Book Review

Walter Nugent's Into the West is an engaging and important book about "how the West got its people." It is not really a demographic history, nor is it simply a history of migration, although Nugent gives at least some account of virtually every western immigrant group. It is instead an attempt to discern the motives involved in movement: why people came and why they stayed. And since motives do not translate directly into results, it tries to discern the actual results of the demographic churning of the western part of the continent.	1
Sometimes Into the West reads as a kind of human geology: streams of migration bring generations after generations of people into the West, with the migrants sometimes flowing around, sometimes overlaying and transforming what previous generations had already transformed. There are upheavals. The baby boom alters western life as much as it does national life. The oldest peoples in the West—Indian peoples—do not simply disappear beneath layers of newcomers. They, too, change, rearrange themselves, and, not only persist, but repopulate surprising places.	2
Nugent understands those movements within a historical framework shaped by familiar transformative events, such as the Mexican cession, the acquisition of Oregon, World War II, and other more arbitrary markers. He chooses 1889, a date close to the magical Turnerian 1890 for the closing of the frontier, as a key moment, but for different and somewhat vaguer reasons than Frederick Jackson Turner. This is the period when Nugent's homesteading frontier persists but now overlaps with a newer urban West that will evolve into the modern metropolitan West.	. . .