REVIEW ESSAY:< i> The Way West Written and directed by Ric Burns (original) (raw)

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West

The American Historical Review, 1988

At the end of the recent television miniseries. Lonesome Dove,. Woodrow Call, the taciturn visionary, returns to his point of departure, the town of Lonesome Dove, Texas. Call had driven a herd of Texas cattle to Montana, creating an entire new industry for the West. In the epic journey, however, his only real friend and several other loyal followers had perished. Even the town of Lonesome Dove had suffered as a result of Call's vision: the saloon keeper, in despair over the defection of the resident prostitute to Call's party, had locked himself in the saloon and burned it down around him. As Call ponders the ruins, an eager reporter pleads with Call to tell the story of the cattle drive. "They say you're a man of vision," he beseeches the unresponsive Call. "Yes," Call finally replies regretfully, "a hell of a vision." Call's few short words express the American experience with its West. While the story was grand and ultimately successful for many, the cost was high. In the past, the popular image of the West, created by people like the news reporter in Lonesome Dove, emphasized the triumphs. The academic view was more balanced but acknowledged the overall virtues and successes of the past. Today, several academics are working to create a revised vision of the western past. Embarrassed by the popular West and disdainful of previous academic interpretations that saw the good in the struggle, the revisionists are creating their own bleak story of our past. To them it matters little that the Woodrow Calls in our history accomplished their goal and made it to their figurative Montanas. All they see are the bodies of the dead along the way. It is a hell of a vision. Patricia Nelson Limerick's book. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, has provided a central interpretive focus for the otherwise disparate work of other new revisionists in the field. In Limerick's western worldview, ethnocentrism, a universal attribute of human cultures, has become Eurocentric racism; frontier has been replaced with invasion, conquest, colonization, or exploita

“Crossing the Great Plains: A Sesquicentennial Look at the 1847 Mormon Pioneer Trek West.”

1997

Rock viewing vehicles decorated to represent wayonx and ¡he aniinals that pulled them. (Historical Departiiicni, Archives Division, The Church ofje.sus Christ of Uitter-day Saints) Below: ¡n ¡997 the Mormon commemoration was marked hy an overland irek with wagons and handcarts. (Courte.sy of Eileen A. Bell) î Crossing the Great Plains: A Sesquicentennial Look at the 1847 Mormon Pioneer Trek West by Jay H. Buckley O NE HUNDRED FIFTY YEARS AGO some 4,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints huddled along the west bank of the Missouri River in their makeshift cabins, wagons, and dugouts awaiting spring. Freshly dug graves in a hill just a few miles north of present Omuha, Nebraska, contained several hundred fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters who had perished from exposure, disease, and malnutrition. The survivors hoped their future would brighten, like the coming of the spring grass after a long winter, as they Hed from their tumultuous past seeking a place to dwell in peace and safety. With the hardest 265 miles of their 1,300 mile trip accomplished, Brigham Young, the president of the church's governing body, the Twelve Apostles, made plans to settle "in some good valley in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains.. . |or] ... the great Basin."' From 1847 to 1897, some 100,000 Mormons traveled west along the Great Platte River Road to the Great Salt Lake Valley, the last 30,000 riding the newly completed transcontinental railroad all the way to Ogden, Utah, after its completion in 1869. This article analyzes the motives forcing the Monnons to venture west, observes several unique features that made the Momion Trail experience different from that of other overland travelers, and examines how that experience has been memorialized.Ô f all the forces driving people to venture west along the Overland Trail-furs, gold, land, and adventure-perhaps none was stronger than the Latter-day Saints' desire to escape religious