The Wild West

The Historiography of the American West

As you read the following historiography, especially if you have been working through the webpages in this unit, I defy you not to be interested as you keep seeing ideas which are familiar to you, and where you will say: “Ah!  That’s where that idea came from!”

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THE FRONTIER THEORY

When people started to think about the history of the American West at the end of the 19th century, historians turned to a man named Frederick Jackson Turner and his ‘Frontier Theory’.  This theory posited that there was an identifiable-if-invisible geographical borderline between the ‘civilised’ east and the ‘wild’ West, and that the history of the century was about the latter being civilised by the former.  That process, argued Turner and his successors, shaped the nation of America – the east as well as the West.  His concept was dynamic, with an ever-moving frontier and an ever-diminishing West until 1890, said Turner, when the West was won and the history of the ‘wild West’ came to an end. 

This theory was so persuasive, so popular and – let’s face it – so obvious, that you can still see traces of it in academic books of the 1970s (and in the textbooks of today). 

If historians fell in love with Turner, however, ordinary people, by contrast, preferred The Winning of the West (1889) by a politician – Theodore Roosevelt – who would eventually become President.  Roosevelt’s story was the same as Turner’s, but he told it in words people wanted to hear:

“It was our manifest destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us. 

“Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conflict, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won.  It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. 

“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages… it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”

Histories of the time portrayed the ‘winning of the West’ as a tale of American exceptionalism and individual heroism, a wonderful conquest accomplished by ordinary-but-superior American men who tamed the brutal environment and defeated a savage and treacherous foe. 

It was a theme devoured by the masses in the popular ‘dime novels’ of the time.  The hero – sometimes a known hero such as Davy Crockett or Buffalo Bill, sometimes a gunslinger or an outlaw – thwarted treacherous ‘Indians’ and lazy Mexicans, always saving the day (and the women-in-distress) in a wild West of ranching, and saloon-brawls, against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains, barren deserts or wide-open plains. 

In the years after 1890, popular fascination with ‘all-things-Indian’ grew exponentially in America, and unemployed cowboys and displaced Indigenous warriors cooperated to make a living from ‘Wild West Shows’ that ‘re-enacted’ moments from history such as an attack on a wagon-train, or Custer’s Last Stand.  ‘Indian tourism’ began in the southwestern reservations, and Indigenous women would weave baskets and ‘authentic’ beaded belts for sale. 

So this stereotypical interpretation of a ‘wild West’ became the dominant image – tirelessly repeated: in Frederick Remington paintings, Zane Grey novels, Roy Rogers songs, John Wayne films, TV series like Bonanza, and innumerable children’s comics (and even children’s ‘cowboys and Indians’ games) – well into the 1970s.  You can still buy “hand-crafted Native American beaded belts” for eye-watering sums on the internet. 

It is like Harold and the arrow-in-the-eye; no matter how many historians tell you that it’s all an ahistorical myth, when anyone mentions it, that is the image that flashes into your mind. 

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1920s-1960s

Historian Richard Etulain has pointed out that – however static was the popular interpretation of the American West – genuine historical research continued, and continued to make advances in the period 1920-1960. 

The first development was what Etulain calls regionalism, and what Turner (who himself was refining his theory) called ‘sectionalism’ – ie the development of local studies. 

In 1931 Walter Prescott Webb focussed on The Great Plains; his theory was that, coming into a new environment, ingenious cowboys and settlers develop new tools (such as the six-shooter, barbed wire, windmills, cowboy skills) to deal with the new situation they encountered.  This, Webb argued, was the real history of the Plains.  Another historian saw a cross-border regional unity in the former-Spanish colonies of the southern USA and northern Mexico.  Regional historical magazines emerged celebrating areas such as the Prairies, the SouthWest and New Mexico. 

A second development was Henry Nash Smith’s 1950 book Virgin Land, in which he demonstrated how 19th century myths (such as the role of the hero figure, and the idea that the West was ‘the garden of the world’) had not been discarded, but had instead grown into symbols of ‘The West’ – ie that the history of the West was an evolved myth. 

The third contributor Etulain mentions is Earl Pomeroy who, likewise, tried to get historians to move away from the ‘rough and radical’ approach to the history of the West, “to avoid all the romanticism, even sensationalism of Indian conflict, cowboys, and chase”, and to realise that there was much more continuity and less change than had hitherto been realised – for example, the key issue with Western agriculture was not the changes, but the fact that it was all based on the eastern idea of ‘the homestead’ (and that was why it failed in the 1930s). 

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THE NEW WESTERN HISTORY

Etulain touts Patricia Nelson Limerick as “the forerunner of a new development in historical writing, but it had been developing since the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War had taught a generation of young scholars to question. 

In 1973, Gerald Nash had labelled America’s West “a colony”.  Donald Worster (1979) highlighted the contribution of Western farming techniques to the 1930s environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl.  Paul Prucha (1984) detailed the harmful impact of government policy on the Indigenous Peoples.  Other studies focussed on the role and experience of Chicanos and African Americans.  Glenda Riley advocated the need to pursue feminist studies of the West. 

A turning point was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), a heart-rending account of the defeat of the Indigenous tribes.  Coinciding with a new awareness of ethnic diversity and civil rights, people began to portray the Indigenous Peoples as deeply-wronged victims.  The 1970 film Soldier Blue, focussing at the start on a gentle and amusing romance between Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss, exploded into an explicit and traumatic portrayal of the Sand Creek Massacre; nobody who watched it was ever the same again.  The occupation of the Wounded Knee Trading Post in 1973 by the American Indian Movement drew attention to the continuing abuse of the Indigenous Nations.  People began to feel sorry for the Indigenous tribes and, from the 1990s, historians have accused the US of ethnic cleansing/genocide … a very different picture to Roosevelt’s triumphalism.  In 2008, Karl Joacoby was uncompromising:

“The true magnitude of the violent encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of North America remains unacknowledged even today – at once the most familiar and overlooked subject in American history.”

Historians also began to watch their language – to avoid terms like ‘squaw’, ‘totem pole’ and ‘medicine man’, to use terms like ‘Native Americans and ‘Indigenous Nations’, and to refer where possible to the specific tribe. 

So, when Limerick published Legacy of Conquest (1987), her work was summative as much as groundbreaking.  The New Western History, she told Etulain, differed from earlier histories in that it was not national or racist, paternalistic or monocultural; and it recognised that here was a dark side to the period – its villainy, vice, greed, maltreatment of the Indigenous population, and exploitation of natural resources.  It did not see the American West as a moving frontier, and the period did not end at 1890 – its legacy stretched far into the 20th century. 

This reworking leaked into modern culture.  ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ demythologised the wild West hero, and a string of Clint Eastwood films highlighted the violence and corruption of the times; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) showed ‘baddies’ as amiable and anything but fearless; Dances with Wolves (1991) showed white Americans as immoral killers destroying the buffalo.  In 1991, also, the Smithsonian mounted a Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier exhibition, showing how artists of the American West had revised their interpretations to fit in with an expansionist ideology (although it provoked outrage, and demands in Congress for the Museum to be defunded). 

By 2008, Paul Christesen could summarise:

“The ‘Wild West’ evaporated … to become an ideological trope, a fantasized place where America's final shape was wrested away from an arid, jaggedly mountainous terrain to be reborn in guidebooks, photography, calendars, movies, and travel brochures.  Mirages, illusory histories, and a continuous unfolding of an inadequate version of events piled up…”

Jordana Finnegan (2008) quotes from Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian:

“It is a vanished world.  No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring it to you now”

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INTO THE 21st CENTURY

So, having totally disposed of the traditional stereotype, what remains of the historiography of the West?  Where do we go from here? 

One of the most valuable features of the New Western History was the focus on local studies, rather than monumental syntheses.  These have made us aware of the massive complexity and diversity of different histories across an area half the size of Europe.  Neil Campbell (2000) commented that the New Western narrative is therefore:

“not a unified and totalizing story but one in which many voices speak, many, often contradictory, histories are told, and many ideologies cross, coexist, and collide.”

There are many Wests, and each has their own different history. 

Building on this idea, Jordana Finnegan (2008) suggested a string of interesting and overlapping interpretations.  She evokedthe idea of history as a palimpsest – a document that is erased and over-written – in which she saw not just white Americans over-running the West, but also “the dominant culture’s historical suppression of indigenous histories”, not least in portraying the Indigenous peoples as primitive and uncivilised and declaring the American West “free” for the taking.  She proposed the story of the times as an outworking of the uneven power relationship between the Native people and the US government.  And she touched on the idea of the West as an American colony … not just created as a colony, but also held back and “politically underpowered” because of that unequal relationship with the centre. 

Another aspect of this modern complexity is Intersectionality.  Finnegan’s book integrated history with literary studies, but there are many more intersections to explore – where region crosses with national, for example, but also at the intersections of feminist, ethnic, cultural, environmental, emotional and a whole host of other ‘histories’ of the West. 

One of my recurrent themes, as you will know, is that we have to give oppressed peoples ‘agency’ – they are not just victims, and we need to see them realistically as ‘whole people’, capable of good and bad, trying to live as best they can in the situation in which they find themselves.  As Stephen Aron (2016) comments

“Rescuing indigenous people from the condescension of New Age romanticism that turns them into ever peaceful, perfect ecologists, newer histories have shown how Indians not only resisted European colonialism, but also in some parts of North America carried out their own expansions.

“The best of these newer Western histories detail as well how prolonged interactions resulted in ethnic crossings as well as ethnic cleansings.  Most visibly, this intercourse produced mixed-race offspring, but historians have also tracked a wide range of exchanges that led to a blending of cultures.”

Aron has also (2015) explored the way US policies in the American West informed Nazi policies in Europe, as well as what he calls the Indigenous Peoples’ “love-hate relationship” with the US government. 

Finally, taking a global approach, CP Kakel has proposed A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on the history of the American West (2019).  Commenting:

“American history is best understood as the story of a supplanting society, a society intent on a land grab of Indigenous space and driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants”

he builds on the idea of settler ‘colonialism’ as a key to situating the American experience in a broader global context, where the American absorption of the continental West is just another example of the global imperialism that was going on across the world (not least the US appropriation of the Philippines), and he compares the ideologies underpinning such expansion ... particularly the ideas of racial superiority which were used to justify the marginalization of indigenous peoples.