Truth about the west

Press, 26 October 1989, Page 14

Truth about the west

From a correspondent in Santa Fe for the “Economist”

SEVERAL western states are celebrating their centenaries this year. Montana, Washington and the Dakotas were admitted to the Union in 1889. Oklahoma, though not a state until 1907, was first settled by whites in 1889 in the mad rush set off when Congress changed its mind about leaving the land as Indian territory for as long as the grass would grow.

The anniversaries have been the occasion for much frontier nostalgia, such as the great cattle drive Montana held last month. But they come at a time when revisionists are busy rewriting the history of the west. At a conference attended by 300 scholars in Santa Fe last week, the revisionists presented a thoroughly, depressing view of the old west. The settlers were not simple people taming a land of virgin splendour. They were invading a land already much altered by Indians; they brought with them pollution and urban sprawl almost from the beginning, and they introduced class-riven cultural baggage from their lands of origin — which were Mexico and Asia as much as Europe. Historians are bound to say

such tiresome things; theirs, after all, is a task of separating fact from myth. The story of the American frontier was a myth, created largely by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 when he published “The significance of the frontier in American history.”

Turner painted the west as an extraordinary land being settled by ordinary people; it was not so much a geographical area as a line between civilisation and savagery. According to this thesis, the roots of American democracy lie among the rugged selfreliant individuals who fought lonely battles against nature. Many of the revisionists have simple axes to grind, as environmentalists or feminists. Ms Peggy Pascoe of the University of Utah challenges the myth that frontier women were either the non-beings their absence from the history books would imply, or the harpies and angels that western films have painted them. Her colleague, Mr Richard White, says that the Oregon trail from Missouri, far from being a waggon trail through pristine country, was a wide dirt highway so littered with rubbish that in the 1840 s overlanders had to

wear goggles because of dust, manure and debris. But, as Mr White admits, modern historians pay a lot of attention to rubbish because it acts as a record.

Other examples of revisionist sport-spoiling include the diverse ethnic composition of the settlers and the greater importance to western settlement of mining boom towns, like Tombstone, Arizona, than farms and ranches. In the desert west, even today, a larger proportion of the population lives in towns than do in the much more heavily populated east.

There seems no end to these historians’ determination to explode legends: even the fight at the OK Corral, they say, was between Republicans and Democrats. As Mr Donald Worster, a historian at the University of Kansas, says “For this region that was once lost in dreams and idealisation, we historians have been creating a new history, clear-eyed, demythologised and critical.”

Or is it just that man views history with the same obsessions that he views his own times?

Copyright — The Economist