Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West by David Wrobel (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 3 4 9 her present. The essays involve her return drives to the “higher ground” of those places, including the Texas and Colorado regions of her childhood, around the time of her early retirement as a professor of French literature. But just as water­ sheds tend to flood from their forced unity, Brosman’s essays confederate around an unyielding sense of self, the place where all her essays’ roads inescapably lead. Sometimes a writer’s charismatic voice can keep this from being a detriment, but Brosman’s tends to be off-putting in its Amoldean cultural elitism and social bitterness. Her attempts to blend place and polemic are often incongruous: writ­ ing about visiting a friend in Texas, old houses in Colorado, or the canyonlands of Utah, Brosman detours into harangues against those who have threatened her “maverick nature” over the years, including multiculturalists, Foucauldians who dispute individualism, and other “black-shirted intellectuals” (42, 23). An independent woman on the road, she is, nevertheless, highly dismissive of con­ temporary feminists. As this French scholar’s range of literary reference is drawn from European thinkers, there is a certain novelty in reading the American West through epigrams from Proust and Montaigne. It is therefore disappoint­ ing that her interpretations of the West amount to a few myths about rugged individualism and pastoral simplicity (ideas at least as outdated as the vintage Gulf Oil service station map she uses to guide her nostalgic trip through Texas). At times, Brosman’s writing style can also be distracting, for it is difficult to nav­ igate the often tortuous sentences, where dependent clause piles against clause, no object in sight. Certainly, Finding Higher Ground succeeds as a declaration of independence, as the essays work to construct a persona heroically unfazed by the influences around her. But its predominant self-absorption and strident tone (a tone Brosman faults Marxists for using) may keep the reader at the same willed distance she maintains as a writer. Taken together, both books highlight two facets of highway travel, with Brosman reaching for an elite Sartrean isolation and Olsen recognizing the communities that paradoxically exist within isolation. Both have value in expressing the traveling mindset, but readers may find that Olsen’s introspec­ tive questions, providing insight about the mobile quality of the contemporary West, carry them further than Brosman’s unyielding answers. Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West. By David Wrobel. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 322 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Matthew Bokovoy Oklahoma State University, Stillwater From the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, promotional tracts created by land developers, the railroads, local boosters, and courthouse politicians brought forth an image of the West as the last unspoiled Eden for enterprising Americans. Regions in the American West found success luring visitors, tourists, and settlers through elaborate celebrations that advertised human community, 3 5 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 4 leisure, and economic opportunity. New Mexico’s Bureau of Immigration pub­ lished Aztlan: The History, Resources, and Attractions ofNew Mexico in 1885 to bring the white settlers required to achieve statehood status. San Francisco publicized its civic progress with the California Midwinter Exposition of 1894. Other western cities held great expositions that drew crowds of millions to Omaha in 1898, St. Louis in 1904, Portland in 1907, Seattle in 1909, and San Diego and San Francisco in 1915. By World War I, people living outside of the West certainly knew very well the bucolic and romantic images of every sin­ gle region west of the 100th meridian. In Promised Lands, David Wrobel takes a fresh look at promotional tracts and weighs the cant of progress espoused by boosters with pioneer reminis­ cences that viewed western settlement as a golden past of hardship and sacri­ fice. Eschewing the temptation to view boosters “as the human embodiment of the worst excesses of unbridled American capitalism,” Wrobel makes the two genres appear as compatible parables of the western future...