The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, by Megan Kate Nelson
How the West was Won, the title of a 1962 Hollywood movie, sums up attitudes once held by most Americans. A deluge of books published in recent years have questioned the efficacy of “winning” the West, giving fuller account of frontier life. And it wasn’t always simple as white settlers versus the Indigenous.
One of the latest reappraisals, Megan Kate Nelson’s The Westerners, examines the frontier through the lives of seven distinct individuals from the 19th century: the Native American Sacajawea, the mixed-race fur trader Jim Beckworth, Latina entrepreneur Maria Gertrudis Barcelo, Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, Canadian-born rancher Ella Watson, Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis and a lone white man, Ovando Hollister.
The latter person seems cast as emblematic of the usual characters depicted as “winning” the West. Hollister was restless and successful, moving westward several times in search of wealth. Despite being raised as a Shaker, for whom all people contain a spark of divinity, and despite his opposition to slavery, Hollister advocated wiping out the American Indians who stood in the way of Manifest Destiny.
An American Indian, Sacajawea, is the only one of Nelson’s seven representatives of frontier life widely remembered today. Her life experience dispels any overly romanticized vision of Indigenous life. The tribes fought each other over land—not necessarily “ownership” in the western sense but of the resources of the land. At age 12, Sacajawea, a Shoshone, was taken captive in a raid by their Hidatsa enemies, a nation that had recently been forced westward by the warring Lakota. The Hidatsa warrior who captured Sacajawea traded her, at age 16, to a French voyageur, Toussaint Charbonneau. She became one of his two “wives.”
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A distant nation called the United States of America would soon intersect with their lives through a military expedition sent by that republic’s president, Thomas Jefferson. In 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St. Louis (just purchased from France) with orders to find the way to the “Western Ocean” (Pacific), “have conferences with the natives on the subject of commercial intercourse” (Jefferson’s words) and make a scientific study of the land (specimens were sent to Jefferson’s home, Monticello). Lewis and Clark were authorized to hire “hunters and explorers” to help along the way. Charbonneau was one of those contractors. He was paid $500 (and brought Sacajawea along for free).
With her knowledge of Indigenous languages and folkways, Sacajawea proved significantly more valuable to Lewis and Clark than her “husband.” They treated her considerately, even after she became pregnant (Clark eventually became guardian to her children). The expedition also included Clark’s enslaved servant, York, who participated in decision making (a rare display of true democracy) but was never freed.
The author makes an honest effort to sift fact from legend in an eye-opening account on the diversity of frontier life.
Get The Westerners on Amazon here.
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