Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
In his seminal work Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.
1 See, for example, Boatright, Mody, ‘The American Myth Rides the Range’, South West Review, 36 (Summer 1951)Google Scholar; Davis, D. Brion, ‘Ten-Gallon Hero’, American Quarterly (Summer 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fussell, Edwin, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Steckmesser, K. L., The Western Hero in History and Legend (Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1965)Google Scholar; Lee, Robert E., From West to East. Studies in the Literature of the American West (Urbana, University of Illinois, 1966)Google Scholar; White, G. Edward, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
2 See Higham, John, Strangers in the Land. Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New Brunswick and New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1955).Google Scholar
3 See Haller, J. S., Science and American Concepts of Race 1859–1900, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 1970.Google Scholar
4 See Higham, op. cit. and Gossett, T., Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
5 Smith, R. Mayo, ‘The Control of Immigration’, Political Science Quarterly (09 1888), p. 412Google Scholar; Aldrich, T., ‘The Unguarded Gates’, Atlantic Monthly, 1892, p. 57.Google Scholar
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8 Chicago Record—Herald, 25 September 1901Google Scholar. Quoted by Saveth, E., American Historians and European Immigrants 1875–1925 (New York, Russell and Russell, 1948), p. 129.Google Scholar
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11 See the listings on Australia in Poole, W. F., An Index to Periodical Literature.Google Scholar
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14 See Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) (Boston, Beacon Press, 1955), ch. 9Google Scholar; and Boller, Paul Jr, American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Chicago, Rand McNally and Co., 1969), ch. 9.Google Scholar
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16 Historians began to look more closely at the Spanish American contribution to American history after the turn of the century, beginning with the pioneer work of Herbert Eugene Bolton. See Hanke, L., Do the Americans Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1964)Google Scholar. See Durham, P. and Jones, E. L., The Negro CowboysGoogle Scholar, on the absence of Negroes from Western mythology. Recent literature concerned with European immigrants in the West includes Rolle, Andrew, The Immigrant Unpraised: Italian Adventures and Colonists in an Expanding America (Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1968)Google Scholar; Shepperson, Wilbur S., Restless Strangers: Nevada's Immigrants and their Interpreters (Reno, University of Nevada, 1970)Google Scholar; Jordan, Terry G., ‘The German Settlement of Texas after 1865’, Southwestern Historical Quarterly (10 1969)Google Scholar; Douglas, W. A., ‘The Basques of the American West: Preliminary historical perspectives’, Nevada Historical Quarterly, 13 (Winter 1970).Google Scholar
17 Quoted by Ostrander, G. M. in Cushing Strout, ed., Intellectual History in America, vol. 2, From Darwin to Niebuhr (New York, Harper and Row, 1968), p. 41.Google Scholar
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21 ‘Mr. Goldwin Smith's Views on our Political History’, Forum, 16 (1893), 497.Google Scholar
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24 Turner, op. cit., pp. 2–3.
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26 Quoted by Ostrander, op. cit., p. 45.
27 See Turner, , The Frontier in American History, pp. 316, 327, 300.Google Scholar
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29 Turner, op. cit., Foreword by Ray Allen Billington, p. ix.
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31 Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land (New York, Alfred Knopf [Vintage Books]), p. 122.Google Scholar
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33 Zogbaum, Rufus Fairchild, ‘A Day's Drive with Montana Cowboys’, Harpers Magazine, 71 (1885), 190.Google Scholar
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35 ‘A Rodeo at Los Ojos’, Harpers Monthly, 88 (March 1894), 523–4.Google Scholar
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37 See White, op. cit., for perceptive analysis of some aspects of the response to social change in the East and its effect on attitudes to the West, specifically of three influential purveyors of Western imagery in this period – Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington and Owen Wister. White also notes their concern to depict an Anglo-Saxon West, but does not pursue this or link it with nativism.
38 Gossett, Thomas, Race: The History of an Idea in America, p. 208Google Scholar; Davis, D. Brion, ‘Ten-Gallon Hero’, p. 116.Google Scholar
39 Wister, O., ‘At the Sign of the Last Chance’, in When West Was West (New York, Macmillan, 1928), p. 215.Google Scholar
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41 Wister, , ‘La Tinaja Bonita’, in Red Men and White (1895) (New York, MacMillan, 1928), p. 215.Google Scholar
42 Norris, F., The Octopus: A Story of California (New York, Doubleday, 1904), p. 502Google Scholar. See also p. 20.
43 See ‘The American Cowboy’, Harpers Monthly, 73 (1886)Google Scholar, for an account of the origins of ranching where the Spanish American experience is not even mentioned.
44 Wister, , ‘The Evolution of the Cowpuncher’ (1895) in Red Men and White, p. xxxii.Google Scholar
45 Wister, op. cit., pp. xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxix. See also Wister, , ‘The Right Honorable Strawberries’, in When West Was WestGoogle Scholar, for a variation on the theme of the affinity of the English aristocrat for life in the West.
46 Quoted by Solomon, B. M., Ancestors and Immigrants, p. 170.Google Scholar
47 Wister, , ‘The Evolution of the Cowpuncher’, pp. xxiii–xxiv.Google Scholar
48 Quoted by G. E. White, op. cit., p. 109.
49 See Solomon, op. cit., p. 108.
50 Ibid.
51 Series of articles on ‘The Control of Immigration’, Political Science Quarterly (March–September 1888), pp. 51, 69, 414.Google Scholar
52 ‘The Control of Immigration’, pp. 217, 218.Google Scholar
53 Roosevelt, , The Winning of the West, vol. 1, p. 123Google Scholar; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, pp. 7 and 83Google Scholar; ‘In Cowboy Land’, p. 280.Google Scholar
54 Harpers Monthly, 109 (1904), 200Google Scholar; Atlantic Monthly, 79 (1897), 609.Google Scholar
55 Something similar to this seems to have occurred in Argentina, a country which, in approxi mately the same period, faced the impact of rapid social and economic change, and an even greater relative influx of immigrants than the United States. The image of the ‘gaucho’ underwent a transformation similar to that of the American cowboy, and the cult of the ‘gaucho’ seems to have been used to contrast traditional Creole values with those of the immigrants and to depict the immigrant as inept and unsuited for an idealized, vanishing epoch of Argentinian history. This can be seen in José Hernández' famous and influential poem, Martin Fierro. See also Onega, Gladys S., La Inmigración en la Literatura Argentina (Buenos Aires, Editorial Galerna, 1969), esp. pp. 68–70Google Scholar; and Solberg, Carl, Immigration and Nationalism. Argentina and Chile 1890–1914 (Austin and London, University of Texas, 1970), pp. 154–6.Google Scholar
56 I would like to thank Dr Klaus J. Hansen, of Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, for his criticisms and comments on an earlier draft of this paper.