| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David M. Wrobel. Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. Pp. xi, 322. $34.95.

In his evocative collection of essays, Owning It All (1987), William Kittredge remembered Charlie Russell's 1923 speech to the Great Falls, Montana, Booster Club. "In my book," asserted Russell, "a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indians who owned the land, and called it progress." Russell's beliefs placed him at odds with most of his contemporaries, and certainly with popular historical images of the American West. More common were the ideas of progress and development contained in the innumerable railroad brochures and countless booster volumes exhorting men and women to populate the vast, Edenic West. David M. Wrobel examines the roles of western promotion and remembrance in creating a collective image of the American West that remains a powerful yet problematic component of regional identity today. The book falls both temporally and spatially within familiar parameters. It focuses on the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, and Wrobel's West—although rarely treated as a distinct region but rather as a set of smaller locales—occupies the lands from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. This time period marked an age of "anxious transition from the premodern to the modern" (p. 2), and these lands were "the last Wests" (p. 5), upon which rested the promise of the future as well as the nostalgic romanticism of the frontier past. This was, as the author states, a critical time and place.

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