Review by Ed Quillen
Western History – May 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Something in the Soil – Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
by Patricia Nelson Limerick
Published in 2000 by W.W. Norton
ISBN 0-393-03788-6
IN A SOCIETY where the phrase “you’re history” implies that you may not be worthy of further attention, it may seem odd that historians get much popular attention.
But there are exceptions, like the historians of the New West, most notably Richard White (It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own), William Cronon (Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West), and Patricia Nelson Limerick (Legacy of Conquest). They get a lot of public attention, but they also generate enormous controversy.
To some people, Patty Limerick is the Wicked Witch of the Ivy League, engaged in an all-out revisionist assault on the Traditions of the True West.
Perhaps in self-defense, she has on occasion ventured away from the classrooms of Boulder to the lecterns of the West — and not just the elevated West of Santa Fé or Missoula or Jackson, but the gritty West of Rawlins, La Junta, and Poncha Springs, where she spoke for Anza Day in 1997.
That delightful speech (also published in the September, 1999, edition of this magazine) is among 16 speeches and essays assembled in Something in the Soil, wherein Limerick takes her wit and her arguments directly to the public.
In the introduction, she summarizes the New Western History with 4 C’s: Continuity (the story didn’t end in 1890), Convergence (the West was invaded by many cultures), Conquest (let’s be honest about what was going on), and Complexity:
Describing the West as morally complex, I have had many opportunities to observe, will elicit a chorus of dismay and protest against such a negative point of view. Thus, a major project of the New Western History had to be the assertion that benefits often came packaged with injuries, good intentions could lead to regrettable outcomes, and the negative aspects of life wove themselves into a permanent knot with the positive aspects. The deeply frustrating lesson of history in the American West and elsewhere is this: human beings can be a mess — contentious, conflict-loving, petty, vindictive, and cruel — and human beings can manifest grace, dignity, compassion, and understanding in ways that leave us breathless.
FOUR OF THE BOOK’S five sections (each with three or four essays/speeches) concern the West and its history, and it’s hard to pick a favorite, since they’re all witty, informed, and well-organized.
Consider some of these observations:
“When reporters asked him [New York Gov. Al Smith, running for president in 1928] about his appeal in the states west of the Mississippi, he replied ‘What states are west of the Mississippi?’ Writers of the current crop of American history textbooks have a certain amount in common with the ill-fated Smith. A few of them run into moments of trouble in keeping these big, square, evidently interchangeable states straight.”
— from “The Case of the Premature Departure: The Trans-Mississippi West and American History Textbooks.”
“By the mid-1870s, [John] Sutter and his friends had constructed a narrative which, if unsuccessful in moving Congress, was perfectly put together to bore Western schoolchildren for a hundred years to come.”
— from “John Sutter: Prototype for Failure”
“With its record of wars and holocausts and threatened atomic annihilation, the twentieth century provides no viewers’ grandstand on which we can sit in self-righteous judgment of the cruelties of the nineteenth century. Thus, when the writers of a recent American history textbook tell us that ‘By twentieth century standards, [Andrew] Jackson’s Indian policy was both callous and brutal,’ one cannot help wondering, ‘And which twentieth century standards are those?'”
— from “Haunted America.”
These examples were plucked almost at random, and the book sparkles throughout. Some explanation may lie in the concluding trio of essays, where Limerick departs from the West and examines writing and academia, with the thoughtful observation that if more professors took the trouble to make their work accessible to the public, universities might have an easier time getting money from the state legislature.
One of the hazards of reviewing is that you generally set aside a time to read a book, and then plow straight through it.
This book would be better savored at an easier pace, an essay at a reading, followed by a day or two before picking up another one. Each stands on its own quite well, and if you’ve got any interest in the West or the history of the history thereof, you’ll feel rather sad on the day that you realize you’ve read them all.
— Ed Quillen
(Patricia Nelson Limerick will be among those participating in an urban-rural divorce trial on Saturday, April 29, at 7:30 p.m., in the John Held Auditorium at Salida High School. Admission is $7 with proceeds going to local educational charities.)