Entrepreneurs of the Old West by David Dary, and The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West by Patricia Nelson Limerick (review)

Reviews 181 . . . the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it . . . neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope. (p. 60) The concluding lecture, “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur” is a study of culture and personality as they appear against the landscape, in a re-examination of ideas familiar from Letters from, an American Farmer. Stegner’s character sketch is more incisive than affectionate, a critique of the inability of a society to adapt to its own land. On that note, he looks at the literature of the West, starting with a cool evaluation of Owen Wister’s Virginian as a paid thug, and proceeding to the modern day with a series of raptorial swoops. His literary values—which include integrity—are expressed in a well-turned jeremiad that ought to be required reading for anyone intend­ ing to write about the West. Summing up this book isat least as difficult as Stegner’sattempt to sum up the region to which he has given a lifetime of study and devoted the major part of his art. The West is a difficult region to grasp, whether physically or spiritu­ ally. By either measure, Stegner’s work is a monument and this book—a vast treatment in a limited space—is essential reading. C. L. RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming Entrepreneurs of the Old West. ByDavid Dary. (New York: Knopf, 1986. 416 pages, $22.95.) The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. By Patri­ cia Nelson Limerick. (New York: Norton, 1987. 416 pages, $17.95.) Legacy of Conquest and Entrepreneurs of the Old West are both about the American West, and both deal more or less with the profit motive. Each depends substantially on secondary sources, and each offers a synthesis of the western experience. There is also some overlapping in the affinity of the two authors for a good story. There similarity ends. In character, purpose, and mood they are distinctly different. Entrepreneurs, by David Dary, tells of a “silent army” of western business­ men who, through hard work, accumulated wealth and created the heritage “we call the free enterprise system” (325). Presented in simple terms, this proposition is more a matter of belief than a device for analysis; it gives rise to a story made mainly of heroic and romantic stuff. In it, traders, freighters, sutlers, railroaders, land speculators, bankers, and vigilantes all feature largely. Dary’s facts are generally sound, if thinly documented; his narrative is quickmoving , and his style readable. 182 Western American Literature His work is a reaffirmation appropriate for the Reagan era, for Alfred A. Knopf Inc. (which first published Entrepreneurs), and for the University of Nebraska Press which issued it in paperback. In earlier times Knopf was deeply committed to the heroic narrative of the Old West. More recently University of Nebraska Press reprints have made it a stock in trade. Dary’s argument that entrepreneurs got short shrift in the heroic narrative seems an extension of Reagan conservatism. These credentials may auger well for quick sales, but Entrepreneurs promises little to the lasting history of the West. Legacy of Conquest undertakes a comprehensive history of the West and belongs to a newer and sterner historiography. This is as apparent in its tempo and spirit as in its explosive mix of journalism, history, anecdote, synthesis, and revision. Plot, setting and cast, however, are familiar. Frederick Jackson Turner is first on stage, where he is criticized for truncating western history at 1893, for emphasizing process over place, and for ignoring women, native Americans and ethnic groups. But he still does duty as advocate of rewriting history for each succeeding generation. From Turner the cast spreads out, crowding the stage with historians, novelists, journalists, politicians, lobbyists and, sadly, an all too believable array of problem-ridden westerners from past and present. The plot around which this crowd seethes abandons Turner’s frontier process for the concepts of conquest and legacy. Limerick’s setting is the transMississippi West, and time plays back and forth almost within sentences from...