| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840–1935. By Martin Padget. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. xiv, 250 pp. $37.95, ISBN 0-8263-3028-2.)
Indian Country is a well-written if superficial excursion through already well-traveled territory: the construction of the Southwest as America's exotic "Orient" during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Martin Padget both critiques and situates himself in a long line of travelers who described, sensationalized, and commodified the region's Indian and Hispanic heritage. Padget's photograph of himself at Taos Pueblo in 1993 provides an understated irony to the parade of travelers, scientists, reformers, and promoters he deconstructs.	1
Padget begins with observers, such as Richard Henry Dana and Josiah Gregg, who ventured into the Southwest before it became a part of the United States. His reading of Dana is particularly acute, juxtaposing Dana's observations of Mexican Alta California as a young man in the 1830s with his "melancholy" return trip in 1859, when "the utopian qualities of life in California had already been thrown into doubt" (p. 19). Like so many other travelers to the Southwest, Dana was an ambivalent romantic, aware that something valuable was being lost yet wedded to the notion that -Anglo-American colonization brought industry and progress to a backward land.	. . .

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