Post #9, Comments on Women and Gender in the American West (for 31 Oct seminar)

Post #9, Comments on Women and Gender in the American West (for 31 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Audrey's site and Dan's site .

Once again I am faced with a book that challenges my limited understanding of the West. In the collected essays in Women and Gender in the American West, I read and re-read alternate approaches to looking at the same question differently. Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Instead of dwelling on who did what to whom and positing that that action is more important that the previous discussions, maybe historians could embrace the Rodney King statement “why can’t we all just get along?” Wouldn’t it be nice to read a book that acknowledges the importance of a holistic picture vice a dogmatically-driven soda straw view of the elephant?

Is there anything wrong with openly acknowledging that the environment, topography, weather, wildlife, domestic animals and the people – all the people: men, women, indigenous nations, invading Europeans, mixed-race neighbors from the North and the South, Africans brought to North America in literal bondage but now constrained by social bondage, Asians deciding if they will build a nest egg and return home or remain here, and on and on – are vital to the tale of the West? And most importantly, could we also come to grips with the statement that the same could be said of any other region in the world?

In short, I am in favor of additive, vice alternative, history.

Comments on Colony and Empire

Post #8, Comments on Colony and Empire (for 24 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Audrey's site and Dan's site .

Much like last week’s collection of expanded lectures, Colony and Empire is an amalgam of related essays lashed together into a single volume. This approach significantly detracted from the readability of the entire work and watered down the useful sections with non-sequiturs and annoyingly stiff arguments.

The book’s thesis, that capitalism is the root cause of all western development, is at once both insipid and Machiavellian. It is about as far as one could possibly get from Turner, and it also strips any agency at all from the actors who are actually transforming the region. While I’m sure this Orwellian view of the world warms the cold, dark recesses of his Marxist heart, I believe that Robbins has lost sight of the goal. His assertion that capitalism, and capitalism alone is the answer might be palatable if delivered in an additive manner, as in “let’s all compare our wildly different views of the elephant to try to construct a composite image that is better than the individual parts.” Instead, the combative tone I detected in this work would best be paraphrased as “I’m right and you and the other historians are dim for not having seen it sooner.”

Even this abrasive tone would have not completely turned me off if the book itself did an adequate job in supporting the point. Alas, the third and final failing of this book is that it’s scattered structure and weak conclusions did not add up to a cogent, well-supported and convincing argument. I was confused by his hopping around geographically and topically, so maybe I didn’t try hard enough to ferret out the salient connections, but should it really be so hard?

Yes, global forces matter. Yes, those who control the capital get to make decisions that victimize those who lack the capital. Yes, the myth of western independence is just that, a myth. Is that all he wanted to hear? Will he go away now and never come back? Good.

Post #7, for the week of 17 October

Post #7, Comments on The Way to the West (for 17 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Ricky's site and Dan's site .

This small book, a collection of expanded lectures from 1993, succeeds at telling a careworn tale in a unique way. Using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating measures of history, anthropology, environmental studies and sociology, the author paints a picture of a limited section of the West – between the Platte and Cimarron in the years well before gold fever struck Colorado – that has received critical acclaim in academia by ethnologists and historians alike.

Central to the book is the assertion that it was human interaction in general, not just white settlers, which had a cumulative effect on the region. It is this thesis that interested me, and had the strongest representation in the first two chapters. I was fascinated by the discussion of repercussions from competing interests of settlers and Native Americans that had never previously entered my mind. If I had given thought to the interaction of Bison and horses, I had certainly never drilled down to discover a hidden competition for forage and water between the horses of the tribes and the teams of the settlers. The author’s assertion that this competition between the two categories of horses had an effect on Bison long before the commercial destruction of the latter was a new insight to a problem I had assumed I had an adequate understanding. This additive nature is, to me, a hallmark of a useful work.

I was also impressed by the sections dealing with the Great Peace of 1840, and by discussion of the changes to the Platte River Valley due to transient Oregon Trail travelers. I would have never associated a peace between nations as directly contributing to the demise of the Bison, but the author makes a compelling case for exactly that result. Prior to reading this book, I would have also assumed that the vast expanse of the area would have allowed for wagon ruts to be the only trace left by the settlers heading west. This book quickly disabused me of that notion as well, by presenting the reduction in firewood and forage in the river valley – commodities the Cheyenne relied on for winter survival – as a consequence of the passing of settlers.

Excellent read, I’m saddened that I will miss the discussion (I’ll be in Germany until Wed) this week.

Post #6, Comments on Roy Baker (for 11 Oct seminar)

I also commented on Ben's site and Dan's site


Someone is lying. Many are being less than truthful, either with intent to deceive, or by virtue of innocent mis-recollection. There is an uncanny preoccupation with precise timekeeping that is found throughout the testimony, and an equally ubiquitous predilection for malice. There are myriad small axes to grind, and, of course there is a murder.

The reading of the transcripts from the coroner’s inquest into the demise of Roy Baker offers an interesting reversal of the usual process. We are afforded the gist of the story, however veiled by the individual testimonies, without any context. Allusions to long-standing infighting, aborted desertion attempts, previous thefts, and identification of favorites by both the women of town and the men of the Fort prove a weak substitute for a working knowledge of the day to day activities and interrelationships between the two. Lacking that understanding, the cryptic nature of the allusions imbedded in the testimonies force a binary decision on the part of the reader. One can either dispassionately accept each assertion of fact at face value, or allow the suspect nature of the testimony – the incomplete tale, the imprecise recollection of time in contrast with more specific citations, the expectation that two individuals at the same brothel could not fail to notice each other, the decidedly personal reasons for not being completely forthcoming – to erase any chance of acceptance. What the reader is unable to reliably do, however, is perform as a “jury of your peers.”

Therein lies the rub of walking a mile in shoes that have sat dormant for over a century, and the challenge for the historian. Can any amount of research prepare me, or my contemporaries, to be a meaningful participant of an inquest into the murder of Roy Baker? Can we really know what the hidden back-story might be that explains actions, reactions and acceptance of late 19th century behavior? Or are we resigned to the role of voyeuristic spectator, surmising the portent or lack thereof as we examine each statement and action recounted (maybe it was common in the gaming houses and saloons of 1890 Laramie to stick another fellow in the chest with a knife without constituting the presumed attempted murder we ascribe such actions today)?

Post #5, Comments on Johnson and Lubet (for 3 Oct seminar)

I commented on Dave's site and on Dan's site .


In keeping with the themes of “meeting and conflict” previously addressed in One Vast Winter Count, Susan Johnson’s bottom-up history of life in the camps gives voice to those denizens of the mining communities who heretofore have been silenced in history. In Roaring Camp, she underscores the transitory nature of society on the fringes, as successive periods of exploration, settlement and finally civilization shape the character of the towns in question.

In Murder in Tombstone, however, Lubet deals not with the temporal quality of the character of the town of Tombstone, but instead serves up a layered and subtle depiction of the more nefarious backstory of one particular period. Other than the explanatory pre-story and the denoument, Lubet focuses most of his book on the infamous day of the shootout at the O.K. Corral and the following inquest and findings; he covers a span of a few months. What I most thoroughly enjoyed about this work was the effort the author went to portraying the events from the viewpoint of both an advocate and a detractor. With a bit of supposition and counterfactual postulating, Lubet does yeoman’s work in ferreting out the story as seen by both the Earp-sympathizers in 1891 Tombstone, and the concerned citizens who were as concerned by the law as the lawless.

What both these books add to our discussion, and my education, it a understanding of the complexity of these stories, and by extension of the history of the American West. Suffice it to say that I will be giving a closer read to accounts that I may have previously taken at face value, and will also strive to discover the story behind the story.