Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism by Daniel R. Maher (review)

Although historians may not recognize the specific case under study, they will find very familiar thematic concerns in Daniel R. Maher's reading of the "frontier complex" in Fort Smith, Arkansas (p. 3). Following such authors as Tony Horwitz, David Lowenthal, and Richard R. Flores, Maher, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas—Fort Smith, uses the term frontier complexto problematize the numerous iconic images modern Americans have used to define, display, celebrate, and, above all, commercialize the Wild West. All across America, under varying guises as "Frontier Days," "Founder's Days," or "Pioneer Days," local communities invoke cowboys and Indians, marshals and outlaws, to supplement flagging municipal revenues with tourist dollars. Ocean City, Maryland; Wetumpka, Alabama; Tombstone, Arizona; and Dodge City, Kansas are all in on it, and Fort Smith is, too, in especially big and revealing ways.

Established in 1817 at the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau Rivers, Fort Smith was among the original network of military posts ranging from Louisiana to Minnesota designed to police the first "permanent Indian frontier" (p. 7). A second Fort Smith, constructed in 1838, survived Zachary Taylor's budget ax (he lived there from 1842 to 1845) and flourished after the U.S.-Mexican War as garrison personnel escorted swarms of westering Americans down the Santa Fe Trail and across the continent to the California gold fields. This second fort was decommissioned in 1871, the year Fort Smith began what became its quarter-century run as the seat of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas. Here "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker dispensed justice to outlaws hauled before him by an impressive list of U.S. marshals, both real and fictional, including Bass Reeves, a black man who may or may not have been the model for the Lone Ranger, and Rooster Cogburn, hero of the Charles Portis novel True Grit(1968).

Especially since the golden age of frontier tourism in the heady days after World War II, Fort Smith has trafficked heavily in Wild West imagery. Today, some fourteen sites, most of them clustered downtown near the Arkansas River, beckon curious motorists to stop and explore, among others, Miss Laura's Visitor Center, located in a former bordello, the Fort Smith National Historic Site, Judge Parker's Courtroom, and a nearby replica gallows, where tourists can play executioner to condemned dolls. Local residents impersonate both Miss Laura and Bass Reeves. Other reenactors stage mock shootouts.

Probing Fort Smith's "frontier complex" through three years of fieldwork, Maher exposes enough false fronts to fill several Hollywood back lots and shows how the town's lived history bore little resemblance to the heritage local boosters promote. The original fort facilitated the expansion of white settlement at the expense of indigenous groups. The territory over which Judge Parker imposed "order" has been deliberately inflated over the years, while the Supreme Court overturned several of his decisions. Bass Reeves and the man who plays him are ensnarled in the complexities of contemporary identity politics. Miss Laura did not preside over a houseful of hookers with hearts of gold. Local residents prefer to ignore the extent to which the town has benefited from federal spending.

None of this will surprise historians, especially those of the West; nevertheless, Maher's work contributes meaningfully to the ongoing discussion of how Americans display and consume their complicated past. One can hardly blame local promoters for displaying a rosy version of the Old West. Their interest is commerce, not critical interrogation. Yet, especially in this anxious age of deindustrialization, neoliberal resurgence, and global transformation, we ignore at our peril Maher's passionate critique of this confected "heritage," the power relationships it sustains, and the history it erases.