Empire and Innocence in the West

Question for Discussion: What does Limerick
mean when she argues that we should question
Westener's traditional stance as innocent victim?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 35-48,
52-54 ; Kittredge, "Overthrust Dreams" ;
Steiner, "What is the New West?" and "Turner: the Meaning of the West"

Video: Women in the West; Five Western Women

Maps of the New West

Limerick, The Anglo American West as Myth
(in-class)
John Gast, American Progress image (1872)
(in-class)
Explanatory Text used to market
American Progress Lithograph (in-class)
Gaylord Watson, "The Great West" (1881) (in-class)
Batchelder Promotes farming in the
Dakota Territory (in-class)
Solomon Butcher: Photographs of
Nebraska Homesteaders (in-class)
Limerick, Anglo Americans as Innocent Victims in the West (in-class)
Frederick Turner, The Meaning of the West (in-class)
(Note this is not Frederick Jackson Turner
of the Turner Thesis. He is a West Historian.)
Steiner, What is the New West? (in-class)
Kittredge, Overthrust Dreams (in-class)
History of the American West 1860-1920: Photographs
Paul Starr's Images of the American West
The Western motif of "innocent victim."
Was Narcissa Whitman victim or invader?
Were White's victims of Indians?
Were Indian's victims of White invaders?
Were Western settlers victims of a crowded
frontier?
Was the land the victim of Indian captivity?
Were White's the victims of the Federal
Government and the Indians?
Were women the innocent victims of men's
desires to settle in the West?
Who are the real victims and who are the
real exploiters?
Can you see that the motif of "innocence"
reduces the complexity of real lived
experience in the West?

Limerick, Empire of Innocence

The Anglo-American West as Myth

"Acknowledging the moral complexity of Western history does not require us to surrender the mythic power traditionally associated with the region's story. On the contrary, moral complexity provides the base for parables and tales of greater and deeper meaning." (54)

"Tribal people or nationalists, tellers of stories
or keepers of account books, humans live in a
world in which mental reality does not have to
submit to narrow tests of accuracy." (35)
Limerick

"The dominant motive for moving West was
improvement and opportunity, not injury to
others. Few white Americans went West
intending to ruin the natives and despoil the
continent." (36)
Limerick

"Narcissa Whitman was an intolerant invader.
If she was not a villain, neither was she an
innocent victim." (41)
Limerick

Anglo Americans as Innocent Victims
in the West

"Whether the target resource was gold,
farmland, or Indian souls, white Americans
went West convinced that their purposes
were as commonplace as they were
innocent." (41)
Limerick

"Misfortune has usually caused white
Westerners to cast themselves in the role
of innocent victim." (42)
Limerick

"By assigning responsibility elsewhere, one
eliminated the need to consider one's own
participation in courting misfortune." (47)
Limerick

"In the broad sweep of Western history, it
may look as if a united social unit called
"white people" swept Indians off their lands;
that group, as the history of prostitution
shows, was not a monolith at all but a
complex swirl of people as adept at preying
on each other as at preying on Indians." (51)
Limerick

"Male or female, white Westerners were both
sinned against and sinning. One person's
reward often meant another person's loss;
white opportunity meant Indian dispossesion.
Real Westerners, contrary to the old divisions
between good guys and bad guys, combined
the roles of victim and villain." (54)
Limerick .

By questioning the Westerner's traditional stance as innocent victim, we do not debunk Western history but enrich it. (54)

Kittredge, Overthrust Dreams

"It wasn't just gold that he never found--such instant boomer riches were to have been only the beginning. The ultimate reward for his searching was to have been the green and easy dreamland fields of some home place, the grape arbor beside the white house he would own clear and outright, where he could rest out his last serene years while the hordes of grandchildren played down across the lawns by the sod-banked pond where the tame ducks swam and fed and squawked in their happy, idiot way. The pastoral heaven on this earth--some particular secret and heart's desire version of it--has time and again proved to be the bottom line in American dreams."

"The beginning has always been characterized by careless haste in the expectation of landing in the chips, quick profit for the skillful and lucky, city planning generally non-existent or close to it, and residents willing to pay almost any price for whatever it was they wanted, from dentistry in the old days to cocaine in Evanston. The central theme is easy money, followed by large numbers of people, gambling, prostitution, sewage problems, and all the macho you could hope for--all combining to make law enforcement nearly impossible, all undermining respect for what have been called the civilized virtues of home, the arts, regular bathing, and literature."

"And the sociologists and journalists, the people like me, come to view the rush of vitality and rich-kid chaos as if it were theater, another episode in the Wild West Extravaganza. Out along the frozen-over ranchland meadows along Bear River north of Evanston, I rode a creaking hay wagon with a man who had been born in the house where he lived. "The sons a bitches," he said. "I got some of their lease money, and I like it fine .. and you think you shouldn't stand in the way, with gas the price it is.

"But goddamn," he said. "That was country I knew, each and every rise and fall of it, and now she is roads and derricks and a lost cause. The only pretty thing about it is those towers out there at night, lighted up like Christmas trees."

Steiner, What is the New West?

"The American West has always been our dream of freedom. It is still the land of that dream.

From the beginning of our history men and women from the East did not go West to conquer the continent and advance Manifest Destiny, or to Christianize the Indians and civilize the wilderness. The pioneers went West, as old Daniel Boone simply said, "to be free." In the past, as in the present, the dream of freedom did not always become the reality, but the reality did become the dream, and, thanks to this legacy of the Old West, the New West may not be quite what it seems." (198)

"The politics of the New West is confusing to the politicians themselves. It is not clearly defined or understood--even by them. It is a new phenomenon. But it has its roots deep in American history, going back to the democratic philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, the backwoods politics of Andrew Jackson, the frontier beliefs of Abraham Lincoln, the agrarian populism of the Old West, and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt."

"One thing is certain. The politics of the New West has touched the dreams and hopes of the American people in ways that no one could have predicted just a few years ago.

"And so, the origins of the New West and its politics should be explored sympathetically as well as critically. Where did it come from? Why has it arisen at this time? What are its human dimensions? Who are its spokesmen and women? What is its history? What is its future?

To me there is no better way to do this than to go directly to the people involved, the new Westerners, and let them speak for themselves."

Turner, The Meaning of the West
(This is from an interview with Stan Steiner)

Steiner: "One of Thoreau's spiritual descendants is Frederick Turner. But, unlike the sage of Walden Pond, Turner has traveled West through myth and the reality of fast-food restaurants and gas stations into the world of the modern emigrants who have been cast out of Eden into Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For all that, and despite his sorrow as a cultural historian of the American West, he has not lost his faith in the grandeur and wonder of our land.

Fittingly perhaps, Turner now lives at the end of the old Santa Fe Trail. He does not drive a pickup truck and he does not wear cowboy boots. He cherishes the West in his heart."

Frederick Turner:

"The meaning of America still resides, somehow, in the West. From the beginning it is clear that the spaces west of where you are always seem to contain the essence of America."

"It seems to me that the West has always been something that receded before Americans--that wherever they were, that was the West, that was the frontier. Beyond that was a kind of future that receded before them as they hacked and cut and blasted their way westward. "

"From the origins of our Republic there has been the notion that the West contained whatever America really was. And essentially that seemed to be a kind of freedom, a kind of expansiveness of space. It may well be that the West does contain the essence of what America is. But I am not sure that the realities of Western life have justified those hopes and that dream."

"And yet in some ways, rugged individualism is an historical lie. From the beginning of settlement the pioneers expected government help and they got it."

"The settlers of the West didn't come into an empty land, they didn't make that land, they didn't originate it. They came into a land that was peopled. And they took that land from the Indians and Mexicans and they could only have taken it with government help. And I mean
government help as in military assistance."

"So we drop out of the box of memory those things that made rugged individualism possible. And we forget the people on whose backs the prosperity of the West has been built. I am speaking of the Indians and Mexicans. That's something that the rugged individualism of the West often chooses to ignore."

"The time has come for a Western ethic to emerge. Not out of the social programs. Not out of the academies. But out of the West and Westerners, out of a truer sense of the people and places that are already here."