'Continental Reckoning' by Elliot West
The west was “won” at great cost, especially to Native Americans, and the simplistic depiction of the region by Hollywood (before the late ‘60s) and pulp fiction has long been called to question. Continental Reckoning builds on the last half century of research into the Indian wars and western settlement and places it in the wider context of American expansion. University of Arkansas history professor Elliott West examines the U.S. transcontinental land grab from all angles, including political, military, cultural and environmental. Continental Reckoning is massive and brilliantly constructed, scholarly and literary, meant to be read beyond academic conferences by a public that—in these contentious times—needs to understand America’s past.
Horses play a vital role in Continental Reckoning’s account. The Great Plains were the creature’s original home according to the fossil record; they migrated one million years ago across the land bridge that once connected Alaska to Siberia and went extinct in North America. Horses returned with the Europeans and were eagerly adopted by Plains Indians. The “horse culture” that developed contributed to environmental devastation on the Plains—horses hungrily devoured grasslands—and triggered “a reign of violence.” Native Americans were the victims and often the perpetrators as aggressive tribes used horses in their bid to subdue neighbors. Most of their leaders had little inkling of the appetite of the new American republic for expansion or its overwhelming resources. They continued to fight each other as the U.S. prepared to overtake them all.
While the U.S. never had a policy as centrally coordinated as the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, America’s westward expansion was often genocidal in means as well as ends. In California, where indigenous people stood in the way of the gold rush, politicians and pundits extolled “extermination” as the solution for the “Indian problem.” Hispanics were treated almost as badly and were often forced from their land or lynched. West quotes from a San Joaquin newspaper from the 1850s: “it is the duty of every American citizen … to exterminate the Mexican race from the country.”
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West also examines the influx of migrants with fresh eyes. Those wagon trains provided a long, rough ride for families hoping to settle the frontier and played their own role in damaging the ecosystem. And while many came to farm or raise cattle, the greatest impetus for rapid Western expansion was gold or silver. Running throughout Continental Reckoning are stories of enterprise fueled by greed and price gauging, and a federal government trying to establish control over corrupt and virtually lawless territories. There are only a few heroes, among them, a pair of cavalry officers who refused the command of their general to participate in a massacre of Native Americans.
