As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart (review)

Credit Clyde Milner and Carol O'Connor (or perhaps the folks at Oxford University Press) for bestowing the perfect title on this wonderful new biography. Granville Stuart's life was indeed enormous, "as big as the West" and then some. It seems impossible to conjure another individual who actually lived all of the experiences typically associated with the Anglo incorporation of region. Consider that Stuart participated in two gold rushes, worked as a cattle rancher, meted out extralegal justice, and spent his final years recording much of his adventures for posterity. Perhaps the only thing missing from his career was election to national office—and yet he achieved something close (and far more interesting) when he served as United States ambassador to Uruguay and Paraguay in the mid-1890s.

The authors do a tremendous job in bringing this legendary figure to life, so that by the end of the book (or much earlier), the reader has developed a full sense of Stuart and his intriguing complexities. Born in 1834 in present-day West Virginia to humble circumstances, Stuart became an avid reader and taught himself several foreign languages. He married a Shoshone woman in 1862 who bore him eleven children over the course of their twenty-six year marriage, and yet Stuart's affection for his family was shot through with regret that his intimate connection to Native peoples hindered his upward climb through the ranks of Montana society. Stuart's life at once reveals all the promise of the West for nineteenth-century Anglo pioneers as well as its incredibly dark outcomes for the region's landscape and especially its indigenous inhabitants. It is therefore surprising that, until now, there exists no modern scholarly biography of the man.

And yet for all of their admirable work in breathing life into Granville Stuart and his turbulent world, for the most part Milner and O'Connor leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. If there is one criticism that could be leveled at As Big as the West, it is a reluctance on the part of the authors to locate their protagonist in the broader (and vital) debates about the history of the region, among them Native-white inter-marriage, the socioeconomic contours of the cattle range, and even the politics of commemoration (which, as Milner and O'Connor explain, is what led them to Stuart in the first place). The book's tone may rest on a sense that the facts speak for themselves, but these are themes and questions that deserve fuller enunciation.

That said, in no way should this criticism dissuade prospective readers of this excellent book. Milner and O'Connor have obvious gifts for storytelling as well as an insatiable appetite for research, making As Big as the West rewarding for the layperson and indispensable for the scholar of nineteenth-century Montana.