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

With one microhistorical study, Daniel R. Maher of the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith drops the "protective cloak of heritage" from the thousands of historical sites that profit from celebrating American manifest destiny. Using his residence near a tourist destination, Fort Smith, Maher writes about the "frontier complex," a collection of publicly disseminated narratives that legitimize white male privilege while erasing the effects of imperialism and racism on people of color. Heritage and history, past and present generations converge through the development of tourism and larger-than-life western tropes at Fort Smith, where citizens lasso national attention and funds using intentionally developed and harmful storylines.

Mythic Frontiers delineates three frontier periods bounded by Indian removal, restraint, and reservation. Here, the focus is less on Native peoples themselves than on the ways in which ideas of Indian savagery and danger were harnessed keep Fort Smith alive. After chapters 1 and 2 lay out the frontier complex and how it works at Fort Smith, the book's narrative builds upon a series of "mythic alibis," the folk heroes and villains whose fictionalized lives excuse racial and gendered oppression. Maher begins chapter 3 with Fort Smith itself in the early nineteenth century, uncovering the origin story of white men protecting white families from hostile Indians. The legacy of True Grit's Judge Parker overlay Fort Smith's role in expansion in chapter 4; he tamed lawlessness in Indian Territory through swift justice and capital punishment, concealing the injustices of imperialism (disproportionate numbers of the executed were people of color, for example) in the post–Civil War period. In chapter 4 the success of black lawman Bass Reeves, who briefly worked for Parker, provides an anecdotal example of racial harmony while drowning out the thousands of other lives simultaneously affected by racial violence and segregation. Finally, in chapter 5 the examples of Miss Laura the madam and outlaw Belle Starr demonstrate the dangers of leaving domesticity behind while underscoring that the merry prostitutes' clients remained "real" men. Over two centuries, the same cast of characters familiar to baby boomers altered their eastern counterparts' idea of what the West was like. After their decease, they became integral to a commodified, thoroughly modern tourist version of the story they helped create.

The pair of twentieth-century periods, recreation and redoubling, launched Fort Smith into the tourist economy. Maher is at his finest in describing encounters at museums and events in the final two chapters, bringing together a wide variety of consumable materials produced through the frontier complex—movies, statues, plenty of posed mannequins in staged rooms, even a birthday cake—all orchestrated toward an immersive experience for visitors and residents. He digs into the twenty-first-century politics of cultural heritage with his discussion of Fort Smith's ongoing bid for the US Marshals Museum amid flagging visitor numbers to nearby sites. While the author is clearly wary of the museum project and the town's twenty-first-century attempts to market itself nationally as a Wild West site, the final chapter is a nuanced depiction of the economic and political machinations behind large-scale historical attractions: "We can now see the frontier complex as a crafted cultural space, as a master symbol that can be unraveled to expose the underlying power structures behind it" unfolding through struggling cultural heritage projects in towns across the country (243). They are exactly what the ivory-tower social scientist should care about: Through contributions to their own fields, are academics unwittingly legitimizing impending financial disasters or marketing schemes? Although historians frequently conclude a monograph with parallels to present-day structural inequalities, do they examine how their contemporaries use histories to perpetuate inequalities?

These men entered the pantheon of town fathers and tall tales that entertain visitors at private museums and public parks, while the experiences of the diverse Indians groups who passed by Fort Smith remain muted. The perspective...