Western History, Every Which Way :...

“Nightly dissipation did not slow down the workers who, by the spring of 1868, realized they were not mere laborers on a railroad but participants in the greatest race in history. The Central Pacific was winging across the level deserts of Nevada. The Union Pacific was battling through South Pass.”

--Ray Allen Billington “Westward Expansion,” 1960

“A family story lies at the heart of American western history.”

--Kathleen Neils Conzen “The Oxford History of the American West,” 1994

Down the canyons of time here in the West, something like a Tolstoyan echo is ringing these days: Happy history is all alike, while every unhappy history is unhappy in its own way.

For the past five or so years, headline writers have not been able to resist telling us with terms such as showdown and shootout and other macho bull roar that, lo, the “old” frontier history and the “new” western history are in conflict. In a lot of ways, they are: consider the quotes above, one oldfangledly exuberant that things were at their “greatest” when the tracks of a transcontinental railroad were being laid across the West, the other politically corrective in its chiding stipulation that the West needs to be thought of as domestic at “heart.”

Even those of us leery of scholarly arguments perk up at a match over whether the American West is properly a Mrs., Mr., Ms. or myth, don’t we? But where to begin, in any sorting of suddenly omnipresent western historians (28 of them here in “The Oxford History” alone) and their oldness or newness?

How about with the fact that, battling or otherwise, the Union Pacific railroad never passed within a good many miles of South Pass, Wyo.

Ray Allen Billington was a dashing classroom lecturer (no, you can’t look up my Northwestern University transcript and find out what grade he gave me; I simply sat in on his popular “Cowboys and Indians” course) who, when he stopped to think about it, knew perfectly well that it was the Oregon Trail wagon trains that crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass and that the later Union Pacific railroad route ran farther, um, south. But in his textbook persona Billington was a busy interpreter of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 key-to-all-the-doors-of-the-kingdom assertion that “the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization . . . the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” Today’s generation of textbook-dominating historians, quite a number of them born and raised in the West and/or forged by the heated issues of the 1960s--do not see the West’s past along that inexorable and triumphal frontier alignment.

Into the middle of all this comes the just-issued “Oxford History of the American West,” and, at 4 pounds, 3 ounces, it makes considerable ripples.

Fortunately for its target audience of “readers who wish to be well informed, but not overwhelmed,” the Oxford’s trio of editors looked at their expanse of pages and decided to organize, organize, organize:

Section I, Heritage, with essays such as “Native Peoples and Native Histories” and “The Spanish-Mexican Rim.”

Section II, Expansion, with essays including “A Saga of Families,” “Religion and Spirituality” and “Violence.”

Section III, Transformation, which takes in wide-ranging essays such as “Wage Earners and Wealth Makers” and “Landscapes of Abundance and Scarcity.”

Section IV, Interpretation, about the West on the page, palette, celluloid, bumper sticker and so on, more of which anon.

“This volume does not ignore the concepts of Frederick Jackson Turner or his intellectual legacy,” co-editor Clyde A. Milner II maintains in this book’s introduction, “but its assembled authors make their own case for the significance of the history of the American West.” The zestiest of those cases seemed to me in articles such as Jay Gitlin’s “Empires of Trade, Hinterlands of Settlement,” in which he joyfully rummages through world history looking for attachments to America’s frontiers (“This is also a story of--in the words of the historian Fernand Braudel-- ‘dietary frontiers.’ ”) and the hey-history-does-have-consequences essay, “Contemporary Peoples/Contested Places,” by Sarah Deutsch, George J. Sanchez, and Gary Y. Okihiro. Perhaps not coincidentally, this latter survey of racial, ethnic and cultural flash points (its subheadings include “Delano,” “San Francisco City Hall” and “Florence and Normandie”) is the most California-centered piece in the book.

Let us now dispraise the “Literary West” segment and get it over with. Thomas J. Lyons’ chapter is one of the most traditional in the book, and the tradition I have in mind is the old one of historians staying determinedly out of date, by a decade or two, about anything that smacks of modern writing. (In three successive editions of their standard American history textbook, between 1937 and 1950, Samuel E. Morison and Henry Steele Commager opined that the Southern author of “The Sound and the Fury” wrote “tales signifying nothing”; their 1950 edition thus missed the news that William Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before.) For anyone wanting specifics on prose in the American West since, say, Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” was published in 1976, this 1994 Oxford treatment is shy of Rudolfo Anaya, Rick Bass, Mary Clearman Blew, Joan Didion, Harriet Doerr, Michael Dorris, Gretel Ehrlich, Louise Erdrich, Judith Freeman, Linda Hogan, Teresa Jordan, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane. . . .

On the other, “newer” historical hand, if you had the impulse during “Dances With Wolves” to yelp out “Kevin, leave that wolf alone! Put that wolf back where you found it!” then has Richard White got an essay for you. When White goes over the ground with his encyclopedic artillery, a piece of historical territory never quite looks the same afterward. In his “Animals and Enterprise” essay, he ranges back to when “the West was a biological republic,” carries the story to the European-wrought change to “animals of enterprise, which gleaned the energy of western ecosystems . . . to produce hides, meat, and wool that found markets all over the world” and up to just yesterday with his conclusion that although “Dances With Wolves” “seemed to reject the commodification of animals . . . the film itself was a commodity: the audience paid for the sentiments, and the animals were highly trained. Regarded this way, the film was also what it condemned: yet another stage in the evolution of animals of enterprise in the West.”

Perhaps as remarkable, in its way, as White’s eon-wide grasp of topics is the Oregon factor. In 1965, Earl Pomeroy of the University of Oregon brought out “The Pacific Slope,” which made the invaluable (and then-newish) point that the West is also a citified place. Pomeroy’s successor at Oregon, Richard Maxwell Brown, now one of the deans of western history in his own right, shows the same calm, independent thinking in his Oxford consideration of the roots of American violence; Brown not only discerns a violence-employing “Western Civil War of Incorporation” from the 1850s to 1919, he maps it out and decodes it for you.

Taken all in all, then, “The Oxford History of the American West” seems to me best at its most provocative. If the approaches of the “new” western historians end up costing the West its trademark cliches, its Louis L’Armourism and John Waynery, so much the better. A side of America where the mission church of San Xavier del Bac sits like a conquistador’s dropped jewel box outside modern Tucson; where Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac peered with wild surmise from U.S. Forest Service lookout towers in Washington’s North Cascades in forest-fire summers past; where the corduroy and velvet fields of the Sacramento Valley agricultural factory practically run into the runway of the Sacramento airport; an American palimpsest of so many maps, mental and actual, surely deserves ongoing histories, in the plural.