Review by Ed Quillen
Western History – August 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Legacy of Conquest – The Unbroken Past of the American West
by Patricia Nelson Limerick
Published in 1987 by W.W. Norton
ISBN 0393304973
The profession of history, which seemed about as exciting as watching nails rust during my student days, has in recent years jumped onto the national stage and grabbed a major role.
The controversial Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, was once a history professor. Bob Dole, the GOP’s presidential nominee last year, criticized teachers who “sow doubt about the nobility of America in the minds of our children.”
Washington wrangles with national history standards and whether Harriet Tubman deserves more space than Thomas Edison, and tries to make political hay from a Smithsonian exhibit of Western art.
Our West now serves as the historical battleground between the Traditionalists and the Revisionists, and Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, which emerged in 1987 and remains in print, has become a Revisionist standard.
Before we get to the book proper, let’s examine the two sides. The Traditionalist history of the American West is an extension of what I like to call Eastern Seaboard Standard History — that is, America started in Boston and moved west, along a frontier zone, into a vacuum. As soon as the territory was populated (two people per square mile, which Saguache County hasn’t reached yet), then the story was over.
Revisionists — besides Limerick, they notably include Richard White (It’s Your Misfortune and None of my Own) and William Cronon (Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West) — see it as a lot more complicated than that.
The United States was only one country competing to control a West that wasn’t empty. It had Indians, for one thing, who were hardly a monolithic block — the Crow would ally with Yankees against the Lakota, or the Utes would join the Spanish forces against the Comanche.
Nor were Americans a unified bloc — as the labor wars that wracked the West for half a century make evident. Grangers fought the railroads, ranchers warred with homesteaders, small enterprises feared big enterprises, women organized to put other women out of business, settled Hispanics despised rowdy recent immigrants who might give them all a bad name, and so on.
The point Limerick makes in Legacy is that all this mixing and fighting didn’t come to a sudden halt in 1890 (the traditional date for the closing of the frontier), but continues to this day. Thus the subtitle, “The Unbroken Past of the American West.”
This isn’t a detailed history of a place or a culture or an industry — it’s an overview, a synthesis that argues for a new way of looking at the West. Rather than see it as territory subdued by a Manifest Destiny, Limerick argues we should see it as a land that many have entered, a region that has its own story of which the United States is only a part.
She argues, and convincingly to me, that the issues that defined the West in 1860 are issues that were not resolved by the arrival of American surveyors, railroads, and tax collectors.
For instance, the Traditionalist view is that Indians were factor until about 1880, when they were subdued and the survivors sent to reservations, after which we can ignore them. But we see daily headlines about the Utes and Animas-La Plata project near Durango, or about court decisions concerning reservation gambling. The Indians lost some wars, but they’re still players in the West, as Limerick explains in one chapter, “The Persistence of Natives.”
Another Traditionalist view is that the Mexican War of 1846-48 settled something for all time — so why the concerns about unauthorized migration across the Rio Grande, why the Official English movement from some who feel threatened, why the opposition to NAFTA from organized labor? Because history hasn’t stopped, Limerick argues in another chapter, “America the Borderland.”
Her book is divided into two sections: the Conquerors, five chapters which explore conflicts within the invading American culture, and The Conquerors Meet Their Match, five chapters about how the conquered — be they Indians, Hispanics, laborers, Populists, utopian colonists — have refused to exit the Traditionalist stage.
Limerick’s prose is generally clear and informative, even graceful:
The sources of so many American ideals, Jeffersonians held out considerable hope for the civilizing of Indians. Intensely interested in the relation between nature and humanity, Jefferson and his colleagues had considerable faith in the capacity of changed environments to reshape humans. Instructed and restrained in a secondary social environment that encouraged farms and Christianity, Indians could change rapidly from savages to citizens.
Expecting rapid and happy change, the Jeffersonians were predictably disappointed.
The exception is the introductory chapter, which often tends toward dense-pack academese, and I’d advise the casual reader just to skip it and start on page 35 with “Empire of Innocence.”
Legacy of Conquest describes the West I grew up in and live in now with contention over immigration and public-land policies, the West one of my grandfathers tried to homestead while the other hauled slag at a smelter for $2 a day, the West that one schoolmarm grandmother tried to civilize while the other grandmother dreamed of a farm, and so I wonder why the Revisionists are so controversial.
My guess is that in a large sense, the Conquest of the West is the American version of the Iliad — our epic of nationhood. The Traditionalists created not a history, but a mythology, and those who inject facts into the national myth will receive ill treatment from political candidates who promise to “restore America” to some mythological condition that never actually existed.
Anyway, Legacy of Conquest is informative and provocative reading, though not always easy, and it will give you an overview, and much more, of the Revisionist side in the war for the soul of the West.
–Ed Quillen
