The expression was often used in cowboy movies when someone fell to the ground wounded or dead, but its origin comes from much earlier than those movies. “Lick the dust” to describe being wounded or killed is in the Bible, including in the King James Version in Psalms 72. A 1750 translation of The Iliad by Samuel Butler contains the line, “…that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying around him,” although there is some argument that the words were from Butler and not Homer. One reason for that belief is that a Scottish author used the term “bite the dust” in another 1750 publication.