bite the dust: be wounded or die in action; be defeated
Although bite the dust conjures up old-fashioned westerns to most Americans, the imagery is actually much older. The phrase first appears in Homer's Iliad, translated in various ways such as eat the dust and bite the bloody sand. William Cullen Bryant's 1870 translation of this epic poem contains the exact phrase: "May his fellow warriors . . . Fall round him to earth, and bite the dust." However, bite the dust appears even earlier in an 1846 report on the war with Mexico titled Our Army on the Rio Grande. Describing a con man who makes a living by selling a broken-down old nag, stealing it from the customer, and reselling it elsewhere, the author predicts that one day the man will be caught. "When he is found out," the author writes, "his days will be numbered and his father's son will bite the dust."
Bite the dust became widespread as a figure of speech with the 1860 advent of cheap paperback novels called dime westerns. Dime westerns were the nineteenth-century version of popular television shows. Series with titles like Wild West Stories boasted millions of fans who followed the main characters' adventures devotedly. These tales often featured gunslingers and other villains, including highly stereotyped Native Americans, who challenged the hero and inevitably bit the dust. By the 1870s, the expression was being used to indicate any kind of failure. Baseball teams, hapless CEOs, unpopular television shows, poorly selling CDs—just about any entity can bite the dust these days.