“The Undiscovered Country,” by Paul Andrew Hutton (Dutton)
“The Undiscovered Country,” by Paul Andrew Hutton (Dutton)
“The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the great West,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner said in his landmark 1891 speech. America pushed west, always west.
That’s the thesis of “The Undiscovered Country,” a blockbuster book by Hutton, a cultural historian and professor at the University of New Mexico. Set against a background of the push west, the book draws on America’s famed Western heroes — Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Mangas Coloradas and others— to tell Americans’ demand to expand and settle the western part of the country. Boone, Hutton writes, was the true founder of the American West. And Crockett “represented the triumph of American democracy and final rejection of decadent European values of class and aristocracy.”
The westward movement was fraught with danger, of course. Hutton writes of scores of battles between Indians, who fought to protect their land, and white settlers who claimed it. Boone wanted the settlement of Western lands, but he decried how whites desecrated resources. Despite helping to round up Navajos for the horrific trip to Bosque Redondo, Carson actually opposed Indian resettlement.
Hutton tells of the women and children kidnapped by Indians and forced to become part of the tribes. When rescued, some refused to go home. One of the kidnapped, William Weatherford, became the fearsome chief Red Eagle. Slavery, too, was part of the picture. Indians captured Indian and Mexican children and sold them to Hispanic slavers. “In many New Mexico towns, Navajo and Apache slaves were sold in the village plaza after Sunday mass,” Hutton writes.
Although the book is a serious study, there are some amusing incidents. They include a friend reading excerpts from a book about Kit Carson to the illiterate scout, and Indian warriors riding the ponies on a merry-go-round, shouting terrifying war cries.
Hutton did prodigious research on America’s move westward. “The Undiscovered Country” is a major contribution to American history.
“Boots, Buckles & Bolos,” by Jim Arndt (Gibbs Smith)
Worn-out cowboy boots as art? Well, this is the West, and we are proud of our contribution to sartorial history.
Photographer Arndt has produced a number of books on Western fashion. His “Boots, Buckles & Bolos,” with page after -page of photographs, is so gorgeous that it would convince even the most jaundiced Easterner that Western footwear is a thing of beauty. Take the Stars and Stripes America boots with their flags and stars and golden eagles, or the green-and-gold boots made for “Mike,” which are worn through at the toes. There are muddy buckaroo boots worn by some lucky child, and the tiny boots of Major Lynn White (1838-1915), then the world’s smallest man. The photographed boots have ingenious designs and are every color of the rainbow.
Arndt also includes photos of bolo ties and buckles, but we already know those are works of art.
“Frontier Comrades,” by Jim Wilke (Bison Books)
“Frontier Comrades,” by Jim Wilke (Bison Books)
William Stewart, the Scottish lord, was a well-known adventurer in the early West. He hunted, made friends with mountain men and attended trapper rendezvous. What is not so well known is that for years, Sewart had a homosexual relationship with a half-Indian, half-French guide, Clemente. The guide even accompanied Stewart to Scotland, where he acted as a valet.
In a groundbreaking work, Wilke recounts the stories of Westerners who were gay, lesbian, bisexual and transvestites. Several of them are familiar, such as the Seventh Cavalry laundress, a male who posed as a woman and was married to a man for years. She was outed by Elisabeth Custer in one of Custer’s autobiographies. Stage driver Charlie Parkhurst was a woman who dressed like a man. He drank and smoked and was considered “one of the boys.”
The love story between two Aspen women was fodder for the newspapers. When the father of one discovered his daughter’s relationship, he went to court to break them up. One of the lovers was diagnosed with “nervous prostration,” the other considered insane.
One logger and miner is quoted here as saying some 50 percent of the men in one camp turned to each other for affection when they were isolated, perhaps during snowbound winter. Once the snows melted, however, they trooped into town to visit the brothels.