The American West

James B. LaGrand            
Bradley J. Young

The West is still pictured as a pristine land of free and open spaces.  Its tall-grass prairies, big skies, majestic mountains, and desert plateaus grace the American psyche.  In the popular mind (especially in those of European ancestry), the West stands for freedom, opportunity, and success.  It serves as retreat, refuge, and rebirth.  With its larger-than-life heroes , the West represents the essence of American individualism.

Frederick Jackson Turner gave these visions of the West a scholarly tone  at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago on July 12, 1893.  His articulation of the creation myth and American individualism became, arguably, the most persuasive and influencial essays ever in the American history profession.  It still holds a very strong position among many members of  the Western History Association.

Strange and telling events surrounded Turner’s paper.  Only a few blocks away, Americans celebrated the 1893 Colombian exposition, commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.  Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show was one of the favorite attractions of the exposition.  Cody’s show  etched the theatrical (and later stereotypical Hollywood movie) version of the West—not much different from the academic one promoted by Turner—into the minds of ordinary people.  Noticeably absent from Buffalo Bill’s show was Sitting Bull, the Sioux who had been killed by U.S. troops only two and one-half years earlier.

Turner attributed the “American character” to the expansion of European peoples throughout North America.  “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,” he wrote, “explain American development.”  As people moved west in a “perennial rebirth,” they extended the Anglo-frontier, the boundary between “civilization and savagery.”  On the frontier, necessities of wilderness survival mitigated traditional European culture, thus creating a singularly American culture.  Politically and socially, Americans discovered the noble instincts of natural equality, individualism, and democracy.  So runs the Turnerian argument.

Though Turner’s thesis has been challenged numerous  times during the past 101 years, it has continuously survived assault and even maintained its position as orthodoxy.  By the mid-1980s, however, several western historians had begun a sustained attack on Turner’s thesis.  These “New Western Historians” want a more inclusive West.  They want to attain a “multi-vocality” and include the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, women, and Asians.

This issue of the Magazine of History is devoted to the state of western history in the mid-1990s.  In the first article, University of Notre Dame professor Walter Nugent explores the historiographical debate between the Turnerians and the “New Western Historians.”  In the end, Nugent discovers that, contrary to the arguments of their critics, the “New Western Historians” are very American, embracing an old but venerable American tradition: anti-imperialism.  More important, they have revived a field that many in the history profession believed to be near extinction.

Donald Parman of Purdue University, a historian of Native Americans, considers the state of twentieth-century Indian history.  The Indian field as a whole has grown remarkably since the 1960s, and, the author believes, it will continue to grow as more historians and novelists continue to emphasize the uniqueness and needs of the various Indian groups within the larger U.S.  Most of the recent studies, however, have dealt with pre-New Deal Indian topics.  Twentieth-century Indian history is rife for exploration.

Elliott West, a historian at the University of Arkansas, considers the importance of the family in the settling and “winning” of the West.  As the author argues, the family is the most important social unit in any society.  The family—with its reproductive and economic power—can help determine the outcome in a competitive struggle between various ethnic and racial groups.  As Professor West notes, the demographic spread and biological reproduction of whites on the nineteenth-century frontier is unprecedented.

In a related vein, Susan Armitage, a professor of history at Washington State University in Pullman, considers the importance and unique history of women in the American West.  Using a gendered analysis, Armitage notes that women served as farmers, traders, diplomats, and childbearers.  Like Elliott West, Armitage realizes the significance of women in creating stable communities.

As stated previously, the physical environment of the West has a strong hold on the American imagination.  Hal K. Rothman, professor of history at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and editor of Environmental History Review, looks at the historiography of the environment in the West.  Simply put, humans changed nature, and nature, in turn, changed human culture.  Rothman’s article focuses on the work of five leading historians—Donald Worster, Richard White, William Cronon, Donald Pisani, and Stephan J. Pyne.

To facilitate teaching methods we are fortunate to be able to reprint Fay Metcalf’s lesson plan, Knife River: Early Village Life on the Plains.  Metcalf examines the everyday lives of these native peoples in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in what is present-day North Dakota
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Finally, in our Dialogue section, Professor David Wrobel of Widener University presents a witty and energetic discussion of his adventures in teaching undergraduates the present historiography of the West.  Much to his delight, he finds that undergraduates are more than eager to untangle the intricacies of the American West.