| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. By Richard W. Etulain. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. xvi, 174 pp. Cloth, $35.00, isbn 0-8263-2139-9. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8263-2140-2.)

The American West, more than any other region of the United States, is a "created" region; for all the area's inherent geographical and cultural distinctiveness, the "West" that most persons know is the one generated by popular art and popular history. In Telling Western Stories, Richard W. Etulain offers his perspectives on the origins and evolution of that awareness, tracing the development of this central motif in American history from the post–Civil War era to the present. 1

The components of a coherent western story, Etulain says, exist by the end of the Civil War. Like molecules suspended in a supersaturated solution, they needed only a catalytic stimulus to coalesce. The crystallizing stimuli he identifies (he calls them "creation stories") are William F. Cody's wild west show (starting in 1882), the frontier/western dime novel, and the 1893 frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. Each contributes its part to the unifying process: the wild west show brings nationalism, the dime novel romance and the cowboy, and Turner a rationale and ethic in a national setting. . . .

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