1865 he moved to Chicago, where he concentrated on his legal career for much of the rest of his life.
He partnered with L. L. Bond in Chicago and gradually came to devote all of his energy to patent law.
He celebrated his 99th birthday on April 26, 1922, but almost immediately afterward developed a severe Pneumonia.
West subsequently married Caroline Amelia DeClercq in 1878, and that marriage lasted until her death in 1901.