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Book Review
| Domesticating the West: The Re-Creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class. By Brenda K. Jackson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xiii + 180 pp. Illustrations, map, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, 37.95.)
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Anyone who has done research on a western topic has likely found themselves in a "local reading room," surrounded by hagiographies of regional business pioneers, dusty books with titles like "Industrial Giants of the Golden Shore" or "Pioneers of the Inland Empire." Inside these commissioned histories one finds a standard collection of characters: plenty of engineers and growth-boosters; a few founding mothers and voluntary associations; many steely-eyed men with strange beards posing before banks, insurance offices, and hardware stores. According to Brenda K. Jackson, these individuals merit more scholarly attention, for they were the frontier's true pioneers, the middle-class settlers who domesticated the West. |
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The focus of Jackson's narrative, Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt, certainly fit the mold. Both hailed from the Northeast: Thomas Tannatt (1833–1913) from New York, Elizabeth Tappan (1837–1920) from Massachusetts. Both came from prosperous families: Elizabeth from a Tappan clan that included the famous abolitionists Lewis and Arthur, Thomas from a family that, while declining, still had resources to send him to study engineering at West Point. Married in 1860, both had their values forged in the reform ferment of the antebellum period and in the violence of the Civil War. |
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For Jackson, the war was the formative event for a generation of westering Americans, leaving many like Thomas Tannatt with serious physical and psychological scars, devoted to progress, yet rootless and adrift in unfulfilled yearnings for the excitement of camaraderie and battle. Indeed, the Tannatts seemed rootless. In the post-war years they moved from Colorado to Tennessee to Oregon. Thomas grasped and abandoned opportunities, working as a mining engineer, railroad-company manager, and a publicist for Henry Villard's Oregon steamship and railroad operations. In 1880, he settled in Walla Walla, Washington. There he continued as a growth-booster, developing land, serving as town mayor and regent of Washington's new land-grant college. Elizabeth followed him, yet remained ensconced in a "women's sphere" of voluntary activities and social rounds. He became involved in the Grand Army of the Republic, she in the WCTU and the Daughters of the American Revolution. By their retirement years, they had become wealthy local patriots, celebrating the region's past, celebrated by the region as "pioneers" of Washington's "Inland Empire." |
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At this point we are back to the early hagiographies. Jackson could have made much of locating this empire-building in the pathologies and scars of the Civil War. She does not. She provides little context to complicate this picture of progress: nothing on the presumed western "chaos" that preceded the Tannatt's arrival, nothing on the empire's hidden history of environmental destruction, Indian removal, or labor exploitation. In the end, her short narrative reads as a tribute to the Tannatt's "industry," "volunteerism," and "high moral character," traits and values that brought "order" to the West. The ironic quotation marks are mine. In Jackson's narrative, much like the commissioned histories of an earlier time, this order is real and unquestioned. |
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| Brian Roberts
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| University of Northern Iowa |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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