The mythical nature of the West has defined American culture and the history we learned in grade school. But what’s the real story?
The dominant narrative of American Western history is problematic, at best. Lewis and Clark’s expedition, following Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, defined the American West narrative to not only an Eastern perspective but an Anglo-Saxon one, as well. Frederick Jackson Turner’s speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, declared the frontier “closed,” as a result of population density and dispersal, according to the 1890 U.S. Census. This set forth an imagined West, its history fossilized as a relic of white nostalgia.
However, once one digs deeper into the diverse narratives, historians find the West was more than a process; observing the conflict and resilience of Indigenous people defending and sharing their home, Mexican visibility in North American heritage and the Black families that forged Western culture. Modern historiography deconstructs American myths; taking common stereotypes of the past and analyzing the racist foundation within the tropes. Zooming in on individuals and specific places in the West, provides a grassroots, holistic approach to history. Microhistories help provide the stories of the individuals and serve as a “ground-up” perspective, revealing the true ownership of American Western history.
For Indigenous Americans, Western history can go back as much as 10,000 years. Historians have recently begun revising their language with regards to European colonization. Columbus no longer “discovered” America, as this suggests the land did not belong to Indigenous people. American Odysseys such as the Lewis and Clark story are less focused on the men as rugged frontiersmen, but rather as men out their element and out of their depth; their survival was solely dependent on the assistance of tribes such as the Nez Perce, Walla Walla and Shoshone.
By observing the resistance and survival of the Indian Wars (1870s-1880s), it reveals the end of the frontier as a concept coincided with a wave of genocidal policy directed at Indigenous people as well as the death of Reconstruction in the American South. The environmental impacts; pollution, stress on the soil and the over-hunting of buffalo brought disillusion to the white myth of the agrarian nation. The breaking of Indian Treaties unleashed tension between migrants and Indigenous tribes as the government opened up Indian territory for whites to develop. For example, the Dawes Act gave 150 acres of free land in Oklahoma, pushing Natives on smaller and smaller reservations, strangling them economically and threatening their livelihood.
This tension reached a climax with the massacre at Wounded Knee, where up to 300 Lakota men, women and children were murdered by the United States military. The massacre would mark the end of an armed Indian resistance and is symbolic of the history of Native and white relations. The struggle for Native civil rights carries into today, as Lakota and Sioux tribes continue to fight for territorial claims of the Standing Rock reservation. The Dakota Access Pipeline project threatens the destruction of sacred Indigenous land as well as risks to drinking water. White supremacy pushes to divorce the nation’s past from its current condition. However, by exemplifying the role Indigenous people have on the overall history of the American West, it serves to empower generations and forge an equitable collective.
By breaking down cultural stereotypes that surround American Western history, modern historians are able to illuminate the truth about not only the subject at hand, but also reveal context for the myth itself. By observing art as historical markers, events such as the Battle of the Alamo and dominant character tropes such as “cowboys and Indians,” we see a dominant white narrative and a simultaneous erasure of Indigenous, Mexican, Black and Asian presence in Western histories.
In observing George Catlin, the Hudson Valley School landscapes and the Thomas Hart Benton’s regional mural at the New Britain Museum of American Art, one sees a visual representation of Western history myths. George Catlin depicted the nostalgia of Native people but with an ethnocentric bias and perpetuating the notion of “The Noble Savage.” The Hudson Valley School landscapes harken to Darwinian themes of survival; very few people in the landscapes and any urban structures were set against rural scenes. Benton’s regional mural attempted to depict America by geography, however, segregating Natives from the regional discussion altogether. He also interprets them as not adaptive to “civilized” society, barely clothed and dancing- possibly the “Ghost Dance.”
In James Crisp’s Sleuthing the Alamo, Crisp deconstructs the myth of Davy Crockett and the value of properly analyzing historical documents. He also outlined the racialized history of Texas and the use of Jose Enrique De La Peña’s diary to validate Mexican-Americans’ contribution to national discourse. Crisp explores this white-dominated myth in not only what is written about the Alamo, but what is painted about it. He points out the absence of Tejanos, intentional artistic choices to make the Mexicans look more sinister or barbaric and centering the white man in the image to exemplify their mythical martyrdom.
Lastly, by separating the myth from history regarding cowboys, historians extract the true nature of life in the American West. With the rise of the Western American cattle industry, the need for cattle ranching, originally introduced by Spanish America in the form of vaqueros, brought a high demand for cowboys from 1867 to the 1880s. While the height of the industry only lasted about fifteen years, the symbolism of the cowboy has reverberated as quintessentially American. While the aesthetic of the cowboy has culturally been represented as an older white man, weathered, rugged and represented all that is masculine, in reality, cowboys looked much different. It was a short-lived career, the average age of a cowboy was twenty-four and were considered working class. Cowboys were typically very mixed ethnic groups; half were Black, one-third were Mexican and there is substantial evidence of Indigenous cowboys as well. After a series of droughts in the 1880s, as well as the invention of the barbed-wire fence, this isolated open-range cattle farming thus the demand for cowboy ranching dropped exponentially.
Modern historians must bear in mind the notion of intersectional theory when analyzing American Western histories in order to develop a thorough understanding of how it came to be, and how current conflicts and issues are rooted in the power struggles of generations prior. It is vital to illuminate the dominant narrative and its mythological properties possessing a foundation in white supremacy, domination and colonization of marginalized people. We as historians need to preserve the visibility of African American slaves on the Trail of Tears, Chinese contribution to our national infrastructure and the power of Indigenous spiritual resistance. Their stories of struggle, resilience and preserving their community despite political and social adversity, is to me, the American West.