| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American West: The Invention of a Myth By David H. Murdoch. (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2001; paperback edition, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. xii + 136 pp. Bibliography, index. $19.95, paper.)

David Hamilton Murdoch packs tremendous analysis into a stimulating, trim book. An English examiner of the American context, Murdoch argues for the creation of the mythic "images and ideas about the West" as "America's greatest contribution to twentieth-century culture" (p. 10). 1

With refreshing style, Murdoch considers the concept of myth seriously. The West myth operates as a "functional myth," a form that allows societies to "act out the conflicts symbolically" when ideals and reality clash (p. 15). The spread of urban-industrial landscapes over agrarian space (geographic and cultural) in the post-Civil War years threatened America's core values: "individualism, self-reliance, democratic integrity" (p. 65). In Britain, industrialism affected a revival of the Arthurian myth. The collision of industrialism with America's Republican, agrarian value system and the belief in the "tragedy" of a "finished" West, resulted in a unique American response and the creation of the West myth (p. 20). The historical timing also provided the focus on the cattle era and the Northwest cowboy of Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota (not Texas). . . .

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