Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West (review)

2oo7 Book Reviews225 ment and the interior provinces. Focus on western political progressivism barely extends beyond California and Oregon, and border specialists can wince at the absence of maquiladoras, NAFTA, and the intensifying immigration debate. One paragraph for the Republic ofTexas, about die same for petroleum, and nothing for Sam Rayburn, Ann Richards, and die Bushes will disappointTexans, who might find solace in a healthy segment on longhorns and trail drives. But dien something, and some might say too much, had to give. One of the book's strengths is its insightful analysis of the cultural West, its artists, authors, filmmakers, and historians (but not its music or musicians); and examination of the region's divergent religious makeup is a welcome feature. The chapters, both their content and chronological order, reveal certain creativity and the need to move die story along. Placing mountain men, Protestant missionaries, and the Oregon Trail after the Mexican-American War will furrow a brow or two, as will shoehorning ranching, farming, and transportation into a single chapter and creating another, a catchall, that includes the coming ofthe Civil War, postwar Indian-white conflict and reservations, oudawry, labor union activity, the territorial system, and politics. Throughout, the author is determined to steer a course clear of the overly optimistic heirs ofFrederickJackson Turner or their adversaries, the less cheerful New Western historians. They generated intellectual heat during the 1 g8os and 1 990s in emphasizing that the West was, and is, a distinct "place," not a shifting component of the Turnerian frontier "process" characteristic of the works of Ray Billington and Frederick Merk. Here, Patricia Limerick and Richard White contend, diverse peoples blended, clashed, degraded the environment; here good and evil collided. Furthermore, the interaction, assault on nature, and moral conflict continued beyond 1890, Turner's frontier-endingdate, into the twentiedi century, which deserves more study than it has received. Etulain agrees but also straddles the median and delights at his "'radical middler'" label (p. xiii). In Beyond the Müsouri, he seldom veers from the center. He admits, however, to being less successful in establishing the region's "coherent identity" (p. 422), especially in die post-1980 period. The West, he and others have found, is too big, too diverse, too changeable, and, in recent times, too much a part of die nation, die most urbanized part. No matter. Corrals ofWesterners, book club members, and generations ofundergraduates have made the case for the wide-open spaces of another, pre-1900 West—and have put Etulain's worthy effort in perspective. Texas Slate University-San MarcosJames A. Wilson Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes ofEncounter in theAmerican West. Edited by Fay Bodiam and Sara M. Patterson. (Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 2006. Pp. 216. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, contributors, index. ISBN 0816524785. $40.00, cloth.) How are race, religion, and region interconnected in the American West? This volume, edited by Fay Botham and Sara M. Patterson, answers this question through a series of case studies that illustrate the diversity of social encounters and misun- 226Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober derstandings between the "multis, mixes, and mestizos that have been neglected in western historiography" (p. 4) . The contributors focus on the complexity ofreligious experiences by intertwining Native American, Chinese, Mormon, and Muslim lives alongside white and black Protestants and Catholics in the hope ofdemonstrating religion's relevance to the forging of regional identities. The essays in Race, Religion, and Region are an outgrowth of die 2004 Thornton F. Bradshaw seminar, "The Most Segregated Hour: Race and Religion in the American West," held at the Claremont Graduate University. Yet, they have less to say about die "segregated hour" than they do about die way that race and religious practices have historically fused together social arrangements. In order to do so, the audiors make an effort to include representative edinic groups diat are part of the social milieu of die West. Unfortunately, this type of egalitarian history often does not match its lofty ideals: a discussion ofJews in the American West is notably, and regrettably, absent among die presented cases. The volume's eight essays are loosely divided into three sections. The first section examines how three Los Angeles religious leaders each employed the rhetoric of...