Review: The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West

Reviewed Work(s): Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past by William
Cronon, George Miles and Jay Gitlin: Writing Western History: Essays on Major
Western Historians by Richard W. Etulain: Trails toward a New Western History by
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner and Charles E. Rankin: Creating the West:
Historical Interpretations 1890-1990 by Gerald D. Nash: Under Western Skies: Nature
and History in the American West by Donald Worster
Review by: John Mack Faragher
Source: The American Historical Review , Feb., 1993, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 106-
117
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

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 Review Article
The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and
Reimagining the American West

JOHN MACK FARAGHER

William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky:
Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

Richard W. Etulain, ed., Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western

Historians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).

Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.,
Trails toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1991).

Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations 1890-1990

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).

Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American
West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE "NEW WESTERN HISTORY" has been getting a lot of press lately. A recent cover
story in U.S. News and World Report announced that historians had now shown that
the American West was not "some rough-hewn egalitarian democracy, where
every man had a piece of land and the promise of prosperity, but a world quickly
dominated by big money and big government"; not a land "where the sodbuster
might dwell in sweet harmony with nature, but a nearly unmitigated environmen-
tal catastrophe"; not a society of close-knit pioneer families, but one in which men,
women, and children were "torn apart by the great desert emptiness of the West."
These revisions led to an inevitable conclusion: "The Turnerian view of the West
is falling apart these days."'
This is news? In a world of dizzying intellectual fashion changes-from
modernism to postmodernism to claims of the "end of history" itself-it may com
as something of a surprise that historians of the American West have taken so lo
to overturn the interpretation of a century-old conference paper.
Delivered in 1893 to a meeting of the American Historical Association, "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History" by Frederick Jackson Turner

I wish to thank the graduate students who considered the "new western history" with me in a seminar
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the spring of 1992.
' Miriam Horn, "How the West Was Really Won," U.S. News and World Report, May 21, 1990.

106

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 The Frontier Trail 107

(then a thirty-two-year-old assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin) was

the classic expression of the Turnerian view: that "the existence of an area of free
land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,
explain American development," that this frontier accounted for American
democracy and character, and that the frontier had now closed, with uncertain
consequences for the American future. By 1910, the year Turner assumed the
presidency of the AHA as well as a chair at Harvard, the frontier thesis had
become the commanding view of the American past, a position it held for more
than half a century. It became the most familiar model of the American past, the
one taught in school, extolled by politicians, and screened at the local movie
theater each Saturday afternoon. Turner's collected essays, The Frontier in
American Histo7y, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920; and in 1952 the book placed
second on a list of historians' favorites, sandwiched between Vernon Parrington's
Main Currents in American History and Charles Beard and Mary Beard's Rise o
American Civilization. As late as 1964, a survey of nearly three hundred American
historians found Turner's ideas "still dominant."2
Reports of Turner's fall from grace nevertheless struck me as a headline from
the past. At the time of that 1964 survey, I was a California sophomore studying
history, and after graduation I spent several years bumping from one history
graduate program to another until finally settling at the institution where I
completed my dissertation. In every instance, my professors in the history of the
American West always read Turner as a primary source, a fascinating intellectual
road map to the American fin de siecle, but certainly not a model for their ow
work in western history. I came to respect the professional work of the late Ray
Allen Billington, a Turnerian who encouraged much good western history
through his leadership of the Western History Association (established in 1961)
and his Histories of the American Frontier series; but I admit that I found his
defense of the frontier thesis something of an intellectual curiosity. We graduate
students had other things on our minds, inspired by the prospect of applying the
methods of the new social history to the West and by the challenge of re-
envisioning the relationship of region to nation and to the global history of
colonization.
Thus I was surprised that a number of today's most prominent western
historians believe the field remains "stuck in a Turnerian rut." In the words of
Donald Worster, author of the provocative Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the
Growth of the American West (1985), "Turner presides over western history like a
Holy Ghost." At meetings of the Western History Association, Worster remarks,
"heads still bowed dutifully at the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, and a few
still crossed themselves in reverence." Sentiments like these seem to have
resuscitated the few remaining Turnerians, who have risen up angry. Martin
Ridge, who after Billington's death revised his textbook, Westward Expansion: A
History of the American Frontier (original, 1949; 5th edition, 1982), dares historians
like Worster to "explain what is new about their work other than their personal

2 FrederickJackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 1; William N. Davis
quoted in Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations 1890-1990 (Albuquerque, N.M.,
1991), 74.

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 108 John Mack Faragher

assumptions and value judgments." Arguing that they have little to offer as a
replacement for Turner's interpretation, Ridge fires back that they "may find that
it is exceedingly difficult to bury his ghost."3
The arguments over western history sometimes get ill-tempered. Turnerians
unfairly represent the new western history as all doom and gloom, while the
anti-Turnerians exaggerate the strength of their opponents, although it turns out
that Turner's spirit, if not his ghost, is still around. But the current debate,
rehearsed in this bumper crop of new books, is testimony to an extraordinary
burst of intellectual energy. Over the last thirty years, historians have reimagined
the history of the American West.

FOR AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEBATE that has continued in the century since Turner
delivered his paper, turn to Creating the West by Gerald D. Nash, professor of
history at the University of New Mexico and author of one of the first histories of
the modern West, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an
Urban Oasis (1973). Nash organizes his argument around the proposition that the
currents of historical interpretation are a function of generational differences;
when historians, at early stages of their careers, share common perceptions of
decisive events, they form a generational consensus of opinion. "The visions of
the West which successive generations had in mind," he writes, "were as
determining in shaping their particular interpretations as the historical record."4
The generation for which Turner became spokesman, for example, was shaped
by its perception of the American crisis of the 1890s-the farmer and worker
upsurge, the economic depression, the end of continental expansion and the
beginning of overseas imperialism-jolting episodes in the transition from rural
and agricultural to urban and industrial society. Hailing mostly from country and
small-town backgrounds, this generation of historians, writes Nash, found appeal-
ing an explanation like Turner's, which located America's historic meaning in its
rural past. The influence of Turnerian views in the early century, he concludes,
had less to do with the intellectual power of the synthesis or the compelling nature
of the evidence than with a shared sense of generational nostalgia.
Here, at the beginning of his book, Nash makes the best case for his
thesis-perhaps because by paying relatively little attention to the scholarly and
intellectual trends out of which Turner and his contemporaries emerged in the
late nineteenth century, he simplifies the problem of distinguishing what was
unique about their generation. But with his subsequent cohorts-three genera-
tions of historians demarcated by the shaping experience of the first and second
world wars and "the sixties"-he must confront messy transitions, and his
argument is less persuasive.
Before detailing that critique, however, I wish to acknowledge how useful

3 Donald Worster quoted in T. R. Reid, "Shootout in Academia over History of U.S. West,"
Washington Post, October 10, 1989; Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History i
American West (New York, 1992), 8; Martin Ridge, "Frederick Jackson Turner and His Ghost: The
Writing of Western History," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s. 101 (1991): 76.
4Nash, Creating the West, 259.

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 The Frontier Trail 109

Nash's book is as a guide to the debate and how fully it documents the early and
sustained challenge to Turnerian views. Critics began attacking them in earnest in
the 1920s, when an important component of intellectual radicalism took the form
of a kind of inverted frontier thesis, invoking the western past to account for
many of the negative aspects of American civilization. The frontier, John Dewey
declared in 1922, was most notable for its "depressing effect upon the free life of
inquiry and criticism." Other scholars began to question what one of them called
"the shibboleth of the frontier" in American historiography, picking away at
Turner's fuzzy definitions, his internal inconsistency, his sometimes faulty logic.
Charles Beard, with a thesis of his own to promote, blasted "orthodox historians"
for dwelling on the frontier thesis to the exclusion of nearly all other interpreta-
tions; "the tabu is almost perfect," he remarked, "the American Historical
Association officially is as regular as Louis XVI's court scribes." In the 1930s,
following Turner's death in 1932, critics pummeled his work unmercifully.
Numerous studies appeared with alternative readings of his historical evidence:
there had never really been any "free land" (Paul Wallace Gates), the idea of a
vanished frontier was erroneous (Isaiah Bowman), democratic institutions had
been imported from the East (Louis B. Wright), the West had never acted as a
safety valve for urban discontent (Fred A. Shannon), settlement had fostered
community rather than individualist values (Mody C. Boatright).5
Of even greater significance was the emergence of a number of alternative
frameworks for western history. Herbert Eugene Bolton called for a multina-
tional and multiethnic history of the North American West, and Joseph Kinsey
Howard wrote an epic narrative of the metis people of the northern plains that
called attention to some of the continent's other expanding peoples. Walter
Prescott Webb made the case for the West as an arid region and joined with
Bernard DeVoto to charge that it was a "plundered province." James C. Malin
produced pioneering work in western social and environmental history, while
Carey McWilliams sought to inaugurate the history of the urban West. Earl
Pomeroy insisted that the Westerner was "fundamentally imitator rather than
innovator," and Henry Nash Smith investigated the cultural sources of the
American myth of the West, including the deep background of the frontier thesis
itself. With the exception of DeVoto, Howard, and McWilliams, there are
insightful intellectual portraits of these and other men who shaped western
historiography in Richard Etulain's excellent collection, Writing Western History.6

5 Dewey and Beard quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 22, 24; John C. Almack, "The Shibboleth of
the Frontier," Historical Outlook, 16 (May 1925): 197-202; Paul Wallace Gates, "The Homestead Law
in an Incongruous Land System," AHR, 41 (July 1936): 652-81; Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe
(New York, 1931); Louis B. Wright, "American Democracy and the Frontier," Yale Review, 22 (1930):
349-65; Fred A. Shannon, "The Homestead Act and Labor Surplus," AHR, 41 (July 1936): 637-51;
Mody C. Boatright, "The Myth of Frontier Individualism," Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 22
(1941): 14-32.
6 Herbert Eugene Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America," AHR, 38 (April 1933): 448-74; Joseph
Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Metis People (New York, 1952); Walter Prescott
Webb, "The American West: Perpetual Mirage," Harper's, 214 (May 1957): 25-31; Bernard DeVoto,
"The West: A Plundered Province," Harper's, 169 (August 1934): 355-64; James C. Malin, "The
Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 4 (1935): 339-72, and "The
Adaptation of the Agricultural System to Sub-Humid Environment," Agricultural History, 10 (1936):
118-41; Carey McWilliams, "Introduction," in Rocky Mountain Cities, Ray B. West, ed. (New York,

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 110 John Mack Faragher

Thus a debate over interpretation of the western past took form. There can be
little doubt about the shaping influence of the times in which these historians
lived-the power of an iconoclastic spirit during the 1920s, the concern with
economic depression during the 1930s. Turner himself recognized the desirabil-
ity of historical presentism, announcing in one of his first published essays that
"each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions
uppermost in its own time." The frontier thesis of the 1890s retained a strong
following into mid-century, but it did not go unchallenged. "Such is the force,"
William N. Davis concluded after considering the results of his poll of historians
in 1964, "of the anti-, un-, and non-Turnerian groups, that it would appear only
a matter of time until they attain majority status."7
It is much less clear, however, that these shifts in interpretation followed
generational boundaries. Nash's model fails to explain numerous cases. For
example, when Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., began a distinguished career as one of the
most prominent historians of the interwar years, he stated his convictions as
merely a modification of Turnerian views, writing that "the two grand themes of
American history are, properly, the influence of immigration upon American life
and institutions, and the influence of the American environment, especially the
frontier in the early days." Some twenty years later, however, in his presidential
address to the AHA in 1942, Schlesinger rejected the frontier thesis out of hand,
arguing that the American "is the product of the interplay of his Old World
heritage and New World conditions." His views, it seems, were shaped less by his
generation than by the debate of the intervening decades. Moreover, Schlesing-
er's student, Ray Allen Billington, began his career as one of those "anti-, un-, or
non-Turnerians," remarking in 1942 that the "most glaring of the Turner errors
is probably his stress on the lone frontiersman." Billington, too, changed his
mind.8
Nash does not even grant that such cases are anomalous, blithely ignoring all of
them as he moves toward a sweeping statement of his theme. "Essentially," he
concludes, successive generations of historians "were engaged in replacing one set
of myths with another-with those that seemed more satisfying to their own
generation," a view that amounts to a ne plus ultra of historical agnosticism and

1949); Earl Pomeroy, "Towards a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,"
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41 (1955): 579-600; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American
West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). See Donald E. Worcester, "Herbert Eugene
Bolton: The Making of a Western Historian"; Elliott West, "Walter Prescott Webb and the Search for
the West"; Allan G. Bogue, "James C. Malin: A Voice from the Grassland"; Michael P. Malone, "Earl
Pomeroy and the Reorientation of Western American History"; Lee Clark Mitchell, "Henry Nash
Smith's Myth of the West"; all in Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians, Ric
W. Etulain, ed. (Albuquerque, N.M., 1991). The editors of Trails toward a New Western Histo7y
(Lawrence, Kan., 1991), Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin,
dedicate their collection to Carey McWilliams, but unfortunately there is no substantive discussion of
his work in the text.
7 Turner quoted in William Cronon, "Turner's First Stand: The Significance of Significance in
American History," in Etulain, Writing Western History, 75; Davis quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 74
8 Schlesinger and Billington quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 25, 41, 46.

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 The Frontier Trail 111

relativism. Does Nash mean to suggest that we should consider his own historical
work on the West as simply another "myth"?9
That he does not, that he pursues an agenda of his own, becomes evident as he
employs the generational thesis like a club to beat the latest generation of western
historians. Seemingly oblivious to the extreme relativism of his own approach,
Nash criticizes today's young historians as "relativists with a vengeance," accusing
them of "openly abandon[ing] any effort to retain a measure of historical
objectivity." "New Left" historians and "those who followed in their path without
an explicit ideological commitment [fellow travelers?] found little in the West's
past that was right, but saw a great deal of what they considered wrong." But not
once does Nash take up a detailed criticism of the work he so deplores, not once
does he show why he thinks it is wrong by reference to contrary evidence or faulty
logic. His critique is confined to outrage and ad hominem attack. "Nurtured by
unprecedented financial support in their educational development and research
grants not available to previous generations of academics," the sixties generation
burst onto the scene and "rudely disrupted" the proceedings. Nash condemns
their "disservice to the profession" and even implies that they are betraying their
country. "If historians are also keepers of a nation's soul, the custodians of its
sense of identity, one-sided indictments can serve the function of destroying the
very fabric of national identity." Mean-spirited rhetoric of this sort debases and
trivializes the debate.'0
To be fair, Nash is not alone in insisting that controversies over the western past
be cast as a generational struggle. According to Donald Worster, western history
has been remade during the last two decades by the "younger generation, shaken
by the experience of Vietnam and other national disgraces," although he qualifies
this by adding that he does not mean to say that this is solely the achievement of
scholars under the age of fifty. Indeed. The publications first articulating the
themes now identified with the "new western history" were in fact written by
historians of previous generations. Before I, and most of my contemporaries, had
left graduate school, scholars such as A. Irving Hallowell, Jack D. Forbes, David
M. Potter, Roger Daniels, Richard Maxwell Brown, Wilbur Jacobs, and Robert V.
Hine had challenged Turnerian assumptions and begun to detail the perspectives
of the many diverse communities of the West-not only Anglo-Americans but
Indian, Hispanic, and metis peoples, Asian and European immigrants, women as
well as men. Whether they realize it or not, most of today's western historians
build on the contributions of their anti-, un-, or non-Turnerian predecessors. By
failing to give full recognition to these pathbreaking studies, the generational
thesis violates one of the cardinal rules of history: close attention to antecedents.

9 Nash, Creating the West, 259.

10 Nash, Creating the West, 276, 79, 130, 262.
11 Worster, Under Western Skies, 11-12. A. Irving Hallowell, "The Backwash of the Frontier: The
Impact of the Indian on American Culture," in The Frontier in Perspective, Walker D. Wyman and
Clifton B. Kroeber, eds. (Madison, Wis., 1957);Jack D. Forbes, "The Indian in the West: A Challenge
for Historians," Arizona and the West, 1 (1959): 206-15, and "Frontiers in American History,"Journal
of the West, 1 (1962): 63-73; David M. Potter, "American Women and the American Character" [first
published 1962], reprinted in History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter, Don E.
Fehrenbacher, ed. (New York, 1973); Roger Daniels, "Westerners from the East: Oriental Immi-
grants Reappraised," Pacific Historical Review, 35 (1966): 373-83; Richard Maxwell Brown, "Histor-

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 112 John Mack Faragher

Writing in Trails toward a New Western History, Patricia Nelson Limerick, whose
influential Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) is a
stimulating showcase of "new western history" arguments, places the participants
in this debate into categories of "old" and "new," a variation on this generational
framework. This sometimes requires considerable tailoring, for some old ideas,
she admits, turn out to be "new." The frontier thesis was the cornerstone of the
"old western history," but then Turner himself argued for rethinking the past in
light of the present, which made him "new" as well; Walter Prescott Webb "was
decidedly New in his emphasis on the West's limited water and decidedly Old in
his patronizing treatment of Indians and Hispanics"; and so on. Are we likewise
to dismiss some new ideas as "'old"?12
The rhetoric of "new" and "old" seems simply a way of distinguishing between
arguments one does and does not like. Alternative approaches to the history of
the American West have existed among historians since the reconsideration of the
frontier thesis began in earnest, and contrasting interpretations have less to do
with "generations" than with social theory, moral values, and the angle and
breadth of historical vision.

THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL VISION is prominent among a number of themes that

run through the essays in these books. The Turnerians composed imperialist
chronicles, success stories that, in good Turner fashion, told of "the advance of
the pioneer into the wastes of the continent." Their collective narrative linked the
rise of the American nation-state with cherished values like opportunity and
freedom, with the certainty of white supremacy, and with the development of
rugged masculinity.'3
We now require what Sarah Deutsch, in Under an Open Sky, a festschrift
honoring Yale University's Howard R. Lamar, calls "a new narrative form more
appropriate to a pluralistic concept of history." In that same collection, George
Miles observes that in rethinking the Indian past over the last several decades,
ethnohistory has tended to depict Indians and whites in antithetical terms,
making it difficult "to imagine an approach in which Indian history can be
incorporated into the mainstream of American historiography." Because both
groups contributed to the making of the West, he argues, historians interested in
a common narrative need to become more attentive to interchange rather than
conflict. Jay Gitlin suggests the necessity of analyzing the contrasts between the
frontiers created by different European colonial powers in North America. "The

ical Patterns of Violence in America," in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,
Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. (New York, 1969); Wilbur Jacobs, "British Colonial
Attitudes and Policies towards the Indian in the American Colonies," in Attitudes of Colonial Powers
toward the American Indian, Howard Peckham and Charles Gibson, eds. (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1969), and
"The Great Despoliation: Environmental Themes in American History," Pacific Historical Review, 47
(1978): 1-26; Robert V. Hine, The American West: An Interpretive History (Boston, 1973; 2d edn., 1984).
12 Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Trails to Santa Fe: The Unleashing of the Western Public
Intellectual," in Trails toward a New Western History, 61.
13 Turner quoted in Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: Selections, Harvey Wish, ed. (New
York, 1962), xxi.

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 The Frontier Trail 113

Spanish Empire evolved as an amalgam of people and places, and Native

American communities had standing in that heterogeneous polity," while the
French, with their isolated communities and their reliance on the fur trade, "had
no choice but to recognize the sovereignty of Indian tribal communities and
observe the boundaries of legal jurisdiction." Looking elsewhere besides the
British-Indian frontier reveals a rich history of consort as well as conflict.'4
Historians of western women are also building on prior scholarship. Peggy
Pascoe, in Trails toward a New Western History, carefully acknowledges the contri-
bution of the first wave of western women's history while noting its rather narrow
preoccupation with "westering," a Turnerian view if there ever was one. "Now
that it is impossible to believe that there is only one cultural theme in American
history," she writes, "we're struggling to figure out how to write a history that does
justice to them all." She argues for a focus on western women who were
"intercultural brokers, mediators between two or more very different cultural
groups," pointing to the work of Sylvia Van Kirk on women in fur trade society
and of Sarah Deutsch on gender and ethnicity in the Southwest. I would add
Pascoe's own examination of the relationships of Anglo-American women re-
formers to Omaha Indian women, polygamous Mormon wives, and Chinese
prostitutes. 15
Another theme in these essays commanding considerable attention is the
history of the twentieth-century West, something the Turnerians ignored, with
their focus on the closing of the continental frontier at the end of the last century.
Here, too, today's western historians can look to a legacy of challenge to
Turnerian views. During the 1890s, as the frontier thesis began to work its way
into the historical imagination of this country, Adna F. Weber produced the first
statistical study of the growth of American cities, showing that the West "was more
heavily urban" than any other region except the Northeast. Noting the urban-
rural dynamic at the heart of western settlement and development, he pointed out
that "a Mississippi Valley empire rising suddenly into being without its Chicago
and smaller centres of distribution is almost inconceivable." While this insight
failed to inspire Turnerians, in Canadian history "metropolitanism" became the
leading model for understanding the development of the western provinces.
American western historians rediscovered the urban dimension in the postwar
period, making it possible, as Carey McWilliams argued in 1949, to see "the West
from a new point of view: from its centers, not its fringes; from the places where
its interests are articulated, not where they are most dispersed." Earl Pomeroy,

14 Sarah Deutsch, "Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865-1990"; George Miles,
"To Hear an Old Voice: Rediscovering Native Americans in American History"; and Jay Gitlin, "On
the Boundaries of Empire: Connecting the West to Its Imperial Past," all in Under an Open Sky:
Rethinking America's Western Past, William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds. (New York,
1992), 112, 54, 75.
15 Peggy Pascoe, "Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads," in Trails toward a New Western
History, 56, 55. See Sylvia Van Kirk, "Many Tender Ties": Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada
(1980; rpt. edn., Norman, Okla., 1983); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender
on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest (New York, 1987); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of
Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York, 1990).

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 114 John Mack Faragher

Charles Gates, and others made further advances in western urban studies during
the 1950s and 1960s.16
Focusing on the urban-rural connection breaks the distinction between "old
West" and "new West," with a divide at the "closing" of the frontier in 1890.
Patricia Limerick rightly insists on the continuity of western history across the
centuries to the present; she repeats a call issued by western historians from James
Malin to John Caughey, who twenty years ago urged his colleagues to end their
''self imposed imprisonment in the early and antique West." But problems of
periodization remain. As Michael P. Malone argues in Trails toward a New Western
History, Turner may have misidentified the wrenching changes of the 1890s as a
final closing of the frontier, but he was surely correct in identifying the period as
a major transition in the relationship of the West to the nation, just as the
expansionist 1840s were an earlier watershed. A consensus has developed among
today's western historians that another such transition occurred during the period
from 1933 to 1945, when massive federal infusions of capital transformed the
region into an economic and cultural pacesetter for the rest of the nation.17
This argument, forcefully made by Gerald Nash in his influential books on the
twentieth-century West, was also anticipated by earlier work. During the 1930s,
Walter Prescott Webb, Bernard DeVoto, and Joseph Kinsey Howard argued that
the West was, in DeVoto's words, "a plundered province," victimized by eastern
capital, "looted, betrayed, sold out." But DeVoto was also among the first to
recognize that the West had been transformed by World War II. "New Deal
measures, war installations, and war industries have given the West a far greater
and more widely distributed prosperity than it has ever had before," he wrote in
1946; "the ancient Western dream of an advanced industrial economy ... is
brighter than it has ever been before." But while the war certainly transformed
southern California and other urban centers, the western interior remained a
hinterland controlled by metropolitan elites. "Most western men and women may
still be paying economic tribute today," writes Michael E. McGerr in Under an Open
Sky, "but now they are paying more of it to other westerners."'18
On this question of hierarchy and power in the modern West, Donald Worster

16 Weber and McWilliams quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 160-61, 176. For "metropolitanism"
in Canadian historiography, see W. L. Morton, "The Significance of Site in the Settlement of the
American and Canadian Wests," Agricultural History, 24 (1951): 97-104; J. M. S. Careless, 'Frontier-
ism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History," Canadian Historical Review, 35 (1954): 1-21; Careless,
Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities, and Identities in Canada before 1914 (Toronto, 1989). See also
Charles Gates, "The Role of Cities in the Westward Movement," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 37
(1950-51): 277-78; Gates, "The Concept of the Metropolis in the American Western Movement,"
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (1962-63): 299-300; Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History
of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (New York, 1966).
17 Caughey quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 97; Limerick, "What on Earth Is the New Western
History," and Michael P. Malone, "Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western
American History," in Trails toward a New Western History, 86, 158. See Gerald Nash, The American West
Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); and Nash, World War II
and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln, Neb., 1990).
18 DeVoto quoted in Nash, Creating the West, 116, 118-19; Michael E. McGerr, "Is There a
Twentieth-Century West?" in Under an Open Sky, 244. See Bernard DeVoto, "The West: A Plundered
Province," Harper's, 169 (August 1934); and "The Anxious West," Harper's, 193 (December 1946);
Walter Prescott Webb, Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (New York, 1937); Josep
Kinsey Howard, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (New Haven, Conn., 1943).

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 The Frontier Trail 115

has the most to say. Indeed, in his new collection of essays, Under Western Skies,
Worster has a great deal to say on a wide range of topics, making his one of the
most powerful voices in western history today. The West has always been a
supplier of raw materials-grain, meat, lumber, minerals, fuel-for markets
somewhere else. But during the last century, he argues, two "ecological modes"-
cattle raising and irrigation agriculture-have dominated the scene, both contrib-
uting to the growth of "concentrated power." Ranching and agribusiness are
large corporate enterprises, both dependent on the management of resources by
federal agencies. This interlocking system fosters "hierarchy, concentrations of
wealth and power, rule by expertise, dependency on government and bureaucra-
cy." Thus, more than any other region, the West has come under the sway of big
capital and big government. For Worster, western history "best exemplifies the
modern capitalistic state at work."'19
The environmental theme embedded in this analysis has become one of the
most important of recent trends in western historiography, thanks to the likes of
Worster, as well as other historians including Richard White and William Cronon.
But it would be difficult to imagine their work without predecessors like Walter
Prescott Webb, the pioneer of the environmental arguments about the West, or
James Malin, whom Allan Bogue describes in his biographical essay as "the first
historian to understand and make constructive use of ecological theory." One of
Malin's projects was the study of human adaptation to the Great Plains. The Dust
Bowl of the 1930s, he concluded, was the product of a "pioneering" culture. An
opponent of the New Deal, he opposed government regulation or supervision
and suggested that Plains farmers would do better once they more completely
understood environmental limitations. While praising Malin as "the man who,
more than any other, anticipated the emerging ecological synthesis in history,"
Worster dissents from Malin's conclusions, arguing that political ideology "pre-
vented him from taking a detached view of the culture he was seeking to
understand." This criticism does not sit well with Bogue, who condemns it as a
case of "intellectual patricide." While this comment strikes me as considerably
wide of the mark, it is clear nonetheless that Worster's politics influence his history
at least as much as Malin's did his.20
In the tradition of DeVoto and Webb, Worster writes as an advocate as well as
a historian, arguing that "the history of this region, if it wants to be vital and
listened to, cannot be kept isolated from public controversy." There are no politics
in this work, however, perhaps because he seems not to envision change arising
from the existing configuration of social and political forces in the West. For
Worster, nature itself offers the only hope of real transformation. Pointing to the
build-up of salinity in western rivers, the result of intensive irrigation, he warns
that "nature has a way of undermining the most entrenched elites in history,
especially when they have overreached themselves." As Richard White observes,

19 Worster, Under Western Skies, 15,

20 Worster, Under Western Skies, 94-95; Bogue, "James C. Malin," 233. See Richard White, Land
Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle, Wash., 1980);
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); and, for a selection
of Malin's work, James C. Malin, History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland, Robert P. Swierenga, ed.
(Lincoln, Neb., 1984).

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 116 John Mack Faragher

Worster writes environmental tragedies in which the only "satisfaction we gain is

the knowledge of our limits."2'
The essay that concludes Worster's collection, however, finds him reflecting on
some of the limitations of his own approach. "We do need a better story than the
one we've been telling about the West," he now believes, "if nothing else than to
save us from gloom and excessive pessimism." In the end, he suggests a historical
study that seems to move closer to Malin's concerns: "We need a new past, one
with the struggle for adaptation as its main narrative, one that regards successful
adaptation as a kind of heroism too."22

THE THEME THAT SPARKS THE MOST DEBATE IN THESE ESSAYS is the matter of West
and frontier considered as place and process. Worster counts himself among
those arguing strongly for place, for a regional approach. He adheres to Webb's
declaration that "the heart of the West is a desert, unqualified and absolute." "I
know in my bones," writes Worster, "that Webb was right." All the West, of course,
is not desert, but aridity has played a shaping role in the region as a whole.
Consider, for instance, the impact of water-hungry southern California on the
water-rich portion of that state. In Webb's phrase, the American West is an oasis
civilization, but developers have often created the oases by diverting water from
somewhere else. Other traits help define the region: the extraordinary control
over land and resources exercised by the federal government, the continuing
dependency on extractive industries with a resulting boom-and-bust economy,
and the largest populations of Hispanics, Indians, and Asians in the country.
Furthermore, as Michael P. Malone points out, "a major part of the region's
shared cultural heritage lies in the drama and recency of the frontier's passing."
To objections that such traits fail to add up to a coherent regional identity,
Limerick responds sensibly that, "judged by equally stern standards, very few
regions-and fewer nations-would qualify as genuine units of society or units of
study."23
Problems arise not so much from the loose regional boundaries of today's West
as from the contingency of the term "West" itself. Moving back through the
American past, it refers to ever more eastward regions of the continent: to
Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa before the Civil War, when Americans considered
the West of today to be "the Far West"; to the old Northwest and old Southwest
territories at the end of the eighteenth century; to Kentucky and Tennessee
during the American Revolution. Turner used the phrase "the Great West" to
encompass them all. But the new western regionalists have no patience with such
historically mobile definitions. "If 'the West' is sometimes in Massachusetts,
sometimes in Florida, sometimes in Kentucky, sometimes in Illinois, sometimes in

21 Worster, Under Western Skies, 15, 77; Richard White, "Trashing the Trails," in Trails toward a Ne
Western History, 32.
22 Worster, Under Western Skies, 253.
23 Webb quoted in McGerr, "Is There a Twentieth-Century West?" 246; Worster, Under Western
Skies, 24; Malone, "Beyond the Last Frontier," 150; Limerick, "Trails to Santa Fe," 70.

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 The Frontier Trail 117

California, sometimes in Colorado," says Limerick, "then what on earth is a

'western American historian.'"24
Another contemporary group of western historians answers with the frontiers
approach. By no means does regionalism command a consensus in these essays.
Indeed, argue the editors of Under an Open Sky, the paradox of process and place
is "the central problem" of western history. "The West may be the region lying
somewhere beyond the Mississippi River, but it is also the experience of going
there." In this view, western history is the study of "the Great West," with special
attention to the "last" West in the vast and arid trans-Mississippi region, an
approach that obviously owes a great deal to Turner. "We share his belief that a
comparative study of parallel regional changes-'frontier processes'-has much
to offer," they write, for "without it, regional history loses much of its broader
significance." Where their model differs from Turner's is in the nature of those
processes, which they characterize as a series of open-ended transformations
carrying no imperial implications about progress.25
David J. Weber, a historian of the Southwest who recently served as president
of the Western History Association, argues that "abandoning the idea of the
frontier and making the West as place the center" threatens to drain away "the
drama of life on the edges where people and places meet." Turner studied the
frontier not merely because it was his special area of interest but first and foremost
because he believed its history could illuminate the broader story of America.
William Cronon believes that "to jettison Turner's frontier in favor of an
apparently less problematic 'regional' definition runs the grave risk of abandon-
ing the cross-regional and national emphasis he sought to establish for the field."
His perspective reminds us that the power of Turner's frontier thesis derived
from its commitment to the study of what it has meant to be American. That is
part of the Turnerian view we would do well to preserve.26
24 Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western America,"
in Under an Open Sky, 168.
25 William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, "Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for
Western History," in Under an Open Sky, 26, 6.
26 Weber's comment is in "The Legacy of Conquest, by Patricia Nelson Limerick: A Panel of
Appraisal," Western Historical Quarterly, 20 (1989): 317; Cronon, "Turner's First Stand," 93.

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