|
|
|
Reviews
The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West
|
By Stewart L. Udall
|
Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2002. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, index. 267 pages. $25.00 cloth.
|
Reviewed by Stephen Haycox
University of Alaska, Anchorage
|
|
|
| In The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the His-tory of the Old West, Stewart Udall has written a deeply personal plea for a fuller, more careful understanding of the West's history. Hollywood, novelists, social critics, and even historians, Udall argues, have created myths that distort historical reality. Most particularly, they have obscured the "ordinary folk" whom he calls "wagon settlers," courageous families who trekked west before the railroads to break the land and produce small aggregates of agricultural surplus (pp. 4–5). Udall favorably quotes the late George Ellsworth, who called the settlers' cultivated farms and ranches "small footholds of civilization." Udall's western forebears built such footholds, and he recounts their sacrifices and achievements with great love and respect. |
1
|
|
Udall distinguishes clearly between the pre-railroad West and that following the technological impact of investors such as the Guggenheims in Leadville, Jay Gould and Andrew Mellon in Coeur d'Alene, and E.H. Harriman and J.P. Morgan in Sonora and Chihuahua. Udall castigates William G. Robbins for ascribing the character of all western history to the influence of absentee, corporate, capitalist exploiters of the region's natural wealth in Colony and Empire. Such broad outlines, Udall insists, led Robbins and others to overlook the human faces and stories of the pre-railroad settlers, which would reveal "what animated individuals and families" and would help "develop a sense of what these men and women faced and an idea of the magnitude of their achievements" (pp. 10–11). |
2
|
|
Thus, Udall names several pre-industrial pioneers and recounts their travels and efforts. Among those whose contributions Udall celebrates are Edward Milo and Amelia Owens Webb, for example, as well as William Bailey and Lucretia Bracken Maxwell, Jacob V. and Louisa Bonelli Hamblin, Levi and Margery Wilkerson Stewart, and John Doyle and Emma Batchelor Lee. John Lee, who was made the scapegoat for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was Stewart Udall's great-grandfather. Udall states categorically that the victims of the massacre bore no responsibility for it whatsoever, and he recounts his own role in helping to bring descendants of victims and perpetrators together to dedicate a monument to the event near Cedar City, Utah, in 1990. In his own poem carved on the monument, Udall asks, "how to cleanse the stained earth, how to forgive unforgivable acts" (p. 72). |
3
|
|
Historians have forgotten, Udall writes, that religion was a central factor in shaping the early settlers and their culture. It led them to create caring societies with the shared goals necessary for social progress. Not just the Mormons, but Catholics and Protestants also accepted religious society's restraints on their material appetites. Udall contrasts those societies with that produced by the California gold rush, one of the most "hare-brained ventures" in history (p. 132). The gold rush encouraged a self-centered, socially destructive individualism that was uncharacteristic of the pre-railroad west. That individualism was particularly manifest both in the racism directed against Hispanics, Chinese, and Indians and in the "environmental havoc" wreaked on California and other western landscapes. |
4
|
|
Scholars have also misread the role of violence in western culture, Udall asserts, and he chastises Richard Maxwell Brown for elevating short-lived land disputes and conflicts between workers and employers to "seminal events in western settlement" (p. 12). Udall finds that the most vicious and unjustified violence was actually directed against Indians generally, in episodes that should be called not "wars" but "atrocities," often as not unprovoked. |
5
|
|
Even the Oxford History of the American West and the New Encyclopedia of the American West, Udall argues, perpetuate the violent and sensational aspects of western history and give short shrift to its true founders, the early wagon settlers. In this deeply personal appeal, Udall, debunking many myths most western historians now readily recognize, calls for their rescue from the West of William Cody and Hollywood. |
6
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|