Essay

The revisionists' faiiure of imagination.

How the West Was Won or Lost BY LARRY MCMURTRY

I.

"You've been to too many burying par- ties," Augustus said. "Old Wilbarger had a sense of humor. He'd laugh right out loud if he knew he had the skull of a cow bufFalo for a grave marker. Probably the oniy man who ever went to Yale College who was buried under a buffalo skull."

—Lonesome Dove

Immodest though it is to quote myself, I plead Yale College as an excuse. My lik- able cowman Wilbarger may have been the only Yale man, fictional or otherwise, to be buried beneath a buffalo skull, but he was by no means the only Yale man to involve himself vigorously and fatally in the winning (or was it the losing?) of the West. Yale is no cow college, yet it can't seem to let the West alone. Will Yale deconstruct the Old West, too? Are our myths safe for a few more years, or must we Westerners face up to living with nothing more stirring than our suburbs, now that John Wayne is dead? If the young Yale historians end up whipping the old Yale historians, we'll be lucky even to keep the suburbs.

There's a new land rush in the history departments, a new Wild Bunch thun- dering out of New Haven, racing through the academies, shooting out streetlights, roping barber poles, and telling everyone who will listen that the West was actually being lost while a be- fuddled nation thought it was being won. Well, I exaggerate about New Haven; the new Wild Bunch recruits from coast to coast, and includes quite a heterodox group of historians. Insofar as it is a group, its work on the history of the American West conforms to what the Yale-trained historian Patricia Nelson Limerick calls the "rendezvous model," her favored model for a consideration of an actually quite heterodox time and place.

Rendezvous were the annual meetings of the mountain men, to sell furs and lo carouse, in the early decades of the nine- teenth century. From what I've read about them, they anticipated the big

LARRY MCMURTRY is the author most re- cently oi Buffalo GiVii, just published hy Simon and Schuster.

(275,000 strong) Harley-lovers rally that all but did in Sturgis, South Dakota, a few months ago. What interests Limerick about the rendezvous was that it was not just a gathering of Anglo-European white males. You might have heard Rus- sian spoken, and you would certainly have heard French, of a sort. You might have heard just about anything spoken. And you might have gotten your ear bit- ten off by a Samoan, a woman, a Metis, or a Blackfoot—a mutilation that carried more cachet than getting it bitten off by a white man.

These historical revisionists are scrap- pers, to say the least. Reading them in bulk, however, one is likely to come away feeling let down. What a fat mess the Old West was! How ruinous, how destruc- tive, how inflated! How flimsy and how temporary its victories! Failure Studies, the new history of the West might be called. Maybe Buffalo Bill was rigbt: win- ning the West was in the end jyst a form of entertainment, something the nation did while it was waiting for television to be invented. Bugles in the afternoon, 7th Cavalry, Custer, the Alamo, amber waves of grain, and all the rest were just brief and engaging white man's lies. Little wonder that it's only as a form of enter- tainment—the Western—that it now sur- vives.

Still, as one reads through the more revisionist of these books. Limerick's particularly, anomalies do tickle the brainstem, the first one being that to- day's historians are still pounding away, across almost a full century, at the much- pounded figure of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose famous address, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered in 1893 and various- ly revised, has recently been reprinted yet again. Turner, a Victorian historian from Wisconsin, is a problematic figure. My problem with him is that my eye simply flinches when it encounters his prose (though my eye, to be fair, reacts in the same way to the prose of Ed- mund Gosse). "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" fills only thirty-eight pages of large clear type, but it has taken me twenty years to get through it. In the case of Turner, I'm glad I stuck it out, because now I under-

stand why the little speech continues to upset almost everyone who reads it or hears about it.

It isn't because of Turner's patient theory that prairie agrarianism was the ideal soil for democracy. Henry George had made hash of that notion twenty years before Turner gave the speech. What made "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" such an epochal event in our national life is that Turner dared to tell America, in his very first paragraph, that something was over. The frontier was over. They couldn't have any more free land.

Well, then and now, Americans really don't like to hear that they can't have any more—free land, in this case, but it could just as well be Jane Pauley, or anything Americans want more of Tell them there's no more of something, and you make a tasting impression, if a bitter one. "The lights must never go out, the music must always play," as Auden put it; and if you're talking about the Old West, the white man better be holding up the scalp when the movie ends.

I remember laboring, around 1971, on a screen offering for John Wayne,James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, a bittersweet, end-of-the-West Western, in which no scalps were taken and no victories were won. The three actors were horrified, genuinely and touchmgly horrified. Over? The Old West? They couldn't quite articulate it, but what they were struggling to say, I think, in response to the disturbing script that eventually be- came Lonesome Dove, was that the only point of the movies, and thus, more or less, of their lives, was that the Old West need never be over. You might as well say that America could be over, a notion so high-concept as to be, at the time, unthinkable, or at least unproduceable.

P II.

atricia Limerick has re- ceived much the most at- tention of the score or so of active revisionists, and for

several good reasons, the simplest being that she is a good deal more readable than most of the rest of them. She's a lively writer, she^can be funny, and her case studies in the darker side of the West are clear and admirably succinct. Far too many Western historians drone on like the honeybee. Also, Limerick has something like an idee fix .̂

It is that our westward expansion was a mosaic of failure, financial attd personal, but also, in the largest sense, ntoral. The expansion was, specifically, an irrespon- sible white male's adventure, hugHy de- structive of the land itself, of the naliv* peoples, and even of the white male's own women and children. In Limerick's

32 TiiK NKW RKRHLH; OCTOBEH 22, 1990

view, the dominant school of American historian?—ihe Triumphalisls, we might call them—^havc painted over these fail- ures and gone hlandly on proclaiming [he whole westward movement, from Daniel Boone to the Turner speech, from Lewis and Clark tO Wounded Knee, a smashing and unblemished success.

Ihe Triumphalist text thai Limerick uses to clinch her point—she quotes it frequently—is one sentence in the fifth edition (1982) of a widely used textbook called Westward Expansion, edited by Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge. Here's the sentence: "The history of the American West is, almost by definition, a triumphal narrative, for it traces a virtu- ally unbroken chain of successes in na- tional expansion." Limerick has spent fruitful years destroying that sentence. In The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), Limerick ably demonstrates that westward expansion was anything but an unbroken chain of successes. She also argues, less persua- sively, that the problems that plagued the West in the nineteenth century are, m essence, all there in the twentieth cen- tury as well. Her summary:

In the second half oilhe iwentieth century, every major issue from "frontier" history reappeared in the courts or the Congress. Struggles over Indian resources and tribal autonomy: troubled relations wiih Mexico; controversy over the origins of Mormon- ism; conflicts over water allocation; anoth- er farm crisis; a drastic swing downward in the boom/bust cycles of oil, copper, and timber; continued heavy migraiion to some parts of the West, with all the famil- iar problems of adjusting to growth and sorting out power between natives and newcomers; disputes over the use of the public lands; a determined retreat on fed- eral spending in the West: all these issues were back on ihe streets and looking for trouble.

F air enough, but I'm not sure the similarities really outweigh the differences. Then we had Indian wars;

now we have an Indian remnant. Then we had a war with Mexico, and took a hunk of it; now we have "troubled rela- tions with Mexico." Then halfof the con- tinent was still unspoiled; now it isn't. It's utiderstandable that historians would be intrigued with continuity and change, and it's interesting to pick threads of the past from the fabric of the present. Still, a Western pioneer in the nineteenth cen- tury and a Western suburbanite in the twentieth century have had profoundly different realities to contend with, and the fact that the problems of the latter stem from ihe behavior of the former shouldn't be allowed to blur the diOerence.

But back to the sentence in the text-

THE NEW HISTORY The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America

by Robert G. Athearn University Press of Kansas (1986),

319 pp.. $25, $9.95 paper

Myth of the West by Chris Bruce, et al.

Rizzoii (1990), 190 pp., $45

Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining

by A. Dudley Gardner and Veria R. Klores Westview Press (1989), 24.S pp., $37

New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Creat Age of Discovery

by William H. Goetzmann Viking Penguin (1986), 528 pp., $17.95

The West of the Imagination by William H. and William N. Goetzmann

W W. Norton (1989), 458 pp., $34.95

7"̂ !? Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West

by Patricia Nelson Limerick W W Norton (1987), 396 pp., $17.95

The Female Frontier.-J Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains

by Glenda Riley University Press of Kajisas (1988),

292 pp., $25, $12.95 paper

Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, hnd the Cali- fornia food Processing Industry, W30-1950

by Vicki L. Ruiz \ University of New Mexico Press (^987),

212 pp., $12.95 paper

The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy

by Kirkpatrick Sate \ Knopf (1990), 453 pp., $24.95 \

Far From Home: Families of the Westward foumey

by Lillian Schlissel, et al. Scbocken (1989). 288 pp., $19.95

Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives edited by Lillian Scblissel, et al.

University of New Mexico Press (1988), 360 pp., $27.50, $14.95 paper

Cowboys of the Americas by Richard W. Slatta

Vale University Press (1990), 306 pp., $35

Beyond the Mythic West by Stewart L. Udall, ei al.

Gibbs Smith (1990), 176 pp., $29.95

Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870

by Sylvia Van Kirk University of Oklahoma Press (1983).

301 pp., $22.95. $11.95 paper

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster

Oxford University Press (1982), 277 pp., $9.95 paper

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Crowth of the American West

by Donald Worster Panihi'on (1985), 402 pp.. $12.95 paper

book, and to the revisionist criticism of Western historiography. Mightn't there be a little old-fashioned Western over- statement in the criticism? Couldn't the sentence be foolish, rather than pivotal? Does it really bear the weight of consen- sus that Limerick claims for it? Have American historians really overlooked completely the obvious horrors of con- quest or the perfectly plain missteps and inequities that occurred along the way? Or could it be that these few inert words in a textbook were the catalyst for a post- Vietnam, post-civil-rights movement, post-American innocence assessment of the long westering movement of the American people?

I raise the question because the first thing that strikes one about the histori- cal revisionism about the West is its post-ness. The second thing is its influ- ence, and it does seem that the two things are linked: the influence appears to derive from the post-ness. The fact is that American readers have been told these messy truths about the West be- fore, and by abler historians than most of the revisionists. They have been told them, indeed, hy historians with a deep- er sense of the tragic nature of the Western story than the revisionists pos- sess. Those historians wrote, however, before any, or many, Americans were ready to receive bad news from out West. It is impossible to impress a peo- ple with truths that they aren't ready to hear, much less to accept.

But attitudes can change,and to some extent theAmerican attitude about\ ' -^ America has changed. Con- quest, once a national habit, almost a national ideal, is now despised. Old, bru- tal, masculine American confidence has been replaced (at least among histori- ans) b'y a new, open, feminine American self-doubt—a moral doubi, the sort that can produce a malaise of the spirit, per- haps the very malaise that Jimmy Carter was decrying even as it sucked him under. \

Now that the Infant, Doubt, is with us, it's only to be ocpected that historians would begin a reordering of priorities and emphases. A priafession that once mainly concerned itself with national he- roes and their actions now prefers to pay some attention to victims. There is no shortage of victims out West; you have the native peoples (destroyed), the mi- grant poor (degraded), the landscape (damaged, mangled, eroded, stripped), the women and children (brutalized, ex- ploited), the national ideals (tarnished). Also requiring attention are the hun- dreds of business ventures that went un- der in the Old West—some swiftly, oth- ers after lingering trauma for peoples

OCTOBiR 22. 1990 THt: NKW RKPI'BI.IC 33

and regions—but these are lesser con- cerns, mainly illustrative of the moral limitations of naked greed. Writing about business failures has certain built- in dramatic pitfalls, the chief one being that people love to read about booms but immediately yawn when asked to read about busts. Booms are fun: the briefly rich try so gallantly to extend the small reach of human extravagance tbat they tend to lead the eye away from the lap- sarian nature of it all.

111.

T he reading lists appended to this essay contain thirty- two books, sixteen more or less new and seventeen

more or le.ss old. Not all of the new books are by revisionists; William H. Goetz- mann certainly, and several others prob- ably, would reject the label. Conversely, and this is not something you would learn from the breatbless revisionists, many of the old books contain sober per- spectives or dour analyses that are quite compatible witb what the revisionists are saying.

A good case in point is Henry Nash Smith's J'lr^n Land: The American West a.s Symbol and Myth, published in 1950. and an influential book in my own graduate school days, f'irgtn Land examined the history of westward expansion, and the texts produced by it. in simple pre-struc- turalist language. It focused on image, metaphor, and symbol, mining dime novels and travel narratives for the glit- tering metaphorical nuggets they con- tained. Smith was a more than capable historian, as well as a literary scholar. The dominant myth leading people west might be the myth of the Garden, he ob- served, but the actual West was mainly semi-arid plain, mountain, or desert: a capricious Garden at best.

Smith's fine chapter on the "Failure of the Agrarian Utopia" anticipated a num- ber of the revisionists' arguments. He also pointed out that others, particularly the brilliant Henry George, had noted a full seventy-five years earlier that the government's policy of land distribution encouraged monopolies of land and cap- ital that actually worked against agrarian democracy—-just as the revisionists now emphasize. In Our Land and Land Policy. National and State (1871). George ana- lyzed the tendency to land concentration that everyone now deplores (not least because the concentrations will probably Fall into the hands of Japanese or Germans).

In the process of being smart and thor- otigh in guiding us through the Garden that confused its gardeners. Smith also provided as acute a rejoinder to the Turner thesis a.s I've seen to this dav.

THE OLD HISTORY We Pointed Them North by Teddy Blue Abott

and Helena Humington Smith Farrar and Rinchari (1939)

Sky Determines: n Interpretation of the Southwest

by Ross Calvin Macmillan (1934)

Son of the Morning Star ^ by F.van S. Conncll orth Point Press (1984)

The Rise and fall of the Choctaw Republic \ by Angie Debo

L'niversityvof Oklahoma Press (1934)

The Road to Disappearance by, Angie Debo

University of tJklahoma Press (1941)

Geronimo: The Afan, His Time, His Place by Angie Debo

University of Okla'iioma Press (1976)

Exploration and Empire\The Explore^- and the Scientist in the Winning af^the American West

by William H. Grtetzniann Knopf (196^

Charles Goodnight: Gowman dnd Plainsman byj. Evetts HaleyX

Hougbton Mifflin (19?

The Trail Drivers of Texi edited byJ. Marvin Hunter

Jackson Co. (1920)

Turner. Bolton. and Webb: Three Historians of the American Erontil

by Wilbur R.Jacobs, et al. University of Wasbington Press (1965)

The Gomanche Earner to South Plains Settle- ment: A Gentury and a Half of Savage Resis-

tance to the Advancing White Frontier by Rupert Norval Ricbardson A. H. Clark and Co. (1933)

Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth

by Henry Xash Smitb Harvard University Press (1950)

The American Gowboy by Lonn Taylor and Ingrid Maar

Library of Congres.s (1983)

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

by Frederick Jackson Turner An address delivered in 1893, variously

revised and reprinted

The Plains Across: Tfte Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860

byjobn D. Unruh University of Illinois Press (1979)

The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb

'OinnandCo. (1931)

The Great Frontier by Walter Prescoti Webb

of "lexas (1964)

Here's a bit of it:

. . . the general course of social evolution in the United Stales created a grave ibco- reticai dilemma for bim [lurner]. He bad ba.sed bis bigbest value, democracy, on free land. Btit tbe westward advance of civ- ilization bad caused free land to disappear. Wbat tben was to become of democracy? Tbe difliculty was tbe greater because in associating democracy witb free land he bad inevitably linked il witb tbe idea of nature as a source of spiritual values. All tbe overtones of t bis conception of democ- racy were tberefoie tinged witb cultural primitivism. and tended to clasb witb the idea of civilization. In itself, tbis was not necessarily a disadvantage; tbe conception of civilization bad been invoked to justify a number of dubious undertakings in tbe course of tbe nineteentb century, includ- ing tbe European exploitation of native peoples all over tbe world. Fuitbermore, as we bave bad occasion to observe in studying tbe literarv' interpretation of the agriculttiral West, tbe tbeory of social pro- gress tbrougb a uniform series of stages was poor equipment for any observer wbo wished to understand Western farmers. But Turner bad accepted tbe idea of civili- zation as a general description of tbe soci- ety tbat bad been expanding across the continent, and witb tbe final disappear- ance of free land this idea was tbe only remaining principle witb wbicb be could undertake tbe analysis of contemporary American society.

Since democracy for bim was related to tbe idea of nature and seemed to bave no logical relation to civilization, tbe conclu- sion implied by his system was tbat post- frontier America contained no force tend- ing toward democracy.

.Smith tben dryly noted tbat Turner Hsafely civilized at Harvard after 1910) '\urned to the rather unconvincing idea th^ the Midwestern universities might be afele to save democracy by producing traineq leaders." About that, the iurv is still out\

Ifonepuis tbe two reading lists side by side and stares at tbcm, hoping tbat Clio will dip her wand and reveal what's really new in the ncw -̂history (what is not new. I repeat, is that the cost of winning the West was high, physically and morally), tbe wand dips immediately at one novel development: the gertder of the histori- ans. 7en women had a band, either as author, co-autbor, or edjtor, in tbe six- teen books on the new list. Only three women appear on tbe old list. Of those three. Ingrid Maar was the co-curator of the line cowboy exhibition tbe Library of Gongress mounted in 1983. and, Helena Huntington Smith was the ghostwriter who helped Teddy Blue with his spar- kling memoir; and the only full-fledged female historian on the old list is tbe re- markable (and recently deceased) Angie Debo. who lived almost a century.

Debo began her labors long before women were welcome in history depart-

34 IHK Nhw REPt:Bi.i(: OCTOBER22,1990

mcnts, or in any departments for that matter. Her work on Indian removal and dispcrsa'l\ especially The Hi.se and Fall of the Chocta-u>-^epnbUc (1934) and The Road to Disappeorant\(\^A\) (ihc latter a his- tory of the Crehk Confederacy and its ruin), is excellent,\s is the biography of Geronimo that sheMehvered in 1976, when she was eighty-six. Debo had the ability, uncommon in an American his- torian, to deal with tragic stibjects movingly but unsentimentally, wilh a kind of Roman measure: grief bul no hair-pulling, as opposed to hair-pulhng but no grief, which is what one frequent- ly finds in books about the destruction of the American Indian.

But back to my point, which is that the women's sttidies wing of the American historical profession now has a powerful Western branch. This branch is busy putting women into the Western story. The more interest- ing specialized studies— such as \'icki L. Ruiz's Cannery Women. Cannery Lives, a study of Mexican women in the California food processing indus- try between 1930 and 1950, or Sylvia Van Kirk's Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Soci- ety, 1670-1870—provide much fascinating detail about bow women func- tioned in industrial or preindustrial subcul- tures, and offer many ex- amples of women's resil- ience, of their great competence in the face of long odds.

L'nlil now, women had been repre- sented mainly by Maureen O'Hara or Jo- anne Dru standing nervously on tbe pa- rade ground of the fort, waiting for Captain Wayne to return from his peril- ous mission. All that is being smartly and appropriately redefined, as diaries, trav- el journals, and letters to luckier loved ones back East bave begun to emerge from attics, family trunks, and (mainly) state historical societies. Most of the let- ters in the state historical societies bave been there for a long time, as unconsult- ed as the women who wrote them were in their lifetimes. No more: tbe long- ignored writings of these many women constitute a kind of second Trail of Tears. Not that the womenfolk failed to manage bravely: but tbe children kept dying, and it's hard, ain't it bard, as Woody Guthrie said.

The feminist correction of Western history is, as I say. quite appropriate. To anybody familiar with tbe West, howev- er, it is not exactly news. On this point I

would Hke to append an exhibit, a photo- graph of my McMurtry grandmother with her two sisters-in-law, around 1940. ouiside the house in which I'm writing these lines. These three women came to the lexas frontier late, in the 1870s. af- ter the Comanches were defeated and tbe worst was over. Between them they bore more than twenty children (it may have been closer to thirty). Look at tbe women. Look at the men. Enough said.

Most of these historians of the female role in Western industry or Western set- tlement are generally not long on theory. In tbe main, they are content to describe, and tbeir descriptions are often vivid. The revisionist wilh plenty of theory is Donald Worster. of Needles. California, and \ale. who now teaches at the Univer- sity of Kansas. In Rivers of Empire: Water.

FAMILY I ' O R I KAI A R <L. 11 K R t : 1 I \

Aridity, and the Crowth of the Ameriasm West, Worster gives a respectful nod to^̂ such earlier historians as Walter Presrott Webb and Henry Nash Smith, but he, is on the whole far more critical, and per- suasively so, of the Western experiment.^ In this book he does a brilliant job of showing how water management, very early on, gave the lie to the myth of the West as a place of untrammeled free- dom. According to Worster. "The Amer- ican West is also more consistently, and more decisively, a land of authority and restraint, of class and exploitation, and ultimately of imperial power." He elabo- rates the portrait later in the book:

1'hf .'\niericaii West can bcvsl be described as a modern hydraulic society, which is to say a social order based on the intensive. large-scale manipulation of water and irs producis in an ;irid setting . . . the hydrau- lic society of ihc We.st is . . . increasingly a coercive, nionoiithic. and hierarchical sys- lem, ruled by a power ehle based on the ownership of capital and expertise.

Wors ter moves easilv from a disctis-

sion of Papago irrigation methods into an analysis of Karl Wittfogel's studies of Cbint'se agricullurc. and thence on to a more general reflection on ibe Frankfurt School, two of whose members, Hork- heimer and Adorno, resided briefly in Pacific Palisades, in the very maw of the liydraulic society. Worster believes that history reflects nature and its fate, and that tbe American West, with its dyna- mos and irrigation canals, would have provided Horkheimer and Adorno with "as clear and illuminating a test of tbe cultural implications of the rule of instru- mental reason and the domination of na- ture as any in the world." Of all the new historians, Worster is the one I felt I'd like to go back and reread, not so much for his argument as for tbe breadth and tbe interest of his historical reference.

He has reflected with love, sadness, and anger not merely on the Ameri- can West, hut more gen- erally on water's part in what he calls "the flow of power in history," and he tempts the reader to ponder these matters, too.

Worster's achieve- ment notwithstanding. I keep discovering what seem like prophetic in- sights, about aridiiy and water rights, or pop- ulation and agriculture, in books such as Ross Calvin's Sky Detn-mine.<i (1934) or Walter Pres- cott Webb's The Great Plains (1931). Webb, the

" " dryland fanner turned historian, seems to me still the thinker who made the most fruitful use of lijrncr's frontier thesis. He was one of tbe first to expand it, to look at European conquest as a whole in terms of the possi- bilities and the limitations of frontiers in

\ a book called The Great Frontier, the study what be called a "four hundred vear

L^uppose. then, that the root of my uneaMness with the Western revisionism genera^y is that the revisionists would Hke us to^believe ibat they were more or less the fii^t to notice, or at least to em- phasize, ho\^ violent, how terrible, and bow bard wiriijing the West actually was. My own reading, as well as my boyhood among the old-timers, leads me to exact- ly the opposite conclusion: everyone no- ticed how hard it was. Even the young males, of several races, who were the ones most disposed to see it all as a grand adventure and a perpetual frolic, have copiously noted how quickly and how completely the fun could drain out of it.

fhe same state historical societies tbat

OCTOBER 22, 1990 I fiv. Nhw RKI'I III,]<, 35

are revealing the unrevealed lives of pio- neer women contain even more diaries, journals, and letters of pioneer men. Even though the men know that it's not manly to complain, they do complain: it's too hot or too cold, it's too wet or too dry, the animals won't bebave, the Indi- ans are scary, the distances interminable, they're hungry, they're starving, they're sick, they're injured, they're close to be- ing defeated, tbey are defeated. Good- bye Ma, give my love to my sisters. And we buried him there, on the lone prairie . . .

I n fairness. Limerick frankly admits that the gritty, discour- aging facts about the West have long been known and of-

ten stated. Tbe problem, sbe claims, is that the Triumphalist myths continue to overwhelm the equally old survivor's facts, that the public continues to see Western triumph and igtiore Western failure. It is this perception that the revi- sionists must correct.

In The Conqimt of Paradise, on Colum- bus and his legacy, Kirkpatrick Sale nice- ly and provocatively describes the tre- mendous, often fatal shock that occurred when the first colonists met those they would soon be colonizing. The natives quickly died off. more than ninety per- cent of them, but tbe colonists died al- most as quickly, and not from disease, not from starvation, just from a kind of wilderness sbock. Even in cozy, fertile, forested Virginia, not that different to- pographically from Europe, Captain Smith's colonists, in surprising numbers, just sort of sat down, went blank, and died.

If Virginia was such a rude shock, think about tbe West. Better yet, go look. Fol- low the Santa Fe trail, follow the Oregon trail. Follow the Chisholm trail, the Tex- as trail, the California trail. Exit 1-40 now and then and look at what can still be seen of the recently famous Route 66, which was still a fully viable trail in the days of Kerouac and Cassady. It's taken scarcely thirty years for the plains and the desert to erase Route 66. How much easier for ibe same plains or tbe same desert to erase a family, or a wagon train. Tbe West, in the phrase of the 1960s, has always been and remains in many ways just Too Much. Little wonder tbat peo- ple in the wagon trains began to die be- fore tbey were even out of St. Louis. The distances are daunting, and it's usually too hot or too cold, too wet or too dr\\

Tbe enduring drama of tbe West is still a drama of sky and land. Thousands of pioneers recorded their sense of insig- niftcance in relation to it, and many his- torians have observed that the pioneers were right: they were insignificant in rela- tion to it. Stuck recently in successive

traffic jams, breathing successive smogs, in Denver, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, I thought, grimly, that one has to concede the Triumphalists one point: the place did get settled—and yet there is such a quality of impermanence in even these sprawling settlements that one can still wonder. After all. Limerick's beloved ghost towns were once thriving settle- ments too, and not long ago. A tornado nearly took Wichita Falls, a flood nearly took Cheyenne, and the Big Qjiake, pa- tient as a grizzly', still stalks San Francisco and Los AngeleS.

IV.

T o Understand the west- ward expansion, one needs not merely the ex- plorer and the scientist,

but the artist as w6ll. From the begin- ning, artists were part of tbe enterprise— and a vital part of it, for it was the artists, rather more even tha î the explorers or the scientists, who ended up selling the West to the East. To tbtAgreat extent that there was a West of thp imagination— and this was the West tltat most Ameri- cans knew—it w-as the artiits, not the pio- neers, who created it. I have recently, in a novel involving CalamityJaVie and Buffa- lo Bill, attempted to conVey how the West became show business\almost im- mediately. Within a year of taking the famous First Scalp for Custer (a^calp still shrouded in controversy), Burifalo Bill had his Wild West Show going, aVid only a decade later he was racing eighc^Euro- pean kings around Earl's CourtXin a stagecoach, at Queen Victoria's Jubilee, while Indians, resting between mock bat- tles, played pingpong behind the tent\.

William H. Goetzmann, a Yale-trainecî historian and perhaps our principal stu-\ dent of the exploration of the American West, has recently, in New La?tds, Mew Men, followed Webb {his distinguished predecessor in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin) back- ward and outw'ard into a consideration of the exploration of the New World as a whole, and of what it meant, particularly, for science. Goetzmann's earlier, Pulit- zer Prize-winning study. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1967), was a ricb work of history whose insigbts are significantly extended in The West of the Imagination, the art book he has produced with his son as a companion volume to a FBS television series of the same name.

Reading the Goetzmanns' hook re- minds one again of just how mstanta- neously the selling of the West got under way. 1 he artists were right there, in lockstep with the explorers, if not a jump ahead. From Titian Peale and Sam- uel Seymour through Catlin, Bodmer,

Miller, Kane, and the rest, the art- ists were painting while the explorers mapped. Nor were the writers sluggish: the beavermen had scarcely reached tbe headwater of the Missouri before Feni- more Cooper and Washington Irving be- gan to use the West in their writings.

Scholars bave been slow to relate Western experience to the art tbat car- ried this experience home to the rest of the nation. As long ago as 1938, Robert Iaft did it for photograpby in Photography and the American Scene 1839-1889. Most such attempts focus either on fiction or film, but there's so little of either that carries much significance that the at- tempts usually fall flat. Because Donald Worster is a student of the Dust Bowl, he has devoted a chapter to Steinbeck's sen- timentalities in The Grapes of Wrath, but the fact that tbe art has been so largely ignored, by tbe old historians and the new, makes one all the more grateful for the Goetzmanns' impressive survey.

Still, there's a lot more to be tbought, studied, and said about the relation of Western art to Western experience. Richard Avedon's recent book of por- traits. In the American West, was greeted witb howls of rage in the West because it dared to shatter the pastoral idealiza- tions that the West believes sbould rep- resent it. The most famous modern Western pastoral, of course, is Ansel Adams's "Moonrise: Hernandez, New Mexico." It's a pretty moon, all right. But it is Avedon's camera that shows you tbe people who might actually live in the town beneath Adams's moon, and they aren't quite as pretty. Scholarship has yet to come to grips with such dichotomies: tbe beautiful, amazing, chilling land- scape and the people whose hearts and bodies bave been broken bv it.

I the debate between theTriuniphalists and the Revi-sionists—a debate still in its\ ^ early stages—Goetzmann and Linrerick are the debaters witb the stron- gest Voices and the most interesting dif- ferences. For now. I think, Goetzmann has the^dge. because of his crucial rec- ognition Vhat the winning of the West was in large measure an imaginative act. Similarly, Robert Athearn's The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America success- fully shows the\way in which the dream of the West as a place of freedom and op- portunity has retained its energy virtual- ly all the way throtigh the twentieth cen- tury, in defiance \jf hugely altered conditions, and also cif a huge mass of negative fact. AthearV like Worster, is a Westerner, and canMjardly awaken from the dream himself, though his book is a gallant attempt at full- critical wakefutness.

As Goetzmann and Athearn under-

36 THKNKW RKI'I B[.[(: OCTOBER 22,1990

stand,\he winning of the West was an act based on'^ dream of empire dreamed by people with very different mentalities and ainbitioi^ from those historians or Westerners wYk> may now direct a critical eye, quite fairl\\ al ihe legacy of that same dream and that same act. Failure Studies, by coiUrast, in their effort to have the truth finally told, often fail themselves because they so rarely dojus- ti(e to the quality of imagination thai constitutes part of the truth. They may be accurate about the experience, but they simplify or ignore [he emotions and imagmmgs that impelled the Western settlers despite their experience. Explor- ers and pioneers of all stamps needed miagmation, much as aihletes need ear- hohydrales. l-antasy provided part of the (Iber that helped them survive the severi- ties that the land put them to.

C ross the Oklahoma pan- handle on a winter's dusk aild see if you can avoid a sinking of the spirit. Cross

the barren Shoshone Reservation in the Wind River valley of Wyoming; cross the brutal Bridger Plateau in the same state. Cross the Staked Plains, cross the central Mojave, cross the Donner Pass in a blizzard, cross the Badlands, cross the Canyonlands, cross the Dismal Riv- er country of northern Nebraska—cross almost anyplace in the West when it is too cold, too hot, too empty, when the sand IS blowing in your face or ihe hail- stones are threatening your windshield. Cross almost any part of it in a lowering light and you may wish heartily that you were back in some civili/ed place like the Piazza Navonna, eating gelato and feeling cozy.

Or, if you don't want to drive, look through a hundred or so of the Lake- side Classics, the wonderful series of re- prints of original narratives of explora- tion and settlement done hy the R. R. Donnelley Company of Chicago over the last seventy-five years. In format, in edit- ing, in the selection of texts, the Lakeside Classics are exemplary reprints, a Li- brary of America before there was a Li- brary of America, only they're Ameri- cana literature: they tell you, in ihe words of those who did it, what it was like to settle this country. You won't get a death a page, but you'll still get a huge number of deaths, and thousands of wounds of a non-terminal nattire. The West killed people by the thousands: Indians, whites, Hispanics, blacks. Asians. It also broke people by the thousands, people of all races and both genders.

What you won't find much of, in the vast literature of settlement, is disap- pointment. People went West with such high hopes that often they were de- stioved before thev reallv had time to

become disappointed. Perhaps the idea o( opportunity was just too potent. While the land was open, certainly, that idea was virtually all-sustaining. Fail here, succeed there. Bust here, boom there. Drought in Texas, try Nebraska. Too hot in Kansas, try Colorado. Grazed out in Wyoming, try the Dakotas.

V.

B ut disappointment did come. It came in the twenti- eth century, when the free land was gone, the people

were more numerous, the opportunity was harder to spot.

Always I wondered, as a hoy, at my father's tragic sense. What did he see that was so sad? We didn't have much, hut we had as much as our neighbors. We even had better horses. What did he see? What he saw was ihat the frontier was over, just as Frederick Jackson Turner had said. The time had come to awaken from the great dream of the West. And brief It had been: from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee was but a long life- time. A young cowboy going up the trail with the first Iexas herds in 1866 could have also gone up the trail with the last herd around 1890, he finished with the Vyhole glorious adventure, and still be starcely middle-aged. Could he be hap- pŷ however, selling insurance in the suburbs?

My father and his eight hrothers spent their\ lives in what is called the "range cattle industry," but no cattleman or cowboy I ever met regarded it as an in- dustry, or even a job. It was a calling, as fur-trappjng was a calling, or prospect- ing was a galling. Even ninety years ago, wben my father was born, anyone smart could see ihat caltle weren't going to last. In the f̂ast twentieth century, it wouldn't do ĵust to let steers graze around on thê , grass until they got fat enough for subtjrbanites to eat; such a method was too slow, too inefficient, too capital-intensive. (Ranching and cowboy- ing and all that my father and thousands like him lived would Soon end—and now it has. But not the yearning for it: in the last five years I've bef^ asked to write introductions to no les^ than a dozen books of photographs of cOwboys. There probably isn't a cowboy, a boot, a well- sweated glove, a dogie, a btjnk bouse, a branding fire, or a ranch cook in America that hasn't been photographed at least once by some photographer determined to record the glory before it fades.

My father's tragic vision had a Simple focus. He might have been in deb̂ t for fifty-five years, but be had not only keen the West in its fresh beauty, he had had a calling. His children, who might also be in debt for fiftv-five years, would only

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have jobs. The Garden was lost, and not one of his children would see the won- derful country as it had once been. Ihc difference might apply lo history, too. The Triumphalists write about a West where people had callings and were sus- tained by them. The Revisionists see a West where people had only jobs, and crappy, environmentally destructive jobs at that.

T he West produced a few ir- repressible optimists, such as Custer and Cody, but the larger figures saw too

clearly and too far to miss the horror and the nightmare within the dream of em- pire. I think particularly of the great plainsman and cattleman (!]harles Good/' night. When asked, near the end of his long life, whether he was a man of visi/)n. Goodnight replied, "Yes. a hell of^ vi- sion." The great ones, such as Ciood- night, were too smart: they saw the end in the beginning, saw the death/and the destruction that lay between as well. Kip- hng would have approved of/them, for they looked on triumph and disaster with the same stoic, unwavering, unsentimen- tal eye.

They were hard to persuade, and even harder to impress. Goodn/ght, so far as I know, was only once moved to compli- ment the behavior of a numan being in prim. He directed that/these words be carved on the gravestone of the black cowboy Bose Ikard: /

Served with me four years on the Good- night-Loving trail, nev?r shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, ratle with me in many stampedes, participated in three engage- ments with the Cqmanche.s, splendid behavior. /

Goodnight drove the buffalo out of Palo Duro C ânyon and tjegan the settlement of the Texas panhandle, much of which he came to own, fqr a time. But he was not much of a busiijcssman, and the law- yers for his English] partners soon took it away from him. Hq bought some buffalo and tried to breed'them with Herefords, producing a wretched animal called the Herfalo. That's revisionism, with a vengeance.

Goodnight gavejup on the Hertalo, but kept bis buffalo. He once was persuaded to give one of them to a straggling band of Kiowas, who had slipped oil their res- ervation and coiiie to the only place where tbey might still find a buf- falo, which was Cioodnight's ranch. He thought they wanl ed to eat it. What thev really wanted to their skinny horse in the old way, one has a fine story, based on this

lio was to chase it on and kill it with lances,

last time. (]ohn Graves 'The Last Running," ncident.) Goodniglit

watched the last riinning from his porch Or at least that's the storv that is still

told in the lexas panhandle. There is no finer or sadder moment

with which to illustrate the Quixotism at the core of the Western story. And the Quixotism was there almost from the be- gintiing. The very explorer^-wlio began the destruction of the Garaen could not bear to admit that the Garden had been destroyed—that i.t could be so lost, and in only a single lifetime, that the Kiowa Indians woiild have to beg a buffalo from the Old Man of the Plains, a man who had fought them for fifty years and won.

From Zehiilon Pike to Louis L'Amour, no Westerner has watyed to think that the West ol the imaginatioTi was lost. For if that West is lost, then it's all just jobs. The West of the miagination is the West upon which the revisionist Sancho Pan- zas now wish to shine the sober light of common day. Fair enough. Still, it might interest a few of them to read the end of Don Qiaxole, to consider what happens when the crazy old Don surrenders bis fancies and lets the tough little realist bave his wav. •

Fearful Symmetry BY STANISLAW

Hourglass by Danilo Kis translated by Ralph Manheim (Fairar, Straus & Giroux, 274 pp., $22.95)\

T he key to this difficult n el, and to this writer's diri\- cult art, is buried in an in-\ conspicuous paragraph on

page 187. During one of the "interroga- tions" that together form a large part of the novel, a "witness" is asked to de- scribe in detail a trademark of an other- wise irrelevant brand of telephone cas- ings. {"Telephone casings with that trademark could easily be identified on the shelves by their flimsiness and un- wieldiness. . . . The trademark stamped on them was also the work of poets.") His description is this:

The dark Bakelite surface has a white vase stamped on it. a vase or an hourglass or a chalicf; but then you notice that this vase is an empty space, negative, hence an illu- sion, and that the only po.sitive, thai is, real thing is the two profiles turned toward each other, face-to-face as in a mirror, which dehmit the vase or hourglass.

lhe hourglass doubling as a looking glass, us outlines a suggeslion of a mir- ror reflection of a human face: this is the perfect emblem of Danilo Kis's literary magic.

In art. analogies sometimes seem to offer the best way to define an artist's originality. This convenient method can be misleading, though. Before Kis died in Paris lasl year at the age of only fifty- four, he was on his way to becoming, in popular critical opinion, a sort of Serbo- Croatian Jorge Luis Borges: since the educated consumer of contemporary ctiltLire more or less grasps Borges's uniqueness, the average book reviewer

feels free to use Borges's name as a criti- cal tag, and so it became a firm point of reference against which Kis's uniqueness may be better understood. But tbe analo-

\gy merely scratches the surface: it never Veaches the respective historical and per- sc|nal experiences underlying each of thijse writers' imaginary worlds.

It one is to invoke Kis's affinities, the morV telling one is to Bruno Scbulz. It seemed exceptionally fitting last Febru- ary in vJew York tbat a prize named for Scbulz Vas awarded postbumously to Kis. He dc'served it not just as a "foreign writer untier-recognized in the United States," btk also, I'm tempted to say, as Schulz's ScVuth Slavic mirror image. Tbey are, in\a sense, partners in a dia- logue conducted from two sides of the violently upturned hourglass of Central F.urope's calatnilpus history, and multi- ethnic geograph\\^ in our century. Their commonality lies riot only in the striking similarities ibat haVe already been un- derscored by Kis's (Vitics, such as their shared, mixed cultural identity as Jew- ish inhabitants of thii former Austro- Hungarian empire; or iA the role that the half-realistic, half-symboiJc figure of the father plays in their fictional worlds; or in theirgeneral way. asSchulzV)nceput it, of "mytbologizing reality"; orWen in their shared fascination with Hourglasses. {Sanatorium under the Sign of th^ Hourglass was the title of one of the two collections of short stories that Schul/ managed to publish before his murder in 1942.)

1 here are many more invisible threads connecting the works of these two au-

38 1 m N>v\ OCTOBER 22,1990