HOW THE WEST WAS REALLY WON

It is our Book of Genesis. Our legend of Romulus and Remus. The story of the frontier is America's myth of creation. In those rolling prairies and gold-rich mountains, a new, freer man was born, unhindered by tradition, restless and independent, endlessly optimistic, hard-working and unafraid. Living on the "hither edge" of wilderness, in historian Frederick Jackson Turner's phrase, the pioneer had "broken the cake of custom" to forge the headstrong young nation that would become America.

Or so we were told by generations of historians. But the Turnerian view of the West is falling apart these days, dismantled by a group of young scholars raised on the disillusionments of Vietnam and the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the '60s. Turner himself understood that "each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." So this new group of historians sifts through the evidence with an eye toward race, gender and class. They are turning away from Great Men and Great Events to ordinary people and daily life, poring over diaries and letters and the evidence left in the land itself.

Read the new studies, and you discover that the West was not some rough-hewn egalitarian democracy, where every man had a piece of land and the promise of prosperity, but a world quickly dominated by big money and big government. It was not Wait Whitman's "newer garden of creation," where the sodbuster might dwell in sweet harmony with nature, but a nearly unmitigated environmental catastrophe. Nor was the pioneer family, so often invoked by nostalgic politicians urging a return to fundamental American values, a close-knit little household facing down hardship. Often, it was torn apart by the great desert emptiness of the West.

Frederick Jackson Turner was right to locate the roots of the American character on the frontier. But that legacy, say the new historians, is one of rapaciousness and environmental plunder, of fragmented families, racial strife, vast disparities between rich and poor. Though the frontier was "closed" 100 years ago, when the 1890 census showed settlement from sea to sea, that date did not mark a decisive break in history, as Turner and his followers argued. The new historians see a continuous story, with the issues that consumed the old West remaining central concerns in America today.

Still, these historians struggle to be taken seriously. Their more traditional colleagues are mildly critical, charging that they sometimes overstate their case. "Not all of their work is necessarily so new," says Martin Ridge, author with Ray Billington of the pre-eminent college text on Western history, Westward Expansion. "But they are without question innovative and committed scholars, and everybody welcomes new approaches to the region's history." A respectful hearing outside the field is more elusive. University of Colorado Prof. Patricia Limerick, author of the most comprehensive summary of the new view, The Legacy of Conquest, likens the "stereotypes of noble savages and noble pioneers struggling, quality in the wilderness" to the, aura of moonlight and magnolias that long shrouded Southern history, handicapping scholars in their efforts to excavate the realities of slavery and Reconstruction. With the mountain man and cowboy "the domain of mass entertainment and light-hearted national escapism," says Limerick, Western historians are relegated to a quaint regionalism.

They must also do battle with a deep ideological attachment to the fantasies of the frontier. In 1985, Ronald Reagan spoke of the men of the Alamo calling out encouragement to one another, the settler pushing west and singing his song: "It is the American sound: Hopeful, bighearted, idealistic; daring, decent and fair. That's our heritage ... there is always a better tomorrow. We believed then and now there are no limits to growth." That faith in limitless bounty, say these historians. has been nothing but trouble for the American West.

Economic success was the ordained lot of frontier settlers;
men and women had only to apply themselves to achieve wealth
and an elevated social status ... The wide dispersal of land ownership 
mitigated against control by the few or the distant. If people
fell by the wayside they had only themselves to blame.
                      --Billington and Ridge
                    Westward Expansion, 1949

The idea of the self-sufficient individual is the most elevated tenet in the American gospel, codified by none other than Thomas Jefferson. With a vast continent before him, Jefferson foresaw a nation of yeoman farmers, each in possession of 160 acres carved out of the wilderness or liberated from indolent natives to be made productive by the sweat of the American brow.

Unfortunately, what worked in the lush valleys of Virginia was doomed to fail in the arid reaches of the Far West. This was a land of deserts that were fiercely hot and fiercely cold, streams that flooded a few weeks each year and went dry the rest, grasshopper plagues, hail followed by drought followed by hail, sterile salt beds and relentless winds. A rancher might survive with 2,500 acres to run his livestock, but expecting a farmer to make it on 160 acres, wrote Ian Frazier in Great Plains, published last year, "was like expecting a fisherman to survive on a little square of ocean." Most homesteaders went broke when their fields dried up, and were forced to sell to the handful of landowners lucky enough to have water.

Those men accumulated massive holdings, sometimes exceeding a million acres, despite feeble legal efforts to constrain their empire building. According to Marc Reisner, whose 1987 Cadillac Desert examines the role of federal and urban bureaucracies in the competition for water, the West presented endless opportunities for fraud. A speculator might meet the requirement for a domicile on each section, for instance, by scattering birdhouses across his land. Consequently, by the 1890s, seven eighths of the farmland west of the Mississippi was owned by non-farmers, and agribusiness was born. Organized around large-scale water management, the West had become a "land of authority and restraint, of class and exploitation, and ultimately of imperial power," says University of Kansas historian Donald Worster, author of Rivers of Empire.

Monopoly enterprise came quickly to ranching and mining, as well, turning the "rugged individualist" into an impoverished wage laborer. In 1855, 157 Eastern-based corporations ran cattle in Colorado, and the Scotland-based Prairie Land & Cattle Company owned a strip 50 miles wide from the Arkansas River to New Mexico. The cowboy, that icon of freedom, wrote Wallace Stegner in 1987, "was and is an overworked, underpaid hireling, almost as homeless and dispossessed as a modern crop worker." Prospectors, too, soon exhausted the surface gold in the mountains and became virtually indentured to the Eastern financiers who owned the machines, mills and smelters necessary for underground mining.

Ironically, notes Limerick, the myth of self-sufficiency deprived miners of recourse. Compensation for injury was typically denied by courts, which deemed the individual responsible for his own safety. Despite lung-clogging dust and temperatures often exceeding 120 degrees, unionization was long blocked on the ground that it would compromise the independence of the solitary miner.

And it was in the ostensibly self-reliant West, say the new historians, that the modern welfare state was born, beginning with mass federal irrigation projects in 1902 and evolving to include the crop subsidies and drought assistance of modern times. Though he had been lured to barren land by politicians and railroad marketeers, still the farmer was flogged for requiring aid. In the 1870s, Governor Pillsbury of Minnesota warned that assistance to farmers would "sap and destroy the vital energies of self-reliance?'

The Romantic sensibility of the 19th century was fertile ground for the idea of "Natural Man"--an innocent fleeing dark, corrupted cities to settle in the promised land and bring forth its God-given bounty. In fact, says Worster, "the settlement of the Great Plains was a world-class environmental catastrophe, one we still refuse to admit, given our pride in our agricultural expertise."

Historians are now tapping geologists, biologists, botanists and environmental scientists to perform an autopsy on the land. Where alder trees have replaced Douglas fir, it means there was clear-cutting and the land was burned over several times. An abundance of sage and juniper indicates overgrazing well in the past. The damage is vast: Ground water contaminated or depleted; plowed-up topsoil lost to drought and the merciless winds; entire species destroyed.

Yale historian Howard Lamar, who taught many of the new historians and laid the foundation for their work with his Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, describes the slaughter of the buffalo as one of the biggest ecological changes in North American history. In just 30 years, some 60 million animals were destroyed and replaced by cattle, disrupting the native ecology and leaving the land overgrazed and exhausted. "The rancher is a man who supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, mud, dust and flies," wrote environmental activist and novelist Edward Abbey. "He drives off elk and antelope, shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West." The problem has always been greed, argues Worster. The 1880s were a veritable free-for-all on the grasslands. Cattle barons eager to get rich quick built their herds to untenable size, leading finally to the collapse of the cattle kingdom. Miners, too, gutted the countryside to get out the minerals as fast as possible, heedless of the wasted land they left behind.

Until recently, Western history has been by and about men. Now, as scholars reconstruct the lives of frontier women and children, they dismantle nostalgic notions of the prairie family. Again, individualism emerges as a decidedly mixed blessing. "Our national celebration of separation and autonomy has given us the justification for taking families apart," says historian Lillian Schissel, co-author of Far from Home; Families of the Westward Journey.

Drawing on diaries, letters and reminiscences, Schissel traces the sagas of pioneer families. A family of Colorado prospectors buries all but one of seven children. A widow on an Oregon homestead is abandoned by her only son and must contend on her own with a failing farm, one daughter gone mad and another whose husband threat ens to cut her throat. In South Dakota, two families of Russian immigrants live their first winter on the plains with all 12 people crowded into a boxcar "worse than a coyote hole" and so little food the children howl constantly with hunger.

The private records of this misery are richer than any fiction. One of the Russian men writes: "We were so lacking in tools for changing the rugged prairies into productive farmland that when I think back to our first year on that coyote land, I can hardly keep from crying." Things got better the second year, but "my wife Sophie, with seven children and all sleeping in a shanty that became a pond when it rained, loathed everything about America. It is odd we even slept together, but we had no other choice."

Given high mortality rates and the economic advantages of having numerous children, frontier women were nearly always pregnant and worked even in their ninth month hauling buckets of mud or armfuls of wheat to the threshing floor. The men were often drunk and occasionally violent. One frontier ditty advised: "A woman, a dog, a hickory tree, The more you beat them the better they be." Worst of all was the endless isolation. Tied to their homes and often miles from the nearest neighbor, says Schissel, the women would walk down to the tracks to catch a glimpse of human faces when the train passed by. Some went mad in their loneliness, listening to nothing but the incessant wailing of the wind. One prairie daughter recalled often "finding my mother crying, and wondering whether she cried of fatigue, craving a word of recognition, gratitude or praise."

Children, too, worked as soon as they were able. In Growing up with the Country; Childhood on the Far Western Frontier, historian Elliott West unearths a Kansas farmer's letter home about his son: "Little Baz can fetch up cows out of the stock fields, or oxen, carry in stove wood and climb in the corn crib and feed the hogs and go on errands down to his grand ma's." At the time, Little Baz was just over 2 years old. Another boy, at age 11, was breaking horses for 50 cents apiece. "His father tied him to the horse, and tied his hat to his head, and after the kid had flopped around for a bit he got to be an expert," says West.

In the positive view he takes of frontier childhood, West is unusual among the new historians. He emphasizes the youngsters' closeness to the land, a sense of home never fully achieved by their displaced parents. Though to some degree perplexed by their wild prairie children, says West, these parents were extremely loving, if for no other reason than that they couldn't afford to have their children run away. That benign view is disputed by Schissel and others, who argue that frontier children were often emotionally neglected and physically abused. These more pessimistic historians stress the torments of childhood, the bedbugs and pin-worms and cholera and fevers, the filth and starvation and death.

For decades, Western history was not only male but white. The Indian was an object for Western heroism: A savage to be conquered or a noble primitive waiting to be civilized. The Hispanic was the enemy--remember the Alamo. Blacks and Chinese were simply left out. "The migration from the East was only one of many in the 19th century," says University of Utah historian Richard White, who is writing a text to replace Billington and Ridge. "There were also large migrations from the South and from Asia, both of which were periodically blocked and both of which continue to this day."

The approach of the 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus has spurred extensive scholarship on the southern migration, much of it aimed at reclaiming Spain's status as the first to settle the American West. Coronado was already exploring western North America in 1539, hundreds of years before Anglos arrived there. In 1598, Don Juan de Onate led 400 colonists across the Rio Grande, and on April 30, they formally claimed the land for Spain. Last month, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that day the first Thanksgiving in America, and asked Massachusetts to concede defeat.

Even before 1821, the year Mexico won independence, trappers and prospectors had begun encroaching on Mexican land. They were the "illegal aliens" of their day, says Limerick, but were tolerated and assimilated into Mexican culture. By the 1830s, however, distinguished Anglo writers were championing the notion of "the white man's burden" to civilize the more savage races and lamenting the waste of such rich territory. "In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be," wrote Richard Dana in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Historian Francis Parkman, touring the Rockies and Plains in 1846, described Hispanics as "slavish-looking, stupid, squalid, miserable and mean." That same year, America went to war. Mexico lost half its territory. And though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed Hispanics rights to their land, says Limerick, 80 percent ultimately went to American lawyers and settlers. As the final blow, in 1850 California passed the Foreign Miners' Tax, driving Hispanics out of the mines.

Writing Hispanic-American history is tricky business: The issues of the 19thcentury--bilingualism, cultural assimilation, immigration and labor competition remain so volatile today that accounts of the past are inevitably highly politicized. Black Western history suffers an additional handicap--an acute lack of sources. In the few accounts that have been written, some remarkable heroes emerge, men like Jim Beckwourth, a fur trapper who lived with the Crow Indians; Britt Johnson, who rode alone hundreds of miles beyond the frontier to retrieve his wife and two children from their Kiowa captors, and cowboy Bill Pickett, who could drop a steer by biting its front lip and dragging it to the ground.

The first historians of the black West found in the frontier the seeds of racial equality. "Americans need to remember that the Wyoming pioneers desegregated their first school; that the West once approached the democracy they are still striving to achieve," wrote Philip Durham in The Negro Cowboys (1965). But the current crop of historians tells a more sorrowful story.

They write, for instance, of the migration of 40,000 blacks to Kansas in the 1870s, lured by the railroads to a false paradise. Homeless and jobless, they set up shantytowns and began to die at the rate of 50 a day. Within a few years, two thirds were dead or gone. Other states put provisions in their constitutions excluding free blacks: Blacks 'would intermarry with Indians, explained Oregon's delegate to Congress, and "led on by the Negro, these savages would become much more formidable. The fruits of their commingling would be long and bloody wars."

The new Asian historians tell equally bleak tales. The internment of the Japanese during World War II and the current increase in anti-Asian violence, they say, have their roots in the murderous attacks on Chinese railroad workers in the 1870s and in the chilling denial of civil rights in the California Constitution: "No native of China, no idiot or insane person ... shall ever exercise the privileges of an elector."

Once it was clear in the early part of this century that the conquest of the Native American was complete, it became fashionable to lament the beautiful tragedy of nature's wise child. "White people love to watch Indians die," says Ian Frazier. "They love to stand around and say things like 'the red man joins his ancestors' or talk about the 'end of the trail' for the noble brave. The problem is that the real end of the trail was usually smallpox or murder then and alcoholism or car accidents or diabetes now."

The noble-savage mythology has been terribly destructive. Settlers convinced of the natives' barbarism were mistrustful and aggressive, provoking violent confrontation that might have been avoided. The myth of the Indian's primitive purity has been equally destructive: When a tribe adapts to modem life, it is branded as "inauthentic" and therefore unworthy of the rights guaranteed by treaty.

But most damaging for the Indian has been the cult of individualism. Early 20th-century reformers saw Indian loyalty to the tribe as un-American, even socialist. One supporter of the 1887 Dawes Act, aimed at breaking up reservations into individually owned tracts of land, suggested the Indian needed to be "touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent ... to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers, trousers with a pocket that ached to be filled with dollars."

The new historians borrow the methods of anthropology to trace the evolution of the many Indian cultures. They are finding, says White, that many tribes were in fact the creation of European settlers, who herded disparate groups onto a reservation and required them to act as a single people. The Utes, as well as the Navajos, were originally scattered over a huge area with vastly divergent cultures. The Cheyenne were a group of autonomous bands brought together out of necessity as clan members fell to smallpox. These groups often shared no previous political affiliation, and in some cases didn't even speak the same language, but "the whites needed to invent a tribe so someone could sign the treaties," says White.

Surprisingly, the picture of Indian history now emerging is quite positive, focusing on the ability of the Indian, against all odds, to maintain semi-sovereign status. America's founders felt a deep moral obligation to treat Indians fairly, explains White, and chose treaty negotiations over genocide, the favored solution in Argentina and Chile, or the denial of all legal rights, as in Guatemala and Peru. For a century, the treaties were violated in every way possible: Tribal landholdings were broken up, Indians were denied the right to practice their religion, children were removed from their families to assimilationist schools. But the last two decades have seen a resurgence of Indian power in the courts and legislatures, and as severe water shortages have developed in the West, tribal leaders have begun to make use of the "mortgage on Western development" their water rights represent. Historian Vine Deloria, a member of the Sioux tribe, makes the highly controversial argument that "American Indians have actually been treated considerably better than any other aboriginal group on any continent."

Times are tough for the classic hero of the American West. Howard Lamar brands General Custer "a foolish general who got himself into a spot where he was roundly defeated," and objects to "turning that defeat into a kind of moral victory or martyrdom." Frazier describes the William Edwards biography of "the gun-nut" Col. Samuel Colt "as stupider than any biography of Lenin," and notes that the heroes of Dodge City were all kingpins in gambling, prostitution and alcohol. In the words of Wallace Stegner, "Our principal folk hero, the frontiersman, was an antisocial loner, impatient of responsibility and law, coarse, selfish, ready to violence."

Such hero-bashing can have nasty consequences. In 1978, historian Dan Kilgore published an essay--"How Did Davy Die?"--that disputed the heroic account of Davy Crockett's defense of the Alamo (he was supposed to have died with dozens of the enemy at his feet). Drawing on a diary of one of Gen. Santa Anna's officers, Kilgore revealed that Crockett hid during the battle, possibly under a mattress. When discovered, he claimed to be a tourist who had taken refuge in the Alamo on the approach of the Mexican Army. Texans were furious. One newspaper branded Kilgore's essay a "Communist plan to degrade our heroes." And in a remarkable display of the power of myth over reality, People ran a photo of diary translator Carmen Perry alongside one of John Wayne--as Crockett in the 1960 movie The Alamo--and invited the public to decide who was more credible.

The mythic West, it appears, has a tenacious hold on the national imagination. "America has always thought of the West as an escape from history," says Donald Worster, "an escape from Europe, corruption, evil, greed, failure, lust, tragedy." No such escape was possible, then or now, and the legacy of the frontier past remains fully alive today. The welfare state persists in the growing Western dependency on federal aid--farm supports, military installations, defense contracts, public land management and water projects. Right alongside it persists the dream of the self-reliant individual, the sagebrush rebel shaking his fist at Eastern corporations and politicians. The idea of a nation without limits endures in the un-checked growth of cities like Denver and Los Angeles. Both continue to import water from politically weaker agricultural areas, and both have lately begun effectively exporting their pollution by relying on power sources outside the state. "We persist in the fantasy," says White, "that we can transform a desert into a garden."

Most enduring is the idea of the lone ranger, the solitary hero, mistrustful of authorities and ready to take matters in his own hands. Oliver North was nicknamed a cowboy by his admirers, and subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz was cheered as a hero in the mold of Billy the Kid. Perhaps America isn't yet ready to give up its frontier vision--of a world where you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys, a world where complexity gives way to blissful simplicity.

The myths of the West began as corporate come-ons and have persisted for more than a century because of their emotional and commercial power. Starting in the 1860s, good old-fashioned American salesmanship turned the desert West into a pioneer's paradise.

Thanks to the government's largess, the railroads owned nearly 200 million acres of Western land. Needing buyers and customers, they blanketed Eastern cities with leaflets promising health, good fortune and God's bounty. One publicist for the Rio Grande & Western discovered Utah's "remarkable" resemblance to the cradle of civilization: He promptly published a map of the territory with an inset map of Palestine and called it "the Promised Land." Territorial governments helped too. In 1888 and 1889, Kansas attracted settlers by reporting 44 inches of rain. That's odd, since it has never rained nearly that much in Kansas since.

Forget rumors of a Great American Desert, crooned the salesmen. They had a new scientific theory, cooked up by geologists in their employ, that cultivating the soil would disrupt the atmosphere and turn that desert into an oasis fit for a billion people. Their slogan, "Rain Follows the Plow," was one of the inspired cons of the 19th century. Among the other forces that drove the myths:

From approximately 1800 to 1835, populist politicians like Andrew Jackson and Davy Crockett promoted the colorful West for their own purposes. Crockett even had the benefit of a sort-of campaign consultant. When James Kirke Paulding's play "The Lion of the West" opened in New York in 1831, audiences recognized Col. Nimrod Wildfire as their beloved Davy. It was Wildfire who first wore a coonskin cap and boasted that he rode a half-horse, half-alligator. Crockett saw a good thing, and soon the cap and bragging were part of his act and his official biography. In the 1890s it was Teddy Roosevelt who fancied himself a cowboy.

The paintings of Frederic Remington and George Catlin were easily recognized as fantasy, but few viewers knew that photographer Edward Curtis also recreated his Indians. His tragic, mystical primitives appealed to Americans' yearning for the lost simplicity of a pre-industrial world. Curtis often dressed natives in costumes he designed and posed them in scenes he created. (See Library of Congress Edward S. Curtis' Images of North American Indians)