CONTINENTAL RECKONING

Richly rewarding survey of the history of the frontier West.

“It is always easy to miss the obvious,” writes prolific historian West of what he considers to be its defining characteristic—namely, “its sheer energy and fluidity, movement and change of a degree that set it apart at the time and, arguably, from any time before or since.” As the author shows, the acquisition of the West, from the Texas Revolution to the wresting of the Northwest and Southwest from Britain and Mexico, brought so much territory to the U.S. that, if the same bonanza were to happen today, the nation would extend deep into South America. The American population tripled between 1800 and 1840, and a significant number headed west only to find that, even then, the myths of rugged individualism were thoroughly compromised by a cabal of corporatists and politicians. As he did in The Last Indian War and other books, West writes with an eye to irony and telling details. He notes, for instance, that John Wesley Powell’s groundbreaking classification of Native American nations and languages was but one more instrument of their captivity on reservations. While life for non-Whites was exceedingly difficult, White Americans could readily reinvent themselves. Among the greatest ironies the author uncovers is the fact that by the mid-1880s, ranching was “one of the most corporatized businesses in the nation,” with investment pouring in from the East and Europe. Though the Homestead Act—bitterly opposed by the South—did offer land to individual farmers and “enshrined an agrarian version of the ideal of free labor,” its success was mixed. Of lasting effect, in West’s view, is that where the disunion that led to civil war was furthered by lack of interregional communications, the postwar expansion of railroads, fast ships, and telegraphy created a superpower.

A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.