Review by Ed Quillen
History – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West
by David M. Wrobel
Published in 2002 by University Press of Kansas
ISBN 0-7006-1204-1
I USED TO JOKE that it was easy to tell whether you were in the “Old West” or “New West,” just by watching how people greeted each other when they felt friendly. If they hugged, you were in the New West. If they holstered their sidearms, then you were in the Old West.
But as Promised Lands points out, there’s nothing novel about the phrase “New West,” which appeared just after the Civil War in an 1869 railroad guidebook. Within a dozen years, there was a New West Publishing Company, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, which also published New West Illustrated to promote settlement in the railroad’s territory.
The Union Pacific was only one among many railroads, among them the Denver & Rio Grande, with an active propaganda office. To get from one busy terminus to another, western railroads passed through hundreds of miles of unsettled territory. If that land could be populated by farmers and townspeople, then rail traffic would grow. Since costs remained about the same, profits could grow in an impressive way.
Thus writers were put to work explaining how every whistlestop enjoyed the healthiest of climates, no matter how torrid the summer or gelid the winter. Rocky alkaline soil was praised for its fertility. Rainfall was abundant, and just in case it wasn’t, irrigation would of course make the place as verdant as the Garden of Eden.
Wrobel quotes expansively from the boosterism of the time, and it seems amusing at first, until you recall that real people often believed these claims, and then suffered mightily trying to wrest a living from a hard land. But Wrobel generally passes over those abundant tragedies to examine a dichotomy in how people viewed the West.
Our river-running industry provides a modern version of that dichotomy. On one hand, there are thrilling white-water adventures. On the other, it’s safe family fun.
BACK THEN, the Western frontier came with Lakota warriors, grizzly bears and drifting gun-slingers, and provided opportunities for adventurers willing to make something of it. But to attract settlers who were likely to farm and build homes and businesses, boosters had to define the West as a rather civilized place with refined citizens and well-equipped schools. It took some talent to make the same place fit both descriptions.
After analyzing the booster propaganda, Wrobel looks at the recollections of early journeys across the West, and how they became more mythological as time passed. Those recollections also served as reminders to the pampered moderns who crossed the West in comfortable Pullman cars that they weren’t as tough as their pioneer forebears.
But apparently their forebears weren’t all equally tough, either:
“Pioneer reminiscers did more than just draw the contrasts of time and manly virtue when they embedded themselves within harsh, demanding, yet glorious and memorable frontier heritage. Their recollections not only juxtaposed different eras but also drew contrasts between the severity of the frontier process in particular western places. Earlier, state-level boosters had favorably contrasted conditions in their particular states of residence, which they claimed were fully settled and cultured, with other states where conditions were more ‘frontier-like.’ The Nebraska boosters of the mid-1879s, who had warned prospective settlers not to risk the dangerous frontier territory of Colorado, are a good example. Pioneer reminiscers generally drew the contrast in reverse, claiming that they had experienced more demanding and inhospitable frontier conditions than had their pioneer neighbors in other western regions. Old pioneers were sending a message to their regional counterparts. They stressed that the front
And this “I’m a real westerner and you’re not” attitude continues to the present, according to Wrobel, because “locals draw on the power of primacy (length of residence) to deny the westernness of newcomers, questioning whether they can ever assimilate and ‘become western.'”
As you can tell from these quotations, Promised Lands is not casual reading. It’s an academic work, but an accessible one if you take your time and give it some thought as you proceed.
We westerners are people of contradictory attitudes; we complained about Eastern immigrants in the 1920s because they might lower property values, and about California refuges in the 1990s because they raised property prices. But we’re also consistent: “We can reminisce fondly — as the settlers of a century ago were wont to do — about the way things used to be, before the arrival of freeways, fast food, gourmet coffee franchises, and Californians.”
Promised Lands has many such observations, and so it’s a satisfying book if you’re curious about the West of popular imagination and American mythology, a construction which bears only the most tenuous of relationships with the physical landscape. It’s not fast reading, and it’s seldom easy reading, but it is worthwhile reading.