Historiography of the American West - Essay Example

Historiography of the American West of the of the Historiography of the American West His immediate family wondered about him and worried over him - and with good reason, for nothing Remington had done by 1881 or would do over the next few years suggested success, or even much promise. He squandered his sizable inheritance, first on a sheep farm and then on a Kansas City bar. Yet Remington had seen the West and, once his inheritance was near gone, he went back there in order to set about making something f the West as his subject during the late 1880s. Even so, as the Samuels write, "Remington was actually the last f the great Western artists to go West" (94). Alexander Mackenzie and Thomas Jefferson, George Catlin and Paul Kane, Frederic Remington and the North West Mounted Police: the United States West intertwined with the Canadian West - there are thousands f other such moments, innumerable cruxes, and myriad border-crossings. The problem, ever and always, is in how we "Americans" understand these things. (Canadians, f course, are also "Americans" in the sense f being f this continent.) Each f us, Canadians and United States people, living within a national myth borne f exceptionalism, seek to assert our country's historical narrative - especially the narrative f West: expansion - "Westward the Course f Empire Takes Its Way" or, in Canada, the Laurentian thesis propounded to the Canadian Pacific Railway (completed in 1885): Pierre Berton's "The National Dream" (or Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy) (Kaye). Yet these parallel narratives, historically intertwined as they were, and are, have too infrequently crossed, too infrequently been probed and understood as the interconnected fact-based stories they are. The significance f Jefferson's response to his worried moment over Mackenzie's transcontinental success is clear: the massed bulk f the University f Nebraska Press's The Journals f the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1983-99, 13 vols.) looms, the narrative versions f Lewis and Clark have piled up (though they were slow to start - the first, by Biddle, did not appear until 1814), James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series stands mythologizing them yet, especially in its third volume, The Prairie (1827). And two words - Undaunted Courage - have recently again broadcast Lewis and Clark throughout the United States through Stephen Ambrose's popular retelling f the story f their voyage f discovery. Yet early in Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow (1962) - arguably the paradigm border-crossing Western text, a paradigm as autobiography, as history, as art - there is an invocation f the Lewis and Clark expedition on the upper Missouri in May 1805: "They came watchfully," Stegner writes, "for they were the first. They came stiffened with resolution and alert with wonder." "Every river and creek that came in from south or west brought word f the Stony Mountains and the passes that might lead to the Great South Sea; every stream from north or northwest was a possible trail to the Saskatchewan in Prince Rupert's Land. More and more, as they moved westward, the country that lay between them and these desired goals was not merely unknown, it was un rumored" ( 19). Stegner's invocation f Lewis and Clark here - one that is both precise and careful - serves him an important narrative purpose: he places them on the Milk River bluffe (so called because Lewis and Clark renamed them for Euroamericans), staring northward toward the Cypress Hills, the mythic place f his boyhood in Saskatchewan to which he returns through Wolf Willow. Standing at the apex f the continent, Lewis and Clark, Stegner writes, "would have been looking down the imperceptible hill that led to Hudson Bay" (42). Such a careful placement f these paradigmatic explorers in a paradigmatic text by a writer who was a literal border-crosser, and so also something f a paradigm himself, is indicative. Stegner was born in the United States, he self-identified as American but, having spent his "litmus years" (pace W.O. Mitchell) in Saskatchewan, he offers a bifurcated sensibility, an ambivalent nationalism. Wolf Willow, ironically, is a book more valued in Canada than in the United States. Beyond this, Stegner was also a disciplinary border crosser - arguably, much f Wolf Willow and f his other publication is history, despite his status as an important novelist (see Thacker, Erasing). The history Stegner is telling in Wolf Willow - and narrative history takes fully a third f the text - is a recovery project: when he was growing up near Eastend, Saskatchewan, he says, history was always somewhere else, and his education tried to make him a European (24-25). Coming back an established writer and academic on a Guggenheim during the last f the 1950s, Stegner writes the history he never knew when he was a boy living on what he calls in his subtitle "the last plains frontier." Native peoples, Lewis and Clark's nearby passage, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Mtis, Whiskey traders, the North West Mounted Police, settlers and ranchers - each passes by as Stegner mounts his transborder recovery project. All f this is his, and it is encapsulated by the odor f the weed Wolf Willow, he says, an "odor that I have not smelled since I was eleven, but have never forgotten - have dreamed, more than once." "If I am native to anything," Stegner concludes his first chapter, "I am native to this" (18, 20). Stegner literally returned to Eastend, Saskatchewan for purposes f Wolf Willow and, re-seen, that place was the locus f his imaginative "last plains frontier," a place he calls Whitemud in the book. I want to broaden this ubiquitous notion f "frontier" before I return to Cadin, Kane, and Remington. Writing about Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Jonathan Pitts invokes Frederick Jackson Turner and asserts that: "The frontier has been displaced and reconstituted so convincingly in our likeness that we cannot help but read it as our history, as a reflection f our presence. It is literally impossible to see our absence, for where we are not we will inevitably be, and where we once were we can never leave. To open the American eye is to see that which is inevitably and originally American. With the closing f the American frontier comes the opening, as in a God's-eye view, f die American landscape, f the American eye. In this optical democracy, in this intellectual and spiritual equilibrium, everything is necessarily luminous." (18) Pitts's articulation here f Emersonian ideas refracted through the Turnerian prism and focused upon the American West as place - what he calls "optical democracy" - is also indicative. The parade f artists who visited the West to paint it and its peoples - Catlin, Kane, and Remington only the most prominent among them - made physical the imaginative processes involved - "necessarily luminous." William H. Goetzmann offered this as an apt phrasing: "The West as Romantic Horizon" and, more famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald invoked the "capacity for wonder" f the first European sailors to see Long Island - North America, "a fresh, green breast f the new world" (140). Fitzgerald, and Pitts too with his references to "that which is inevitably and originally American," each strive for meaning in the United States West and, doing so, find the "necessarily luminous" there. Put another way, they engage the Myth f the American West and, concurrently, the Myth f United States exceptionalism. Just as Stegner strives to connect his physical boyhood place near the Cypress Hills in southwest Saskatchewan with the West's pervasive myths, renderings he only later came to know, so others have wrested mythic meaning from the West f their imaginations. This West is a place within those North American imaginations that has ever been, and is still "necessarily luminous" indeed. And in some very significant ways, all f this mythologizing began with George Catlin, Paul Kane, and the other Western artists - most pervasively Remington and Russell, a fact well-known among scholar and enthusiast alike. But any such imaginative luminosity - in the North American West or anyplace else - is a construction, and things are constructed for purposes: to persuade, to control, to sell, or to otherwise take some advantage. As he describes Thomas Jefferson's reactions to the news f Mackenzie's book in 1801, Alien makes it clear that while the President sought greater knowledge f the geographical realities f the North American West, Jefferson did so ever with his eye on matters f territorial control and trade. Equally, and as Brian W. Dippie has masterfully detailed in his Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics f Patronage (1990), George Catlin's romantic quest was fueled by the artist's felt need to support himself and his art through the financial backing f government patronage. The complex web f ambitions, jealousies, and stymied plans Dippie offers in that fine book is as daunting as it is characteristic f human overreaching. For his part, Kane serves as contrast to Carlin in the story Dippie tells - the Canadian, he writes, "secured" "public and private commissions f the sort Catlin only dreamed of" (275) - beyond the free support f Sir George Simpson and the Hudson's Bay Company, Kane had paintings commissioned by the Canadian colonial government. When a book, putatively his, entitled Wanderings f an Artist Among the Indians f North America (1859) appeared, its existence owed in some measure to the politics surrounding the question f a parliamentary renewal f the Hudson's Bay Company charter. That did not happen, for Rupert's Land went to the new Dominion f Canada. The rest, as is said, is history. Complementing Dippie's scholarship on Catlin, I.S. MacLaren has been writing since the late 1980s on Kane to elaborate the verifiable facts f that artist - the assessment that emerges from his work is caught by Dippie's comment that "One f Kane's patrons thought his personality a sufficient guarantor f the accuracy f his Indian scenes: he was too unimaginative to invent what he painted" (275). Frederic Remington, the last f the painters to see the West, in some ways the most luminous f the lot, sought none f the patronage Carlin failed to secure and Kane received. Instead, his interests, focus, and timing were impeccable - the West he found and offered through his illustrations in Harper's Weekly, Century, and other publications was just what the public wanted and needed: a Mythic West which, if it existed still at all, was receding into the distant past yet, ironically, remaining to ennoble and mythologize the U.S. West's history. Seeing his first Mounted Policemen in 1881, just as he was inchoately groping for the purposeful career that was to become his, Remington caught a glimpse f a myth already alive and growing - that f the NorthWest Mounted Police. Though he didn't know it at the time, Frederic Remington was home - in the Mounted Police he found a subject he was to use regularly in the following years - there were to be over three hundred Remington "Mounties." Stegner, recovering this history in Wolf Willow, writes in a chapter called "Law in a Red Coat" that "Never was the dignity f the uniform more carefully cultivated, and rarely has the ceremonial quality f impartial law and order been more dramatically exploited" (101; see Thacker, Canada's Mounted, Mystery). When Remington saw Mounted Policemen arresting an alleged Blackfoot murderer in 1881, he saw them before they had collided with another mythic force in 1885 during die North West Rebellion: the messianic Mtis leader, Louis Riel. In 1881, Riel was in exile in Montana - where he become an American citizen (Bumsted). When he returned to Canada and led the North West Rebellion, Riel severely tested the myth f the Mounted Police. (They had already been tested by die Sioux under Sitting Bull who had fled to Canada in 1877 after the Greasy Grass/Little Big Horn battle f June 1876 which saw the destruction f Custer and his troops - indeed, the presence f these people in Canada became one f the first international disputes between the two countries.) And not surprisingly, that rebellion drew Remington back to the North West to illustrate its aftermath for Harper's. In one montage for published in Harper's Weekly, for instance, he portrays "Louis Riel's Captor" (Remington). Again: Alexander Mackenzie and Thomas Jefferson, George Catlin and Paul Kane, Frederic Remington and the North West Mounted Police: the United States West intertwined with the Canadian West. The problem, ever and always, is in how we "Americans" understand these things. By pursuing separate visions and versions f West, by embracing our separate myths, by asserting our separate exceptionalities, we have largely sidestepped the more complex - and border disregarding - story. Owing to its connection to the Mounted Police, Sitting Bull's "flight to Canada" is reified in Canada but largely ignored in the United States (Thacker, Erasing 193-97); conversely, despite being "the individual in Canadian history about whom the most has been written," Riel's American years were first explored systematically only in 1999 (Bumsted 37). So such disregard goes both ways. A recent illustration that embraces the complexity I am speaking of, and will serve as central text here, is Guy Vanderhaughe's The Englishman's Boy (1996). It won Canada's Governor-General's Award for Fiction and, as criticism has since shown, has found a quick currency (see, for example, Calder, Williams). Vanderhaeghc, a Saskatchewan writer who had previously established himself as the author f stories about sensitive, perplexed men, headed off in a new direction with The Englishman's Bay, a direction he has continued to pursue with The Lust Crossing (2002). The Englishman's Bay is a historical fiction that combines a narrative f the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre f a group f Assiniboine by revenge-seeking American wolfers with a fictional narrative f Hollywood's 1920s rendering f this event into a film entitled Besieged - moving into analysis f the ultimate myth machine: Hollywood. Alternating one with the other as they do, Vanderhaughe's two narratives mediate and meditate the relations between a historical happening and any telling f it, imaginative or otherwise. I would take this point a further step, to conclude: this sensibility is "Canadian," I would hold, by virtue f its contingent duality: to speak, as Emerson, as Turner, and as many others have f "the American landscape" and "the American eye," and "the American frontier" is to imagine a homogeneity that no Canadian could countenance - recent criticism on all these matters has only confirmed as much. Such a frontiercrossing sensibility is part f what animates Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy and it is the very purpose f Stegner's Wolf Willow. To have a Canadian point-of-view, especially an English-Canadian point-of-view is to be "on the frontier," to be above America but part f America, to have to cross frontiers. So once again: Alexander Mackenzie and Thomas Jefferson, George Catlin and Paul Kane, Frederic Remington and the North West Mounted Police. These are the moments I have chosen to discuss here, and in my choice there is randomness, certainly. Yet as the essays which follow here show, the very idea that the "Canadian West" can be understood without reference to the "American West," that the North American Western mythology owes only to United States history, is impossible. The stories, the histories, and the myths are utterly inconnected, interdependent. And owing to the felt pull f the nation-state and its concomitant demand for national history, thoroughgoing scholarly comparative analysis f the Canadian West seen in relation to the American West is a nascent thing despite the massed bulk f Western histories from each side f the border. Bringing together several scholars who have already made this attempt and are continuing that work now, this special issue f The American Review f Canadian Studies seeks to both broadcast this comparative work and encourage even more. Bibliography Allen, John L "To Unite the Discoveries: The American Response to the Early Exploration f Rupert's Land." In Rupm's Land: A Cultural Tapestry, ed. Richard C. Davis. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988, pp. 79-96. Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriweather Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening f the American West. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996. Bonazzi, Tizano. "Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the Self-Consciousness of America." Journal of American Studies 27, no. 2 (08, 1993): 149. Bumsted, J. M. "Louis Riel and the United States." The American Review f Canadian Studies 29 (1999): 17-41. Calder, Alison. "Unsettling the West: Nation and Genre in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy." Studies in Canadian Literature 25 (2001): 96-107. Dippie, Brian W. Cutlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics f Politics f Patronage. Lincoln: University f Nebraska Press, 1990. Dippie, Brian W., Terrese Than Heyman, Christorpher Mulvey, and Juan Carpenter Troccoli. George Catlin and His Indian Gullery, ed. George Gurney and Therese Thau Heyman. Washington: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2002. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Goetzmann, William H. and Joseph C. Porter. The West as Romantic Horizon. Omaha: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981. Goetzmann, William H., and William N. Goetzmann. The West f the Imagination. New York: Norton, 1986. Kayo, Frances W. "An Innis, Not a Turner." The American Review f Canadian Studies 31 (2001): 597-610. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Something in the Soil : Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. 1st ed. New York ; London: W.W. Norton, 2000. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest : The Unbroken Past of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1987. MacLaren, I.S. "Creating Travel Literature: The Case f Paul Kane." Papers f the Bibliographical Society f Canada 27 (1998): 80-95. MacLaren, I.S. "'I Came to Rite Thare Potraits': Paul Kane's Journal f His Western Travels, 1840-1848." American Art Journal 21 (1989): 7-21. MacLaren, I.S. "Notes Towards a Reconsideration f Paul Kane's Art and Prose." Canadian Literature 113-14(1987): 179-205. McKown, Robin. Painter f the Wild West: Frederic Remington. New York: Julian Messner, 1959. Pitts, Jonathan. "Writing On: Blood Meridian as Devisionary Western." Western American Literature 33 (1999): 7-25. Remington, Frederic. "Sketches f the Canadian Mounted Police, 1887-1888." Harper's Weekly 13 October 1888: 780. Samuels, Peggy and Harold Samuels. Frederic Remington: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1982. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow. A History, a Memory, and a Story f the Last Plains Frontier. 1962. New York: Penguin, 1990. Steiner, Michael. "From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History." The Pacific Historical Review 64, no. 4 (Nov., 1995): 479-501. Thacker, Robert. "Canada's Mounted: The Evolution f a Legend." Journal f Popular Culture 14 (1980): 298-312. Thacker, Robert. "Erasing the Forty-Ninth Parallel: Nationalism, Prairie Criticism, and the Case f Wallace Stegner." Essays on Canadian Writing 61 (1997): 179-202. Thacker, Robert. "The Mystery f Francis Jeffrey Dickens, N.W.M.P., and Eric Nicol's Dickens f the Mounted." Great Plains Quarterly 12 (1992): 19-30. The Journals f the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Gary E. Moulton. 13 vols. Lincoln: University f Nebraska Press, 198-99. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman's Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Lost Crossing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Vorpahl, Ben Merchant. Frederic Remington and the West. Austin: University f Texas Press, 1978. Williams, David. "Film-nations vs. Print-nations: The Politics f Metonymy in The Englishman's Boy." In Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003, pp. 183-201. Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies : Nature and History in the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Read More