Blog Post 2. "The Legacy of Conquest. The Unbroken Past of the American West"
Patricia Nelson Limerick does a good job of debunking some of the myths of the West in "The Legacy of Conquest, The Unbroken Past of the American West." She does a fine job describing what the West was not. She convincing demonstrates, for example, that despite the ongoing rhetoric and mythology of the individuals heading West and conquering obstacles outside the corrupting influence of the federal government, that the government was absolutely critical to western development in property distribution, assistance to railroads, etc. Limerick writes that she believes the 1980s would become a key period in the history of the West (page 31) chiefly because federal budget cuts would mean big changes for a region dependent on federal involvement. One should bear in mind that Limerick was writing while the Reagan Administration was still in office and shortly after James Watt served as Secretary of the Interior—an inflammatory choice who managed to generate more than thousands of new members for the Sierra Club. Limerick seems to have the doctrines of the libertarian conservative—first Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan—in mind during her narrative. She takes aim at a key political doctrine of the day—the never-never land where absent federal power, Americans are taking shape thanks to the frontier and this rugged individualism. This filter is evident in the discussion of Indian dependence on the government. “Conservatives in the 1980s, lamenting the quagmire of welfare, sounded as if they had cribbed their language and sentiments of the Indian reformers of the 1880s.” (page 211) While some notions of the West are debunked it would have been helpful to see a bit more exploration of where the myths were right or where there were some larger kernels of truth in them. Is there nothing at all to the idea of individuals heading West and helping forge a national character?
Limerick’s makes some interesting observations on California and the southwest and the circumstances leading to the Mexican-American War and the conquest of this territory. She fleshes this out and adds some gray to what has sometimes been portrayed as people in white hats vs. black hats. She notes that the government of Mexico was highly unpopular in Texas and California well before the shooting started and the Gold Rush brought an overwhelming number of Americans to California. “In California,” she notes on page 231, “….those most actively discontented with with the Mexican government were Hispanics, not Anglos.” She also notes that the seemingly “shameless land grab” of the southwest territories by the U.S. was preceded by the grab of the land by Spanish colonizers.
Blog post 3, Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
One can see why Turner’s work had the impact that it did on the study of American history and why it has been popular. It is well written, easy to grasp and simply an appealing narrative, in many ways. The idea of a national character forged at the edge where civilization meets savagery, where the European trades his shoes for moccasins and adapts to his new reality—time and time again as the population moves West from the edge of the Atlantic—is appealing in many regards. Americans learned and evolved as they moved West. It is very appealing to think we are made of this stuff—“the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.” Modern sensibilities call into question the notion of the place where savagery and civilization intersected and the idea that those are clean, clearly distinguishable labels. Many Native Americans would likely offer a different interpretation of the westward movement. Heavy involvement of the government in the westward movement is noted by other authors who are more skeptical of the notion of rugged individualists on the march, and of the extent to which the frontier shaped the national character.
Turner makes some good points. For example, he takes on another historian who puts slavery as the central theme in American history. Westward advance is more important, he argues, and he presents a good case that this is so. He points to an antipathy to control (page 58) and of people on the frontier who wished to do as they pleased. (page 106) He points to the movement westward of those who did not fit or rest on top of the social order in the East and makes a good case. “Religious dissensions would combine to make frontier society as it formed early in the eighteenth century more and more democratic, dissatisfied with the existing order, and less respectful of authority,” he writes (page 70). In Virginia, he observes a contest between “Eastern men of property” and those struggling along the frontier, and the larger impacts of this on the formation of the United States. “…Jeffersonian democracy, with its idea of separation of church and state, its wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special privilege was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old Dominion.” (page 125) It makes sense that the frontier would help shape these sentiments. I suspect elements of this narrative remain worthwhile but may have been cast aside—that the baby may have gone out with the bath water. It is one thing to criticize Turner and point to incongruities. It is another to produce a compelling narrative that stands in its place, and no one seems to accomplished this. It seems very easy to argue that virtually any framework imposed on the chaos of history is a simplification and that a magnifying glass on any one section will demonstrate greater complexities and cast the theory in doubt. But isn’t there some Turner worth saving? As far as form goes, I wish more historian would emulate Turner is worth emulating. His writing is clear and concise. He writes for a broader audience as well as academia. He is a product of his era needs a critical review nearly a century later, but still seems to have much to offer.
I do agree that Turner's writing allows the book to be enjoyed and read by others not in super history programs academia. I enjoyed his style and viewpoints. Interesting how we are reading books from non-Native authors for our first few books, wonder what the Natives thought about the invasions of others onto their lands. A good book for some perspective is Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
Brian Delay certainly brings many shades of gray to what, to me, was previously a black-and-white tale of rapacious conquest of land in the war between the United States and Mexico. The failure of the Mexican government to safeguard the frontier and the potency of Indian raids on the settlements helped set the scene for U.S. seizure of the land—in part due to an arrogance on the part of the United States about being better able to manage the land—thus providing another rationale for taking it—and in part because of the fierce Indian raids that depopulated huge swaths of land and the Mexican government’s neglect of its frontier until it was too late. The Comanches with their raids into Mexico helped bring about the rise of U.S. power, which ultimately doomed them to defeat. DeLay notes that some Mexicans thought the silver lining to the dark cloud of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was Article 11, in which the United States pledged to restrain the Indians who had been raiding Mexican territory—although the U.S. did a poor job living up to this pledge.
DeLay poses but does not answer the question of what Mexico might be like today had not lost a third of its territory to the United States but says it is impossible to speculate about this complex question. He should of stopped before adding: “However, dense the tangle of historical possibilities, the indisputable fact that Mexico would have been quite different is annually attested to by the great number of Mexicans who are literally dying to get to this place that was once their patrimony.” (page xxi) It seems highly likely that such a huge piece of land would have a giant impact in shaping Mexico and the United States, but it seems a stretch to say Mexicans want to come to the U.S. for some sort of geographic reason rather the the economic conditions fostered in the U.S.—conditions not fostered in Mexico.
Blog Post 5 "Roaring Camp, The Social World of the California Gold Rush"
Susan Lee Johnson has an interesting take on the Gold Rush that is worth examining: What happened during the Gold Rush and what has it come to mean. ( “I do not attempt to resolve that tension between memory and history that gives the Gold Rush its salience. I write within that tension, now indulging in why two scholar call the ‘rules of recording an interpretation that …belong to historical discourse,’ now in the more ‘unreflective, erratic operations of memory.’ I am concerned with both what happened in California in 1848 and with what the Gold Rush has come to mean.” (page 26)) In this pursuit I think she touches on a fundamental question of why we bother study history, which is to understand how our current society took shape. I understand the memories are a good way to assess what the story has come to mean but to me, a fundamental task for a historian is to seek truth, and Johnson blurs her assessment of evolved meaning and her assessment of the best evidence of what actually happened. These aren’t factors of equal weight. While no one may be impartial or objective and truth elusive, you can sometimes do a pretty good job of digging out the fundamentals of a historical narrative and some sources of information are certainly more credible than others. One person’s memory of stories told through generation, for example, while worth examining, would most often seem far less credible than an eye-witness account written down at the time and corroborated by others. In my view, she blurs these worlds a bit too much. She states her task “is not so much to construct an accurate narrative of what happened in the Sierra foothills after 1848, to create a new main plot, but to take issue with received wisdom about the Gold Rush by encouraging the proliferation of alternative plot lines, stories not customarily nourished by the dominant culture, broadly defined, or even by most historical scholarship.” (page 27) I would think a fundamental building block would be to try to come up with an accurate narrative of what really happened—or coming as close to it as one could. Johnson cites oral histories gathered in the 1920s through the 1970s from Murrieta descendant, for example, and seems to give them equal weight with the contemporaneous news accounts. She notes the context of these news accounts make them highly suspect—coming during a campaign to exclude many from the gold fields—and that is something of which readers should be aware. However, she doesn’t have to seem much problem with stories that have come down from 70 to 120 years before in a family with an interest in the reputation of its ancestor—comments that are worth recording but are quite suspect in their accuracy. Johnson also takes a look at miners’ journals and finds less shrill sources of first-hand information than the news accounts, and this account notes exodus of Mexican women and children in the face of murder and theft outbreak in the gold fields, but this seems to carry less weight with Johnson as well. A proliferation of alternative plot lines seems a very worthwhile goal but it should attempt to have some basis in reality or attempt to set some benchmarks against which accounts are considered.
Your comment gets to the heart of the historian's dilemma in trying to add voices to the prevailing historical narratives. Most of those voices that have long been ignored or unsought don't have the imprimatur of "objectivity" that official written records have long had. I didn't notice much use of oral histories past the opening chapter, though I might have not been paying attention. Much of the later work does come from diaries, letters, and other unofficial documents that don't make claims to objectivity, but I think Johnson does a good job of questioning the objectivity of the main narratives and the people whose voices they represent. Your questions are well noted and I hope become part of tomorrow's discussion.
Elliott West writes some fascinating essays on the environmental history of the Central Plains in "The Way to the West." Among other things, he succeeds in making the story of how the grass grows pretty riveting to those who wonder what happened in the plains. It really is a web of entangled life. Especially interesting is his assessment of the impact of humans and their interactions with the natural world and the near extermination of the buffalo. He teases out this phenomenon in credible and seemingly ground-breaking manner, taking issue with the conventional view of the buffalo’s near demise from overhunting. It was a highly complex equation, he notes. The buffalo’s numbers were subject to boom and bust and were declining by 1850. Among the likely additional contributors were the degradation of the grasslands over time in part due to migrants heading west with vast herds of animals and numerous rut-carving wagons, increased Native American populations who had been pushed into the area and relied upon large grass-eating horse herds to survive, introduced diseases, Native American hunters who sold hides, and periodic drought. West offers a very nuanced narrative of competition for key areas in the plains that provided nutrition for horses and the buffalo, as well as offering a haven in the brutal winters. He does an excellent job explaining what happens to overgrazed areas over time—the steady degradation of the quality of the feed—and also noted the destruction of riparian areas over time as sapling are used as fodder and human and horse populations grow. After reading West, it is clear the buffalo fared better when the humans weren’t doing so well. Peace among Native American tribes was bad news for them. The no-man’s lands between the tribes—areas that were not steadily inhabited—became steadily inhabited with peace. They had served as havens for the buffalo. It is interesting to note that the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea today mirrors this. It has apparently become quite an astonishing ecosystem of a quality not found elsewhere in either nation.
Blog Post 7 “Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West”
God may be a big fan of Chicago as early boosters said, but as William Cronon points out, the city fell short in the natural conditions that might have more overtly promised to make it a metropolis. One of those areas was the Chicago River, described by one observer in 1848 as “a sluggish, slimy stream, too lazy to clean itself.” (page 33). The boosters may have touted Chicago’s destiny, but the river had other plans. It served as a terrible harbor on Lake Michigan and impeded trade due to its shallowness and propensity to fill with sand even if dredged. It is an interesting point as Cronon digs into what propelled Chicago into the major center that it became. He frequently focuses on the boosters’ visions for Chicago, and tells how these beliefs in some ways, became a self-fulfilling prophecy—a place worthy of investment and a magnet for capital. Natural waterways were critical to Chicago’s growth but Cronon writes that the man-made routes—canals and railroads—were equally important. (page 57) Also of interest is Cronon’s take on Frederick Jackson Turner and how his views meshed with the boosters’ views. Cronon notes a kind of nostalgia in Turner for rural roots and the notion that the frontier is done with when the cities arise. But Turner noted, too, that the people out their on the frontier needed to sell the products of their labor elsewhere and that cities played a role in this vision. Turner sees the city, however, as more of a final stage than a concurrent development.
America’s Largest Oil Spill The Lakeview Gusher What a difference a century makes. America’s largest oil spill, a well blowout in California in 1910 that pumped more than 8 million barrels of oil uncontrolled for 18 months, was largely hailed as a magnificent natural phenomenon, drawing visitors from far and wide. No one seemed to bat an eyelid over the creation of giant open oil storage ponds created by damming gullies and the splattering of a wide swath with oil. The chief concern reported seems to have been whether the oil was going to go to waste or not. Crews battled to keep up with the unprecedented flow, which was so enormous that it depressed oil prices.
There were many wells underway in the area between Taft and Maricopa, California, and not all of them proved viable. The well that was to become the Lakeview gusher was about to be shutdown. The drilling crew had been instructed to give up their efforts. Although they struck oil there the preceding fall, the well kept getting plugged with sand and was ordered shutdown. As the crew started to pull out the equipment, according to a May 1910 Los Angeles Times article: “As the baler came up through the pipes, the heavy tools were blown up against the crown block; a mighty gush of black oil burst from the bowels of the earth, flinging high into the air…. " The reception was definitely celebratory. Just 11 days after the blowout, the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of the gusher shooting hundred of feet into the air with a large lake of oil in the foreground. The headline above the photo: “California’s Most Wonderful Oil Picture—The Lakeview Gusher and Its Great Lake of Oil.” The pipelines from the field were not enough to handle the flow from the well and the oil was “stored in earthen sumps constructed hastily by throwing dams across small canyons in the foothills.” The Times makes a nod to the potential impact of thousands of barrels of oil potentially flowing across the landscape in an article from September 1910, after a good six months of unabated flow. The article notes the efforts underway to provide sufficient storage for the oil and the efforts of the somewhat mysterious “Independent Agency” to take charge of this task. The Agency found “that the quantity of oil in the sumps of the Lakeview Oil Company is approximately 3,000,000 barrels. That this oil is in a very dangerous condition due to the fact that the reservoids (sic) containing the it were hastily constructed and located in canyons where it will be subject to the rush of water from the first rainfall and result in the complete loss of every barrel of oil and consequent damage to surrounding properties.” The flow started on March 14, 1910 and finally stopped on Sept. 9, 1911, “after it had produced over 8,000,000 barrels of oil, about 6,000,000 barrels of which had been saved,” government report from 1920 noted. The well produced about 18,000 barrels of oil in its first a full day and as many as 65,000 barrels in a day, although some accounts give even higher numbers.
Blog post for “An Aristocracy of Color, Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890,” by D. Michael Bottoms Professor Bottoms has produced a well written and interesting work on the nuances of race relations, chiefly in California, in the 40 years following the Gold Rush. I found this a fascinating account of how the legal protections and status of non-white groups changed over time, and of the efforts of the whites in power try to defend their position. I appreciated the context Bottoms provides on these issues and the subtlety of his presentation. This was not simply whites trying to exclude others and hang onto power—although that is a big part of the story—but Bottoms also describes the views of the various groups and how the hierarchy of race was perceived by all parties. Black Californians, for example, viewed themselves as above California Indians and the Chinese, while the Chinese residents also had their perceived pecking order—not a surprise, I suppose, given the views of the time. The rationale for racism often seemed rooted in the idea of industriousness—the same school of thought identified by other authors that whites used to justify the seizure of a massive part of Mexico—competent Anglos would put the land to better use, and therefore should have it. The notions of racial superiority cited in California seem to have a similar root. This view put the California Indians at the lowest rung in society and categorized with the contemptuous term “digger” Indians, and seemed to chastise them for being content to live off the bounty of the land. (Some Puritan work ethic lurks here.) As Bottoms explains, California Indians suffered a dramatic population crash after the Gold Rush—in part due to this hard-core racism. Although the legal system was as racist as can be—excluding the ability of Chinese, for example, to testify against whites, at one point—I was surprised that Californios received equal status under the law as the founding of the state, given some of the rationale for the Mexican-American War.
This web site was a lot of fun to surf and I would imagine could be valuable to historians searching for clues about themes a little more off the beaten path. I notice a button for those who wish to add material and that this material appears to be vetted by historians to some degree before being posted. I think this is a great approach—it gives those with what could be unpublished but important papers and photos a venue to provide them to a larger audience but there is still the check of historians who, it appears from surfing the site, have the good sense to cull a lot of material. Five photos of the holiday parade may be useful. Three-hundred photos of the holiday parade may be more of an obstacle. I particularly like the idea that descendants of pioneers or early arrivals can find a venue for whatever material they have. This could help fill in missing pieces in research and make for some more compelling history. I am somewhat delighted and horrified by the yearbook database—delighted to think you can trace people in this manner and horrified to think my high school year book will be immortal. These also seem to provide a snapshot of what is deemed important at the time—the clubs, the sentiments, etc. I find the inclusion of some material a bit baffling—the hunting regulations from 2006, for example—no doubt they will have more value over time.
In some ways, "Comanche Empire" seems to bring a revival of Turnerian thought. It is a more sophisticated and comprehensive version of what happened on the frontier, but it does ring of Turner. Hamalainen describes the changes in view of colonization from a “seamless, preordained sequence” to “a dialectic process that created new worlds for all involved.” (page 6) This sounds a lot like Turner but without Turner’s dismissal of the Indians as savages, who Hamalainen says are also transformed in the process. Hamalainen chastises Turner for his ethnocentric and “narcissistic" version of the European takeover of North America but tunes in on this transformative interaction. Although Turner dealt with the expansion impulse, no doubt he would not sign onto the idea of the Comanche’s acting like an empire—at least not in his day—just like the American, Spanish and French expansionists. Hamalainen makes a pretty good case for imperial behavior on the part of the Comanches, while noting seeming contradictions. Hamalainen presents an interesting development in the role of Indians in U.S. history. That role seems to jump from savage to noble savage and victim to just as imperialistic as the European powers. Brian Delay, in “War of a Thousand Deserts” backs Hamalainen’s point about some of the ugliness of empire when discussing brutal Comanche raids on northern Mexico. “Comanches were obviously not the only group in history, or even in nineteenth-century North America, to butcher, enslave, and impoverish people who had done them little harm. And, as atlas will attest, Comanche’s were not the only people to exaggerate their grievances in order to take from them what they wanted during the 1830s and 1840s.” (page 138)
Ari Kelman, “A Misplaced Massacre, Struggle Over the Memory of Sand Creek”
This is an interesting history book on many fronts. One of these is how well the book is written and the unusual attention paid to good storytelling. Kelman knows how to and wants to provide a compelling narrative, such as the account of the hunt for the physical site of the massacre. He provides descriptions of the some of the key players involved in the story in a way that is more reminiscent of journalism than a scholarly work of history. Nonetheless, the details of height and voice timbre and their impact on audiences seem highly relevant in a work on the politics and battles around historical memory. It is easy to imagine the blunt, cranky rancher who slowly came over to the idea that it was a massacre. These kinds of detail can help bring a story to life.
Another front is the evolution of the terms used to describe the massacre. The euphemistic description as a “battlefield” won out in some circumstances and better fit the needs of those who wished a narrative of triumphant westward movement, as Kelman notes. Nonetheless, Kelman makes it clear that there were those who accurately characterized the Sand Creek Massacre as a massacre from the outset, whether they used that exact term or not—including an officer who refused to open fire at the scene and was horrified by what he saw. The monuments put up in the 1950s used both terms but the trend seems to have been toward “massacre.” In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine the use of any other term in the face of the most credible evidence available.
Hal K. Rothman in “Devil’s Bargains” convincing lays out the element of triumph in the rise of western tourism. Americans visiting some of the more spectacular destinations in the West were able to glory in the unique landscapes, the conquest of the West, and an area where the nation could in some ways be born anew. This was in keeping with Turner’s vision of how the nation evolved and “the values and nationalism inherent in its conquest of the continent….” (page 41) Rothmans writes: “The preservation of huge areas, such as Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, created an authenticated landscape, where people of an industrial culture could see the physical environment in which their predecessors, the actual conquerers had proved their mettle. The only difference was that these sacred landscapes were cleansed of Indians, the human history erased as the romanticism of American natural history became national iconography.” (page 42) It is worth noting that preservation did not “create” this landscape, authenticated of otherwise, and that it was consistent. Preservation efforts may have stopped its development but did not create the setting. Similarly, when describing the evolution of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination, Rothman also stresses a triumphant message. “The canyon represented the grandeur of the American continent and the hardy people who believed they had conquered it.” (page 80) One element that Rothmans does not capture is the appeal of the untamed West—the vista of the Grand Canyon that can’t be shaped by tourist development along its edge. There may be an element of triumph over the Native Americans and the victory over Mexico, but in many ways what drew and continues to draw visitors to these areas is that they are unconquered nature. The Grand Canyon typically makes visitors feel tiny on an enormous, wondrous landscape. The same is true of the scenic vistas promoted in the West.
Serving Up An Uncooked Vegan Diet with a Side of Social Reforms Joyful: Bakersfield’s Utopian Colony of 1884
Utopian colonies don’t normally spring to mind when thinking of Bakersfield but it, nonetheless, was the site of one named Joyful in 1884. Although nothing is left at the site of the colony, which was covered over by urban development in southwest Bakersfield in the 1990s, written records show that 130 ago, Joyful’s adherents—the Association of Brotherly Co-operators—believed in raw vegan fare dubbed the Edenic diet and served it with a healthy dollop of religion and reform-minded rhetoric. Not much has been written about Joyful, perhaps due to its year-long lifespan and small size. It receives a mention, for example in Vegetarian America, A History, and has an entry in The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions, in which the idea for Joyful reportedly came in a dream to its president, Isaac B. Rumford, of “a land ruled by Christian love” where the people existed on a vegetarian diet of uncooked foods. Joyful is described in a few pages in California’s Utopian Colonies, the 1953 work of University of California, Riverside, history professor Robert V. Hine. Joyful was not alone in its day. Professor Hine describes 17 utopian colonies in California from 1850 to 1950. There were other colonies in Southern California at the same time, including a vegetarian group starting in the 1870s. The Joyful colony apparently had very few residents even at its peak. One of the rare mentions of numbers comes in the November 1884 edition of the News, when he write that there were six people there. He names three, all of whom arrived to improve their health. The other three are presumably Mr. and Mrs. Rumford and their son. Rumford writes, however, that one does not have to live at Joyful to be part of the movement. “We want you here if you can come but to go on as a worker where you are, if unable to join us.” The Joyful News mentions correspondence with followers of the Edenic diet and includes lists of what appear to be non-resident members of the group, which never rises above 30 people. Most of them live in San Francisco, although there are people from London and New York as well. The Joyful News cites the Bible as the source of the call to vegetarianism, and trumpets the benefits of an Edenic diet. A key component of the Edenic diet as spelled out in the News is a combination of finely ground oatmeal and/or wheat, sometimes moistened with water, with added figs, peaches, almonds or walnuts. This is never cooked, which would remove the “vitality” from the food. This is often the main if not sole meal of the day. Social reforms for workers and women were on the agenda, among other things, as stated in its first edition. “The Work of the A.B.C. (Association of Brotherly Co-operators)—Is to assist its members and others to grow into a purer, nobler life than simply living for animal pleasure, and to work together…. That each one, so far as possible, may find the requisite amount and kind of labor suited to their condition, and the reward that belongs theirto, without any regard to sex, sisters and brothers being paid equally for the same labor. We recognize that happiness, or harmony, is the legitimate privilege of everyone, though all do not seem to know how to obtain it outside we hope they will be able to learn to do so with us.”
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ReplyDeleteBlog Post 2. "The Legacy of Conquest. The Unbroken Past of the American West"
ReplyDeletePatricia Nelson Limerick does a good job of debunking some of the myths of the West in "The Legacy of Conquest, The Unbroken Past of the American West." She does a fine job describing what the West was not. She convincing demonstrates, for example, that despite the ongoing rhetoric and mythology of the individuals heading West and conquering obstacles outside the corrupting influence of the federal government, that the government was absolutely critical to western development in property distribution, assistance to railroads, etc. Limerick writes that she believes the 1980s would become a key period in the history of the West (page 31) chiefly because federal budget cuts would mean big changes for a region dependent on federal involvement. One should bear in mind that Limerick was writing while the Reagan Administration was still in office and shortly after James Watt served as Secretary of the Interior—an inflammatory choice who managed to generate more than thousands of new members for the Sierra Club. Limerick seems to have the doctrines of the libertarian conservative—first Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan—in mind during her narrative. She takes aim at a key political doctrine of the day—the never-never land where absent federal power, Americans are taking shape thanks to the frontier and this rugged individualism. This filter is evident in the discussion of Indian dependence on the government. “Conservatives in the 1980s, lamenting the quagmire of welfare, sounded as if they had cribbed their language and sentiments of the Indian reformers of the 1880s.” (page 211) While some notions of the West are debunked it would have been helpful to see a bit more exploration of where the myths were right or where there were some larger kernels of truth in them. Is there nothing at all to the idea of individuals heading West and helping forge a national character?
Limerick’s makes some interesting observations on California and the southwest and the circumstances leading to the Mexican-American War and the conquest of this territory. She fleshes this out and adds some gray to what has sometimes been portrayed as people in white hats vs. black hats. She notes that the government of Mexico was highly unpopular in Texas and California well before the shooting started and the Gold Rush brought an overwhelming number of Americans to California. “In California,” she notes on page 231, “….those most actively discontented with with the Mexican government were Hispanics, not Anglos.” She also notes that the seemingly “shameless land grab” of the southwest territories by the U.S. was preceded by the grab of the land by Spanish colonizers.
Blog post 3,
ReplyDeleteFrederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
One can see why Turner’s work had the impact that it did on the study of American history and why it has been popular. It is well written, easy to grasp and simply an appealing narrative, in many ways. The idea of a national character forged at the edge where civilization meets savagery, where the European trades his shoes for moccasins and adapts to his new reality—time and time again as the population moves West from the edge of the Atlantic—is appealing in many regards. Americans learned and evolved as they moved West. It is very appealing to think we are made of this stuff—“the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.” Modern sensibilities call into question the notion of the place where savagery and civilization intersected and the idea that those are clean, clearly distinguishable labels. Many Native Americans would likely offer a different interpretation of the westward movement. Heavy involvement of the government in the westward movement is noted by other authors who are more skeptical of the notion of rugged individualists on the march, and of the extent to which the frontier shaped the national character.
Turner makes some good points. For example, he takes on another historian who puts slavery as the central theme in American history. Westward advance is more important, he argues, and he presents a good case that this is so. He points to an antipathy to control (page 58) and of people on the frontier who wished to do as they pleased. (page 106) He points to the movement westward of those who did not fit or rest on top of the social order in the East and makes a good case. “Religious dissensions would combine to make frontier society as it formed early in the eighteenth century more and more democratic, dissatisfied with the existing order, and less respectful of authority,” he writes (page 70). In Virginia, he observes a contest between “Eastern men of property” and those struggling along the frontier, and the larger impacts of this on the formation of the United States. “…Jeffersonian democracy, with its idea of separation of church and state, its wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special privilege was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old Dominion.” (page 125) It makes sense that the frontier would help shape these sentiments. I suspect elements of this narrative remain worthwhile but may have been cast aside—that the baby may have gone out with the bath water. It is one thing to criticize Turner and point to incongruities. It is another to produce a compelling narrative that stands in its place, and no one seems to accomplished this. It seems very easy to argue that virtually any framework imposed on the chaos of history is a simplification and that a magnifying glass on any one section will demonstrate greater complexities and cast the theory in doubt. But isn’t there some Turner worth saving? As far as form goes, I wish more historian would emulate Turner is worth emulating. His writing is clear and concise. He writes for a broader audience as well as academia. He is a product of his era needs a critical review nearly a century later, but still seems to have much to offer.
I do agree that Turner's writing allows the book to be enjoyed and read by others not in super history programs academia. I enjoyed his style and viewpoints. Interesting how we are reading books from non-Native authors for our first few books, wonder what the Natives thought about the invasions of others onto their lands. A good book for some perspective is Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
ReplyDeleteBrian Delay certainly brings many shades of gray to what, to me, was previously a black-and-white tale of rapacious conquest of land in the war between the United States and Mexico. The failure of the Mexican government to safeguard the frontier and the potency of Indian raids on the settlements helped set the scene for U.S. seizure of the land—in part due to an arrogance on the part of the United States about being better able to manage the land—thus providing another rationale for taking it—and in part because of the fierce Indian raids that depopulated huge swaths of land and the Mexican government’s neglect of its frontier until it was too late. The Comanches with their raids into Mexico helped bring about the rise of U.S. power, which ultimately doomed them to defeat. DeLay notes that some Mexicans thought the silver lining to the dark cloud of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was Article 11, in which the United States pledged to restrain the Indians who had been raiding Mexican territory—although the U.S. did a poor job living up to this pledge.
ReplyDeleteDeLay poses but does not answer the question of what Mexico might be like today had not lost a third of its territory to the United States but says it is impossible to speculate about this complex question. He should of stopped before adding: “However, dense the tangle of historical possibilities, the indisputable fact that Mexico would have been quite different is annually attested to by the great number of Mexicans who are literally dying to get to this place that was once their patrimony.” (page xxi) It seems highly likely that such a huge piece of land would have a giant impact in shaping Mexico and the United States, but it seems a stretch to say Mexicans want to come to the U.S. for some sort of geographic reason rather the the economic conditions fostered in the U.S.—conditions not fostered in Mexico.
Blog Post 5 "Roaring Camp, The Social World of the California Gold Rush"
ReplyDeleteSusan Lee Johnson has an interesting take on the Gold Rush that is worth examining: What happened during the Gold Rush and what has it come to mean. ( “I do not attempt to resolve that tension between memory and history that gives the Gold Rush its salience. I write within that tension, now indulging in why two scholar call the ‘rules of recording an interpretation that …belong to historical discourse,’ now in the more ‘unreflective, erratic operations of memory.’ I am concerned with both what happened in California in 1848 and with what the Gold Rush has come to mean.” (page 26)) In this pursuit I think she touches on a fundamental question of why we bother study history, which is to understand how our current society took shape. I understand the memories are a good way to assess what the story has come to mean but to me, a fundamental task for a historian is to seek truth, and Johnson blurs her assessment of evolved meaning and her assessment of the best evidence of what actually happened. These aren’t factors of equal weight. While no one may be impartial or objective and truth elusive, you can sometimes do a pretty good job of digging out the fundamentals of a historical narrative and some sources of information are certainly more credible than others. One person’s memory of stories told through generation, for example, while worth examining, would most often seem far less credible than an eye-witness account written down at the time and corroborated by others. In my view, she blurs these worlds a bit too much. She states her task “is not so much to construct an accurate narrative of what happened in the Sierra foothills after 1848, to create a new main plot, but to take issue with received wisdom about the Gold Rush by encouraging the proliferation of alternative plot lines, stories not customarily nourished by the dominant culture, broadly defined, or even by most historical scholarship.” (page 27) I would think a fundamental building block would be to try to come up with an accurate narrative of what really happened—or coming as close to it as one could. Johnson cites oral histories gathered in the 1920s through the 1970s from Murrieta descendant, for example, and seems to give them equal weight with the contemporaneous news accounts. She notes the context of these news accounts make them highly suspect—coming during a campaign to exclude many from the gold fields—and that is something of which readers should be aware. However, she doesn’t have to seem much problem with stories that have come down from 70 to 120 years before in a family with an interest in the reputation of its ancestor—comments that are worth recording but are quite suspect in their accuracy. Johnson also takes a look at miners’ journals and finds less shrill sources of first-hand information than the news accounts, and this account notes exodus of Mexican women and children in the face of murder and theft outbreak in the gold fields, but this seems to carry less weight with Johnson as well. A proliferation of alternative plot lines seems a very worthwhile goal but it should attempt to have some basis in reality or attempt to set some benchmarks against which accounts are considered.
Greg,
ReplyDeleteYour comment gets to the heart of the historian's dilemma in trying to add voices to the prevailing historical narratives. Most of those voices that have long been ignored or unsought don't have the imprimatur of "objectivity" that official written records have long had. I didn't notice much use of oral histories past the opening chapter, though I might have not been paying attention. Much of the later work does come from diaries, letters, and other unofficial documents that don't make claims to objectivity, but I think Johnson does a good job of questioning the objectivity of the main narratives and the people whose voices they represent. Your questions are well noted and I hope become part of tomorrow's discussion.
Blog Post, "The Way to the West," Elliott West
ReplyDeleteElliott West writes some fascinating essays on the environmental history of the Central Plains in "The Way to the West." Among other things, he succeeds in making the story of how the grass grows pretty riveting to those who wonder what happened in the plains. It really is a web of entangled life. Especially interesting is his assessment of the impact of humans and their interactions with the natural world and the near extermination of the buffalo. He teases out this phenomenon in credible and seemingly ground-breaking manner, taking issue with the conventional view of the buffalo’s near demise from overhunting. It was a highly complex equation, he notes. The buffalo’s numbers were subject to boom and bust and were declining by 1850. Among the likely additional contributors were the degradation of the grasslands over time in part due to migrants heading west with vast herds of animals and numerous rut-carving wagons, increased Native American populations who had been pushed into the area and relied upon large grass-eating horse herds to survive, introduced diseases, Native American hunters who sold hides, and periodic drought. West offers a very nuanced narrative of competition for key areas in the plains that provided nutrition for horses and the buffalo, as well as offering a haven in the brutal winters. He does an excellent job explaining what happens to overgrazed areas over time—the steady degradation of the quality of the feed—and also noted the destruction of riparian areas over time as sapling are used as fodder and human and horse populations grow.
After reading West, it is clear the buffalo fared better when the humans weren’t doing so well. Peace among Native American tribes was bad news for them. The no-man’s lands between the tribes—areas that were not steadily inhabited—became steadily inhabited with peace. They had served as havens for the buffalo. It is interesting to note that the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea today mirrors this. It has apparently become quite an astonishing ecosystem of a quality not found elsewhere in either nation.
Blog Post 7
ReplyDelete“Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West”
God may be a big fan of Chicago as early boosters said, but as William Cronon points out, the city fell short in the natural conditions that might have more overtly promised to make it a metropolis. One of those areas was the Chicago River, described by one observer in 1848 as “a sluggish, slimy stream, too lazy to clean itself.” (page 33). The boosters may have touted Chicago’s destiny, but the river had other plans. It served as a terrible harbor on Lake Michigan and impeded trade due to its shallowness and propensity to fill with sand even if dredged. It is an interesting point as Cronon digs into what propelled Chicago into the major center that it became. He frequently focuses on the boosters’ visions for Chicago, and tells how these beliefs in some ways, became a self-fulfilling prophecy—a place worthy of investment and a magnet for capital. Natural waterways were critical to Chicago’s growth but Cronon writes that the man-made routes—canals and railroads—were equally important. (page 57)
Also of interest is Cronon’s take on Frederick Jackson Turner and how his views meshed with the boosters’ views. Cronon notes a kind of nostalgia in Turner for rural roots and the notion that the frontier is done with when the cities arise. But Turner noted, too, that the people out their on the frontier needed to sell the products of their labor elsewhere and that cities played a role in this vision. Turner sees the city, however, as more of a final stage than a concurrent development.
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ReplyDeleteAmerica’s Largest Oil Spill
ReplyDeleteThe Lakeview Gusher
What a difference a century makes. America’s largest oil spill, a well blowout in California in 1910 that pumped more than 8 million barrels of oil uncontrolled for 18 months, was largely hailed as a magnificent natural phenomenon, drawing visitors from far and wide. No one seemed to bat an eyelid over the creation of giant open oil storage ponds created by damming gullies and the splattering of a wide swath with oil. The chief concern reported seems to have been whether the oil was going to go to waste or not. Crews battled to keep up with the unprecedented flow, which was so enormous that it depressed oil prices.
There were many wells underway in the area between Taft and Maricopa, California, and not all of them proved viable. The well that was to become the Lakeview gusher was about to be shutdown. The drilling crew had been instructed to give up their efforts. Although they struck oil there the preceding fall, the well kept getting plugged with sand and was ordered shutdown. As the crew started to pull out the equipment, according to a May 1910 Los Angeles Times article: “As the baler came up through the pipes, the heavy tools were blown up against the crown block; a mighty gush of black oil burst from the bowels of the earth, flinging high into the air…. "
The reception was definitely celebratory. Just 11 days after the blowout, the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of the gusher shooting hundred of feet into the air with a large lake of oil in the foreground. The headline above the photo: “California’s Most Wonderful Oil Picture—The Lakeview Gusher and Its Great Lake of Oil.”
The pipelines from the field were not enough to handle the flow from the well and the oil was “stored in earthen sumps constructed hastily by throwing dams across small canyons in the foothills.” The Times makes a nod to the potential impact of thousands of barrels of oil potentially flowing across the landscape in an article from September 1910, after a good six months of unabated flow. The article notes the efforts underway to provide sufficient storage for the oil and the efforts of the somewhat mysterious “Independent Agency” to take charge of this task. The Agency found “that the quantity of oil in the sumps of the Lakeview Oil Company is approximately 3,000,000 barrels. That this oil is in a very dangerous condition due to the fact that the reservoids (sic) containing the it were hastily constructed and located in canyons where it will be subject to the rush of water from the first rainfall and result in the complete loss of every barrel of oil and consequent damage to surrounding properties.”
The flow started on March 14, 1910 and finally stopped on Sept. 9, 1911, “after it had produced over 8,000,000 barrels of oil, about 6,000,000 barrels of which had been saved,” government report from 1920 noted. The well produced about 18,000 barrels of oil in its first a full day and as many as 65,000 barrels in a day, although some accounts give even higher numbers.
Blog post for “An Aristocracy of Color, Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890,” by D. Michael Bottoms
ReplyDeleteProfessor Bottoms has produced a well written and interesting work on the nuances of race relations, chiefly in California, in the 40 years following the Gold Rush. I found this a fascinating account of how the legal protections and status of non-white groups changed over time, and of the efforts of the whites in power try to defend their position. I appreciated the context Bottoms provides on these issues and the subtlety of his presentation. This was not simply whites trying to exclude others and hang onto power—although that is a big part of the story—but Bottoms also describes the views of the various groups and how the hierarchy of race was perceived by all parties. Black Californians, for example, viewed themselves as above California Indians and the Chinese, while the Chinese residents also had their perceived pecking order—not a surprise, I suppose, given the views of the time. The rationale for racism often seemed rooted in the idea of industriousness—the same school of thought identified by other authors that whites used to justify the seizure of a massive part of Mexico—competent Anglos would put the land to better use, and therefore should have it. The notions of racial superiority cited in California seem to have a similar root. This view put the California Indians at the lowest rung in society and categorized with the contemptuous term “digger” Indians, and seemed to chastise them for being content to live off the bounty of the land. (Some Puritan work ethic lurks here.) As Bottoms explains, California Indians suffered a dramatic population crash after the Gold Rush—in part due to this hard-core racism. Although the legal system was as racist as can be—excluding the ability of Chinese, for example, to testify against whites, at one point—I was surprised that Californios received equal status under the law as the founding of the state, given some of the rationale for the Mexican-American War.
Blog Post for Montana Memory Web Site
ReplyDeleteThis web site was a lot of fun to surf and I would imagine could be valuable to historians searching for clues about themes a little more off the beaten path. I notice a button for those who wish to add material and that this material appears to be vetted by historians to some degree before being posted. I think this is a great approach—it gives those with what could be unpublished but important papers and photos a venue to provide them to a larger audience but there is still the check of historians who, it appears from surfing the site, have the good sense to cull a lot of material. Five photos of the holiday parade may be useful. Three-hundred photos of the holiday parade may be more of an obstacle. I particularly like the idea that descendants of pioneers or early arrivals can find a venue for whatever material they have. This could help fill in missing pieces in research and make for some more compelling history. I am somewhat delighted and horrified by the yearbook database—delighted to think you can trace people in this manner and horrified to think my high school year book will be immortal. These also seem to provide a snapshot of what is deemed important at the time—the clubs, the sentiments, etc. I find the inclusion of some material a bit baffling—the hunting regulations from 2006, for example—no doubt they will have more value over time.
"Comanche Empire"
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, "Comanche Empire" seems to bring a revival of Turnerian thought. It is a more sophisticated and comprehensive version of what happened on the frontier, but it does ring of Turner. Hamalainen describes the changes in view of colonization from a “seamless, preordained sequence” to “a dialectic process that created new worlds for all involved.” (page 6) This sounds a lot like Turner but without Turner’s dismissal of the Indians as savages, who Hamalainen says are also transformed in the process. Hamalainen chastises Turner for his ethnocentric and “narcissistic" version of the European takeover of North America but tunes in on this transformative interaction. Although Turner dealt with the expansion impulse, no doubt he would not sign onto the idea of the Comanche’s acting like an empire—at least not in his day—just like the American, Spanish and French expansionists. Hamalainen makes a pretty good case for imperial behavior on the part of the Comanches, while noting seeming contradictions. Hamalainen presents an interesting development in the role of Indians in U.S. history. That role seems to jump from savage to noble savage and victim to just as imperialistic as the European powers. Brian Delay, in “War of a Thousand Deserts” backs Hamalainen’s point about some of the ugliness of empire when discussing brutal Comanche raids on northern Mexico. “Comanches were obviously not the only group in history, or even in nineteenth-century North America, to butcher, enslave, and impoverish people who had done them little harm. And, as atlas will attest, Comanche’s were not the only people to exaggerate their grievances in order to take from them what they wanted during the 1830s and 1840s.” (page 138)
Ari Kelman, “A Misplaced Massacre, Struggle Over the Memory of Sand Creek”
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting history book on many fronts. One of these is how well the book is written and the unusual attention paid to good storytelling. Kelman knows how to and wants to provide a compelling narrative, such as the account of the hunt for the physical site of the massacre. He provides descriptions of the some of the key players involved in the story in a way that is more reminiscent of journalism than a scholarly work of history. Nonetheless, the details of height and voice timbre and their impact on audiences seem highly relevant in a work on the politics and battles around historical memory. It is easy to imagine the blunt, cranky rancher who slowly came over to the idea that it was a massacre. These kinds of detail can help bring a story to life.
Another front is the evolution of the terms used to describe the massacre. The euphemistic description as a “battlefield” won out in some circumstances and better fit the needs of those who wished a narrative of triumphant westward movement, as Kelman notes. Nonetheless, Kelman makes it clear that there were those who accurately characterized the Sand Creek Massacre as a massacre from the outset, whether they used that exact term or not—including an officer who refused to open fire at the scene and was horrified by what he saw. The monuments put up in the 1950s used both terms but the trend seems to have been toward “massacre.” In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine the use of any other term in the face of the most credible evidence available.
Hal K. Rothman in “Devil’s Bargains” convincing lays out the element of triumph in the rise of western tourism. Americans visiting some of the more spectacular destinations in the West were able to glory in the unique landscapes, the conquest of the West, and an area where the nation could in some ways be born anew. This was in keeping with Turner’s vision of how the nation evolved and “the values and nationalism inherent in its conquest of the continent….” (page 41) Rothmans writes: “The preservation of huge areas, such as Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, created an authenticated landscape, where people of an industrial culture could see the physical environment in which their predecessors, the actual conquerers had proved their mettle. The only difference was that these sacred landscapes were cleansed of Indians, the human history erased as the romanticism of American natural history became national iconography.” (page 42) It is worth noting that preservation did not “create” this landscape, authenticated of otherwise, and that it was consistent. Preservation efforts may have stopped its development but did not create the setting. Similarly, when describing the evolution of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination, Rothman also stresses a triumphant message. “The canyon represented the grandeur of the American continent and the hardy people who believed they had conquered it.” (page 80) One element that Rothmans does not capture is the appeal of the untamed West—the vista of the Grand Canyon that can’t be shaped by tourist development along its edge. There may be an element of triumph over the Native Americans and the victory over Mexico, but in many ways what drew and continues to draw visitors to these areas is that they are unconquered nature. The Grand Canyon typically makes visitors feel tiny on an enormous, wondrous landscape. The same is true of the scenic vistas promoted in the West.
ReplyDeleteServing Up An Uncooked Vegan Diet with a Side of Social Reforms
ReplyDeleteJoyful: Bakersfield’s Utopian Colony of 1884
Utopian colonies don’t normally spring to mind when thinking of Bakersfield but it, nonetheless, was the site of one named Joyful in 1884. Although nothing is left at the site of the colony, which was covered over by urban development in southwest Bakersfield in the 1990s, written records show that 130 ago, Joyful’s adherents—the Association of Brotherly Co-operators—believed in raw vegan fare dubbed the Edenic diet and served it with a healthy dollop of religion and reform-minded rhetoric.
Not much has been written about Joyful, perhaps due to its year-long lifespan and small size. It receives a mention, for example in Vegetarian America, A History, and has an entry in The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions, in which the idea for Joyful reportedly came in a dream to its president, Isaac B. Rumford, of “a land ruled by Christian love” where the people existed on a vegetarian diet of uncooked foods. Joyful is described in a few pages in California’s Utopian Colonies, the 1953 work of University of California, Riverside, history professor Robert V. Hine. Joyful was not alone in its day. Professor Hine describes 17 utopian colonies in California from 1850 to 1950. There were other colonies in Southern California at the same time, including a vegetarian group starting in the 1870s.
The Joyful colony apparently had very few residents even at its peak. One of the rare mentions of numbers comes in the November 1884 edition of the News, when he write that there were six people there. He names three, all of whom arrived to improve their health. The other three are presumably Mr. and Mrs. Rumford and their son. Rumford writes, however, that one does not have to live at Joyful to be part of the movement. “We want you here if you can come but to go on as a worker where you are, if unable to join us.” The Joyful News mentions correspondence with followers of the Edenic diet and includes lists of what appear to be non-resident members of the group, which never rises above 30 people. Most of them live in San Francisco, although there are people from London and New York as well.
The Joyful News cites the Bible as the source of the call to vegetarianism, and trumpets the benefits of an Edenic diet. A key component of the Edenic diet as spelled out in the News is a combination of finely ground oatmeal and/or wheat, sometimes moistened with water, with added figs, peaches, almonds or walnuts. This is never cooked, which would remove the “vitality” from the food. This is often the main if not sole meal of the day.
Social reforms for workers and women were on the agenda, among other things, as stated in its first edition.
“The Work of the A.B.C. (Association of Brotherly Co-operators)—Is to assist its members and others to grow into a purer, nobler life than simply living for animal pleasure, and to work together…. That each one, so far as possible, may find the requisite amount and kind of labor suited to their condition, and the reward that belongs theirto, without any regard to sex, sisters and brothers being paid equally for the same labor. We recognize that happiness, or harmony, is the legitimate privilege of everyone, though all do not seem to know how to obtain it outside we hope they will be able to learn to do so with us.”