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from page one and watching it be accepted. That has been a slow, hard-won victory, and I think it is time we acknowledged the achievement. The first bonafide revisionist, in a sense the prophet of a new western history, was Henry Nash Smith, for it was he who first told us what was wrong with the old history and dared to call it myth. That was in 1950 with the publication of Virgin Land. By myth Smith referred to the grand archetypal stories of heroic origins and events that all people create for themselves, a kind of folk history written by anonymous minds. Myths tell how things came to be, how they are and why they are, and if the real world does not quite correspond to them, it may come closer to the ideal as time goes on; myths can mightily affect the course of events. In later years Smith admitted he had been a little too quick to dismiss myth as simple falsehood when in truth popular belief and historical reality are joined together in a continuous dialogue, moving back and forth in a halting, jerky interplay. Still, it must be added that there is a lot of falsity in any myth, not excepting the one about the West, and such falsity can lead people into difficult, even tragic, situations.

We have had many myths about the West but the principal one was a story about a simple, rural people coming into a western country—an ordinary people moving into an extraordinary land, as Robert Athearn has put it—and creating there a peaceful, productive life.4 In this great, good place human nature was supposed to rise out of its old turpitude and depravity to a new dignity: sturdy yeoman farmers would have here the chance to live rationally and quietly, free of all contaminating influences. By the millions they would find homes in the undeveloped vastness stretching beyond the settlements, bringing life to the land and turning it into the garden of the world. Never mind that much blood would have to be shed first to drive out the natives; the blood would all be on others' hands, and the farmers would be clean, decent folk dwelling in righteousness.

From the beginning the agrarian myth was filled with all the unresolved contradictions of innocence. Civilization was to find in this region its next, higher incarnation, and in that expectation the myth of the garden, writes Smith, "affirmed a doctrine of progress, of gigantic economic development." On the other hand, the West was supposed to offer a place to escape civilization; the myth implied "a distrust of the outcome of progress in urbanization and civilization."5 Logic says you cannot have it both ways, physics that you cannot go forward and backward in the same moment. Yet the agrarian myth was able to hold both possibilities together because it did not follow the rules of logical discourse; instead, it was a song, a dream, a fantasy that captured all the ambivalence in a

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people about their past and future. Moreover, if your optimism is strong enough, you will believe that what is impossible for logic and physics is possible for you. No region settled in modern time has had so much optimism in its eyes as the West, an optimism that was all but blinding. What people could not see was, in Smith's words, any possibility of "radical defect or principle of evil" in their garden. They knew there was plenty of evil in the world but supposed that it had all been left behind. And the people left behind were "by implication unfortunate or wicked." "This suggestion," Smith goes on,

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lacked the "intellectual passion" of a critic, sharpening his mind on the problems of his society. Gentle and humane in his personal relations, he had no capacity to see the shameful side of the westward movement: "riotous land speculation, vigilantism, the ruthless despoiling of the continent, the arrogance of American expansionism, the pathetic tale of the Indians, anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese nativism, the crudeness, even the near-savagery, to which men were reduced on some portions of the frontier."8 Such matters did not engage Turner's intelligence, and he could not fathom why anyone would want to investigate them or would feel anguish about them. In being so evasive he was not really lying about the past as much as he was omitting whatever interfered with what he regarded as the greater truth, the genesis of a free people. The twentieth century has not dealt kindly with Turner's reputation, and the reason has more to do with the man's lack of critical acuity than of hard evidence for his theories. As Hostadter writes, "it is the blandness of his nationalism that most stands out, as it is the blandness of such social criticism as he attempted, the blandness indeed of his mind as a whole."9

The generation of western historians who were contemporaries of Henry Nash Smith and Richard Hofstadter, men and women who came of age in the 1950s and '60s, began to lay the foundations for a different, more academic style of regional history. They organized graduate seminars in which they trained hundreds of Ph.D.s in the field. They sent them into the archives-to the "sources," they said with solemn dignity-and taught them to collect data and make footnotes. They launched an industry of monographs. In October 1961, leaders of that generation came together in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to revive western studies in the wake of Turner's fall from authority; following that meeting they established the Western History Association and began publishing a scholarly journal, the Western Historical Quarterly. When those founders gathered around the banquet table, heads still bowed dutifully at the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, and a few still crossed themselves in reverence. The westward course of empire school still had its spokesmen in Ray Alien Billington and other frontier scholars. But for all those vestiges of piety historians slowly began to conceive the West in post- Turnerian terms.

For the first time the West took on a clear, concrete physical shape, essentially the area stretching from the Great Plains states to the Pacific Coast. But though they acknowledged that the West was an actual place, not that vague mythical landscape of pioneering Turner had in mind, postwar historians tended to down play the idea that there was anything radical or distinctive about it. The story of their West was primarily the

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story of American economic enterprise written over and over again in new terrain-written in larger letters each time, written frequently with a heroic hand, but above all written in familiar economic language. The key words for this postwar generation remained the standard national cliches of "expansion," "development," and "growth": growth in western transportation, growth in investment, growth in population, growth in statehood, growth toward an urban civilization.10

Growth had indeed been a prominent idea in the settlement of the West, and that idea was, by any cool, rational analysis, incompatible with backward-looking agrarian fantasies. The postwar generation faced up to that contradiction and threw the old mythic agrarianism out the window. Far from representing an escape from history, a place for idealists and romantics, they insisted that the West was urban and progressive to its core. By all the indices of economic success, it began far behind the rest of the nation and long had to suffer as a mere colony of the East; nonetheless, it ran hard to catch up and become one with modern America. Thus, the western story appeared to be not one of pioneers turning their back on a spoiled past but one of competitive, conformist drives to be in the national mainstream.

In reaction against Turner's theme of a return to a primitive time, the postwar generation of historians, led by scholars such as Earl Pomeroy and Gerald Nash, discovered the twentieth century. The West did not suddenly end in 1890, with the passing of the frontier, they declared, but was at that point only beginning its ascent to prominence. With the pass-ing of the brief pioneer era, it entered into anew, open-ended period of expanding technology and enterprise that had no limits in sight. Historians were impressed by millions of new migrants coming into the region, and it was their experience-their cities, work, leisure, and politics, their conflicts with and sources of capital in the East, their relations with the federal government, and especially their search for a modern affiuence-that increasingly came to dominate historical research. The legendary man on horseback, fighting against a horde of menacing savages, the plowman toiling alone beneath a prodigious sky, all but faded away in this nonagrarian, professionalized, heavily footnoted, technology-centered, city-based redefinition of the region's past.

That is not to say there was no mythic element left in the postwar generation's writing. The old agrarian fantasy may have lost its hold, but there endured among many that old "doctrine of progress, of gigantic economic development" that Smith also identified as part of western mythology. We might call it the mythic world of the Chamber of Commerce, for whom the West will be an unfinished frontier until it is one with Hobo-

ken, New Jersey, until we Americans will have written a saga of industrial conquest from sea to shining sea. Through the 1950s and '60s not a few western historians acted as though they were charter members of the Chamber, and their books and articles could almost have been introductions to company reports or state tourist brochures trumpeting the arrival of a "New West."

One may, of course, find countless things to congratulate in the region, but is it the job of the historian to shout them up, to act as the Merv Griffin of the western game show? After all, there are plenty of well-funded agencies charged with that task. What the boosters will not do, and what the historian alone is in a position to do, is to examine those radical defects of society Hofstadter talked about. For a long time, even after it had left Turner behind, the academic history of the West did not make that examination. There was little interest in dwelling on the dark, shameful aspects of the region's past. Graduate students were not expected to emerge from their seminars with a critical perspective; on the contrary, they were commonly taught to be positive and hopeful, to believe in the essential goodness of their institutions, to avoid any expressions of radical discontent, and dutifully they did so. In that moral complacency, if hot in all their theories, they remained true to the Turnerian spirit, and the history they wrote remained an exercise in blandness. While the rest of the world's historians were facing up to the horrors of the Holocaust, the infamy of southern slavery, the satanic mills of global industrialization, western historians continued to wear a cheerful face. Terrible things had happened elsewhere, they knew, but on this happier side of the happy North American continent one could find only a little fraud and corruption in the land laws, only a few third-rate senators to decry, but no great evils to write about. A sense of tragedy had not yet made its way west.

One of the most important books produced by the postwar generation illustrates my point clearly: Gerald Nash's The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War. No one before him had demonstrated so compellingly the scope and promise of twentieth-century regional history. No one had traced the emergence of the New West of urban, industrial enterprise in more enthusiastic detail. And certainly no one could disagree with many of the conclusions he reached:

The American West emerged from the Second World War as a transformed region. In 1941 many westerners had feared that the expansion of the region had come to a close. The economy was stagnant, population growth had ceased, and the colonial dependence of the region on the older East pervaded most

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aspects of life. But by 1945 the war had wrought a startling transformation. Westerners now had visions of unlimited growth and expansion, a newly diversified economy was booming, a vast influx of population was changing the very fabric of western society, and the region had just witnessed a growth in cultural maturity which was totally unprecedented in its history. The West emerged from the war as a path-breaking self-sufficient region with unbounded optimism for its future. World War II had precipitated that transformation, and in retrospect constituted one of the major turning points in the history of the American West.11

Unquestionably, those words reveal a historical imagination that has gone well beyond the old frontier, Turnerian tradition, and they come from a historian who, with others of his generation, has reenvisioned the West in a fresh light. But to my mind there are a few things missing from Nash's reinterpretation of the West, and they are serious omissions. How could one, for example, write about World War lI's impact and leave out the glaring fact that this region henceforth would be dominated by the military-industrial complex, that its economic health would rise and fall with the prospects of the Pentagon and the Cold War, a fact that is obvious today from San Diego's navy yards all the way to Montana's missile silos? Or how could one leave off that list .of so-called achievements the doomsday shadow of the atomic bomb-the fact that the West has been forever poisoned by nuclear fallout and, since the war, has found itself sick and dying of radiation, beset by the problems of nuclear waste disposal, living in white-knuckled fear in the vicinity of such places as Rocky Flats Arsenal, Alamagordo, Los Alamos, Hanford, and the Nevada test site? Clearly, there was more to the region than we had yet been told either by Frederick Jackson Turner or by the postwar generation of Nash and others, but it would take yet another generation to see those darker facts, to discover their roots, and to give them significance.

Around the year 1970 (the year when Dee Brown published his searing polemic against the U.S. military's aggression against Indians, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) that still untold side of the western past began to find its tellers. A younger generation, shaken by the experience of Vietnam and other national disgraces-poyerty, racism, environmental degradation-could not pretend that the only story that mattered in the West was one of stagecoach lines, treasure hunts, cattle brands, and wildcatters, nor for that matter aircraft plants, opera companies, bank deposits, or middle-class whites learning how to ski. What was missing was a frank, hard look at the violent, imperialistic process by which the West was wrested from its original owners and the violence by which it had been secured against the continuing claims of minorities, women, and the

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forces of nature. That capacity for violence may be inherent in all people, but when it showed its ugly face among the respectable and the successful it was called "progress," "growth," "the westward movement," "the march of freedom," or a dozen other euphemisms-and it was time historians called such violence and imperialism by their true names. During the past two decades a new western history has appeared with the express purpose of I confronting and understanding those radical defects in the past. This new history has tried to put the West back into the world community, Mth no illusions about moral uniqueness. It has also sought to restore to memory all those unsmiling aspects that Turner wanted to leave out. As a result, we are beginning to get a history that is beyond myth, beyond the traditional consciousness of the white conquerors, beyond a primitive emotional need of heroes and heroines, beyond any public role of justifying or legitimating what had happened. Here are some of the most important arguments the new history has been making.

First, the invaded and subject peoples of the West must be given a voice in the region's history. Until very recently many western historians acted as though the West had either been empty of people prior to the coming of the white race or was quickly, if bloodily, cleared of them, once and for all, so that historians had only to deal with the white point of view. They particularly ignored the continuing presence, the intrinsic value, and the political interests of the indigenous peoples, Indians and Chicanos.

All that has dramatically changed in the last few years. Today no historian who wants to be taken seriously would dare proceed without at least acknowledging the prior presence of non white groups and their persistence into the present. Some historians, white and non white alike, have gone even farther to attempt to rewrite the whole story from the point of view of the conquered peoples. I do not mean to say that this is the sole achievement of scholars under the age of fifty; on the contrary , many of that immediate postwar generation have also come around to a more pluralistic point of view. Gerald Nash again may serve as an example; three of the eleven chapters in his book cited above deal specifically with the experience of blacks, Spanish-speaking Americans, Indians, and Japanese-Americans, and they are chapters filled with compassion and candor. Nonetheless, it is the younger generation appearing in the 1970s and '80s who have especially made this new multicultural perspective their oWn. They have discovered that minorities not only have not always shared in the rising power and affluence of the West but also have in some ways thought differently about the ends of that power and affluence. As

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part of that reevalution, we are increasingly asked to re examine the process by which native peoples were dispossessed in the first place, to remind ourselves of the manner in which whites went about accumulating land and resources for themselves, and to uncover the contradictions in a majority, male-dominated culture that can in the same breath trumpet the idea of its own liberty and deny other peoples the right of self-determination. Further, we have Jearned to pay more attention to the substantial numbers of non-native people of colorwho have come into the garden of agrarian myth to live alongside the European settlers, people from Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Asia, making the West in fact alar more racially diverse place than the myth ever envisioned-more diverse indeed than either the North or South has been.

So we have arrived at an important truth that was long obscured by the old mythology: the West has not at all been a place to retreat from the human community and all its conflicts. On the contrary, it has been a place where white Americans ran smack into the broader world. It has been on the' forward edge of one of modern history's most exciting endeavors, the creation, in the wake of European expansion and imperialism, of the world's first multiracial, cosmopolitan societies. That development has obviously been a terribly difficult one, plagued by racism, ethnocentrism, brutality, misunderstanding, and rage on the part of majority and minority peoples alike, but especially marred by oppression and exploitation on the part of those holding the whiphand. All the same the invention in the West of a diverse community has gone steadily forward, until today there exists in this region the potential for an enlargement of our several cultural visions that was inconceivable in the past.

A second theme in the new western history is this: The drive for the economic development of the West was often a ruthless assault on nature, and it has left behind it much death, depletion, and ruin. Astonishing as it now seems, the old agrarian myth of Turner's day suggested that the West offered an opportunity of getting back in touch with nature, of recovering good health and a sense of harmony with the nonhuman far from the shrieking disharmonies of factories, technology, urban slums, and poverty that were making life in Europe and the East a burden to the spirit. That traditional faith in the region's natural healing power endures even now in the popular mind, which tends to think of the "real West" as a place without industry or cities, as an idyll starring Robert Redford in the role of lonely trapper wandering through an awesomely beautiful wilderness. Most of California, by that selective reasoning, is not in the West, nor are the open-pit copper mines of Arizona, or the labor union halls in Idaho, or the commuters wheezing and creeping along in a Denver freeway

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haze. Indeed, about the only real West we have left, according to the old mythic thinking, is the state of Montana, along with Louis L'Amour's ranch in southwestern Colorado, last, fading sanctuaries where vigorous, independent men might live in the bosom of nature.

Here again truth is breaking in, driving out myth and self-deception, as we face unblinkingly the fact that from its earliest days the fate of the western region has been one of furnishing raw materials for industrialism's development; consequently, the region was from its beginning in the forefront of America's endless economic revolution. Far from being a child of nature, the West was actually given birth by modern technology and bears all the scars of that fierce gestation, like a baby born of an addict. Agriculture was one of the first areas where this dependency on the global industrial economy appeared. Contrary to the agrarian myth, farm-ers in the West were some of the first agribusinessmen on the planet, and in places like the Central Valley of California (incidentally a part of the West long ignored by historians) the results of that fact in terms of labor oppression and class conflict, as well as environmental exploitation, have been open for all to see. Supporting that drive for industrial and capitalist development has been a powerful political apparatus in Washington, D.C., whose role has largely been to promote the private accumulation of money through such public investments as water projects, mining leases, and military bases. That role is manifest all over the nation, in fact throughout the global economy, but it may be the American West that best exemplifies the modern capitalistic state at work.

Historians have more or less known this fact for a long time, but until very recently they have chosen to down play, or even disregard, its implications. They seldom undertook to write about any of the ecological disasters and nightmares that have occurred in the West, the pillaging by oil companies and other energy and mining entrepreneurs of the public lands, the pollution of coastal waters and pristine desert air, the impact of big-scale irrigation on the quality and quantity of water, or the devastation of wildlife habitat by the hoofs and bellies of the fabled cattle kingdom.

To be sure, older historians did not completely ignore the devastation of the western environment that had gone on. Often they took a stand in favor of "conservation"-meaning the careful, rational, utilitarian con-version of natural resources into wealth. In that definition, however, the historians marginalized more radical environmentalists like John Muir, who had fought against such materialistic resource management; if he appeared at all in history texts, Muir was usually portrayed as an impractical mystic or an "ecofreak." Yet it is Muir who has turned out to be the
 

most influential environmental reformer of his day, and it is his radical embrace of the nonhuman community that has gone out from the West to win a global audience.

Over the past decade or two the neglect of industrial capitalism's impact on the western environment has begun to be repaired, due to the fact that the study of the West, more than of other regions, has come to be allied with the emerging field of environmental history, an alliance that has encouraged doubts about the role of capitalism, industrialism, population growth, military expenditures, and aimless economic growth in the region-that questions whether they have really blazed a trail to progress.

A third argument in the new history is that the West has been ruled by concentrated power, though here, as in other places, power has often hid-den itself behind beguiling masks. The old "frontier school" liked to believe that the West did not have much of an internal problem with power and hierarchy. Power lay in the hands of easterners, while the West was a simple democratic place, unfortunately at the mercy of those outsiders but fortunately far removed from them physically. The postwar historians continued that fantasy by somehow writing about technology, growth, and urbanization without talking much about the knot of power gathering in the West. Now we can be more frank. The West has in fact been a scene of intense struggles over power and hierarchy, not only between the races but also between classes, genders, and other groups within the white majority. The outcome of those struggles has a few distinctive features found nowhere else in America-power elites that don't quite look like.those in other parts, particularly located at points of intersection between the federal land management agencies and their client groups: for example, the Bureau of Land Management and the various livestock associations, or the Bureau of Reclamation and western irriga-tion districts.

Though distinctive, the western elites have followed the old familiar tendency of power to become corrupt, exploitative, and cynical toward those whom it dominates. Power can also degrade itself, as it degrades others and the land, yet it commonly tries to conceal that fact by laying claim to the dominant myths and symbols of its time-in the case of the American West, by putting on cowboy boots and snap-button shirts, wav-ing the American flag, and calling a toxic dump the land of freedom. Perhaps the single most important, most distinguishing characteristic of the new western history is its determination not to offer cover for the powers that be- not to become subservient to them, by silence or consent. Arising generation of historians insists that it is their responsibility to

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stand apart from power and think critically about it, as it is to think critically about western society as a whole, about its ideals and drives, about the contradictions it has created, about its prospects for new identities, goals, and values.

This may be the hardest pill of all for more traditional historians to swallow. They may go so far as to agree that it is now time to talk seriously about admitting non whites to the conversation; perhaps it is even okay to use such hard but honest phrases as capitalism, conquest, imperialism, and environmental destruction to talk about the West. But for Fete's sake, they add, don't talk critically (which is to say, hostilely) about those in power, for after all they are the great, necessary agents of progress and development. They make possible our universities, our salaries, our libraries, and our history and art museums. Don't knock them, and don't get the image of being a knocker. And if you must talk critically about power, or generally take: a critical look at your society's past, don't show much passion or bite. Don't reveal that there may be important ideals that have been violated or argue that there are new ones we must discover; if you do, you will be considered romantic, naive, biased, polemical, or ungrateful. You may even become "an ideologue" (a dreaded label which often is applied to any historian who doesn't take the dominant or official ideology for granted). In other words, keep western history, and the West itself, safe from controversy or radical challenge. Be sure to write in a style that is intellectually timid, long on footnotes and bibliography but short on original ideas, especially short on uncommon or unconventional ideas. If you have any such ideas, keep them to yourself or cover them over with a camouflage of dull gray prose so that no one will take them seriously. History, insist many traditional western historians, is supposed to be an "objective science," intent only on collecting the pure, distilled, empirical truth. Nothing could be more misleading than that notion. The his-tory of this region, if it wants to be vital and listened to, cannot be kept isolated from public controversy, struggles over power, the search for new moral standards, or the ongoing human debate over fundamental principles and values. Rather than claiming to be some detached laboratory technician, the historian ought to be unabashedly and self-confidently an intellectual whose express purpose and primary justification for being is that he or she lives to question all received opinions, to take alternative ideas seriously, to think as rationally as possible about them, and con-stantly work to demythologize the past. When historians fail to see them-selves as critical intellectuals, as I believe historians of the West have done, they become ideological in the most dangerous sense: they become prisoners of ideology rather than masters of it.

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The new western history insists that scholars must perform deliberately and thoughtfully the role of cultural analyst, even to the point of presuming now and then to be a self-appointed moral conscience of their society. While accepting membership in that society, and being sympathetic to its needs and interested in its fate, historians must also be free to act like outsiders, as all intellectuals do, free to transcend the common pieties of their region and explore freely the larger world of ideas.

In order to perform effectively this complex role and be true to their role as intellectuals, western historians must study and learn from other peoples; trying, for example, to look at the past through the eyes of an American Indian. Even more radically, they must try to examine human behavior from a nonhuman perspective-to look, as it were, through the eyes of the rest of nature. That is often an unpopular stance to take, for the public does not find it easy to tolerate what may seem to be a betrayal of its interests. White intellectuals seem especially disloyal when they take the side of non white minorities, minorities who can be as outraged as the majority by any criticism. Most minority history is still where Frederick Jackson Turner's history was in 1893; it is a celebration of "my people," a record of what "we" have accomplished, a lament for how "we" have been neglected or oppressed or unappreciated. Eventually, one supposes, that will change, as it has in the case of the dominant white majority, and His-panic and Indian and Asian-American communities will find themselves confronting their own intellectual dissidents. Meanwhile, the white majority of the American West has reached the point where it ought to be secure enough in its power and wealth that it can expect something from historians besides that subservient role of cheerleader or defender. I believe we have indeed arrived at that point, and that is precisely why a new generation of western historians has arrived on the scene, gaining national and international attention for the region, a generation indebted to the work of all their predecessors but ready to perform a very different role in society.

Here then, as I see it, is the program of the new western history:

• To find ourselves prefigured in our ancestors and find in them the origin of the problems and questions that plague us today;

• To achieve a more complete, honest, penetrating view of those ancestors as well as ourselves, including the flaws and ironies in their achievements; to question their and our successes, to explore other points of view and discover new values;

• To free ourselves from unthinking acceptance of official and unofficial myths and explanations;

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• To discover a new regional identity and set of loyalties, more inclusive and open to diversity than we have known, more compatible with a planet-wide sense of ecological responsibility.

This new western history is now setting the agenda of the field. Surely it has its own shortcomings, and they will become more apparent in the years to come. But if it delivers what it promises, the new history will help the American West become a more thoughtful and self-aware community than it has been, a community that no longer insists on its special innocence but accepts the fact that it is inextricably part of a flawed world.