Editor’s Note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
A new book, “The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier,” weaves together the stories of seven fascinating characters as they crisscross the American West in the 1800s.
Some of them, like Sacajawea, you’ll recognize. Others, we should know more about but just don’t. That’s according to Pulitzer-finalist Megan Kate Nelson. Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards sat down with Nelson to discuss why setting Western history straight is so crucial to the American project.
Melodie Edwards: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the title. It’s provocative.
Megan Kate Nelson: “The Westerners” has been the title of the book from the very beginning. I had pitched the book to be called “The Westerners” mostly in response, actually, to another book by another historian, “The Pioneers” by David McCullough, and his subtitle was something like, "The brave pioneers who brought the American ideal West" [the actual subtitle is "The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West”], which was just a complete encapsulation of the frontier myth.
Historians of the American West kind of went crazy after this book came out and published a lot of think pieces about what it meant that one of our great bestselling historians was still kind of connected to, and disseminating, the idea of the pioneer as brave and only moving in one direction and embodying American ideals.
And I was thinking, "Well, what if instead of thinking about people who built the West as pioneers, as the frontier myth would have it, what would happen if we thought about them as Westerners?" It's a more capacious term. It could help us kind of rethink who Western identity belongs to, who gets to claim it, who gets to be a part of Western history, instead of just this very narrowly defined group of mostly white, nuclear family-based Easterners who have moved West in the mid-19th century in their Conestoga wagons in order to settle the American West.
ME: You have this array of characters that you assemble, and in so many ways they become what you call cultural brokers.
MKN: Cultural brokers were individuals who lived in the borderlands between different communities, and they often spoke multiple languages. They were highly adaptive, and they were then able to become go-betweens and people who were often translators, were often traders. Some of these cultural brokers were biracial or multiracial. Some were not.
Sacagawea is the first protagonist in the book, and I think she's the one most people will know pretty well. We usually are thinking of her life solely in the context of Lewis and Clark, and she is really predominantly seen as a guide and a translator. She actually plays many, many different roles, and this was what was really fascinating to me. Reading through the Lewis and Clark journals, they mention her more than 150 times, and she is always doing something or saying something. She is kind of a botanist in her own right. She's always picking plants and telling Lewis and Clark about them. Ultimately, she's also a diplomat. This is one of the things that cultural brokers are so adept at doing, is performing this role where they're enabling not violence, but connection.
She shared that in common with Jim Beckwourth, who's another protagonist in the book who is biracial. His father was his enslaver and his mother was an enslaved woman. He ends up literally everywhere in the American West. One of my friends called him the Forrest Gump of the 19th century American West, and it really is true. He ends up in Wyoming as a fur trapper and lives with the Apsáalooke peoples for 10 years. He ends up in the California Gold Rush, the Colorado Gold Rush. He participates in the Mexican-American War, in the Civil War as part of the Sand Creek assault on Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. He's one of these people, a bit like Sacagawea, who can adapt.
ME: To shift to another one of your Native American characters, do you mind talking a bit about Little Wolf and how Wyoming Territory was important to him?
MKN: He is most famous for leading this exodus of his people from Indian territory, from a reservation in which his band was forced, after surrendering to the U.S. government in the late 1870s and discovering that Oklahoma was not going to work for them. Northern Cheyenne territory encompassed southeastern Montana, much of eastern Wyoming, parts of Nebraska, all the way down to the Platte. They had this territory that they felt very strongly about was their homeland. So Little Wolf organizes this breakout and leads his relatively small band at this point – but several hundred people – on horseback over 1,500 miles back to their homeland, and ultimately surrenders a little bit west of the Black Hills.
A lot of this territory became contentious in the 1860s, mostly because of gold strikes in Montana, because the Oregon Trail was moving right through southern Wyoming. Then the Bozeman Trail moved off of there and started moving northwestward through Wyoming and into Montana. This cut right through the heart of Northern Cheyenne territory. Pretty immediately, Little Wolf and many of his fellow chiefs acted to defend their homeland, and they actually did successfully in 1868 at the Fort Laramie treaty signing. They did negotiate with the U.S. government for the government to withdraw from the Bozeman Trail forts. That's pretty incredible that they were able to do it, and it's one of the few times the U.S. government actually did what they said they were gonna do.
They withdrew federal troops from there, and immediately Little Wolf and many of his compatriots moved in and burned down those forts because they were symbols of federal presence. They were symbols of the protection of white settlement in their space.
ME: I wonder if you can maybe bring this back around to land us with what your hopes are for this book and how it can set us straight, in terms of the history of the American West?
MKN: I really hope that people read this, and they really take on board this idea that the American West – what we understand as the American West today – has always been a place of great diversity, has always been a place of contention where people want to control different parts of it and all of its natural resources, and the vitality of all of the different communities engaging with one another is what creates the Western identity.
You can hear the full interview with Nelson in the latest episode of the Modern West podcast, including the story of Cattle Kate, a woman wrongly hanged for cattle rustling outside Rawlins.
