New Books In The American West

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped m

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016). Coyotes as a species predate humans in North America, and people have been, by turns, fascinated and horrified by coyotes for as long as the two creatures have coexisted. The coyote’s relationship with humans has been, as Flores describes it, a rollercoaster. Considered a semi-deity figure and trickster god among many Indigenous cultures across the American West, the first Europeans to encounter the coyote were puzzled by the animal. Lewis and Clark struggled to fit coyotes into existing categories; was it a jackal, or closer to a wolf? By the end of the nineteenth century however, Americans had largely decided the coyote was, above all, a nuisance and took up arms to eradicate the animal. The effects were both gruesome and surprising. While government-laid traps and poisons kille

John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common animal—the cow—changed the landscapes, economies and peoples of both California and Hawai’i, and linked them together in unexpected ways, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the introduction of cattle into each of these societies by Europeans, not only did the cows bring ecological change, but they fundamentally altered how people lived, worked, earned their living and interacted with the world at large. As California’s and Hawai’i’s economies became increasingly focused on cattle, especially the hide and tallow industries in the 1820s and 30s, the changes both in the land and the people who worked it paved the way for broader colonial projects both by European countries and eventually the United States. Ryan Fischer is a visiting assistant professor at the Un

In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, argues that war or disease can’t explain this population drop. The state and federal government carried out genocide against California Indians between 1846 and 1873. Madley uncovers, in excruciating detail, how government officials created a killing machine that cost at least $1,700,000. An American Genocide has won many awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, the Charles Redd Phi Alpha Theta Award for the Best Book on the American West, the California Book Award’s Gold Medal for California, and the Heyday Books History Award. The book was also named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Indian Country Today Hot L

In the summer of 1885, the Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull toured North America as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous “Wild West” show. His participation, as Deanne Stillman explains in her book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill (Simon & Schuster, 2017) linked two celebrities of Gilded Age America into an association that would endure for long afterward. Both men were legends of the American West–Cody for his service as a scout and prowess in killing bison, Sitting Bull for his role as a leader and his association with the Battle of Little Bighorn. Taking advantage of Sitting Bull’s relationship with Annie Oakley, another star performer in his show, Cody succeeded in enlisting his involvement, where he proved a popular draw. Though Sitting Bull’s time with the show was brief, he formed a bond with Cody deep enough to lead Cody to cross the country five years later in an unsuccessful effort to intervene in th

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the “Stars and Stripes” to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John “Black Jack” Pershing. Growing up in Tucson, Arizo

Calamity Jane was a celebrity of the 19th century American West, yet the woman portrayed in the newspapers and dime novels was one very different from the actual person. In The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Richard Etulain sorts through over a century of fiction and half-truths to uncover who Calamity Jane was in real life. Born Martha Canary, she was orphaned at a young age and left to provide for her siblings. Working a variety of jobs, she came to Deadwood in 1876, where she soon received national press attention both for her unusual persona and her brief association with “Wild Bill” Hickok. Yet these accounts were usually more fabrication than fact, and often did not reflect the difficult circumstances of her life. Suffering from alcoholism, she lived an itinerant and unstable existence, one in which her drinking impeded her efforts to provide for herself and her daughter and led to her early death. Etulain’s biography gets to the truth of Calami

In “Georgia O’Keeffe: At Home in the Wonderful Nothing,” a text accompanying the exhibition catalogue Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors 1916-1918 (Radius Books and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2016), Amy Von Lintel investigates a lesser studied period in O’Keeffe’s life and work: the artist’s time in West Texas. In 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas to accept a position as founding faculty of the West Texas State Normal College. O’Keeffe had first journeyed to West Texas in 1912 to teach in the newly founded Amarillo City Public School District. During her time in Canyon, she produced 51 watercolors (46 of which are reproduced in the book), characterized by a level of experimentation that foreshadows her later work. The dry, flat lands of the region, and the stark horizons with their dramatic shadows and sunsets, appealed to O’Keeffe. From 1916-1918, she used watercolor to render landscapes, abstract images, and nude

The West, particularly the mountain West of states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, has long had an image as a land of white men. This image dates to the 19th century, yet it is counterintuitive. Before it became a white man’s paradise, the West was the land of Native Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and even occasionally free blacks. In his new book, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (University Press of Colorado, 2016), Jason Pierce (Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University) examines this transformation. Initially, the West was treated as a space to send the others of society, including primarily non-whites, in order to keep the Eastern United States more racially pure. Yet, when gold was discovered and the West became a desirable location for white inhabitants, the image had to be remade. Pierce examines how this was done and how the image of the West continued to be contested. He also discusses how violence helped disempower the non-white

Kevin Bubriski, a New Englander and internationally acclaimed photographer, was a freelance photojournalist when he first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 to study filmmaking in Santa Fe. Bubriski recalls, “Although I was working as a news photographer on my own, I was looking for images that I enjoyed for their own visual merit and innate curiosity.” Bubriski found himself in a new culture as distinct to him as any foreign country he would later photograph. He took his 35-millimeter camera and hand-cranked 16mm Bolex, and began to explore the environs, particularly the neighborhoods of native New Mexicans. Excited by the photographic opportunities, he says, “I went to every fiesta, every parade, every celebration and religious observance.”Look into My Eyes: Nuevomexicanos por Vida 81′-83‘ is a collection of images from that personal exploration, it is a photographic documentation of Hispanic New Mexicans, Nuevomexicanos, taken between 1981-1983 in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and s

In Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River (University of New Mexico, 2015), Kenna R. Archer examines the history of the Brazos river. The river, which runs from eastern New Mexico through Texas and to the Gulf of Mexico, is not among the most well-known rivers in the nation. Over the past two centuries, despite their best efforts, politicians and engineers have mostly failed at numerous development projects. They have been unable to reroute, dam, contain, or otherwise force the river to confirm to human will. In this new book, Archer examines how the challenges posed by this river are just as important as more famous, successful river projects, to understanding the relationship between American faith in technology and the environment. In this episode, Archer discusses how she came to be interested in this challenging river by making her way from environmental science to history. She tells us about the new book and its insights for understanding our nations long history of trying

In Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Dr. Frank P. Barajas details the central role of Mexican labor in the development of the agriculturally rich coastal plane located between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In this thoroughly researched history, Barajas relates the curious unions (i.e., unlikely partnerships) formed between agricultural industrialists and small independent growers on the one hand, and a multi-ethnic milieu of Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino laborers on the other. The alliance of small growers with agribusiness dictated a pattern of commercial, residential, and municipal development that simultaneously integrated Mexican laborers into the lowest tier of the local economy, while also segregating them and other people of color residentially and socially. This schizophrenic pattern of economic and spatial development resulted in unintended cross-cultural interactions among people of color that provided the

In Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Dr. Mario Jimenez Sifuentez combines U.S. labor, environmental, and Chicana/o history to tell the story of Mexican laborers in the states of Oregon and Washington. Beginning with the initial migration of Mexican guest workers to the Northwest in 1942 and culminating with the formation and success of regional organizations advocating for farmworker rights in the mid-1990s, Dr. Sifuentez’s study highlights the central role of Mexican labor in transforming the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country after World War II. At the heart of the book is a deeply personal history of Mexican worker resistance, which Sifuentez traces from the braceros of the 1940s, to the Tejanos of the postwar period, to today’s largely undocumented workforce. Throughout, Dr. Sifuentez discusses the uniqueness of the ethnic Mexican experience in the Pacific Northwest, which departs i

In Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2015), Lori A. Flores illuminates a neglected part of Salinas Valley’s past “to show how this agricultural empire was continually a center, a microcosm, of significant transitions and moments in U.S. labor, immigration, and Latino history.” Focusing on a period some consider the golden age of 20thcentury American abundance and prosperity, 1942-1970, this history examines the interactions of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants during the implementation, administration, and termination of the U.S.-Mexico Emergency Farm Labor Program (a.k.a. Bracero Program). Challenging the more conventional narrative of postwar American prosperity, Grounds for Dreaming reveals how industrial agriculture’s unquenchable thirst for Mexican immigrant labor shaped race relations in California, produced intragroup conflict within ethnic Mexican communities, and stymied the advance

As multifaceted as it was multinucleated, the Chicana/o Movement of the late-1960s and 1970s was “the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment struggle by Mexican Americans in U.S. history.” Since the early 2000s, scholarship on El Movimiento has blossomed, initiating a process of excavation that has revealed the multiple sites, issues, participants, and strategies engaged in this broad struggle for self determination and social justice. In The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement (University of California Press, 2015), Mario T. Garcia, Professor of Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, assists in this process by centering on Los Angeles, “the political capital of the movement,” and the lives of three of the city’s most prominent activists, Raul Ruiz, Gloria Arellanes, and Rosalio Munoz. To tell their stories, Dr. Garcia employs the testimonio, a narrative form that works as a sort of collaborative oral history or “collab

In Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540-1859 (UNC Press, 2014) Assistant Professor of History at Whittier College Natale Zappia provides an in-depth look into the “interior world” of the Lower Colorado River. Tracking the people, networks, economies, and social relations of an expansive indigenous world that includes parts of the modern-day states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, California, Baja California, and Sonora, Mexico, Dr. Zappia narrates the history of the region through an examination of its diverse ecology and multiethnic political economy. Breaking from the Eurocentric narrative tropes of “discovery,” “conquest,” and “frontier,” Zappia’s interior world is a fluid borderland where the practices of trading and raiding are central in linking indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American people, ideas, and commodities into fragile interdependent networks emanating from indigenous trade centers and roadways alon

The Emergency Farm Labor Program (a.k.a. Bracero Program) was initiated in 1942 as a bilateral wartime agreement between the governments of the United States and Mexico. The program’s initial objectives were two-fold, address labor shortages in U.S. agriculture, and promote the modernization of rural Mexican peasants through a type of worker training (i.e., contract labor) that would infuse the Mexican economy with cash remittances. In the standard narrative established by scholars over the last few decades, the Bracero Program was a boon to American corporate agriculture as U.S. and Mexican government officials subsidized the profits of the industry by turning a blind eye to numerous reports of worker exploitation and employer abuses throughout the continuous twenty-two year history of the program. Additionally, scholars have highlighted the period as essential to understanding the evolution of U.S.-Mexico migratory trends, the rise of so-called illegal immigration, and the entrenchment of restrictioni

Due in large part to sensationalist representations in contemporary media and politics, the U.S.-Mexico border is popularly understood as a space of illegal activity defined by threats of foreign intrusion including: undocumented migration, drug trafficking, and national security risks. Viewed through the late-20th and early-21st century prisms of drug wars, immigration restriction, terrorism, surveillance, and resurgent American nationalism, the border itself appears to be a definitive boundary between dichotomous societies, nations, and people. Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University Geraldo L. Cadava challenges this view in his book Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013). Focusing on the Arizona-Sonora segment of the U.S.-Mexico border during the mid-to-late 20th century, Cadava narrates the interlocked histories of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and whites as regional boosters (i.e., politicians and businessmen on

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.” About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, the tallest building in the state of Arizona. Connecting the two places is a maze of energy infrastructure, hidden and ignored when a Chase executive enters his air-conditioned top-floor office. “Electricity and power lines had become second nature in Phoenix, as assumed and expected aspect of modern life,” writes Andrew Needham. “Appearing in Phoenix’s homes, businesses, and factories at the flick of a switch, electricity s