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Reviews
Western Lives: A Biographical History of the American West
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Edited by Richard W. Etulain
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University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004. Photographs, maps, index. 454 Pages. $23.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Peter J. Blodgett
Huntington Library, San Marino, California
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| Intended "primarily for students and general readers," Western Lives offers "a history of the region through illuminative lives of several emblematic men and women" (p. 3, 1). Editor Richard Etulain has assembled a distinguished group of fifteen historians who have selected an eclectic list of thirty-four individuals (and one mythical figure). Upon dividing the history of the North American West into three parts, Etulain releases his authors to their individual tasks. |
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Beginning with the era of initial contacts between North America's indigenous peoples and new arrivals from Europe, the volume's first five essays delve deeply into exploration, colonization, conquest, and resistance. Gary Clayton Anderson's portrayal of Wakantapi of the Dakota and Juan Sabeata of the Jumano in the seventeenth century contrasts nicely with John Kessell's depiction of the Spanish frontier of Juan Bautista de Anza (father and son) in the eighteenth. William Lang, following the trails of explorers George Vancouver, David Thompson, and Lewis and Clark, highlights the juxtaposition of various imperial agendas in the northwest corner of the continent, while Cheryl Foote and Barton Barbour, in profiling Stephen F. Austin and doña Tules, and Jedediah Smith and Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, respectively, elucidate the entanglements of peoples as Native Americans and Euro-Americans collided in the early nineteenth century. |
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Focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century, the next five essays chart the intricacies of cultural encounters, the arduous struggles over possession and development of land and the evolving mythology of the frontier experience. Through the unlikely duo of Denver philanthropist Elizabeth Byers and Mormon apostate Samuel Brannan, Anne Hyde examines the enduring influence of the Mormon search for refuge and the miner's pursuit of riches on the development of the post-Civil War West. The lives of Mariano Vallejo and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, as observed by Richard Griswold del Castillo, reflect the costs imposed on the West's prior inhabitants and their ways of life. Elliott West untangles the fabric of resistance, defeat, and survival woven by indigenous Americans such as Sarah Winnemucca and Chief Joseph. R. Douglas Hurt examines the strategies adopted by cattle barons such as Henry Miller and Charles Lux and homesteaders such as Rachel Calof and Nannie Alderson in trying to bend the land to their purposes. Against the backdrop of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and the "wild West show," Glenda Riley investigates the stories through which many Americans tried to make sense of the West at the end of the century. |
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To shed light on the rapidly changing character of the West in the twentieth century, the final essays trace the convergence of hopes and dreams held by entrepreneurs and reformers, visionaries and realists, the empowered and the excluded. Tracing turn-of-the-century social, political, and cultural struggles that aroused the Progressive movement, Mark Harvey outlines the influential careers of railroad magnate James J. Hill, suffragist Jeannette Rankin, and conservationist John Muir. Probing the tumultuous decades between the world wars, Katherine Aiken encounters the mounting significance of western cities and the disastrous impact of the Great Depression in the remarkable career of Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Marking the West's indispensable role in World War II , Jon Hunner scrutinizes J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the atomic bomb program at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Rosie the Riveter, the mythic heroine of assembly lines who represented the stupendous contribution of women to American war work. Underscoring the stresses and strains of postwar growth and the adamant demands from westerners of all races to be included in this burgeoning society, Mark Foster surveys the lives of Walt Disney, César Chavez, and Barbara Jordan. Concluding with the steadily urbanizing, increasingly high-tech West of the twenty-first century, Carl Abbott profiles Paul Allen, co-founder of computer giant Microsoft and fabulously wealthy patron of Seattle philanthropies. |
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In a work that seeks to cover so many decades in so few pages, the occasional misstep inevitably occurs, jumping out to a particular specialist's eye (such as the fact that Levi Strauss, pioneer of blue jeans in Gold Rush California, who appears on page 158, is one entrepreneur, not two). Nor, unfortunately, is every individual as fully representative of her or his times as readers might hope. Even a life so incredibly varied as Aimee Semple McPherson's, for example, cannot encompass the full range of events that transpired in the West of the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the essays, therefore, stretch the circumstances of their subjects' lives a bit far to fit their chronological boundaries. |
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That said, Western Lives has much to commend it to readers. The authors took seriously Etulain's injunction to describe the lives of their individual subjects and "to demonstrate how each of these of these lives illustrated or broke from the main currents of the region's history" (p. 1). Though no two authors have taken the same path to integrating the particular with the general, each one has prepared an essay rich in contextual detail that fleshes out the individual stories of their subjects. Moreover, each historian has prepared an extensive bibliography of relevant readings about the lives and times they have described in addition to Etulain's twenty-four-page bibliographical compilation. The essays maintain a high standard of literary quality, and several of them, such as those by William Lang, Elliott West, and Mark Harvey, are models of graceful brevity. May this book find a long and happy life in the classroom or the personal library of many western historians. |
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