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Reviews
Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West
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By David Wrobel
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University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2002. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 336 pages. $34.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Gene M. Gressley
Jacksonville, Oregon
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Literature on frontier promoters and boosters abounds. What distinguishes
Promised Lands from the chants of these huckster hustlings
is simply that it is a work of subtlety, full of nuances. Wrobel
challenges his readers to revise their encrusted images of frontier
boosters, to treat booster effusions as being of significance, not
worthy of derision.
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A second tributary of his narrative centers on pioneer reminiscences. Wrobel explores the massive stream of these personal testimonies, teasing from their florid prose allusions that would escape a less discerning historian. In his probing search to discover their undertow of import, Wrobel undertook massive research on the period between 1895 and 1920, which he documents in more than a hundred pages of notes and bibliography — a veritable third of the book. |
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Avoiding entrapment in narrative flotsam of pioneer reminiscences and booster propaganda, Wrobel suggests that the "true significance of the frontier" may reside more in the remembered past than in authentic reality. Regardless of the impact of the frontier on the national psyche, chronicler and booster/promoter alike couched much of their "message" in verbiage that gloried in the past to the detriment of the present, just as they pitched their tidings that the frontier represented opportunity, not hardship, to the unwary immigrant. |
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As case studies of the pioneers — both individual and, later, collectively through pioneer societies — Wrobel focuses on the Jayhawkers and Ezra Meeker. The Jayhawkers, after their remarkable hegira west, devoted their energies to preserving their roles as epic heroes for the younger generations. Meeker recounted the journey west for one and all, entreating his listeners to appreciate what the journey meant for his and subsequent generations. |
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Both boosters and those who re-created their personalized West sought through their reservation mentality to perpetuate the westward experience as "wonderlands of whiteness," although one should quickly concede that neither promoters nor chroniclers were monolithic in their racial attitudes. Wrobel argues that perhaps the most lasting contribution on race of these sagebrush clarions was that they presented a forum for debate on the status of minorities, be they Native Americans or eastern immigrants. |
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As to the subject of place in the attitudes of boosters and chroniclers, Wrobel writes: "People often define themselves and their places by reference to what they are, who they are not, and where they are not" (p. 193). Regionalism can be, and frequently is, a retroactive process. As an elaboration of this point, Wrobel contends that when immigrants moved from an impacted area to one of "stock mythic imagery," they frequently clung to the hoary legends of their new place. |
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Wrobel has written an important book. How significant will be left to future historians of the West who probe these same paths, some hidden, some well blazed. Wrobel concedes as much when he warns at the beginning that his book was intended as a survey of the "contours" of western promoters' offers and the pioneers' reminiscences. |
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