AmWest Post #2: “Well, I knew it wasn’t the East”

This afternoon I attended a meeting of the Potomac Corral, a group of people in the Washington region interested in the history and culture of the American West. Everyone went around the table to introduce themselves. The icebreaker question: What is your connection to the West? What drew you here?

In part because of the readings for class this week, I listened intently to how people responded. Most of us talked about growing up in places that this week’s authors would or wouldn’t define as the West (some of which have my hometown of San Antonio in, and others out), or a close affiliation, such as attending college or one’s studies. One answer particularly struck me, though: One attendee mentioned going to college in California, and that she guessed that it was the West. I said, half-jokingly, “What makes somewhere the West?”

Her response: “Well, I knew it wasn’t the East!”

Although this was far from a scientific poll–really just an anecdote that we didn’t discuss further (it was an icebreaker before the main event, after all)–it provided, to me, an interesting definition, one that dovetails with this week’s readings that contain many ways of defining just what the West, and Western history, is.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the man whose name continually pops up in the interrelated fields of Western, borderlands, and frontier history, leads off the order. For him, the West and the frontier meant the same thing: the line of “white” (term used loosely) settlement (term also used loosely, in my case). For the U.S. Census from 1790 to 1890, this was a literal line, separating where settlement of U.S. nationals (vis-a-vis Native Americans) lived at a density of at least two people per square mile. For Turner, then, Western history was frontier history–the history of the place where the frontier happened to be at a given time, and the process by which those places ceased to be frontiers. Thus, going to the point that Limerick took pains to refute in last week’s readings, according to Turner Western history ended in 1890.

I had only read Turner’s famous 1893 thesis, and in high school at that. Rereading that, and then the rest of his book, I was amazed at just how much his ideas of what the frontier was, and its phases, have influenced U.S. history–and not just Western U.S. history. For a paper in my previous round of graduate school, I read through several New England town studies, which were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them followed a mode I now recognize as Turnerian: People of European descent show up, they found a town, the town develops. Sometimes Indians figured into the story, but most often not. The sequence of events in these stories reads like chapter 2 of The Significance of the Frontier.

These studies also relate to the revision of Turner in historiography. There was a small revival of town studies in the 1990s, in which Native Americans played much more prominent roles, reflecting a redefinition of frontier happening at that time. That term, in the North American context, took back what Turner calls its European meaning: A meeting place between peoples, rather than Turner’s line between civilization and savagery.

So for Turner, the West is a place defined by a particular process. But others, both historians and not, consider the West a place. Colin Calloway defines his West as the trans-Appalachian western part of North America for his magisterial One Vast Winter Count, which covers the region’s history from the arrival of the first humans to the arrival of Lewis and Clark. Limerick, meanwhile, focuses on the trans-Mississippi West, noting that as a controversial definition.

Then came this week’s most precise, creative, and logic-driven definition of the West: that of David Emmons in a 1994 Western Historical Quarterly article. He bases his definition on the areas that could be considered beyond the Census/Turner definition of frontier in 1843, when the historian Hubert Gutman argues that the United States (as a rough date) turned from a “preindustrial” to “industrial” country. Emmons argues those regions formed “a separate West not because it was so environmentally different but because it was settled at a different time and under the rules of market capitalism and national states” (445). Because the United States incorporated these places after that time, they can be seen, according to Emmons, as having a unified history and can truly be considered a region.

So, taking these together, what is the West? What is this place we are studying this semester? Is it a place, or a process, or both? Does a place need to have a unified history to make it worthy of study as a cohesive place? That, for me, is the biggest question–one that remains unresolved–to come out of this week’s readings. It’s one thing to say that the West is the place that’s not the East, or that it’s the trans-Applachians, trans-Mississippi, trans-98th meridian. But do those places constitute one region, with a unified overarching story with a host of particulars? Do they need to in order to make an object–or class–of study? Not to mention, how does the changing notion of frontier discussed above fit into this picture? I look forward to discussing these questions in class–I’m now even less sure of my own answers than I was before…

Commenting

This week I commented on Allyson’s blog.