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  The American West

  The Lamar Series in Western History

  The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute to a wider under standing of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West.

  Editorial Board

  Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Past President of Yale University

  William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison

  Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan

  John Mack Faragher, Yale University

  Jay Gitlin, Yale University

  George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University

  Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton University

  Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico

  Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian, National Park Service

  Recent Titles

  Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination, by James Robert Allison III

  George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration, by Carlos K. Blanton

  Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field

  Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, by Lori A. Flores

  The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico, by Raphael Brewster Folsom

  Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928, by Andrea Geiger

  The American West: A New Interpretive History, Second Edition, by Robert V. Hine, John Mack Faragher, and Jon T. Coleman

  Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946, by Katrina Jagodinsky

  Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870, by Sami Lakomäki

  An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, by Benjamin Madley

  Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier, by Honor Sachs

  The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity, by Gregory D. Smithers

  Wanted: The Outlaw Lives of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly, by Robert M. Utley

  First Impressions: A Reader’s Journey to Iconic Places of the American Southwest, by David J. Weber and William deBuys

  Forthcoming Titles

  White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Adaptation, and Rapid Change in the Early Twentieth Century, by John R. Bockstoce

  The American West

  A NEW INTERPRETIVE HISTORY

  SECOND EDITION

  Robert V. Hine, John Mack Faragher, and Jon T. Coleman

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New Haven and London

  Published with assistance from the Joan Patterson Kerr Fund and from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury Memorial Fund.

  First edition 2000. Second edition 2017.

  Copyright © 2000, 2017 by Yale University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Minion and Egiziano types by Newgen North America.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960137

  ISBN 978-0-300-18517-1 (paperbound : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR BOB AND SHIRLEY HINE

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Dreams and Homelands

  Chapter One: A New World Begins

  Chapter Two: Contest of Cultures

  Chapter Three: The Struggle of Empires

  Chapter Four: The Land and Its Markers

  Chapter Five: Finding Purchase

  Chapter Six: War and Destiny

  Chapter Seven: Machine

  Chapter Eight: A Search for Community

  Chapter Nine: The Urban Frontier

  Chapter Ten: New Frontiers

  Chapter Eleven: As the West Goes . . .

  Chapter Twelve: “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At”

  Notes

  Index

  Preface to the Second Edition: The Re-Boot

  The skeletal remains of an industrial city scroll across the windshield of a cruising automobile. Empty highway off-ramps loop overhead while roadside factories spew filth into pallid skies. A guitar strums the opening chords of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and day blinks to night. A tough voice hails Chrysler’s 200, a ridiculously high-end four-door sedan that somehow captures the spirit of hideously lowdown Detroit.

  Detroit molders on the fringes of the United States. Parked next to Canada, the city teeters on a geopolitical drop-off. Detroit’s actual location, however, meant little to the advertising professionals that chose the city and Eminem to star in their 2011 Super Bowl commercial. Only the ugly weather suggested a true global position. No, the ad makers came to Eminem and Detroit for their exquisite down-and-out-there-ness. Both were damaged icons. Kneecapped by the auto industry’s overreliance on truck and SUV sales, hollowed out by thousands of laid-off workers escaping for sunnier climes, and set aflame by the 2008–9 financial meltdown, the city proffered Hollywood its ashes. The rapper knew hard times as well. An addict with a taste for pills, he spent the 2000s coming to terms with the success he achieved the previous decade. The titles of his last three albums—Encore, Relapse, and Recovery—hinted at his troubles.

  Detroit’s status as a car-wrecked municipality and Eminem’s reputation as a flawed human being make them the ideal opening act for a revised edition of The American West: A New Interpretive History. While nowhere near as obsolete as the U.S. auto industry, The American West is due for an overhaul. More than a decade has passed since its last refurbishing. A lot has happened: terror attacks and security crackdowns, wars-of-choice and drone campaigns, economic downturns and taxpayer bailouts, tea parties and occupied parks. The planet has continued to heat up while information has flowed in ever quickening streams to manifold devices. The world has turned since 2000, so too has the history of the American West. A new generation of scholars, inspired by an energetic group of (now) senior citizens, the “New Western historians” of the 1980s and 1990s and their critics, has come into their own and filled bookshelves with new research and interpretations.

  The rush of work, for all its intelligence and well-deserved accolades, seems timid and scattered when compared to the vintage stuff. The New Western history organized debates around a set of pressure points: region versus frontier; place versus proce
ss; progress versus decline. Was the West a distinctive locale, defined by its aridity, its mountainous terrain, or its proximity to the Pacific Ocean, or was it a set of colonial relationships and power struggles that rippled across many landscapes throughout the continent? Did borders and boundaries in time and space define the place and its history or did line-crossing economies, migrant groups, and nation-states explain the past better? Was this history bright and hopeful or criminal and tragic? Scholars picked sides (sometimes in opposition, sometimes at right-angles, many times in parallel—there was a good deal of talking past one another in the 1980s and 1990s) and threw down in public. The ruckus has since died down, and the scrum parted, not so much in peace as indecision. Most western historians have agreed to agree. Western history deals with most everything now: place and process, region and frontier, men and women, whites and racial minorities, queers and heteronormatives, humanity and nature; the good, the bad, and the ambiguous—especially the ambiguous.

  It’s hard to plant your feet in such a vast and poorly bounded field. But perhaps a foul-mouthed rapper from the Canadian-American hinterlands can supply a fresh orientation.

  Born in 1972, Marshal Mathers III moved from Kansas City to Detroit as a teenager. In the city’s eastside eight-mile neighborhood, he reinvented himself as Eminem, a rare musical concoction at the time—a white rapper who wasn’t a gimmick or a knockoff. Black artists had dominated rap since hip-hop emerged from the urban youth culture of the South Bronx in the late 1970s. Eminem wanted to crash a party that celebrated hyper-masculine black men with impeccably bad credentials. Artists posed as gangsters and hoodlums and policed each other for signs of softness and fakery. Growing up in poor and violent locations boosted rappers’ reputations. Eminem’s dysfunctional home environment and squalid surroundings turned out to be assets. (He was also verbally dexterous; a witty writer and a fierce improviser.) Stardom, though, waited until he teamed up with a brilliant producer from a tough background no one questioned. Dr. Dre signed Eminem to a record contract in 1998. A founding member of NWA, Dre came from the crack-infested Compton section of Los Angeles. He and his band mates pioneered “gangsta rap,” a version of hip-hop dedicated to brutal realism. Cores didn’t come any harder.

  Eminem’s conquest of the globe’s airwaves and earphones depended on his connection to two hardscrabble places—Detroit’s eastside and LA’s Compton neighborhood. His fame transcended geographic, political, and demographic boundaries, yet his persona remained localized. Indeed, his plausibility as a sincere hip-hop artist—a white rapper people of all races and backgrounds could respect—depended on him staying rooted in marginal places. His edginess only intensified with the 2002 release of 8-mile, the autobiographic film that chronicled his formative years in Detroit. Eminem scored his biggest hit single, “Lose Yourself,” from the movie’s soundtrack. Chrysler banked on that song’s popularity and Eminem’s Detroit ghetto lineage to restore its brand. The global corporate entity needed him to drive down some very specific mean streets to recapture its customers’ imaginations.

  The silliness of the whole setup—extoling luxury with images of “ruin porn” during an international broadcast sporting event—shouldn’t detract from its historical import. When placed at the tail end of a narrative history of Americans’ relationship with their frontiers, the 200 commercial suggested a break with the past as well as a hold in pattern. The commercial imbibed in the American cultural habit of looking to the margins for inspiration, renewal, and authenticity. While they might abhor and denigrate blighted places and broken people, Americans often staged their comebacks from the fringes. Thus, Eminem and Detroit belonged to a string of down-and-outs or far-and-aways that rebooted the nation.

  Yet, despite the fervent wishes of ad agents and auto execs, the gears of American frontier worship never shift smoothly. Nations built on edges tend to fall off them, and Eminem’s America balanced on a precipice of global dimensions. Eminem, the 200 sedan, Chrysler, hip-hop, the Super Bowl, even the song “Lose Yourself,” weren’t contained by one nation. They spilled across an information network that mocked lines on maps. They shot through space and slipped into human minds from Borneo to Buckingham Palace. For successful businessmen-rappers, staying put brought obscurity, and thus poverty. They wanted their products to migrate like a disease, to go viral. Despite its sickly appearance, Detroit languished because it wasn’t communicable. The Motor City sat while its workforce retired to Arizona, its factories relocated to China, and its corporate leaders drifted to the Caymans on golden parachutes. In the virtual world of 2011, real places were for losers. And Detroit and Eminem were surely losers, albeit lovable and instructive ones. They embodied the resurgence of frontiers in a globalized United States.

  In its own way, the 200 ad scripted a new ending for the American West. “The West” (both as a space between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi River and a vague geo-political notion, the obverse to “the East”) flourished in a super-powered world where clear lines and boundaries held allies together and kept enemies apart (think Berlin Walls and DMZs). When the Soviet Union crumbled, geographies and ideologies based on cardinal directions collapsed as well. The West, you might argue, won the Cold War and utterly lost itself in the process. The East/West world fragmented politically even as the internet—a Cold War invention—triggered a communication revolution that eroded boundaries of all kinds. The result was a globalized culture in which place mattered a great deal and not at all. The West became a niche among niches, a site in a web of connections.

  This is a different ending from the one predicted in the previous edition of The American West: A New Interpretive History. In that text, the American West modeled national trends and disappeared into those trends. The region pioneered things like the military-industrial complex, hot tubs, illegal immigrant panics, fast food, energy-based derivatives, big Cabernets, and uni-bombing. It led the nation towards planetary dominance and then withered sometime in the 1980s or 1990s when the United States achieved maximum homogeneity. Basically, the West got Starbucked to death.

  With high-end java available on almost every American street corner, it’s hard to argue with this conclusion. Western enterprises, politics, and caffeinated beverages have infected the country, muting the differences between regions. Yet the same communications revolution that sped the westernization of the mainstream also strengthened the margins. The internet both linked and fragmented people; it aided globalization and spurred localism at the same time. No event symbolized the clash of these opposing forces better than the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Activists of all stripes (and gripes), from sea turtle conservators to antihormone vegans to NAFTA-hating teamsters, coalesced to halt the proceedings. They rejected the neoliberal argument that globalization—symbolized by free trade—represented an unmitigated good. Marginal people, bound to locations, suffered when protections fell, to the benefit of corporations and their first-world government enablers. To underscore this argument, anarchists tossed car batteries through the glass storefronts of the downtown chains. Starbucks’s green and white mermaid logo proved an especially inviting target.

  Since 1999, regular folks have networked through social media to topple dictators and organize flash mobs. They have spread videos of kittens and leaked classified torture documents. The internet has opened a universe of choices. Confronted with a smorgasbord of information, people satisfy their tastes with preferred delights. Do you enjoy knitting or conspiracy theories? Then you need not consume anything but knitting and conspiracy theories. The end result: a population united and blown to pieces by the same media.

  The 200 advertisement cruised in this reality. It linked geographic, social, and cultural margins in a chain of associations that sold over-priced cars to a cash-strapped audience with flashes of industrial decline and a hummable song. The ad celebrated an authentically fringe setting even as it conjured a magical ride out of the Motor City’s grime. So diametrically opposed, D
etroit and the 200 only synched in a split-screen format that accounted for both the power of place and the joys of dislocation.

  Such is America in the twenty-first century. It is our hope that this latest edition of The American West: A New Interpretive History will give readers new analytical tools to apply to their present. We contend that western and frontier historians offer a unique vantage point from which to explore the interplay between fragments and wholes, edges and centers, shadows and spotlights.

  Our history of the American West reconnoiters the seams of the past, where geographic, social, and cultural margins met, buckled, and subsumed one another. We argue that the tectonic friction along these edges explains some of the most prominent features of the North American historical landscape: the large-scale migration and settlement of peoples, the rise and fall of Native and European empires, the development of a United States of America with continental aspirations, the US’s conquest and incorporation of the hunk of space that came to be known as the American West, the growth and dominance of the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the near disappearance of the region in the post–World War II era when most of the United States came to look more or less western or Sun-Belted. The narrative ends in the present with a new chapter that considers the West as a site in a globalized, virtual world.

  For those of you still unconvinced by the frontier credentials of Eminem, Detroit, and the 200, I offer Chrysler’s follow-up 2012 Super Bowl commercial as further proof. In that spot, a whispery voice touted what the city, the company, and the country supposedly represented. Once on its heels, Chrysler was fighting back. Detroit too had regained its feet. If America followed their example, stopped squabbling and took heart, the nation could once again mount a comeback from the margins.

  Given the gridiron setting, the ad’s “halftime in America” sports metaphor struck a chord. But Chrysler didn’t hire a Knute Rockne to deliver its win-one-for-the-Gipper speech. They enlisted a movie star instead, an actor famous for his western roles. Clint Eastwood, the squint-eyed gunslinger, kicked the country out of the doldrums with a boot to the rear, underscoring the connection between frontiers real and imagined, past and present.