Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.Anne F. Hyde, 2011, Univ. of Nebraska Press. HarperCollins reprint.
A year ago, I published a blog post on "Getting to the West" by various means. I was writing a family history book and need to understand about travel to the west and west coast. Anybody who is descended from the 19th Century national expansion has a stake in that history.
A (well-hinted) Christmas gift last year was Prof. Anne F. Hyde's thorough study Empires, Nations, and Families. It's a big book - over 500 pages of text, and academic in its citation and documentation of sources, so it took a while to rise in the reading stack. I was pleased to find the text is clear, well developed and well-arranged. It is never pedantic but it is direct and doesn't play the reader. The approach is academically sound and the language flows well and is readable. The story is very accessible, and the author does excellent work in maintaining temporal continuity. Dr. Hyde, now at the University of Oklahoma, was a professor of history at Colorado College at time of writing (pub. 2011). The book won a Bancroft prize and was considered for a Pulitzer.
Though I have lived elsewhere for decades, I grew up on the margin of midwest and west America. In mid-Twentieth Century western Kansas, the city ways, cares and crop lands of the east trailed off into the vast fields, sparely settled range lands and small market towns and struggling communities of the west. We learned in school about the native Americans, the Indians, as if they were pre-historic peoples. In the 1950s we visited their ruins on field trips and took photos of one or two dressed and posed for tourism and "education." A tourist attraction, usually preceded by the name "Old Fort ...." had photographs of Indians around during its active life, if it survived to the photographic era. It might employ an ancient Indian in a war bonnet to pose for tourist photographs during summer travel times. A percentage of the communities there had been established at military outposts, and "Old Fort ...." attractions appear in at many towns. Our well-plowed crop lands, fenced pastures and towns with grid streets alphabetically named after trees that didn't grow there, all clearly were intended to displace the character of the prairie lands. The "old settlers reunions" were about those who came when history began, mostly in the 1870s following Kansas statehood as a free state in 1861. Centennial celebrations were a big deal for a while. They celebrated the "beginning of civilization" in what was considered empty land.
A big thing for kids was to search "old Indian sites" for arrowheads, but there were few such local battlefields or Indian attacks. Local history museums displayed prominent older collections, and there always were a few folks who had collected (and traded) a dozen, and more "possibles."
All of this is prelude to my acknowledging how little we knew. The land was not empty. I have the impression that there has been some revision of that narrative in schools today. I'm sure it remains a difficult story to sell. We only knew it as our version of the Roman ruins. A world lost and only curios remain.
Hyde's excellent book begins with the fur trade - Hudson's Bay Company, the Sublettes, the Choteaus, the Bents, their outposts and and prominent trading families. She goes into considerable detail on their operations and their interaction with the native Americans. Of particular note and importance in the narrative and history were the practices of marital diplomacy. Traders were pragmatic and practical people operating at the edge of European-American civilization, and the finely tuned moralities of protestant Europe had little place in their lives when it came to creating families. They married native Americans, sometimes in multiple settlements, and established extended families, with many of their children becoming partners in their enterprises. These alliances brought them acceptance and support among native peoples throughout their trading region.
As the country expanded that life came under tremendous pressure, native Americans were forced into losing conflicts with European-Americans who asserted a supreme right to appropriate the lands. So very many efforts to compensate and accommodate were disastrous to the natives. Their rebellions were brutally suppressed as they were summarily disposessed and occasionally annihilated in the national expansion. In so many cases, the received story is considerably at odds with the events that took place, and in most cases the public motives were highly objectionable - even immoral by today's standards.
The traders and their extended families were the interchange and last link of common ground between expanding European civilization and survival of native American life. The book is a thoroughly readable and informative social and political history of the earliest American west. I'm hanging on to this for re-reads. I highly recommend it.
Arthur Dirks
23 October 2016
