This week’s reading, University of Arkansas historian Elliott West’s excellent The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, focuses on two major migrations into the Central Plains during the mid-19^th century: the better-known westward movement of U.S.-Americans and the lesser-known largely southward movement of various Native American groups, particularly Cheyennes. Through a series of four essays, originally lectures at the University of New Mexico in 1993, West traces the interconnectedness of these two migrations with the region’s larger environmental history.

This book particularly reminded me of one of my favorites, Colin Calloway’s One Vast Winter Count. Initially as I read The Way to the West, I thought of it as a sequel to One Vast Winter Count—until I realized that the former is eight years older than the latter. Nonetheless, in a lot of ways The Way to the West is a sequel chronologically.

Calloway’s geographic scope is much larger than West’s: The trans-Appalachian West, rather than the Central Plains (which West defines as the land between the Front Range of the Rockies and the Missouri River, south of the Platte River and north of the Arkansas River). Calloway’s chronological scope is from the arrival of the first humans in the Western Hemisphere up to when Lewis and Clark traversed the continent.

Nonetheless, Calloway and West echo each other strongly in focusing on the movement of peoples, and how they interacted with the environment (and how the environment interacted with them), as the basis of Western history. They both rightfully show that the many peoples lumped together as “Native Americans,” as well as the many people lumped together as “whites,” “Anglos,” “Americans,” etc., were neither static, monolithic, nor acting in a vacuum. Rather, their movements and interactions formed a “web of relationships.” For example, as West highlights, it was politics among the various Native peoples of the Central Plains that partially contributed to a sanctuary for bison—until a peace pact opened that territory for exploitation not just by whites but by Native peoples.

Randolph Campbell’s 2003 synthesis of Texas history, Gone to Texas (since updated), follows a similar track—arguing that the history of a particular Western state, Texas, has been one of migration.

So, then, taking West’s work in context with that of Calloway, Campbell, as well as others we’ve read this semester (particularly Limerick), could we say that the big theme of Western history has been movement into and out of this broadly-defined place called “the West”?

Instead of this class’s Turnerian name, “U.S. Westward Movement” (one I’m guessing has been a long-standing title for this course number, and which is really not used outside the course catalog), should it be something like “Movements into the U.S. West”? Is movement of various peoples, and their interactions with the environment (particularly how the environment has thwarted their dreams), the unifying thread of Western history?

On a related note, is this thread unique to Western history, or simply more pronounced in this region? As I was reading (the author) West, I wondered about a certain exceptionalism of the history of the (region) West. Is Western history exceptional?

What do others think?

Last week, in discussing Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts, we briefly touched on the topic of oral history as a means to learn about the past–not just from a person’s lifetime, but from a family, tribe, and/or community’s more distant past. As we noted, DeLay used very little, if any, oral history; instead, he relied on written sources (as most historians do) to piece together the fascinating story he tells.

This week’s book, Susan Lee Johnson‘s Roaring Camp, uses oral history in what I thought was a fascinating way–one I’d like to discuss a bit further, since this has been on my mind after, as I’ve mentioned ad nauseam in this blog and in class, last week’s American Association for State and Local History conference. My previous encounters with use of oral history to glean pieces of the distant, non-lifetime past have largely, if not completely, come from Native American history.

Thus, Johnson’s use of oral history to get at both facts and memory of the legendary bandit Joaquín Murrieta fascinated me, especially since she uses it oral history to learn about a literate society. Her prologue discusses stories about Murrieta, and how those have evolved over time, beginning with family memories. She then goes into other sources for this story, including written news and literary treatments.

Like Anton Treuer said about his use of Ojibwe oral traditions to glean the motives of the leader Hole in the Day, Johnson largely uses Murrieta family tradition to learn more about why Murrieta took the actions he did. Family tradition stated that he was avenging the rape of his wife, murder of his brother, and flogging of himself.

Like others using oral history and family memory, she uses these sources to compare with others, and to bring in context. With regard to Murrieta, she discusses what family memory says about him, and how that relates to broader historical trends. For example, in discussing the move of Joaquín and his wife Rosa to California from Sonora, she notes that Sonoran men, more often than others, did not travel to the gold fields alone but brought their wives. Thus she is using family memory to add a personal detail and illuminate a broader story.

At the same time, Johnson treats family memory, along with written sources, with a rightful degree of skepticism–more than many other authors do. This in large measure reflects Johnson’s concern–not just with the history but how the story came to be told. That raises the question of how transparent we should all be with our skepticism of our sources. Is this because of her focus–that she is taking a strongly textual analysis approach to these stories? Is this because she’s asking particular questions about history and memory, and thus interrogating how the idea of a “white” Gold Rush came to be?

I would say that this is the case–and that it made me think more about how I use my sources in my own work. We all interrogate our sources as we use them, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of each and the purposes for which we can and cannot use them. But are we being transparent enough about that process? Would that bog down the stories we try to tell?

Furthermore, will the need for transparency and discussion about sources, especially family memory like Johnson uses, recede as anthropological methods of using oral history to learn about the distant past become more mainstream in history? Is the need to explain these sources a byproduct of them not being as accepted in the historical profession and in the world at large? Or is it more a part of the cultural turn in history?

For lack of a compelling conclusion to my series of questions, all that I can say is, I look forward to discussing these issues further in class!

Commenting

This week I commented on Nick’s blog post.

This week’s reading of Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts, as well as Bernard DeVoto’s abridged version of Lewis and Clark’s journals (digital version of the entire set here), coincided for me with a trip to Minnesota for the American Association for State and Local History’s 2014 conference. The timing could not have been better, as some sessions at the conference–particularly the keynote by Dr. Anton Treuer at the Awards Banquet–related extremely well to DeLay’s themes.

One of the recurring themes through DeLay’s book is the importance of understanding decisions by various Native American groups as political decisions–rooted in culture and economics, yes, but in the end political decisions. For him, rightfully, the only way to understand Comanche decisions to go to war against Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s is through the lens of politics. Raids on an increasingly large portion of Mexico did certainly yield economic benefits. But Comanches destroyed what they couldn’t take; for DeLay, this was a calculated political move, meant to demonstrate Comanche power.

He also yields insights on why Comanches chose to make war on northern Mexico and not on the United States or the Republic of Texas: They knew Mexico’s state was weaker, and their treaties had fallen apart. In other words, they knew how to play the political game.

Additionally, DeLay argues for the importance of what he calls the War of a Thousand Deserts–his name for this series of raids–on the outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War. The raids had so weakened northern Mexico, and the Mexican state generally, that they paved the way for the U.S. victory.

Treuer’s talk at the AASLH conference detailed another such story from less than two decades later: The role of Hole in the Day, an Ojibwe leader in northern Minnesota, during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. He raised the important point that we cannot simply look at United States versus Indians when discussing these relationships.

Rather, Treuer showed what he called a “web of relationships”–a term that applies to what DeLay discusses, as well. In 1862, Dakotas in southern Minnesota had attacked white settlements throughout the region. The U.S. government, which had already sent two regiments away from fighting the Confederacy to fight the Dakota, was desperate to keep the Ojibwe out of the war. So Hole in the Day won significant concessions from the U.S. government by threatening to intervene. This war was not a pan-Indian effort (indeed, almost none of the so-called Indian wars were) but rather a war between one Native American group and the U.S. government, which another group used to its advantage. Hole in the Day made a political decision with his people (the Ojibwe, not all Indians) not to intervene. Treuer also focused on political dynamics among various Ojibwe groups that played into that decision.

For both Treuer and DeLay, then, politics within and among Native American groups were paramount in the outcome of these wars. Decisions by Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and other groups to trade, raid, and deal with the United States, Mexico, and the Texas Republic made all the difference in the U.S.-Mexican War. Ojibwe decisions not to join the U.S.-Dakota War made all the difference in that war’s outcome, and perhaps even in the U.S. Civil War; what would have happened had more U.S. Army regiments been diverted to Minnesota in 1862?

Commenting

This week I commented on Ben’s, Doug’s, Megan’s, and Carol’s blog posts.

To Learn More

Here is a condensed version of the talk Treuer gave at the AASLH conference:

And below is my Storify of his talk.

This afternoon I attended a meeting of the Potomac Corral, a group of people in the Washington region interested in the history and culture of the American West. Everyone went around the table to introduce themselves. The icebreaker question: What is your connection to the West? What drew you here?

In part because of the readings for class this week, I listened intently to how people responded. Most of us talked about growing up in places that this week’s authors would or wouldn’t define as the West (some of which have my hometown of San Antonio in, and others out), or a close affiliation, such as attending college or one’s studies. One answer particularly struck me, though: One attendee mentioned going to college in California, and that she guessed that it was the West. I said, half-jokingly, “What makes somewhere the West?”

Her response: “Well, I knew it wasn’t the East!”

Although this was far from a scientific poll–really just an anecdote that we didn’t discuss further (it was an icebreaker before the main event, after all)–it provided, to me, an interesting definition, one that dovetails with this week’s readings that contain many ways of defining just what the West, and Western history, is.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the man whose name continually pops up in the interrelated fields of Western, borderlands, and frontier history, leads off the order. For him, the West and the frontier meant the same thing: the line of “white” (term used loosely) settlement (term also used loosely, in my case). For the U.S. Census from 1790 to 1890, this was a literal line, separating where settlement of U.S. nationals (vis-a-vis Native Americans) lived at a density of at least two people per square mile. For Turner, then, Western history was frontier history–the history of the place where the frontier happened to be at a given time, and the process by which those places ceased to be frontiers. Thus, going to the point that Limerick took pains to refute in last week’s readings, according to Turner Western history ended in 1890.

I had only read Turner’s famous 1893 thesis, and in high school at that. Rereading that, and then the rest of his book, I was amazed at just how much his ideas of what the frontier was, and its phases, have influenced U.S. history–and not just Western U.S. history. For a paper in my previous round of graduate school, I read through several New England town studies, which were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them followed a mode I now recognize as Turnerian: People of European descent show up, they found a town, the town develops. Sometimes Indians figured into the story, but most often not. The sequence of events in these stories reads like chapter 2 of The Significance of the Frontier.

These studies also relate to the revision of Turner in historiography. There was a small revival of town studies in the 1990s, in which Native Americans played much more prominent roles, reflecting a redefinition of frontier happening at that time. That term, in the North American context, took back what Turner calls its European meaning: A meeting place between peoples, rather than Turner’s line between civilization and savagery.

So for Turner, the West is a place defined by a particular process. But others, both historians and not, consider the West a place. Colin Calloway defines his West as the trans-Appalachian western part of North America for his magisterial One Vast Winter Count, which covers the region’s history from the arrival of the first humans to the arrival of Lewis and Clark. Limerick, meanwhile, focuses on the trans-Mississippi West, noting that as a controversial definition.

Then came this week’s most precise, creative, and logic-driven definition of the West: that of David Emmons in a 1994 Western Historical Quarterly article. He bases his definition on the areas that could be considered beyond the Census/Turner definition of frontier in 1843, when the historian Hubert Gutman argues that the United States (as a rough date) turned from a “preindustrial” to “industrial” country. Emmons argues those regions formed “a separate West not because it was so environmentally different but because it was settled at a different time and under the rules of market capitalism and national states” (445). Because the United States incorporated these places after that time, they can be seen, according to Emmons, as having a unified history and can truly be considered a region.

So, taking these together, what is the West? What is this place we are studying this semester? Is it a place, or a process, or both? Does a place need to have a unified history to make it worthy of study as a cohesive place? That, for me, is the biggest question–one that remains unresolved–to come out of this week’s readings. It’s one thing to say that the West is the place that’s not the East, or that it’s the trans-Applachians, trans-Mississippi, trans-98th meridian. But do those places constitute one region, with a unified overarching story with a host of particulars? Do they need to in order to make an object–or class–of study? Not to mention, how does the changing notion of frontier discussed above fit into this picture? I look forward to discussing these questions in class–I’m now even less sure of my own answers than I was before…

Commenting

This week I commented on Allyson’s blog.