Book Review: 'The West: An Illustrated History'

© 1996 Little, Brown and Company (a division of Hachette Book Group)

On September 1, 1996, New York-based Little, Brown and Company published The West: An Illustrated History, the companion volume to the Public Broadcasting Service's documentary miniseries The West: A Film by Stephen Ives, a project that was conceived and produced by Ken Burns. Written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward (A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt), The West: An Illustrated History is a lavishly illustrated and extremely readable history of America's westward expansion. starting with the arrival of the first Europeans in what is now the state of Texas and ending with the "taming of the West" in the 20th Century.

The West: An Illustrated History follows the format of Ward's previous companion books for Burns' The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994): it is divided into eight chapters, one for each episode of The West in its broadcast edition. Complementing the main narrative are essays by noted historians and writers who share their insights about the West, the various peoples that lived, fought, and often died in it, and the many facets of America's "manifest destiny" as a continental nation with coasts on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The 446-page hardcover edition is divided as follows:

• Preface by Stephen Ives and Ken Burns
• Chapter One: The Northern Mystery (Essay: Other Wests by Richard White)
• Chapter Two: The Most Avid Nation (Essay: The Mission at Wailatpu: A Meeting Place for Western Women by Julie Roy Jeffrey)
• Chapter Three: Seeing the Elephant (Essay: Myth and Myopia: Hispanic Peoples and Western History by David G. Gutierrez)
• Chapter Four: A Hell of a Storm (Essay: Believing in the American West by Patricia Nelson Limerick)
• Chapter Five: The Greatest Enterprise Under God (Essay: Great Migrations: The Pioneer in the American West by John Mack Faragher)
• Chapter Six: Rivers Run Backward (Essay: Wilderness and the West by T.H. Watkins)
• Chapter Seven: The Great Die-Up (Essay: The American West and the Burden of Belief, by N. Scott Momaday)
• Chapter Eight: The Outcome of Our Earnest Endeavors (Essay: Monument Valley by Dayton Duncan

(Note: In other companion volumes to documentaries produced or directed by Ken Burns, the chapter titles usually match episode titles from the TV version. In The West: An Illustrated History, only one title from The West: A Film by Stephen Ives, "The Greatest Enterprise Under God," carries over from the film to the book by Ward.)

Based mostly on Ward's script for the 12-hour-long documentary that aired 23 years ago on PBS, The West: An Illustrated History is a fine example of American historical writing at its very best. As the book's dust jacket blurb states:

Drawing upon hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship, THE WEST chronicles the arrival of wave after wave of newcomers from every direction of the compass. The cast is as rich and diverse as the western landscape itself--explorers, soldiers, Indian warriors, settlers, railroad builders and gaudy showmen. Coronado, Custer, Jesse James, Chief Joseph, Brigham Young and Buffalo Bill are all here. So are scores of lesser-known westerners whose stories are no less compelling--a Chinese ditchdigger. a rich Mexican landowner, a forty-niner from Chile, a Texas cowboy born in Britain, a woman missionary to the Indians who loathed the West and a Wellesley graduate who loved it in spite of everything it did to her and her family. It is the central story of America, a story filled with heroism and hope, enterprise and adventure as well as tragedy and disappointment. THE WEST explores the tensions between whites and the native peoples they sought to displace, but it also encompasses the Hispanic experience in the West from the time of the conquistadors to the transformation of a Mexican-American village called Los Angeles into the region's major metropolis, the lives of Chinese immigrants who called the region "Gold Mountain", and the ordeals of freed slaves from the South who sought a better life homesteading on the Great Plains. Beautifully written, richly illustrated, meticulously researched. THE WEST tells the story of a unique part of the country and provides a metaphor for the country as a whole.

My Take

I have loved history –  especially American history – for almost half a century. My main focus is modern military history, especially World War II and its sequel conflicts. As I have grown older, though, I have remembered some of the concepts that I learned in my history classes in college, including the axiom that says, "Nothing in history takes place in a vacuum." (In other words, you can't understand why certain events happen in one era without at least examining what happened before.)

Thanks in no small part to the riveting documentaries by Ken Burns, I have cast a wider net when it comes to choosing books to read or TV series to watch. Beginning with 1990's The Civil War (a series that I was hesitant to watch), I have learned about baseball, Prohibition, jazz, the Roosevelts, and, with the film and book versions of The West, the rich, entrancing, and often heartbreaking saga of the United States' expansion, often at the expense of peoples that already lived there, including Native Americans and Mexicans whose lands were coveted by wave upon wave of migrating Americans.

Based on a multitude of sources, including personal journals, letters, official documents, and contemporary media accounts, Ward's book complements Stephen Ives' film. The narrative expands on the topics covered by the documentary, but even though the book is based on the author's own script, it adds original material that enhances the content viewers saw on television without parroting the narration word-by-word.

The book also serves as revisionism - of the good sort - for readers and viewers of the series who were raised on John Wayne Westerns where the whites were the brave, plucky settlers of a land inhabited by "savage Indians" who were always hostile to American pioneers. Ward and the essay writers - especially N. Scott Momaday, a member of the Kiowa tribe and a renowned novelist, essayist, and poet - do not romanticize "the first Americans" or portray them as mere victims of unscrupulous settlers, nor do they shield them from criticism when its called for.

I don't have many books about 18th and 19th Century American history, and The West: An Illustrated History is the only one in my library devoted to its particular topic. Nevertheless, I find it to be as well-conceived and written as the series that inspired it, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the American national character.