The West in American History

Question for Discussion: What do Wilkinson, Cronon,
Steiner, Robbins, and Travis mean when they argue
that the West is both a real place and yet at the same time a place of dreams and stories?

Reading: Wilkinson, "Defining the West"; Cronon, "Becoming West"; Steiner, "Many Wests and Western Regionalism" ; Robbins, "Introduction" ;
Travis, "A Region Defined" ; Milner, "American Only
More So"

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the readings is "westsap".

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Film:The Way West: Introduction

Where is the American West?

Why Study the American West? (in-class)
What is the West in American Culture? (in-class)
Visions of the Frontier in American Culture (in-class)
The New West versus the Old West (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Vision of the West (in-class)
Milner, "American Only More So" (in-class)
The West as Myth and Dream (in-class)
Charles Wilkinson, "Defining the West"
William Travis, "A Region Defined"
Cronon, "Becoming West"
Steiner, "Many Wests and Western Regionalism"
Jim Robbins, "Introduction to Last Refuge "
Historians' Geographical Definitions of the West
For Limerick, Four Words Explain the West (in-class)
Limerick's List of Characteristics of the West
(in-class)
American Indian Tribes, 1600 (in-class)
Map of Indian Reservations, 2000 (in-class)
Boundaries of the Contiguous United States
State Map of the 20th Century American West
(in-class)
Robert Athearn's West
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
Topographic Map of the American East (in-class)
Topographic Map of the American West today
(in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West (in-class)
Percent of Government Land in the West
by State (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
The Earth at Night (2000)
The West from Space at Night (in-class)
Map of Different sub-regions in the West
The Real or Unambiguous West (in-class)
The Marginal or Interior West
Nugent Map of Historian's West (in-class)
Nugent Map of Western Writers' West
National Atlas Mapmaker
Paul Starr's Images of the American West

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Maps of the New West
National Atlas MapMaker
World Map, 1997
Map of Indian Reservations today
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Population per Square Mile in the West
The West from Space at Night
Percentage of Western state land
owned by the the U.S. Government
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Annual Rainfall in the West

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Satellite Maps of the U.S.

MSN Virutal Earth
Google Earth
Google Maps Mania
Globe Explorer.com
National Atlas.gov

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What is the West in American Culture?

T he West as the Home of Indian Peoples

The West as unsettled Wilderness

The West as Spain

The West as Mexico

The West as the United States

The West as a "Garden of the World"

The West as the "Great American Desert"

The West as Frontier

The West as "Safety Valve"

The West as "the Wild West"

The West as Freedom from Society and the Past

The West as "Free Land"

The West as under-Developed Region

The West as a "proces " of Frontier Settlement

The West a a Place to make your Fortune.

The West as vast, empty Wasteland

The West as Property of the Federal Government

The West as "Borderlands" for diverse peoples

The West as a distinct region in the United States

The West as wide-open Spaces

The West as a Pristine Environment

The West as untapped Natural Resources

The West as Tourist and Nature Preserve

The West as a Place that represents America

The West as crowded, Urban Centers

The West as vast Rural Wasteland

The West as Small Towns and Communities

The West of Farmers, Ranchers, Miners, and
Loggers

The West as a Nuclear and Military Waste Dump

The West as California

The West as Arid Land

The West as our Home for the future
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Visions of the Frontier in American
Culture

Wild West Show Posters (in-class)
The Marlboro Myth (in-class)
The Marlboro Man and Freedom
Images of the Ford Explorer (in-class)
Images of the Ford Escape (in-class)
American Progress by John Gast (1872) (in-class)
Explanatory Text used to Market American Progress
Modern version of American Progress
Manifest Destiny Exhibit
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier" (1893)

Cheap PDF editors

Turner's Frontier Vision of the West (1893)

Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History":

In a recent bulletin of the superintendent of the census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly he said to be a frontier line. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life, and shape them to meet changing conditions. Now, the peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.

..... . Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.

What is the frontier? It is not the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about it is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purpose does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area" of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.

... Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. "

The West as Myth and Dream

"The Modern regional West has become the repository for a national frontier past. In this sense, the history of the frontier has never ended but continues to this day as a key element in the mythology and ideology of American nationalism."
William Cronon, "Becoming West"

"Often a dream, sometimes a metaphor, the American West is a place that millions of people can visualize. Certain landscapes of mountain and desert are instantly recognizable. So are certain residents, if they ride horses and wear broad hats or feathered headbands. In these nearly universal images, the West seems grandly conceived and easily explained. It is the West that serves as popular myth and national symbol."
Clyde Milner, "America, Only More So"

"The question still lingered: where or what was
the American West: Was the West primarily an idea
floating from place to place according to time and
imagination? Was the West a disparate collection of
pieces and parts, localities and areas with little in
common?....Was the West really a definable
region?"

Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil (p. 23)

"Even though some Western landscapes practice
a trickster's habit of presenting themselves to
newcomers as if they were fresh, untouched,
vacant spaces, nonetheless, stories have become
quite literally something in the Western soil...Of
course, the West has had a very full life as an
abstraction, an ideal, and a dream. And yet the
West is also actual, material, and substantial--
'something in the soil,' a set of actual places now
holding layer upon layer of memory."

Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil (pp. 13 and 28)

"But not just the West of geography. It was also
the West of the mind, of the spirit, a concept that
for generations had reassured Americans of a
future, a place to go, even though most of them
would not choose to move. Somewhere out there
in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean lay a
depository of unending resources, imperfectly
described or understood...that often was one
more of imagery than of substance, yet dreamers
thought of it as being real."

Robert Athearn, The Mythic West in 20th-Century
America (p. 10)

The New West vs. The Old West

The New West: Recreation, Tourism, Wilderness,
Retirement, and Preservation

The Old West: Logging, Mining, Ranching, Oil and
Gas Drilling, and Development

For Limerick, there are four words to explain the American West:

Continuity, Convergence, Conquest, and
Complexity:

Continuity: The American West has a continuous
past that even today moves into the present and
future. The American West as "closed" or at "the
end of the frontier" is simply incorrect. As a place,
the American West has a long and storied past that
still help shapes present life in the West.

Convergence: The American West is a meeting
place of diverse peoples. It is a place where people
converge together from all over the world.

Conquest: The American West is a place that has
undergone conquest. White, European Americans
settled in and displaced the Indian, Spanish, and
Mexican peoples.

Complexity: The American West is a place of moral
complexity. It is not a place of innocence and
goodness.

"The deeply frustrating lesson of history in the
American West and elsewhere is this: human
beings can be a mess--contentious, conflict loving,
petty, vindictive, and cruel--and human beings can
manifest grace, dignity, compassion, and understanding"

Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil (p. 21)

For Limerick, the West is a place that
can be characterized by certain common characterists:

1. The West is prone to aridity and semi-aridity.

2. The West contains many Indian reservations
and many visible, unvanished Indian people.

3. The West shares a border with Mexico, and
has been the entry point for Mexican immigrants.

4. The West provides a gateway to Asia and the
Asian-Pacific rim.

5. The West contains the bulk of the land still
under federal control.

6. The West is a laboratory demonstrating the
impact of conquest on the United States.

7. The West has a long history of boom/bust
economies of extractive industries such as mining,
logging, ranching, oil and gas drilling, and commercial
farming.

8. The West has a long history of "commercial,
intentional mythologizing of the West as a place
of romantic escape and adventure."

9. The West has been the United States' dumping
ground for difficult peoples, toxic wastes, and
nuclear materials.

10. The West to this day still demonstrates and
displays the ongoing legacy of conquest in
everyday American life.

Milner, "American Only More So"

"Often a dream, sometimes a metaphor, the American West is a place that millions of people can visualize. Certain landscapes of mountain and desert are instantly recognizable. So are certain residents, if they ride horses and wear broad hats or feathered headbands. In these nearly universal images, the West seems grandly conceived and easily explained. It is the West that serves as popular myth and national symbol."(1)

"This volume will view the American West primarily as a distinct place whose historical interpretation follows no one master narrative and no single factor of plot. Instead many narratives, themes, and ideas, like the many peoples of the region, are brought together. In other words, the large and complex story of the West stretches across a shared historical terrain. It is a terrain containing many discrete locations, separate voices, and diverse ideas." (2)

"The American West is an idea that became a place. This transformation did not occur quickly. The idea developed from distinctly European origins into an American nationalistic conception. The western edge of several European empires, especially the British, moved into the hinterlands of North America. The United States inherited this westward edginess and made it the main directional thrust of its own empire. Once across the Mississippi, these American lands did not fill up with a steady progression of settlers. Overlanders and gold seekers pushed ahead to Oregon and California. The mountains, plains, and deserts would be filled in later, if at all. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States laid claim to more and more of its West, culminating in 1898 with the annexation of Hawaii." (3)

Wilkinson, "Defining the West"

"The American West and its distinctive regional institutions are shaped by the combination of several characteristics of climate, terrain, and political geography. Wallace Stegner, whom I count as the wisest observer of this region, said that the two most influential factors of society in the West are its aridity and its high concentration of federal public lands. Western water, or the lack of it, has determined agricultural, ranch, and mineral development; built financial empires; propelled and limited municipal growth patterns; and inspired recreationists, poets, and citizens of all stripes who are drawn to the rivers, streams, creeks, and rivulets coursing down the steep pitches of western canyons. The public lands matter because of their abundance (they constitute about 50 percent of all land in the eleven western states and nearly 90 percent of Alaska land), their economic value, their intrinsic tendency to create a pattern of dispersed population, and their extraordinary stores of wildlife and beauty."

"The aridity, the federal public lands, the Indian lands, the mountains, the deserts, and the plains combine to create another influence on western society: open space. Population is moving west but, in a sense, the region is not filling up. The people are settling in the cities, not in the hinterlands--the American West has a higher percentage of its population, approximately 83 percent, residing in metropolitan areas than does any other region. To be sure, the empty quarter is feeling the press of growth, but the awesome space persists. Its tomorrows will be a focal point of the West's law and policy."

"The principles constituting the Law of the American West often seem disconnected and arbitrary if they are studied in a vacuum. These characteristics are particularly noticeable in connection with a phenomenon that pervades policy and law in the West--the dominance of nineteenth-century laws that seem outmoded by today's lights. Some of these laws (water, mining, grazing, and Indian law are perhaps the best examples) may seem outmoded but they are not arbitrary: they arose for good reason out of specific, compelling circumstances. Two leading examples of laissez-faire programs developed to meet the needs of the nineteenth-century West are the prior appropriation doctrine in water law (the "first in time, first in right" rule, allowing water developers a near-unfettered prerogative to divert and dam rivers and granting water users a permanent, vested property right) and the Hardrock Mining Law of 1872 (granting to hardrock miners the right to enter the public domain and, upon discovery of a valuable deposit, to obtain a vested right in the minerals and the overlying 20 acres of land, without payment of any royalty to the United States)."

"An appreciation of the fullness of the region will help create a better society in the West. We need to improve our ability to assess the multifaceted effects of most development decisions (whether the decision is to develop or not to develop) on a wide range of economies, communities, cultures, land forms, water-courses, animals, and intangible values such as beauty and open space. Thus, ultimately, I hope that my groupings will play some role in demonstrating the many legitimate concerns, human and natural, that ought to be given dignity in order to build principled, integrated policy approaches in the American West. To this end, the impressive body of western writing created during the past few decades has made great strides toward identifying the region's constituent parts and their relationship to each other, toward creating a consciousness of the American West as a distinctive place."

Cronon, "Becoming West"

"No other phase of U.S. history--with the possible exceptions of the Revolution and the Civil War-- was more beloved by Americans. Professional historians belonging to Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier
school" were nearly unanimous in arguing that "the westward movemen" had given Americans their democratic values and their special character as a people. Although a few critics complained that the Turner school made too much of the frontier experience, they were a distinct minority. Most Americans--historians and lay people alike--agreed that one could not hope to understand the United States if one overlooked its frontier, its western past." (3)

"The West of the popular imagination, unlike the West of the scholars, is an almost timeless sort of place. At some point in our lives, often when we were very young, we came to know it as a landscape peopled with brave men and women, unforgettable pioneer heroes who helped build the nation. We know some of them by name and can tell their stories by heart: Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson, George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody. Others are anonymous, yet we know their stories just as well."
(4-5)

"If the presidency of Ronald Reagan taught us nothing else, it surely affirmed the continuing power of western symbolism to express the identity and vision of ordinary Americans. The historians might be writing fewer books about it, and Hollywood might even be filming fewer movies beneath its dry hillsides, but the West as a landscape of dream and desire is very much alive."

"Why this should be so remains one of the most intriguing problems of western history. The modern regional West has become the repository for a national frontier past. In this sense, the history of the frontier has never ended but continues to this day as a key element in the mythology and ideology of American nationalism. For good or for bad, the frontier is where many Americans continue to locate a central core of their identity. The meaning of heroism, the relation of the individual to family and community, the nature of patriotism, the value of freedom, the challenge of making a home: however abstractly we state these things, it takes but an instant to think of frontier icons that express them."

"The West, then, is many things, and one cannot define away its complexities by fiat. This is where Turner's critics went awry. The problem they thought they saw in his definition of western history was, in fact, the central problem of that history. The West may be the region lying somewhere beyond the Mississippi River, but it is also the experience of going there." (25)

"And because the experience of ceasing to be west has happened everywhere, even in the West itself, the icons of the western frontier express the common history not of a particular region but of America itself. Whether we begin with the myths, the history, the region, or the frontier, sooner or later we find ourselves wandering through all of them because together they are where we came from." (27)

Steiner, "Many Wests and Western Regionalism"

"This revisionist approach, historian Elliott West notes, has produced a "longer, grimmer, but more interesting story."30 Longer, because the frontier framework that brought western history to a close with the end of the nineteenth century has been largely abandoned in favor of one that addresses developments in the twentieth-century West and emphasizes continuity between the western past and present. Grimmer, because the dark underside of the western past--featuring environmental despoliation and oppression of peoples of color, women, and the laboring classes--has been placed more squarely under the scholarly microscope than was the case when frontier triumphalism constituted the thematic framework for western history. 31 And more interesting because, as leading revisionist Patricia Nelson Limerick has pointed out, the intention of the New Western History is "to make clear that in western American history, heroism and villainy, virtue and vice, and nobility and shoddiness appear in roughly the same proportions as they appear in any other subject of human history."32 Historical interpretation is intrinsically more interesting and more credible when stories of tragedy and triumph--and the myriad shades of gray that lie between--occupy the same stage . "33

" De-emphasizing the frontier process and focusing on the West as a definable place marked by certain characteristics--such as aridity, conquest, Native Americans, racial and ethnic diversity, and boom-bust economic cycles--has amounted to a double-edged sword for western historians. On one level, it has bolstered the West's regional identity by applying to it characteristics that move beyond frontier-centered notions of the area as the final stage in a heroic process of Euro-American settlement."

"To fully appreciate the many Wests within the larger West, we must move beyond both the mythic West of the frontier paradigm and the geographically bounded West of recent revisionism. We have to venture beyond the sweeping generalities to see the various sub-regional realities that make up the broader West. The theoretical debates that have driven the field--most obviously, the issue of whether "frontier" or "region" provides the more appropriate operational paradigm for western history--have helped western historians become very effective at defining the metaphorical forest, but a little reluctant to recognize its constituent trees."

Jim Robbins, "Introduction to Last Refuge "

"The American West is fast leaving an era when nature was the great variable. The primary components of the Old West, logging and mining and agriculture, constitute the West in which nature was battled and forced to give up a living. Sometimes it didn't work that way. A storm or a fire or a cold snap wiped it all out. Or lives were lost.

Those occupations are fading in the West, and instead people who work in the cities and towns have the choice of going out into nature or staying home. Nature is important, but not largely an integral part of existence anymore. Fewer people have to battle nature for their living. Or fear it. This new view of nature is the view from the New West, the urban West, the West of tourism and adventure and national parks. The new view is a luxury and it is dramatically changing the way people relate to the landscape."

"Now a protracted land war is being fought over these millions of acres of public domain. Last Refuge is about the battle between New West and Old, about two different ways of seeing the world, and about a new kind of vision that seeks a middle ground that might preserve the best of both."

"There's more to the comparison than just the physical. Yellowstone, like the West, holds a unique place in contemporary American mythology. The western myths, many of the stories America holds dear, dwell in the mountains and the plains. The West is a "vision shed," a place where mystery and adventure and beauty are stored like the water the mountains harbor."

"A definition of "the West" is in order. In a broad sense the West is often defined as that part of the United States west of the hundredth meridian, where the amount of rainfall is considerably less than that to the east and where behavior changes dramatically by dint of a parched landscape. The West of this book is somewhat smaller. It is primarily about those states where the Rocky Mountains are: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Oregon, Washington and California are included because of their substantial acreage of public lands, though growing numbers of people and development, in my opinion, have drastically changed their western character."

Travis, "A Region Defined"

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1775 (in-class)

"The West keeps moving around in time and space. At moments in American history it was everything beyond the Alleghenies, then all lands west of the Mississippi, and, finally, a coastal West of dynamic Pacific cities. It is also a congery of subregional stories: the challenge and tragedy of farming the Great Plains, exploration of the Rocky Mountains and Colorado Plateau, dynamic tension among Natives, Hispanics, and Anglos in the Southwest, and creation of distinctive, cosmopolitan cities like Los Angeles and many Seattle, that anchor America's quadrant of the Pacific Rim."

"Mining, logging, and ranching--long the defining Western land uses--still mark the West, but the extractive economy now trails the so-called "services" sector, everything from hamburger flippers to telecommuting professionals now settling into Western places. Lifestyle refugees pour in from other states, building mountainside homes near trout streams and ski runs."

"In a sort of topographic psychoanalysis, American affection for imposing Western landscapes--expressed in paintings, film, National parks, and the vacation--is a form of cultural monument envy, a continental inferiority
complex born of the nation's lack of the trappings of European culture (cathedrals, grand estates, monumental government buildings); European immigrants could not reinvent, nor readily transfer, the place-rooted culture of their home countries, but they could, especially in the West, revel in landscape drama of wilderness and ruggedness."

"The thinly vegetated West reveals its geology to all who will see. The place is more mountainous, convoluted, and incised than any other American region except Alaska. Between the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains lies the nation's sharpest topographic boundary. In many places from Montana to New Mexico one may stand at the mountain front with one foot in the Plains and one in the Rockies. To the east a vast plain stretches to the Mississippi; to the West lie range after range of mountains, deep canyons, and searing deserts. The Rockies on the east and Sierra Nevada on the west- create the. Great Basin, the nation's largest area lacking a drainage outlet to the sea."