A Western legacy of dreamers

New West magazine was launched in the mid-1970s with high hopes and not a little hype. As the title implies, its editors and contributors were full of confidence about their ability to put their readers on the cutting edge of life in California -- “newness,” after all, is the essence of “Westness.”

As we discover in “Promised Lands” by David M. Wrobel, however, the phrase “New West” was first used in the title of a guidebook in 1869, and by the time of the publication of the first New West magazine in 1909, the phrase was already a cliche -- a manifestation of the “newnessphilia” that has always characterized the Western imagination.

“Promised Lands” traces the origins of the California dream to a singular struggle that defined us and shapes us still. Vying for the claim to California’s image are the “reminiscers” and the “boosters,” those clinging to a nostalgia for the past and those longing for the future.

Western mythmaking has always depended on the visual arts, this much we know, whether it is map making, landscape painting, movies or music videos, as pointed out in several books recently reviewed here (Book Review, Nov. 17). But Wrobel shows how the entire enterprise begins at an even deeper place in human consciousness -- the most willful and determined of the mythmakers “literally tried to imagine western places into existence.”

“[W]estern promoters hurriedly raced toward the future, often announcing its presence before it had actually arrived,” he writes, “while old settlers lamented that arrival and expressed their reverence for past times.”

Wrobel, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has tapped into the considerable resources of the Huntington Library in San Marino, where he worked through a vast accumulation of mostly overlooked writings and publications -- a “mountain of printed promises,” as he puts it, and the “[t]riumphal tales of white pioneer males (and, to a lesser extent, of white pioneer females).” To his credit, he succeeds in wringing new meanings out of these mostly-overlooked sources.

The claims that the boosters made for the “New West” ranged from the sublime -- “[R]ainbows cast their glittering coronets around the mountains,” wrote one panegyrist about Colorado, “and radiant irises dance in many a romantic gorge” -- to the divine: “This is the happy Canaan -- the holy land,” wrote one newspaper editor in describing Riverside in 1885.

Other propagandists were more down to earth. Cheap and fertile land was the most powerful magnet, but the boosters also advertised the social and cultural advantages of the tamed frontier. “[B]etween the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast,” boasted the Boise City (Idaho) Board of Trade in 1887, “there is no school superior to, if any equals, our city school in discipline, equipment, or any other advantages.” The author of “Homes and Happiness in the Golden State” (1884) engaged in special pleading for California, warning readers that California was free of the “fevers and diseases of the malarial character” afflicting other Western states.

Standing in opposition to the boosters (whose descendants are today pushing the boundaries of L.A. farther out) were the old-timers who blazed the trail to the West in the first place. They felt estranged from the drumbeat of development, and they indulged in fond recollections of a simpler and livelier era. In books and broadsides, posters, pamphlets and countless newspapers, readers were reminded of the time, not long before, when the West had been “a howling wilderness,” as Alfred Lambourne wrote in an account of his own wilderness experiences, “inhabited by bands of savages and penetrated only by intrepid trappers and hunters!”

As the West became a more orderly (and less exciting) place, the appetite for such tales grew ever sharper. Indeed, it was the closing of the American frontier in the late 19th century that prompted what Wrobel calls “frontier anxiety,” a phenomenon that expressed itself in recollections of the struggle to explore and settle the West. Faced with the realities of “a terrible economic depression, heightened agrarian protest, industrial strife, urban squalor, and continued political corruption,” readers all over America found a certain consolation in the heroism of “Death Valley in ‘49,” William Lewis Manley’s account of his own adventures during the Gold Rush.

The contrast between promotion and memory, Wrobel demonstrates, created frictions between the boosters and reminiscers. “Those who questioned the feasibility of the dream,” Wrobel points out, “were labeled ‘knockers’ and were often the objects of social ostracism.” Yet the promoters were ready to co-opt even the most irascible old pioneers through a curious exercise in nostalgia called “journey reenactment.” The St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, for example, organized a rail excursion to the Red River for some 350 “Old Settlers” in 1871, thus promoting travel and tourism while celebrating the life of the hardscrabble pioneers.

“Even though they were the ones riding in luxury in the present,” Wrobel writes, “these old pioneers could take pride in the fact that they had experienced the journey under more trying experiences.”

At certain moments, the two elements were combined into a single, potent and uniquely American expression. The single best example is Buffalo Bill Cody, frontiersman turned showman, whose reenactments of the “Wild West” attracted nearly 6 million paid spectators during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and countless millions more during a career that lasted more than 30 years. “Of all the creators of the mythic frontier western heritage, Buffalo Bill Cody is surely the most memorable,” writes Wrobel. Not much has changed since the first mythmakers went to work in the invention of the West. “We continue to hold onto our own selectively remembered mythic visions of western pasts, just as we continue to construct visions of western futures,” writes Wrobel, “and these contemporary creations are often no less fantastic than those of earlier pioneers and promoters.” What we learn here is that our own “newnessphilia” is rooted in a tradition that is very, very old.