THE MORROW ANTHOLOGY OF GREAT WESTERN...

It is a commonplace that the settlement of the West molded America’s personality. Our notions of individualism, emancipation and suffrage in governance; our egalitarianism and tolerance of others, however fickle in practice; our essential isolationism; our stubborn creed of growth and expediency; our get-rich-quick materialism; and, above all, our belief that we are never too late to remake ourselves and seek a fresh start--all these notions can be traced to the immutable exigencies of having to survive in a frequently unfriendly frontier.

These ideas were less an outgrowth of the designs of the nation’s founders than they were a betrayal. For the founders, and those who followed them over the next hundred years, feared untrammeled westward expansion and sought, at almost every turn, to control it. John Quincy Adams, for one, had envisioned a nation in which the cities and culture of the settled Eastern states would prosper in compact units, thanks to the federal government’s exploitation of an unsettled, resource-rich West. The fruits of frontier farms would be brought back to Atlantic seaboard factories. That dream was not to be. Instead, factories would follow farms. Even so redoubtable a Populist and defender of western expansion as the 19th century Sen. Thomas Hart Benton agreed that “the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down.” The California Gold Rush, however, threw open the floodgates of western migration.

Frederick Jackson Turner argued just over a hundred years ago that the story of America should be read left to right, west to east, in order to appreciate “the forces dominating American character.” Three recent books offer an opportunity to see if reading America in this way is still fruitful.

If the six-gun cowboy potboiler no longer sparks the imagination of the immigrant factory worker in the grim industrial cities of the crowded East, the tales collected in “The Morrow Anthology of Great Western Short Stories” nevertheless remind us, as cultural history--even if we are loath to concede the heresy--that the dime novels of Dodge City define some of the more enduring of America’s stereotypes, as authentically as the pamphlets of Sam Adams’ Boston.

But the western as a literary form left us with another legacy. No other region of the nation produced a comparable genre of formulaic, relentlessly aggrandizing whitewash--and it has stigmatized all subsequent writers from (and those writing about) this part of the country. To say one is a “western writer,” or that this is a “western story,” is to automatically raise a doubt as to its long-term merit as literature.

Enter William Kittredge and his scatter-gun collection of poetry and literature from and about the American West, “The Portable Western Reader.” This is an anthology of 74 distinguished writers whose unifying theme is that the worthwhile prose and poetry of the West, for all its rich variety, should not be mistaken, Kittredge writes, for the “nonsense” of the Western. Thus, we encounter, between the same covers, Czeslaw Milosz on Robinson Jeffers, e.e. cummings on Buffalo Bill, D.H. Lawrence on James Fenimore Cooper, Ken Kesey on Big Nurse and Terry Tempest Williams on cancer and pollution.

Modern Library’s one-volume reissue of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1885 “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman” and his 1893 “The Wilderness Hunter,” is a welcome addition, if only for the historical insight it provides. At the time of original publication, these books were popular and critically acclaimed accounts of the president-to-be’s two sojourns into the frontier.

Frederick Jackson Turner suggested that the characteristics of the Westerner were those of “coarseness and strength . . . acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients . . . restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism . . . that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” Considered together, these three volumes meet the test, revealing the graphic directness of the western writer and the west as story.

These traits are everywhere to be found, for example, in Roosevelt’s leisurely, painstakingly detailed accounts of his days in Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming. They are there in Zane Grey’s 1924 shoot-’em-up about the quintessential vagabond cowboy Monte Price and in Dorothy M. Johnson’s more placid 1967 family tale, “Virginia City Winter,” both part of the Morrow anthology. They are to be found in Ernest Hemingway’s story of the end of summer in Wyoming and in Wallace Stegner’s portrait of spring on the Saskatchewan prairie, both collected in Kittredge’s reader.

These are not easy books to begin a literary exploration of the West. Too much comes too fast and from too many directions. Instead, these volumes more properly fill a place as resource works or night-stand samplers for browsers. Or, for the energetic, they stand together as a nearly 2,000-page record of those things in the American soul and psyche shaped by frontier imagination and western experience.

As I trawled through hundreds of pages and dozens of writers, I was repeatedly struck by a singular omission: the relative scarcity of humor, of a rollicking sense of travesty and cultural absurdity. Westerners tend to move ahead by dead-reckoning and without benefit of irony. They are men and women who hold their ground without a great deal of self-doubt. To be sure, there are exceptions, like the incomparable Mark Twain (oddly not collected here) or William Eastlake (also absent) and much of Edward Abbey’s work (though not Kittredge’s selection from “Desert Solitaire”). More typical is this passage from Roosevelt:

“While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, and while, moreover, from a purely selfish standpoint many, including myself, would rather see it continue to exist as the chief feature in the unchanged life of the Western wilderness; yet, on the other hand, it must be remembered that its continued existence in any numbers was absolutely incompatible with anything but a very sparse settlement of the country; and its destruction was the condition precedent upon the advance of white civilization in the West, and was a positive boon to the more thrifty and industrious frontiersmen. Where the buffalo were plenty, they ate up all the grass that could have supported cattle. . . . Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question.”

As it happened, Roosevelt would be remembered by history as a heroic pioneer conservationist, and today a remnant bison herd owes its semi-protected status in Yellowstone National Park to him.

Yes, the West molded America’s personality. But in the way of the young, with bluster and earnestness, with energy, noise and vain self-importance. And, yes, the story of America can still be profitably read west to east. But cutting through the cliches of our own making is hard and necessary work. There is not yet widespread appreciation for the underlying tragedy that accompanied the settling of the West or enough appreciation of the farce that so often followed. Without such appreciation, how can we fathom the standoff in relations between whites and natives a century after conquest? How can we endure the unending insult to our precious dowry of natural bounty by generations who profess to love it even as they spoil it? How can we accept what the West was, how we idealized it, how we turned it into self-serving myth?

Roosevelt was wrong about many things, but he was often right. What he wrote of the westerners he met in the 1880s remains true: “They hold strongly by certain rude virtues, and on the other hand they quite fail to recognize even as shortcomings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy in older communities.”