Beyond the Frontier Myth: The Complicated West | Megan Kate Nelson | The Westerners

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today. I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:14

Cowboys, covered wagons, rugged pioneers pushing West. We all know the story of the American Frontier. Or do we? What if the real West was far more complicated?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:28

My guest today is historian, writer, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Kate Nelson. She is the author of The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. Welcome, Megan. I am so excited for you to join me here on the Clio Dialogues.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 0:46

Yes, thanks for having me, Jennifer. I'm so glad to be here.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:49

Your book is wonderful. The narrative is lovely. I felt like I could feel the wind and smell the wildflowers. I think that people who don't normally read a nonfiction history book would find this book very appealing.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 1:03

That is always one of my goals, to not only give readers a book that kind of teaches them something about an event or a place they thought they knew really well, but also a reading experience that is pleasant and immersive. I think that's one of the great things about history and its great potential is really immersing people in the past, putting them down in a place and a time, which is probably why historic sites are really popular for people who are just generally interested in history, because that those places actually give you that feel of the materiality of a place and its context and the landscape.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 1:46

So we're having this conversation at a moment when Americans are arguing about how American history should be told. And I don't think that's anything new, but recently the Trump administration has charged the Smithsonian with presenting an unsavory history of the American past. And it calls for something that they call more unifying, but it's really more narrow. I'm curious, what is your take on this current controversy? I have so many thoughts, Jennifer.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 2:15

So many. Actually, this move on the part of the Trump administration and the emergence of the frontier myth in just the whole American cultural zeitgeist in 2019 was part of the impetus for the book itself. In 2019, two things happened that were really interesting. One was that David McCullough published the book The Pioneers, which has the secondary title, something like the heroic settlers who brought American Ideals West, who have perfectly encapsulated the frontier myth, this idea that it was white families in wagons moving from east to west, who were conquering Native people and the landscape in order to settle the American West and become ideal Americans. And so that book came out. US Western historians, as I'm sure you remember, went completely insane because it seemed like such an old-fashioned argument from a historian who had been, you know, up to that point, I think pretty responsible in terms of his research. But, you know, despite the fact that scholars wrote a bunch of essays about how this book was not great and not taking into account current historiography and this really shoring up this kind of single linear narrow version of American history, that book was on the bestseller list for 16 weeks. And yeah. And that same year was the premiere of the show Yellowstone, which became a huge hit kind of at the end of that year and then into the pandemic, and has now spawned the greater Taylor-Sheridan cinematic universe of Westerns from the late 19th century to the early 20th to today. There's a lot to talk about with those shows. They do some interesting things along the way, but for the most part, they are kind of cowboy uh chic and celebrating the rugged individualism of the white pioneer. And so I was seeing all these things come to the fore, and it seemed like so many Americans were reveling in this frontier moment that the United States was having. And then in 2024, the Trump administration started tweeting a lot of Western images. John Gast's American Progress, a painting of a pioneer family in a wagon with a baby, a very strange ICE recruitment poster that was actually a modern photograph of a cowboy riding along the front range. And it was in Sepiatone, but then there's a stealth bomber flying above him, which connects that cowboy image and the rugged individual to the US military complex. All of these images, pretty much all, were coming out of the Department of Homeland Security in support of ICE and in support of immigration programs in particular. And this to me was really the sort of apex of this use of frontier imagery as the celebratory narrative of the nation, which is extremely narrow, it is extremely white, and it is simple and linear and easy to understand. This is one mark of authoritarian regimes, is that they want to push one single version of history. And they know how compelling that linearity is and that simplicity is, and they want it to shore up their power. For the Trump administration, that narrative is the frontier narrative. We're recording this in the wake of the convention that was held in Texas where AI images were produced of Trump on horseback. He's wearing a cowboy hat. Apparently, there were lots of sequined red mega cowboy hats. It was very definitely using and buying into that frontier image in order to really argue that the United States only needs one historical narrative. Trump administration is using that argument to go after the Smithsonian and to go after the National Park Service and the NEH and the NEA and any other federal institution that really for years has been doing a really great job conveying the very diverse histories of this country. And they are complicated, but to my mind, and probably to yours too, they are as equally compelling and also have the benefit of being true. So yes.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 6:52

You know, yeah. Yes. And I know historians are always saying it's complicated, right? It's complicated. History is so complicated, it is not a simple narrative. So tell us how does your book complicate the simple telling of the American West?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 7:08

So the Westerners does two things. One, it combats the frontier myth through the stories of seven different people. So I approached this kind of narratively with multi-perspective narrative to say there were many other people in addition to white pioneers in the West. There were white pioneers. I'm not trying to argue that there weren't. But they were not alone. And they did not establish or settle the American West all alone. They had help from the federal government and they were also connected in a lot of different ways to all of these different communities that I talk about in the book, including tribal nations, including Mexicans who became Americans, also European and Canadian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants. These people are all moving throughout the American West over the course of the 19th century. They do have surprising overlaps in terms of not only their life journeys, but also the themes of their lives and their experiences building the American West. One of the ways that I think you go after an incredibly popular and very sticky narrative like the Frontier Myth is that you spin a different version of it. And you say, well, what if instead of thinking about the West as the product of pioneer energy and ambition and dreaming, we think about it as the production of Westerners, ambition and dreaming. That the and that just even changing a single term can make the idea kind of more capacious and welcoming. And it can really represent the reality on the ground, which is that there were many, many different communities in the American West during this period. There are Northerners and Southerners, there are enslaved people, there are free black Westerners, along with indigenous and Asian and European Westerners, and then of course Spanish and Mexican Westerners. So it's really a fascinating and dynamic region of the country. I don't think that Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong that the American West was the place where we see American institutions take hold, but I think he was wrong about the reason. I think the reason is that all of these communities were coming into this space. So one of the ways is narrative. The other way, and readers will notice if you have a hard copy of the book, there are many maps in the book. And the Frontispiece map, which is a two-pager, tracks all of the journeys of the seven people in the book. And when you see them, it really is astonishing. You can see that propulsive linearity of the frontier myth is a total lie. People did not move just east to west. They moved in all directions, from south to north, from west to east, from north to south. And they did so through their entire lives. Many of them kept moving. They're connected through trade networks, kinship networks, transportation and communication networks to a lot of other communities in the West itself and then the nation. So they are benefiting from and exploiting mobility even when they are standing still. So that's the other way that I combat the myth is to show you the actual maps of their movement, because that's such a strong element of the frontier myth.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 10:29

You see that in the narrative as these people are moving back and forth in their crossing paths. You weave it just so beautifully. It is a cohesive story. It's just not a simple story. Can you give us a sense of who these seven people are? Who are these people that are different from the standard narrative that we typically hear?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 10:48

Well, first of all, I want to point out that four of the seven protagonists are women. And women really get short-shrift in Western popular culture and also a lot of popular Western history. The Frontier Myth depicts women only as pioneer mothers or as brothel madams. And so I wanted to have women in the book who are demonstrating the very different kind of life experiences that real women in the West actually had. So the book begins with Sacajawea, who will be the most recognizable protagonist, I think, to most readers. But I don't just talk about her as a member of the Corps of Discovery, even though she was kind of an outstanding member of that core and did a lot of work for them that we don't usually think about. But I start with her life before that point, as someone who is part of a very large network and an indigenous world in the early 19th century, and that these tribal nations are living their lives and doing their thing without any reference to European powers in many cases until the mid-19th century, really. And so I wanted to show you her life before Lewis and Clark arrived, and then after they left as well, to kind of show you her life as a real person who was working in a couple of different cultures across a couple of different cultures, who was a mother just looking at her map of movement. I think she was one of the most well-traveled women in 19th century America before the Civil War. And then María Gertrudis Barceló , who was born in Sonora and then moved north with her family into Nuevo, Mexico, and ultimately established a gambling saloon in Santa Fe and built this incredible empire. She was the wealthiest woman in Santa Fe when Stephen Watts Kearney arrived with the Army of the West in 1846 to take New Mexico for the United States as part of the Mexican-American War. I really wanted people to know about her, not only because her movement was from South to North, but also because she has this incredible life story. And she is initially Spanish and then Mexican and then American. And not really of her own doing. National borders are just kind of moving around her. The other two women in the book come a little bit later in the 19th century. Ella Watson arrives with her family from Canada. They are Scots-Irish. They first settle in Kansas. She marries an absolutely terrible man, leaves him and moves to Nebraska, divorces him, and then makes her way to Wyoming.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 13:18

How unusual was it for a woman to seek divorce and get divorced in the 19th century?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 13:24

It was fairly unusual. Nebraska had higher rates of filing for divorce and for divorces filed initially by women. I think it maybe was one of those places that had maybe looser rules. It was still a pretty small percentage. She had two skills that worked really well for her, no matter where she went. She was an excellent cook and she was an excellent housekeeper. So she could find work anywhere across the American West. So she ended up in Wyoming and she ended up meeting a man who she didn't actually marry. And I think it was because they both wanted to file separate homestead claims. And if they had been married, they could only file one. So they filed for homesteads along a creek in the Sweetwater Valley of Wyoming, and she had a dream of becoming a cattle queen, of having a cattle ranch and being a ranch woman. And then another immigrant to the West from another country entirely was Polly Bemis, who was forcibly trafficked. So this is important to note. Several of the protagonists in the book, while they were moving, some of their mobility was not their own choice. They were forced into movement. And so she was trafficked to the United States in 1872 and ended up in this tiny mining town in Idaho that was 80% Chinese. And the reason for that is because of both an immigrant stream from China during the 1849 gold rush in California, and then a subsequent one that took basically the same route and had the same kind of pattern for the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. Once those workers were done constructing the railroad in 1869, they kind of fanned out into the northern Rockies. And so there were quite substantial populations of Chinese miners, particularly, but then of other groups that were working in other businesses. So she arrived in 1872 and she lived until the 1930s and was in Idaho her entire life, but facing increasing immigration restrictions and surveillance and tracking based on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and then the Geary Act that followed 10 years later. So it was important to me to show these four women with these very different experiences that were really showing the diversity in the range of women's lives in this period and how they were able to succeed, what their success sometimes cost them, and also their lives as Westerners during this period. And then the three men in the book, one is James Beckworth, who I think readers will find fascinating. He was born into slavery in Virginia and his enslaver father brought him to St. Louis after the Louisiana Purchase to take up land, former Osage land. And ultimately he left in the 1820s and he just he seemed to be everywhere in the West.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 16:12

I was thinking that he seemed he was like the forest gump of the 19th century.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 16:17

Absolutely. He was in the beaver trade. He lived with the Apsáalooke peoples and engaged in their transition from beaver trapping to bison robe trading in the 1830s. He took part in the Mexican-American War. He took part in the California Gold Rush. And then he ultimately ended up in Colorado, taking part in their gold rush, and then in the Sand Creek Massacre. He lived into his late 60s. Like Sacajawea, he was a cultural broker. He kind of moved in between worlds fairly easily. He was always kind of one step ahead of organized territorial or state government because he knew as a man who was biracial but was phenotypically black, he would have been identified as black to anyone who actually met him that he was going to lose all of his civil rights once a government was organized. So he he was one of these guys who was taking advantage of these early, early times in Western towns where everything was a little bit chaotic. He was highly adaptable, like many of his fellow Westerners.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 17:20

Who are these other two men?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 17:21

Ovando Hollister, who is the more typical of your white pioneers. He grew up in New York. He first went to Kansas and then he made his way to Colorado as part of that gold rush in 1860. He was there when the Civil War began and he ended up signing up for the first Colorado. I first ran into him in my research for the Three Cornered War, one of my previous books, because he wrote a really great account of the First Colorado and the battles they fought against Confederate Texans who were trying to take New Mexico and Colorado for the Confederacy in 1862. He ultimately had to leave the Army, but he decided that he really liked writing. And so he bought a newspaper in Blackhawk, Colorado. He wrote for the Rocky Mountain News and he ultimately ends up in Utah, writing for newspapers there, but also becoming a federal tax collector, which you can imagine meant many people in Utah did not like him, but they really didn't like him because he was a very loud opponent of Mormon power in Utah. And he was trying to fight for Utah statehood so that the federal government would come in and to his mind, Mormon power over the economy and the government would be broken. So he agitated against Brigham Young and the Mormon establishment for about 20 years from a house three blocks from Temple Square in Salt Lake City. So even though he is the kind of typical white pioneer, he's also atypical in a lot of different ways. And then finally, Little Wolf was a Northern Cheyenne chief. He was an incredible leader of his band. He was also recognized as a very good diplomat and decision maker for the entire tribal nation. And then he was also a really excellent military strategist. So he was really leading the Northern Cheyenne in their fights against the U.S. government in the 1860s. And he was the one who ultimately, unfortunately, had to surrender his band to the US government in the wake of the Battle of Little Bighorn. This is another person who was forced to move. He and his people were forced then from their homeland in southeastern Montana to Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. And so they were forced onto a reservation. About a year later, Little Wolf, he just knew that his people were not going to survive. And so he planned and executed a breakout from the reservation. He took his people 1,500 miles back north to their homeland. Once they got there, he did surrender again to the U.S. government, but he successfully negotiated for them to stay in southeastern Montana, which is why the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is where it is today, a little bit northeast of Yellowstone.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 20:04

One of the things that struck me about the lives of these people is that they do not fit neatly into categories. They were complex. Probably the best example of this was Jim Beckworth. He was born into slavery, but his white father gives him a horse and money and says, go do your thing. And that horse and money is coming from a slaveholder.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 20:27

Yes.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 20:27

So he's benefiting from the system in that way. He goes west, he has all these experiences. Um, he marries many times. I lost count.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 20:35

Yes. So did I, so did I. Eight or nine, something. Yeah.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 20:39

There are some things that are very admirable about him, and yet he takes part in the Sand Creek Massacre. How did you think about the complexity as you're writing characters like this?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 20:51

I enjoy it when they are complex because first of all, I think it's real. Second of all, it's much more interesting to write about interesting people. I have come up against some protagonists in other books who just seem too good to be true. And I just was trying to figure out like they must have done something wrong. They must have. They cannot be this good. Like nobody is this good. So Jim Beckworth, yeah, he's so complicated because he's he's so ambitious, he's so restless. He ends up really hurting people. He makes promises to a woman in St. Louis and then takes a job going west again with the beaver trade and doesn't come back for 10 years. And when he comes back, he's like, oh, she got married. And you know, you're like, well, you think? I mean, she thought you were dead, first of all. Second of all, you could have come home and you did not. He stayed for 10 years with the Apsáalooke people. He was someone who was pretty self absorbed. He was, in our terms, probably a narcissist. He just wanted to have an adventurous life. And he did really well. He made a lot of money in the gold mines of California. He did not mine himself, but he provisioned miners and he took them for a ride. He he totally increased prices and contributed to inflation. And when he finally actually did kind of settle down in the Feather Valley north of Lake Tahoe, in a town that now bears his name, he built a pass over the Sierras to bring people from what is now Reno, that Great Basin area, over the Sierras and into California. But after a little while, he got bored. Someone had told him about the gold strikes in Colorado. Lo and behold, he ends up there as a merchant, doing what he does best, which is to sell people things. But his relationship in particular with the Southern Cheyenne is incredibly difficult to figure out because initially he is their enemy because the Apsáalooke, the Crow people, are the enemies of the Southern Cheyenne. And so he has fought the Cheyenne before. But then he becomes their interim federal Indian agent in Denver. He speaks on their behalf after their camp is attacked by Denver miners and gets quoted in the paper and writes an article for the Rocky Mountain News on this front. And then he goes along with the Third Colorado and attacks their camp at Sand Creek and kills Southern Cheyenne people. And then he goes back, he finds them to see what they're gonna do. Because everyone knows that the Southern Cheyenne are gonna retaliate for this massacre because it was so terrible, and that they're gonna get a lot of allies to come with them. And so he's sent as an emissary, which of course is insane, and he goes to talk to them and they're like, What are you doing here? You're dead to us, basically. That's what they said. Like, how could you do this? How could you lead these soldiers into our peaceful camp? And he has no answer for them, except something like, Oh, well, they made me do it. They said they would arrest me if I didn't. And the Southern Cheyenne treat that explanation with the respect it deserved. So, yeah, so he he is a man who's always looking out for number one. He is one of these kind of characters who you often see in westerns who enter a town and they mess things up and create a lot of chaos and then they leave. And and in that way, I think he does fit that particular mold. Um, he had a huge impact, and he was one of the most well-known people in the American West at that time. He was mentioned along with Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, and now people don't really know much about him, which I think is too bad because he is a fascinating person.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 24:38

I am surprised that we don't know him. Because he does so epitomize the Westerner. I could see him being a main character of a show. Some Netflix special or something like that.

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 24:49

That would be amazing. I have ideas. Call me. Taylor Sheridan, if you want to adapt this, we'll we'll chat. I'll I'll need to be able to consult, but we can we can chat about it.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 25:02

One of the arguments that we're hearing right now about history is that there's just too much conflict. When we talk about exclusion and we talk about justice, that just divides people. What do you say as a historian about history and division?

Guest, Megan Kate Nelson 25:16

Our whole understanding of history as it is is based on conflicts. If you look at the textbook, how is it divided? How do we understand chronology? It goes from rebellion to war to industrial revolutions to the labor era to the destruction of the bison. This is the way that we actually do understand American history. This is the reality of how life works. What engaged me most actually was to say, look, history is not always about that. Sort of like our daily lives are not always about that. We can sit here and say our politics right now are a complete garbage fire. Like this is insane. But everyone out here, you and I and everyone listening to this, we're living our lives. We have families, we have jobs, we have parents and our kids and our friends, and this is the stuff of life. And this is why I was so happy to end the Westerners with Polly Bemis, because she lives a very ordinary life. She ultimately marries a white man and they run a boarding house and a saloon together and they buy property and they ultimately end up on this little ranch. We know about her daily life because these two sheep farmers moved in across the river. They were younger and they did a lot of work for them on the ranch. And one of them kept an extremely detailed diary. We know all about their visits with each other. We know that she cooked them chickens for their holiday dinners. We know that she made little lace doilies for visitors who would come on boats. We know that she would dig up worms that she would put in her pocket and then use to fish in the river later. Those kind of details I find even more compelling, really, than the battles and the political negotiations and all of these things because that's the real stuff of history. This is how people lived. And I don't believe that you have to live an extraordinary life to deserve to be remembered. Yes, American history is about struggle, it is about pain, it's about persecution and people who fail. But it's also about people who carry on, who are leaders in their own way, who take care of their people, who are connected through a really interesting broad network to other communities around them. By virtue of that, are Westerners and Americans. I think the frontier myth is, along with Manifest Destiny and along with the American Dream, a central American story. I would like people to just be more aware of how all of these Western images are in play, even today, and where they appear in our public consciousness, in political campaigning, in all kinds of imagery and popular culture, and at what cost? Because I think we tend to think of these things as being fairly like, oh, well, who really cares? It's just, it's just the Department of Homeland Security, like retweeting John Gast's American Progress with the tagline for heritage and homeland. So what? But when you erase people or marginalize people from a central national narrative, when you say indigenous people do not belong in this narrative, Chinese women like Polly Bemis do not belong. They are not part of the national story. It means you are positioning them as others, as outsiders, as literally aliens. This makes it easier to take their rights away.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 28:51

To learn more about this and any book featured on the Clio Dialogues, read Clio's book reviews at Cliodialogues.com. This has been the Clio Dialogues. Please like, follow, and subscribe. And join me again next time because history isn't finished with us.