How the West Was Unsettled : IT’S YOUR MISFORTUNE AND NONE OF MY OWN: A New History of the American West, <i> By Richard White (University of Oklahoma Press: $34.95; 634 pp.)</i>

Richard White, McClelland Professor of history at the University of Washington, is one of the “new historians” who have come of age since the end of the Vietnam War, a group of younger academicians who have been arguing for a conceptual change in the way in which the American West has been portrayed for nearly a century in standard texts by Frederick Jackson Turner and his descendants.

The traditional take on the American West, say the new historians, has been a romanticized and ethnocentric picture of America’s trans-Mississippi expansion--an epic tale of heroic white males in white hats conquering ignoble savages, taming the land and bringing civilization to an arid wilderness. It is a literary representation of old myths about hearty pioneers, backwoods cunning, rugged individualism and manifest destiny that has little to do with reality, but has been bolstered by pop-fiction writers like Zane Grey, Max Brand and Louis L’Amour, and by every Hollywood shoot-’em-up from “Red River” to “Lonesome Dove.”

Not only is this picture considered sexist, racist and nationalistic, it is morally suspect. In its glorification of violence it becomes a justification, by implication, of genocide against the American Indian; of the oppression of Hispanics, Asians, French Canadians and women; and of massive environmental destruction. These acts become regrettable--but unavoidable--transgressions committed by people in the business of fabricating the greatest nation on Earth.

Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own” is a massive overview of Euro-American expansion from the 16th Century to the present, an overview that attempts, among other things, to recharacterize the ways in which the land beyond the 100th meridian was shaped by repeated waves of migration--and in turn shaped the migrants themselves. White rejects Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis concerning the significance of the frontier in American history, i.e. that American development and American character can largely be explained by the Westward movement of white settlement along a continuously receding line between “savagery and civilization.” In fact, White rejects the idea of “frontier” altogether, devoting the first part of his book to a summary of Indian and Spanish civilization that long antedated Euro-American expansion in the West. As his narrative clearly demonstrates, Turner’s thesis was indeed nationalistic: “The West was a wilderness to Anglo Americans,” White points out, “only because they defined it as such.” To those who had been occupying (and transforming) it for centuries before the white man arrived, it was completely familiar.

But the larger purpose of “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own” is the development of White’s own thesis that a continual competition for control of the land itself by successive groups of people (all of them dependent upon and sustained by the federal government) was the primary circumstance that makes the Old West a distinct historical region, and still defines the modern West.

It was a process that had its ennobling moments, but none without enormous social and ecological costs. Jefferson’s vision of a land of independent yeomen tilling the soil to provide for their families was fast obliterated by what another of the new historians, Patricia Limerick, has called the “boom and bust instability of capitalism.” Revisionist history of the American West, then, is as much a story of exploitation as accomplishment: exploitation of minorities in a fight for cultural dominance, exploitation of little farmers by a federally subsidized agribusiness, exploitation of a poor and unrepresented labor force.

New Western historians see it as a moral imperative that scholarship make clear distinctions between the “real” West and the imagined or mythic West, and that it illustrate the costs of empire building in terms of human lives and environmental health. They are inclined to chronicle the downside--inefficiency, failure, corruption, violence, ecological disaster, personal tragedy--in order to balance more jovial judgments about democracy, growth, progress, prosperity, adaptability and innovation that they feel inspires the work of their predecessors.

The question (and it has been asked by others) is whether these doom-and-gloom disclosures are really all that revisionist--if they are, in fact, new at all. That the American West wasn’t made up of Anglo-Saxon males, that women and minorities suffered there as elsewhere, that heroes are often little more than romanticized killers, that progress and development are frequently synonymous with environmental rape, that life isn’t fair, is perhaps a little obvious to readers familiar with the discourse of many of the of historians (C. Vann Woodward, Howard Lamar, Gerald Nash, Paul Horgan, William Goetzmann, Earl Pomeroy) and with the work of non-horse-opera Western writers such as Mary Austin, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Wallace Stegner, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko, Rudolfo Anaya. And poor old Frederick Jackson Turner has been taking his licks now for several generations’ worth of historians.

The message that the West was replete with villains and villainy, no doubt, bears repeating. The ways in which it has been mythologized and continuously reimagined is worth repeated documentation. And it would be unfair to suggest that Richard White makes any claims for his work in regard to unexplored historiography. On the contrary, without delivering a revisionist manifesto, he has produced an exhaustively researched and near encyclopedic excursion into our Western past, and he pulls together an enormous amount of information about the social and political forces that shaped--and continue to shape--the most compelling region of our nation.