There are many myths about the American west. There’s the myth of bringing order out of a savage wasteland. The myth of the noble Caucasian cowboy. The myth of rugged individualists who wrested a living from the earth without help from anyone else. And the myth of women without agency who deferred to men. All of these are wrong. Yet they are remarkably sticky in American cultural consciousness, according to historian Megan Kate Nelson, a former Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Nelson will speak at Illinois State University on March 19. Her talk How the Real West was Lost: The Frontier Myth and the Erasure of U.S. Western History is part of the history department's programming sponsored by the Sage Foundation. Nelson’s new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier is out at the end of the month from Simon & Schuster.
Individualism
Nelson said easterners heading west did not somehow manage to survive and thrive in a harsh environment all by themselves with no help from anyone else.
“The reality is that westerners of every different community began almost immediately when they entered the west or moved through it to engage with other communities. They were in trade relationships. Sometimes they were in violent interactions. Sometimes there was a great deal of diplomacy, and these networks were very strong. They were there from before Europeans arrived in the region, in an indigenous world which was heavily networked and connected—and not at all individualized,” said Nelson.
They also benefitted from government policies such as the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the territorial bureaucratic apparatus. There was more direct support too. by U.S. Army garrisons throughout the region.
Cowboys
The lives of cowboys are highly romanticized in popular shows like Yellowstone and a long history of Western movies and TV, and in literature, depicting them as the epitome of masculinity. The stereotype of noble loners riding off into the sunset, sometimes with the girl and sometimes with just the horse is false. The reality is far more prosaic.
“In reality, he was a migrant laborer. He was a wage worker. One of the first strikes, union actions, in the west was a strike of cowboys in the 1880s,” said Nelson. “They were workers in a heavily capitalized industry.”
She pointed out there’s a disconnect with the narrative of the cowboy as a key part of the development of the region as a distinctive place. Factually, many of them were latecomers because the cattle industry they supported did not develop until the 1880s. And those that were there early were not all white.
“There were Black cowboys. There were vaqueros who had a much longer history in the region. There were indigenous cowboys moving sheep herds,” said Nelson.
Little Wolf
One of Nelson’s case studies in her book is Chief Little Wolf of the Northern Band of the Cheyenne, which lived in what is now parts of Montana, Nebraska and Wyoming. Little Wolf busts several myths about Native Americans. He was a skilled diplomat. He was a skilled military tactician and logistics expert, and he was a leader in a complex consensus-based governmental system.
“In fact, U.S. officials tried to erase his history from Northern Cheyenne communities in the boarding school era because he was such an amazing example of indigenous leadership,” said Nelson.
He grew up in the 1830s and '40s in what is now Montana. By the 1860s he held three different leadership positions within the Northern Cheyenne, unusual for indigenous polities, said Nelson.
“He made decisions in consultation with a larger group of indigenous leaders, and then also every 10 years with the council of 44 which would meet across bands,” said Nelson. “Their leadership structure was extremely collaborative.”
Nelson said she viewed Little Wolf’s three leadership positions as a recognition that federal officials just didn’t get the decentralized leadership structure of the Cheyenne and that the tribes needed to have a couple of people to negotiate with Washington at a time U.S. military pressure was ramping up.
“I don't think he ever made a decision, except maybe in the heat of battle, actually by himself, but he was pretty open to talking with federal officials and engaging with them, and trying to avoid warfare when he could, because his primary goal was to protect his people, to protect his band and to keep them on their homelands,” said Nelson.
By 1878, the Northern Cheyenne had been forcibly relocated to Oklahoma. Little Wolf schemed to steal horses from the Southern Cheyenne Band and quietly accumulated supplies which they used to make a bolt north to their traditional homeland.
“He expressed the opinion several times, and yet it still took the U.S. officials by surprise when they left that he was going to take his people back to their homeland, or they would die trying, because they would not be able to survive in the landscape of Indian territory when all that they knew was in the landscape of the northern Rocky Mountains and the northern Great Plains,” said Nelson.
Leaving their campfires burning to disguise their absence and delay pursuit, she said they achieved surprise and a head start. Little Wolf conducted a fighting retreat in a series of skirmishes, a very tough military and logistical task.
“They lost some people along the way, but they were actually quite effective in fighting U.S. military forces and kind of slipping through the U.S. defenses, and ultimately returned to their homeland, which was just a tremendous feat,” said Nelson.
He knew that with women and children, the tribe could not escape for good. Nelson said Little Wolf’s long game was to get home and then try to negotiate to stay there.
“He convinced U.S. Army officials that if they sent the Northern Cheyenne Band back to Indian territory, they would just leave again,” said Nelson. “And so it was not in their best interest to keep chasing,”
She said the Cheyenne promised to stay near forts in Montana and northern Wyoming if they had a reservation there. Following congressional testimony by a couple of U.S. Army officials who had experience in the region, the government created a reservation in the Northern Cheyenne homeland.
“That was very unusual for Native nations to have reservations in their own homelands and to negotiate that process,” said Nelson. “Most were forcibly and violently removed from their homelands and sent to places like Indian territory.” “
Nelson said she thought the story of the Cheyenne exodus from Indian territory was one that needed to be more widely known.
“We hear of all of these other great journeys through the west, the Lewis and Clark expedition being one of them and its dangers, and how everyone persevered, and showed tremendous courage. And this is one of those stories. This is one of those stories that shows how westerners adapted and lived according to their surroundings and the networks they had built across the region.”
Maria Gertrudis Barceló
Nelson’s favorite character in her book is Maria Gertrudis Barceló, an early New Mexican entrepreneur and what would today be called a millionaire. She was born in Sonora, New Spain in 1800. She came to the New Mexico Territory with her family in 1815, the middle of the Mexican Revolution. She married and her husband taught her how to play a card game called Spanish Monte, no relation to the con-game three-card monte. Spanish Monte, Nelson said, is a game played with a 40-card Spanish deck where you bet on the suit that will come up with the turn of the next card. Like many such games, the odds are stacked.
“A punter might win a hand every now and again, but the house won all the time because there were so many people betting, and the odds were very heavily in Barceló's favor whenever she dealt. She built her business from an alley card dealing table to a gambling saloon in Santa Fe and she was the wealthiest woman in New Mexico territory,” said Nelson.
She had hundreds of thousands of dollars, said Nelson. She traded in currency. She traded in mules. She kept her own property separate from her husband's all her life.
“In Santa Fe in the 1840s, she was a very unusual and dramatic and very alluring figure. A lot of American travelers wrote about her because they just could not believe that here was this woman who was dealing Spanish Monte and taking most Americans for almost everything they had,” said Nelson.
Barceló sent wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail all the way to Missouri and south to Chihuahua on the Rio Grande River.
“She also loaned money to Anglo businessmen and Hispanic businessmen in Santa Fe, and when they did not pay her back, she took them to court and sued them, which was a woman's right under Mexican law—a right which they lost when the Americans came in,” said Nelson.
Nelson said court records are how we know a lot of what we know about Barceló because she was often in court.
In the summer of 1846, Stephen Watts Kearney invaded New Mexico for the United States during the Mexican American War.
“Once the Americans got there, they were shocked by her, the fact that she smoked, the fact that she did run this business, the fact that she was so powerful and had this very, very keen sense of geopolitics in the region. She knew which way things were going, and she was one of the first people to invite Kearney and his officers to a party, because she knew that this was going to involve a transfer of power, and that she needed to be in that room with those officers to exert some sort of control over her own situation,” said Nelson.
Barceló even loaned money to U.S. troops.
Nelson said scholars have been trying to dismantle the frontier myth for half a century and have not gotten very far. She’s under no illusion this book will finish the job. The book examines seven people, including Sacagawea of Lewis and Clark fame, and Polly Bemis, a Chinese woman living in an Idaho mining town. Nelson said she hopes her book will add to people’s understanding of the lived experience in the west, and ways people persevered, often in the face of federal attempts to control or oust them from the American scene.
Her next book project will be on an 1864 Kiowa Comanche raid led by the Kiowa Chief Satank [Sitting Bear] in a biracial community in Texas. She said it’s a Civil War narrative and a captivity story about the recovery of family members.
