Review by Bill Hays
Western History – September 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West
by Larry McMurtry
Published in 2001 by the New York Review of Books
ISBN 0-940322-92-7
Very few Americans are unfamiliar with Larry McMurtry’s work, even if they don’t know it. Lest that sound like an oxymoron, McMurtry is the author of 24 novels, two collections of essays, two memoirs and more than 30 screenplays.
It’s the movies, several of which were based on books he wrote, that are likely to be familiar to most people: “Hud,” starring a young Paul Newman, was the first, followed by such well-known fare as “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove,” the TV miniseries based on McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name.
The enduring subject for most of McMurtry’s writing has been the American West, in both its mythic and contemporary manifestations.
Raised the son of a pioneering West Texas rancher, McMurtry became captivated by the subject if not the life of pioneering, cowboys and Indians, mythmaking, and displacement, and their history and romance are the subject of much of his fiction. As he writes: “In my teens, already a failed cowboy, I realized that — one way or another — my work was going to be with words, not herds, though, of course, being a word-herder means that one has not entirely escaped the herding imperative.”
Lately McMurtry has turned primarily to nonfiction, Sacagawea’s Nickname, a collection of 12 essays originally published in the New York Review of Books, is a prime example. He’s also a voracious reader and collector of books on the West — and the owner of two antiquarian bookstores, one in Texas and the other in New York. It’s from this vantage that McMurtry reviews several authors and books on his favorite subject.
The essays in Sacagawea’s Nickname are not primarily book reviews, but McMurtry begins most of the essays in this collection with a reference to a writer or book, and this generally serves as a pretext for extensive personal musing.
It would be difficult to craft a better summary of the book than this paragraph from the author’s own introduction:
In the essays that follow — though I do attempt to acknowledge two remarkable western women, the poet-novelist Janet Lewis (died age ninety-nine) and the historian Angie Debo (died age ninety-eight) — I have not directly concerned myself with literature. Man may have seven ages, but the West has had only three: the age of Heroes (Lewis and Clark), the age of Publicity (Buffalo Bill), and the age of Suburbia, for which the preferred new term is Urban Sprawl. How we got from the first age to the third, and what we destroyed in the process, is a story historians will be worrying about for a long time. Myself, I still mainly like to look.
For readers of Colorado Central, two of the essays in Sacagawea’s Nickname are close to home. In “Powell of the Colorado,” McMurtry assays not only John Wesley Powell’s epic trip down the Colorado River in the nineteenth century, but his status as a federal bureaucrat. McMurtry also comments on chroniclers and analysts of Powell and his exploits, most notably Wallace Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and Donald Worster in A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell.
No resident of the interior West — especially in this year of drought and fire — can be unaware of the importance water plays in the region’s past, present and future, and Powell was one of the earliest and most thoughtful to comment on this aridity. As McMurtry observes:
Powell thought seriously about erosion; he thought seriously about how, or whether, our arid lands could be irrigated. Both Stegner and Worster set up William Gilpin, the boosteristic first territorial governor of Colorado who never met an acre of the West he didn’t like, as a straw man and then both shred him; but in fact even in the middle of the nineteenth century there was perplexity about the West. Was it garden or was it desert? The early explorers contradicted one another on this point. The commonsense answer — that some (Lewis and Clark) traveled in wet years and others (Pike and Long) in dry years — was eventually confirmed by tree-ring studies.
The second essay of proximity to Colorado Central readers is “Cookie Pioneers.” The subject is Patricia Nelson Limerick, the University of Colorado professor and director of the Center For the New West whose own work has graced these pages, as representative of revisionist historians of the West, or as McMurtry describes her: “… perhaps by instinct, a counterstater, even, on occasion, a counter puncher…”
McMurtry is clearly a fan of Limerick’s, if less well disposed toward her fellow revisionists, and makes it clear that he appreciates her writing style, as well as the perhaps-impossible trail she follows:
It has been Ms. Limerick’s task — and that of her revisionist colleagues — to continually restore the contexts which the romanticizers just as continually dissolve. She is, I’m afraid, the Historian as Sisyphus, endlessly rolling the rock of realism up Pike’s Peak, only to watch it roll right back down into the pines of romance. Hers — theirs — is a noble but thankless task; rain though they may on the rodeo-parade model of western history, it’s still that parade that people line up to see: there’ll be an Indian or two, if any can be located, and a couple of faux Conestoga wagons, maybe a stagecoach, with a tottery old-timer riding shotgun, then a riding club, with a number of bankers and businessmen nervously clutching their saddlehorns, and, finally, several Cadillac convertibles with pretty girls in them. There you have the beloved story: wagons rolling on across the wide Missouri, then Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, then Cadillacs (or, more currently,
The other ten essays in this collection are about the larger West. “The West Without Chili,” discusses reference books on the West, primarily The New Encyclopedia of the American West. In “Inventing the American West,” McMurtry discourses on the facts vs. the legends of the West.
“Chopping Down the Sacred Tree” explores the problems James Wilson, author of The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, faces in writing about a subject and culture of which he’s obviously not a part.
“Zuni” describes the bemused toleration and interest on the part of the Zuni Pueblo people for a series of unscrupulous anthropologists out to make their reputations on their ethnographies, regardless of inaccuracies or what parts of the culture they have to threaten to get their material.
Other essays highlight a western poet, a western historian, and western explorers, Lewis and Clark, and their guide Sacagawea.
In “Old Misery” an essay about the Missouri River, McMurtry says: “The American West as we know it today came about in response to European — particularly Spanish — disappointment.” McMurtry doesn’t shy away from describing these disappointments and exposing and contradicting the myths of the West (nor from capitalizing on them in his own fiction).
Sacagawea’s Nickname is informed and informal, and well written with trenchant insights. It’s also a lot shorter than this review might indicate, just 178 pages. Even for readers who don’t wind up agreeing with any of McMurtry’s discursions, the book furnishes a good bibliography for further reading.
— Bill Hays