How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (review)

"Have western cities been different from eastern North America?" (274) asks Carl Abbott in the conclusion of his near-encyclopedic survey of urban development west of the Mississippi River in the United States and in western Canada from the seventeenth century to the present. The answer, of course, is yes. Yet Abbott also demonstrates that western cities, large and small, were different from each other. There were coastal commercial centers established in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for trade along major waterways and across the Pacific. "Some nineteenth-century cities," he writes, "were gateways between the West and the world" (4). For others, urban growth hinged on rail lines, mineral mining, military garrisons or, as was the case with Denver and Kansas City, vocal and effective boosters. By the early twentieth century, cities depended on controlling irrigation systems, on tourism and later on global knowledge-based industries. That diversity is the book's weakness and its strength. The widely varied histories of western cities leave How Cities Won the West without an overarching narrative; the book frequently seems like a string of fascinating anecdotes sewn together. Yet that steady buildup of facts and figures in a loose and lively style underscores the book's central argument: commercial centers—some hardly cities by today's standards—were crucial to the economic and political growth of that mythic place Americans call "the west."

The image of a western frontier fashioned in fiction and film as a vast open space conquered by courageous white men was long ago shattered by scholars of environmental, Native American, and western history. Abbot's study further wrecks the frontier myth. European settlers, he demonstrates, planted commercial centers across the continent, and were followed quickly by entrepreneurs seeking to profit from the west's agricultural and mineral wealth. "Urban history as frontier history," he notes, "deals... with the full incorporation of the west into the system of modern capitalism" (33). Most significantly, cities were hardly accidents of nature. "No one knew which small settlement was going to grow into another Paris or which California mission would be a seed for another Rome" (34). Rather, cities grew while competing for rail lines, irrigation systems, eastern capital, and settlers. By the late nineteenth century, newer cities like Spokane, Calgary and El Paso were outpacing the older regional centers like Salt Lake City. With mining and manufacturing came labor strife and conflicts between white, Mexican and Asian immigrants. Each city's economic base determined its growth pattern as well as the racial, ethnic and class conflicts that crystallized in the twentieth century.

Politics too was crucial. Abbott traces shifts in urban coalitions as nineteenth-century boosters were replaced by Progressive reformers, while in places like Houston, Dallas, and Portland a "radical middle class" (141) of small property-owners and proprietors united with skilled workers and American socialists until World War I. By the late twentieth century, powerful new coalitions, often neighborhood-based and often rooted in the experiences of the Civil Rights Movement, emerged. This "politics of diversity" (205), reacting to mid-century urban renewal and racial segregation, transformed urban centers in San Antonio and Portland.

How Cities Won the West, with its vivid detail and broad scope, its synthesis of scholarship and numerous quotations from great western novels and poetry, is a useful reference work on that no-longer-mythic place.