Post #13, Comments on “Cadillac Desert”

Post #13, Comments on “Cadillac Desert” (for 27 Nov seminar)

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


This book wins my vote for the biggest surprise of the semester. I was fully expecting to be crushed by the deadly triumvirate: a belly full of turkey, a 514-page snoozer, and whiny enviro-twaddle about the sad fate of the three-toed wart less salamander. By the end of the week I fully expected to be found in a corner with bloodshot eyes and a pallid complexion, whimpering “please, please, just let me read some history…that’s all I ever wanted.”

Fortunately, for all of us as I am leading the discussion this week, I sit here hale, hearty and refreshed, eager to dive into the discussion tomorrow night. In short, I liked the book. I found some sections fascinating (especially the sagas of the early explorers, feats of engineering derring-do, bankers with pistols, and incredible tales of hubris). I was entertained by most of the book (two excellent dam-meltdowns) and even disposed to yield grudging admiration for the parts that featured more detail than I would have liked. In short, Reisner’s writing style made the dry section palatable and the good parts great.

There is no doubt that the book is thoroughly researched using primary and secondary sources. I am usually suspect of gratuitous use of numbers as a symptom of 1980’s fetish for quantifiable history (as in reviews that praised books for thorough charts and tables in the appendix without establishing a need fulfilled or value added by the inclusion in clarifying the information or informing the reader), but was impressed by Reisner’s ability to help a reader grasp the immense scale described by the numbers. Some of my favorites explained that as late as the 1930’s over 70% of the Northwest’s three million people were without electricity (p. 161, bottom), or that the storm surge flow of the Missouri river as sufficient to supply New York City for 70 years (p. 189, bottom). I may not be able to picture water flow of 892,000 cubic feet per second, but I’ve lived in New York and now better understand how much water can flow through the Missouri River.

But the book isn’t just about rivers and dams. It is also about people and organizations. Reisner began with the missions of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers—the former to enable irrigation agriculture, the latter to control flood damage—and graphically depicted the wheels coming off both carts over time due to a synergy of organizational momentum and individual failings.

Finally, I was tickled by three quotes that I used to reflect on the meaning of the 500 pages I read (and to assist in the digestion of the holiday feast):

“Water flows toward power and money.” (p. 307)

“Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.” (p. 392)

“The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. ‘Our forefathers would have built these projects’ they say. ‘They had vision.’ That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge unused bonanza they found here.”


I’ll send the questions out via e-mail momentarily.

What I've learned about the Buffalo Soldiers

Post #12, Continuing research re: Roy Baker (for 21 Nov seminar)

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

I volunteered to conduct further research into the Buffalo Soldiers angle of the Roy Baker project. I was initially interested in the character of Briggs and how different his Army experience was than that of black regular soldiers serving in the West about that time. My interest was later piqued by a discussion Prof. Petrik led one evening that delved into the reason Pearl Raymond had said “Baker does not come to my house,” which led to the supposition that the Cheyenne brothels were racially segregated.

While I hadn’t even noticed that nuance in my readings of the transcript, reflection brought memories of previous study of the history of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Spanish American War and references to periods of service in the West. Were there two units at Fort D.A. Russell in 1890? Was the 17th Infantry Regiment (Baker’s unit) paired with a regiment of Buffalo Soldier cavalry (or even infantry)? If so, given the racial prejudices of the time I would not be surprised to learn that Kate’s (and other such Cheyenne brothels) was also mirrored by a brothel serving a black clientele. With a regiment of black soldiers at the fort, or even a few attached companies, there would be enough of a client base to make such an enterprise profitable.

Armed with these curiosities, I set out to see just which units were stationed at Fort D.A. Russell in the fall of 1890. I started with the U.S. Army “Post returns,” the official monthly reports to Washington listing units stationed at the post, strength of the units, officers assigned and a record of events. Dead end; the only unit reported at Fort Russell in 1890 was the 17th Infantry.

Knowing that the Army was highly segregated at the time, and allowing for the potential that even the records were separated, I then pulled the individual cavalry and infantry unit returns. Instead of searching all units, I limited my search to the four Buffalo Soldier Regiments as they were the only black units in the Army at the time (the volunteer black units of the Civil War were long since disbanded and the volunteer black units of the Spanish American War were not yet in existence).

A note of clarity here. In many of the webpages of Wyoming history we have read on the Roy Baker blog, the Buffalo Soldier units are named correctly but are universally listed as a new concept in 1890. All the websites read “in 1886, Congress formed four black regiments: the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry. The 25th was the only unit that didn’t serve at Fort D.A. Russell.” Apparently one of the sources was deemed to be the authoritative repository of all things Wyoming and was trusted without verification by the authors of all the other websites. Here’s what actually happened, according to the Army Historian, the National Archives, and most of the academic writings I’ve found on the subject:

The Buffalo Soldiers, the first units of black soldiers in the regular Army, were authorized on July 28 1866. Six regiments were raised, four infantry and two cavalry. Three years later, the 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Infantry regiments were reorganized with the former pair becoming the 24th and the latter the 25th. These units served in remote posts throughout the West and had their first experience with Army life east of the Mississippi in 1898 while transiting to Tampa, Florida enroute combat in Cuba during the Spanish American War.

Accustomed to living and fighting in close proximity to white troops while both prosecuted the Indian Campaigns between the end of the Civil War and just before the Spanish American War, the black troops were taken aback by the rampant racism and unfair treatment by both the locals in Tampa as well as their fellow soldiers. Buffalo Soldiers had served admirably in the West, several had even earned the Medal of Honor. Fortunately for the white troops who they saved in this nearly disastrous campaign, the Buffalo Soldiers performed superbly in Cuba as well—especially in comparison to the white volunteer units—and several earned the Medal of Honor in this war as well.

Back to Wyoming in 1890. Given the statements above of the favorable comparisons Buffalo Soldiers had drawn to their service in the West, I was anxious to find if any had been at D.A. Russell with Roy Baker. Alas, by pulling the official unit returns for the four units, I discovered that the 24th Infantry was in Arizona and New Mexico, as was the 10th Cavalry. The 25th Infantry has companies at Forts Shaw and Custer as well as in Missoula, Montana. The closest Buffalo Soldiers to Fort D.A. Russell during the time in question were members of the 9th Cavalry, with four companies each at Fort Washakie (roughly 100 miles west of the geographic center of Wyoming…Cheyenne is in the southeast corner of the state) and at Fort McKinney (near Buffalo, WY, about 300 miles from Cheyenne in the north, center of the state).

So, what have I learned? Since there were no units of the Buffalo Soldiers at Fort D.A. Russell for the nine months preceding the murder of Roy Baker, then Pearl’s place of employment did not count on black soldiers to stay in business. Unless Pearl’s drew white customers as well, that bordello was either quite small or there was a sizable black community in Cheyenne that is invisible in the documents we have been exposed to. Assuming that the mental picture we have developed, which features a predominately white town with a few blacks working in the bars and casinos, is more or less correct, then why would Parkinson include Pearl’s place in the rounds as he “searches” for Roy Baker and spills the tale of the pistols?

Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)

Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)

I also commented on Dave's site .

This book offers an alternative to the traditional study of the immigrant experience in America. Instead of the traditional story of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and then settling in either the industrial Northeast or the agrarian Old Northwest, Sanchez challenges us to consider the story of Mexican immigrants entering the United States between 1900-1945, and their subsequent settling in Los Angeles. While this book does an impressive job explaining how religion, family, music, labor relations and education were integral parts of the immigrant experience, I was fascinated by the parallels between the book’s sections on assimilation and the current events in France.

If history is, at least in part, intended to explain how events helped shape life in the past as a way of helping us understand the same relationship today, this book served that purpose in spades. Sanchez offers “important alternative theoretical approaches such as internal colonialism, the process of barrioization, or the dual labor market theory to explain the constraints on assimiliation.” (p. 7) He also explains the cultural, governmental (both American and Mexican) and social brakes applied to the process, but asserts that despite all that, the process went on anyway. Once a person had arrived from Mexico, either directly or following a sojourn elsewhere in America, Sanchez contends that chances were good the person would either assimilate, return to Mexico, or (rarely) lodge in an enclave resisting either preceding alternative. It is that last category, the resistant enclave dweller, that gave me pause.

Drawing parallels to current events is never a precise or intrinsically fair process. Nevertheless, the current firestorm (literally and figuraitively) in France merits comparison. In the latter case, large numbers of obviously non-native peoples have settled in a strongly nationalistic (these people regulate unwanted additions to their language) state that has largely ignored their presence. (for a more detailed analysis, see Eugene Robinson’s column “Where France Failed” on the OpEd page of Saturday’s Washington Post) The immigrants in question have been awarded sustenance and shelter, but no offer of inclusion. Thus, without potential of ever becoming truly one of the whole, this group had chosen to remain apart, and thus allowed the seeds of bitterness, anger and radicalism to sprout.

Taking Sanchez’s portrait of similar process regarding Mexican Americans in comparison, he states “ironically, it was not the search for Mexican nationalism which engendered political radicalism for large numbers of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, but the forging of a new identity as ethnic Americans.” (p. 12) While there were cases of violence, (Sanchez offers the Sleepy Lagoon murder, labor organization, and the Zoot Suit Riots as cases in counterpoint) the Mexican American experience was largely marked by frustration with bigotry and a large hiatus in progress as the Great Depression stalled the forward momentum, the Mexican American adjustment to life in Los Angeles was by and large an incremental process of small steps toward a larger goal. By Mexican Americans downplaying consequences of obvious differences, Sanchez believed that whites were “more apt to see Japanese and Chinese immigrants as “unassimiliable,” these reformers considered the Mexican immigrant as similar to the European in adaptability.” (p. 95)

While there are plenty of injustices yet to work out, Mexican Americans have largely succeeded in carving out a new ethnic identity. One of the slogans of the Mexican American Movement is illuminating: “Experience reveals that Equality, like its companion, Freedom, exists in four modes—
The equality which God gives,
The equality which the State gives,
The equality which a man wins for himself,
The equality which one bestows on another.”
By concentrating on the third, and allowing progress in that area to positively affect the others, Mexican Americans have succeeded in ways that continue to allude immigrants living in enclaves without any assimilation at all. Sanchez’s book is history done well, and has resonance in the present as well as the past.

Post #10, Comments on Print the Legend

Post #10, Comments on Print the Legend (for 7 November seminar)

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

Print the Legend challenged me to dispense with my focused concept of “history worth reading,” and try something a bit different. To her credit, Martha Sandweiss was able to keep my attention through almost all of the 340-odd pages. Her blending of an overview of the history of photography in the West and a deeper discussion on the power of photography to influence impressions provided just enough historical content to offset the overabundance of technical photographic information.

I’ll start with what I didn’t like first. I believe the discussion on the shortcomings of daguerreotypes could have been consolidate to half its length…not quite as succinct as “there were damn few of them that had much impact, they were very small, they were on metal so adding language was difficult, and they could not be easily reproduced to meet a mass market,” but close.

I could have also done with a bit less on the panoramas. Got it, they were impressive in size and duration, they benefited from narration, they were much more popular than daguerreotypes, and they were much better suited to an iconographic or mythic portrayal of the West. Good, let’s move on.

So, what did I enjoy about Print the Legend? Once the author finished the descriptions of daguerreotypes and panoramas, and worked her way through the frustrations of the early expeditions that brought along wet plate photographic equipment, I noticed the pace and the relevance of the book pick up. I really enjoyed the recounting of the narrative breakthrough of photography…easily reproduced on paper, it seemed natural to add words… and the subsequent increase in popularity and relevance for the medium.

I also enjoyed the janus-faced argument about field of view. In the case of the photo of the Golden Spike, the Chinese were kept just out of view giving the illusion of a great technological triumph achieved by the white men pictured (p. 160). On the other side of the coin, the narrative accompanying a prosaic view of a canyon that states that a silver mine is just out of sight around the bend (p. 186).

I also enjoyed the discussions of reality. As Dave noted in his blog, the comparison of the stark daguerreotype image of Henry Clay Jr.’s grave (p. 36) and the accompanying portrait’s heroic depiction of his death (p. 37) speak at once to both the power (and limitations) of each medium, and to the changing tastes of the consuming public – the former was too foreboding and the latter was accepted as it spoke to the type myth that would be preferred to truth, probably the opposite today.

All in all, a great book that strove to blend several disciplines. While that blending was the source of my initial frustrations, I was able to set the extra art emphasis aside and truly enjoyed the history.