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Legacy of Conquest, Essay Example

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The settlement of the American West has been widely perceived as an adventurous victory of the economic development of open lands beginning in the Northwest and came to an end in the 1890s. Patricia Nelson Limerick opens our eyes and demands understanding that history is not a simple story about the past. The work is divided into chapters that tie the events of the past to the problems of the present. In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick provides a glimpse at the parts of the American West that have been primarily unnoticed until this book, while examining how the environmental characteristics of the West, combined with the dynamics of the ongoing conquest of the Native Americans, helped define the history of the region. This book is an examination of all the major themes in Western history.

Limerick sheds light on the past with environmental and borderlands history and begs for a new focus on all people of West, including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, in Western scholarship. Most important, she highlights the notion that the history of the West is the history of the white man, but for whites, Hispanics, Indians, Asians and blacks to see the West as a shared place that all Westerners helped create and begin to tell this shared story.

The American West was a melting pot of different cultures. It was a place “where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-American and Asia intersected.”[1] The history of the West is characterized by the meshing of all these groups. Reaching across the several fields of science including, anthropology, economics and geography, Limerick attempts to erase the lines Turner drew around the West. She raises questions about continuity between the ‘frontier’ West of the 19th century and the contemporary West of the late 20^th century. She seeks to portray “the West as a place and not a process.”[2] Limerick gives sound evidence against Turner’s frontier life and develops an argument in which colonists of the West embrace naive hopes and view themselves as injured innocents[3]. Shortly after, Limerick speaks to the allegedly conquered forces of indigenous peoples, Mexican-Americans, other racial and religious minorities, and the wilderness. Limerick causes question to the composite nationality of interethnic solidarity and divides as significant and persistent as those chronicled in the South.

Interestingly, the 19th-century Western frontiers symbolize a place of safety and peace from the filth of overpopulated Eastern cities and unexplored wilderness. In fact, as The Legacy of Conquest demonstrates, ”Western optimism” proved only a ”faith in postponement,” never any successful evasion of the problems of social complexity.[4] In place of the wild we were supposed to escape one another, the West is where it all began for us. The West is where we all came together.

Limerick argues the accepted notion that the year 1890 marked the closing of the American frontier and the end of an era made unique by Indian wars, border skirmishes, outlaws, mining booms, land barons, and pioneers.[5] She documents the problems and conflicts left for us by the forces of conquest before us, which shaped our relationships with the land and its resources and the peoples who live in the American West.

The American West has a history grounded in questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation.[6] Limerick discusses all of the major events in the expansion of the West. She interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West “meant business” in more ways than one, and their descendants mean business today.[7] Patricia establishes her thesis well and refutes outdated perspectives of Turner.

Turner’s thesis drew a line in the sand, carving out the arrival of white settlers as the beginning of the West and the end of the frontier in 1890. Turner believes that the frontier serves to “Americanize” the nation. These adventurous individuals did not discover a new place – they attempted to conquer a land that was already settled by Indians. In his 1893 speech, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the process of settling the frontier shaped the American character.[8] Limerick argues in The Legacy of Conquest that Turner’s definition of the frontier based on population density is volatile.[9] She also establishes a middle ground between those who view the frontier as a process and those who view it as a place. Limerick demonstrates that the frontier remains an open place and process.

Limericks grapples with deemphasizing the end of the frontier. Historians can “conceive of the West as a place and not a process, and provide Western American history, a new look.”[10] The minority groups mentioned in The Legacy of Conquest formed a pivotal part of western history, yet are completely absent from Turner’s theses.

Although Turner’s conception of the frontier seemed unifying and efficient, its dominance wedded Western historians to an idea that was static, rigid, and exclusionary. The Frontier Thesis may have “created” Western history, but it also sets up arbitrary divisions between “the West” and “the rest” – divisions Limerick was determined to break down in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.[11] Many of the issues she discussed remain unresolved: issues about resource conservation, immigration, and the management of nature seem as relevant today as they did in the 1880s.

The cycle of economic boom and bust is another aspect of western history that has been added since Turner’s thesis. A place of great economic activity, the West was constantly in flux. The two key frontier activities were the control of Indians and the distribution of land.[12] The growing population and the frontier ways came at a cost. “Federal subsidies … made the concept of private enterprise in transportation an ambiguous one.”[13] Westerners depended on relationships with the Federal government and the eastern markets for materials, equipment, and capital. It is also argued that the most successful settlers of the West worked within their close-knit community to rebuild the communities that they had left behind.

In 1984, for example, the West accounted for more bank holdups than the other 37 states combined. In part, this may be explained by the ”West’s proliferation of isolated branch banks” – a phenomenon that dates back to the frontier era. Quoting a 1985 article from The Denver Post, Mrs. Limerick points to other continuities: ”Modern-day bank robbers operate much the same way the Daltons and James gang did. They usually rely on a gun and a lot of nerve.” The underlying complaint here is that, in previous interpretations of Western history, ”the differences between the nineteenth century and the twentieth were so dramatic that they distracted us from the many elements of continuity.” In Mrs. Limerick’s rendering, by contrast, the region’s current ”dependence on federal money, instability in business cycles, and inconsistent enforcement of laws a strong family resemblance to that theoretically dead past.”.

Without the government to build the infrastructure for irrigation of western lands and for transportation of western products, the westward movement would not be possible. The Federal government was always there to bail out the frontier when needed. This continues today, the cycle of boom and bust in western states continue to be the largest recipients of Federal money. Limerick demonstrates that the notion of independent farmers and laborers after the revolution never became anything more than just an ideal. Instead, in the West, Americans became even more dependent on the government, eastern markets, and others for their economic survival.[14] Limerick also demonstrates that the system of patronage and dependence had been transformed, however, from one in which patrons had a personal relationship with their dependents to an impersonal one in which the Federal government.[15] In return for this support, westerners resented their new patron. Westerners blamed their failures on the same government that made their survival possible.

”The Legacy of Conquest” offers an eminently readable historical overview, punctuated by anecdotes in which the present and the past repeatedly intertwine. No, history is not a simple story about the past, but it is a key that we can use to build a better future. In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia shares important means to moving forward united with dignity and grace and serves as an excellent starting point for American/Western historians.

Works Cited

eNotes.com, Inc. “The Legacy of Conquest” Critical Survey of Contemporary Fiction. 2005. http://www.enotes.com/topics/legacy-conquest#summary-legacy-conquest-1 (accessed April 11, 2015).

Jenni. “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (Book Review).”. September 3, 2012. http://www.ushistoryscene.com/uncategorized/legacyofconquest (accessed April 10, 2015).

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Martino Fine Books, 2014.

[1] (Limerick 1987)

[2] (Limerick 1987)

[3] (Limerick 1987)

[4] (Limerick 1987)

[5] (Limerick 1987)

[6] (eNotes.com, Inc. 2005)

[7] (eNotes.com, Inc. 2005)

[8] (Turner 2014)

[9] (Limerick 1987)

[10] (Limerick 1987)