In his book, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, Elliott West combines four essays titled, “Land,” “Animals,” “Families,” and “Stories.” All four essays argue that to accurately understand Western History, individuals need to look beyond the oversimplified narrative of the expansion of Anglo-Americans. Instead, they need to take three things into account. First, western history is long and continuous and does not begin in the 1800s. Second, the events of the 1800s “were made by a large cast of human groups that included white pioneers and diverse Indian groups.” Third, the environment played a key role in shaping the events taking place in the 19th Century West (p.11).
West’s first essay titled “Land,” gives new perspective to the familiar story of the movement of Anglos through the plains on their way to California and the immigration of Native Americans onto the plains. West states that instead of looking at these two events separately, they need to be seen as “simultaneous, interrelated events with wide-ranging consequences “ (p.19). To understand the role of the land in the West, the author describes how the plains need to be seen as a collection of “sub-regions” and “micro-environments.” Although the area is vast, there are limited locations that are critical to survival. He describes how over-grazing damaged grass for horses, cattle and buffalo and how overuse of the river lowlands by Native Americans in the winter and Anglo migrants in the summer made survival in the region very difficult due to a continuously degrading environment due to overuse.
In his second essay, West focuses on the animals and their impact on the land. He first focuses on the buffalo and provides a sound argument that that “The Great Hunt” by Anglos from the 1860s-1880s only exacerbated an already massive decline in buffalo on the plains. He explains that prior to this period, Native Americans were hunting buffalo in numbers well-beyond what they needed for subsistence. But, this over-hunting would not have made a large impact on the overall population. Instead, West explains that the early part of the 19th Century was abnormally wet for the plains. This led to an abundance of resources for buffalo (as well as horses and cattle) whose numbers rose far beyond the historical average. Once the weather pattern normalized mid-century, the population of buffalo began to decline due to a lack of resources and intense competition with other animals such as cattle and sheep moving through the area with Anglos and Native American horses.
West’s third essay focuses on family organization and the interaction of people in the multitude of groups sharing the plains in the 19th Century. In his previous essays, West showed how the land, animals and people were connected and influenced one another. In his essay titled “Families,” he shows the interconnected nature of the many peoples within the plains region. First, West focuses on the Anglo and Native American family structure. He describes how the status of women in Native American tribes decreased when tribes such as the Cheyennes moved onto the plains and took up a pastoral as opposed to horticultural life style. He then changes focus to a study of demographics. He describes how the mathematics of fertility and disease made the Native American position of power in the region unsustainable due to a plummeting population in concert with unprecedented Anglo population growth. But, West again shows that this is only a small part of the picture when he shifts focus to the topic of inter-racial families and how they “increasingly influenced the contours of central plains society” (p.119). West describes the early decades of European infiltration of the plains as a “frontier of inclusion” which goes against the more common notion of stereotypes about isolated mountain men. The inclusive nature of this earlier period comes into direct conflict with the “frontier of exclusion” that gains prevalence with the “rapid invasion of Euro-American families at mid-century” (p. 121). West does an especially good job of revealing the complexity of familial ties in his summary of the Sand Creek Massacre. His analysis shows that the assumption of clear and distinct ethnic lines is far from the truth.
In his final essay, West focuses on why the West is important to Americans. He describes how many of the stories of the West come from outsiders trying to project what they need the West to be. He breaks the perception of the West into two categories. The first sees the West as a “Space” where there is no history and is an “empty room to escape old limits, to do anything, to lose the past, to dance with wolves” (p. 161). This spatial perception was embraced by individuals who either wanted to change the emptiness into the place they left (except to do it right this time) or by individuals who wanted to be “somehow strengthened and cleansed and liberated from both past and future” (p. 137). West argues that many individuals want both simultaneously. The second group sees the West as a “Place… [which is] old and tangled in lessons” (p. 161). This view can only come from those living inside the West. He describes how this perception was common for Native Americans of the 19th Century and is also increasingly common for Anglos living in the west in the 20th Century with familial ties “deeper than that of the Cheyennes when they were ordered onto reservations” (p. 163).
In all of his essays, West tries to show the complicated, important and interconnected history of the West. Multiple perspectives and groups need to be taken into account when considering the West’s history and modern day issues. His essays warn people not to become overly influenced by the mythic narrative of the West. Instead, it is crucial to understand that the West is full of many groups “bound to the place by experience, memory, and familial identity” (p. 163). We can only truly understand the West by understanding these connections and the complicated and interconnected web of the environment, animals and people.
I commented on the following Blog:
<li><a href=”http://austin616.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/post-5-west-and-the-way/comment-page-1/#comment-14″> Comment </a></li>
History 616: American West 