The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776-1860 (review)

Edward Watts and David Rachels's new anthology returns us to a question that Caroline Kirkland asked about "the West" in 1838: "How much does that expression mean to include? I never have been able to discover its limits" (606). To start with mere geography, The First West concentrates on the region from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, with only a couple of exceptions: writing on the trans-Mississippi west from Lewis and Clark's journals, Jefferson's letters, and Cooper's The Prairie. Excluded are "Westerns" such as Irving's A Tour on the Prairies, Parkman's The Oregon Trail, and Ridge's Adventures of Joaqín Murieta. The temporal boundaries, the Revolution and the Civil War, encompass an era of great political transformations in the region. After the Revolution, the nascent United States government felt vulnerable on its western frontier, not only to Native Americans (many of them British allies) but also to its own back settlers, in whom the political energies released in the name of liberty would not be damped down: the likes of Ohio separatist John Amberson or the Pennsylvania whiskey rebels. By the 1840s, the government was firmly in control of the first west, Native Americans had mostly been removed, and the backwoodsman had become the heroic yeoman-while the first sectional division of east-west was being realigned in terms of north-south. This was an era of great technological transformation as well. Steamboats pulled the region more tightly together through its river system; then railroads, cutting across this river system, enabled the region to be split apart. After 1860, the region's "entanglement in national issues changed," as the "complexities" displayed in this collection "were overwhelmed in a strident program of nationalism connected to the war" (xvi).

In 1859, Ohio editor and political activist William T. Coggeshall lamented that "the popular idea of Western Literature" consisted of "tomahawks and wigwams, sharp-shooting and hard fights, log cabins, rough speech, dare-devil boldness, bear-hunting and corn-husking, prairie flowers, bandits, lynch-law and no-law-at-all, miscellaneously mixed into '25 cent novels,' printed on poor paper and stitched between yellow covers" (931). Easterners still controlled the representation of the west, and western writers had to publish in the east in order to succeed, despite a burgeoning literary scene in Cincinnati, for example. Coggeshall thus urged a reevaluation of the canon, in which westerners would review their own cultural history and take productive control of their cultural destiny.

The First West provides a wealth of texts, many reprinted for the first time, from which to begin such a long overdue reevaluation. True, there is a good deal of pulp-fiction Indian fighting here-John Filson, Daniel Boone, James Kirke Paulding, Timothy Flint-and maybe the greatest bear-hunting story of all time-Thomas Bangs Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas." However, these are contextualized by other kinds of materials. On Indians, for example, we have Johnson Jones Hooper's satirical story of Capt. Simon Suggs's exploits with the "Tallapoosy Vollantares" (done up as a mock campaign biography); the autobiographical Life of Black Hawk, as well as Benjamin Drake's highly sympathetic biography; the Narrative of John Tanner, who was taken captive at age nine and lived most of the rest of his life as an Ojibway; texts of several treaties with Native American nations; A History of the Ojibway People by mixed-blood Ojibway William Warren; and numerous other texts unfamiliar to the Norton- and Heath-bound canon. And to put alongside Thorpe's tall tales of a bear hunted so hard that he "run himself into a skinfull of bear's grease" and another that was "unhuntable . . . and died when his time come" (838, 843), we have, for example, Zadok Cramer's The Navigator, a practical guide to emigration via the Ohio River that went through 11 editions from 1801 to 1826...