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Reviews
BEYOND THE MISSOURI: THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST
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by Richard W. Etulain
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| University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, maps, bibliography, index. 479 pages. $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. |
| Congratulations to emeritus Professor Richard Etulain of the University of New Mexico on the publication of this much welcomed survey of western American history. The book is a capstone achievement on the part of a historian whose career began some four decades ago in the Pacific Northwest. During those years, Etulain has distinguished himself as a bibliographer of western history and a scholar of the West's literature and popular culture. Beyond the Missouri rests on the rich scholarship of a historian who has read virtually everything in the field. In fifteen chapters, the author embarks on a journey that features Spanish incursions into the southwestern borderlands and American advances during the early nineteenth century into the lands west of the Missouri. The story continues to the end of the twentieth century, depicting the challenges of modern urban life that came to dominate the American West. |
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Concerned less with the process of western movement (that is, trails to the West), this survey presents an overview of a place undergoing change over centuries of time. The chapters steer a judicious course between a triumphant recitation of American western expansion and the New Western History's darker portrayal of that narrative as conquest, destruction of Natives, and environmental exploitation. Today's college undergraduates, seemingly unmoved by strident issues of their time, may appreciate the restraint and moderation of this text in regard to the longstanding issues of the New Western History, which largely grew out of the social and anti-war protests in the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, all is not restraint. Referring to the fate of the California Indians, Etulain pulls no punches when he notes: "Nowhere in the American West was the story of Indian decimation more bloody and brutal than in mid-nineteenth-century California" (p. 165). |
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A major strength of this story of the American West lies in the unapologetic treatment of religion. Catholic priests and Protestant preachers appear on the overland trails and stake out their missions in the Pacific Northwest. Mormons face environmental challenges in the Great Basin and struggle with the federal government over polygamy but finally capitulate to the "Americanization" of their commonwealth with a ban on plural marriage (p. 356). Etulain rejects Turnerian ideas about the western experience having served to democratize religion in the West. He notes the persistence of doctrine, hierarchy, and tradition in the "instant cities" of the West and the raucous social life that militated against church membership in remote frontier locales (p. 173). In the twentieth century, fiery Protestant fundamentalist preachers faced the challenge of modernism. Reverend Charles Shuler and Amee Semple McPherson attracted large followings of transplanted Midwesterners in southern California. In Seattle, Presbyterian minister Mark Mathews, although backing progressive reform in the city, defended strict Presbyterian doctrine against the challenges of modern science, especially in anthropology and psychology. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, rising numbers of evangelical/fundamentalist and Mormon converts indicate a search for an antidote to anomie and lack of community in the modern West. |
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Etulain's lively writing style does not shy away from well-worn aphorisms. In reference to the Chinese and Irish laborers who built the transcontinental railroad, he notes that "the CP was built on tea and the UP on whiskey" and frequently labels San Francisco as "Baghdad by the Bay" (pp. 205, 166). Moving on to the mid-twentieth century, he focuses on the Rosie the Riveter image in West Coast war production and follows the Gerald K. Nash's thesis that World War II transformed the West into a modern society with full economic membership in the nation. Continued economic growth after the war took many forms but, in the case of gambling economies, the author does not hesitate to ask: What are the social costs of Las Vegas and by extension Indian gaming that now prevails under special legislation on reservations throughout the West? |
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Finally, this story offers a manageable historiography of western history that is neither triumphantly Turneresque frontier history nor militantly critical New Western History. The discussion takes readers through the West of Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas in the 1890s, the urban critique of Turner in the 1930s, the Ray Allen Billington neo-Turnerian consensus and revival during the Cold War in the 1950s, and to the critical New Western Historians of the late twentieth century. All in all, Beyond the Missouri presents a sophisticated treatment of the history of the American West, but its sophistication is no barrier to its easy adoption for classroom use or its appeal to those who still delight in tales of the Old West. |
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| William D. Rowley
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| University of Nevada, Reno |
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