Imagine that you were brought up in a home that hosted a large extended family that was multiracial and multicultural. Your parents were white, of European ancestry, but through marriage and adoption you had a Native 
True story? In a way. It’s actually a kind of an allegorical tale of how our collective memory of the American West has been so distorted by books, film, and TV that what still clings to the minds of many is an image of a mostly empty landscape of big skies and heroic white men wearing white hats—like John Wayne—taciturn, rugged individualists who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to conquer a hostile, untamed land. And somehow, over time, the rich constellation of the remaining cast of characters who once walked that same earth—women, the indigenous, Mexicans, and others—faded until they became, if not entirely invisible, little more than bit players who put in cameos of hardly any consequence.
The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier [2026], a stunning achievement by noted historian Megan Kate Nelson, proves a long overdue remedy for this stubbornly pernicious amnesia with an exciting, even page-turning, panoramic history of the American West that restores the legacy of so many who were by accident or design largely expunged from chronicles of the past. Blending the “journey motif” literary device with rigorous scholarship, the author—in a series of roughly chronological episodes that often overlap—deftly guides the reader to follow in the footsteps of seven specific individuals who each not only left an essential mark on the West but are likewise emblematic of others who once walked alongside. A gifted storyteller who seems incapable of writing a dull paragraph, Nelson rekindles moments of passion, adventure, glory, and tragedy that followed Lewis & Clark to Wounded Knee, true accounts that via her talented pen somehow turn out to be more thrilling than much of the fiction imagined in dime store novels or blockbuster flicks.
Women are conspicuous in their absence in nearly all accounts of the West, just footnotes in the literature, and in popular culture reduced to cardboard cut-outs of pioneer wives or saloon girls—but always of solid Anglo stock, of course. So it is particularly welcome to find that four of Nelson’s chosen seven are female, and of those, three are people of color. Only one—Sacajawea—is familiar to most Americans today. But Nelson challenges our traditional patronizing portrait of this so-called “good Indian”—who helped guide the heroic white folks of the Corps of Discovery—to spotlight her crucial role in an expedition that may not have succeeded as it did without her.
Born an Agaidika Shoshone along what is today the Idaho-Montana border, at twelve Sacajawea was captured in a raid by a rival tribe, the Hidatsa, and force marched to present-day North Dakota. At thirteen, she was sold to a Quebecois trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau who made her one of his wives. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first encountered her in 1804, she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old. They needed a reliable guide and interpreter, and to that end Charbonneau was hired, who brought along his Shoshone-speaking wife. It is unlikely anyone ever asked this teenager if she wanted to be a wife or a mother or a blazer of wilderness trails, but nevertheless, shortly after giving birth, she set out to lead the expedition thousands of miles, toting her son in a cradleboard strapped to her back. Stripped of the caricature imposed upon her as the rare Native American female to actually earn mention in textbooks, Nelson’s Sacajawea was a flesh and blood young woman who was central to their mission as she navigated difficult terrain, identified edible plants, rescued their precious journals from a capsizing boat, and—perhaps most significantly—as an Amerindian traveling with an infant telegraphed peaceful intentions and ensured the safety of the group while facilitating trade with tribes they encountered along the way. She was clearly vital to their efforts; she was mentioned in excess of one hundred times in the journals! Still, she was never compensated; Charbonneau was instead paid for bringing her along. Upon her untimely death some years later, Clark adopted her son Jean Baptiste, who would coincidentally cross paths with Jim Beckwourth, who also has a starring role in The Westerners, decades down the road. And it turns out that Jean Baptiste—half French, half indigenous, raised by an American—was far more typical of the multiracial, multicultural frontier than the white men wearing white hats we were directed to idolize.
Maria Gertrudis Barceló is another fascinating character. Nearly a third of today’s continental United States was once part of Mexico. Largely through violence—annexation, war, and purchase under pressure—more than half of Mexico’s original territory was incorporated into the US, along with something like one hundred thousand Mexicans. One of them was Gertrudis Barceló, a fiercely independent woman—in a culture that permitted that—who ran a vast gambling operation and owned her own saloon in Sante Fe. Both entrepreneurial and opportunistic, when New Mexico changed hands in the Mexican War, Gertrudis Barceló’s operations continued unabated and she died one of the wealthiest residents in the region. Yet, in traditional histories of the American West, you would likely never learn that Gertrudis Barceló or thousands of other Mexicans who were absorbed into the United States ever existed.
There’s also Polly Bemis, a tiny but remarkably intrepid woman who was born in China, sold as a slave, smuggled to San Francisco, and eventually ended up in a mining camp in Idaho. Under the best of circumstances, in this era the Chinese in America were frequently subject to racism, exclusion, and violence, but somehow Polly persevered, winning her freedom and going on to run her own boarding house. Another is Ella Watson, a Wyoming pioneer who met a tragic end, and then suffered the further indignity of having her reputation sullied after death by being branded “Cattle Kate,” a rustler and woman of ill repute who inspired the Zane Grey novel The Maverick Queen that I read some years ago. But it turns out that the Cattle Kate persona was completely fabricated, and rather than outlaw, Ella was a homesteader who ran afoul of a land baron who sought her property and its water rights.
Of all the principal figures of The Westerners, the most intriguing could be Jim Beckwourth, an extraordinary fellow who instantly reminded me of Jack Crabb, the protagonist of Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man later portrayed by Dustin Hoffman on the big screen, although in real life Beckwourth—narcissistic, amoral, and manipulative—comes off as far less sympathetic than the fictional Crabb. While tall tales are so intermingled with facts that it is difficult to fix upon a truly reliable biography of Beckwourth, Nelson skillfully sketches out a nuanced portrait of a man whose incredible life is symbolic of the American West. Born into plantation slavery in Virginia but unusually favored by his white father, Beckwourth’s darker complexion, an obstacle in the east, turned into an advantage on the frontier, where he could inhabit a variety of different worlds. And he did. A fur trapper, mountain man, trader, and explorer—these are just a few of his various occupations—Beckwourth demonstrated much courage, resourcefulness, and dedication to his own self-interest, seeking his fortune while collecting and abandoning a series of wives and paramours along the way. One of those wives was indigenous, and he lived with her and her Apsáalooke Crow tribe for a time. But that experience did not dissuade him from a later stint as an army scout caught up in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 that saw hundreds of encamped Cheyenne—predominantly women, children, and infants—butchered by soldiers. Beckwourth went on to write a book about his exploits, and died an old man of natural causes. If there’s a moral to the story, it could be that many who survived the brutal challenges of the frontier were not only the fittest but the most unprincipled.
An exception to that rule could be Little Wolf (Ó’kôhómôxháahketa), Sweet Medicine Chief of the Northern Cheyenne, arguably the most admirable of Nelson’s seven, who consistently acted only for the interests of his people, and never for himself. The greatest tragedy of the West is the fate of the indigenous that once included hundreds of tribes and millions of inhabitants, their numbers already reduced and lifeways dramatically altered well before the time of Lewis & Clark. Europeans unintentionally brought to the shores epidemics that devastated virgin populations. And not only disease touched them: horses and firearms first introduced by the conquistadors forever changed their way of life. In what would become the United States, eastern settlements that grew into towns and cities gradually forced relocation of many tribes west, displacing those who came before, even prior to when forced “Indian removal” became official US policy. As it was, spread out among so many distinct tribal groups with divided loyalties, they never really had a chance: manifest destiny, the transcontinental railroad, the cavalry, and especially the conviction that the west belonged exclusively to white settlers to do as they pleased with it, would doom their independence. Little Wolf, born when Jean Baptiste would have been only about fifteen years old, could not have known that within his lifespan Native Americans would never again roam free, but would be confined to reservations ever after. The saga of Little Wolf’s valiant struggle against this inevitably represents some of Nelson’s finest work here.
Finally, for those who are looking for white guys, Nelson gives us Ovando Hollister, a Yankee with a commitment to abolition who was raised in a Shaker community and went west to seek his fortune, then on to fight for Union and emancipation in the Civil War. Later, he became an influential journalist. But while he championed freedom for blacks, he was consistently hostile towards the indigenous. He had no objection to Sand Creek, and even came to Beckwourth’s defense in the press, glossing over the atrocities to object that he was unfairly maligned for his skin color.
But there’s another white man who looms over Nelson’s narrative who is not one of her central characters: Frederick Jackson Turner. Three years after another massacre, this time at Wounded Knee, Turner presented his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which—as Nelson points out in her Prologue—was the genesis of the frontier myth that the West was fundamental to the cultivation of our national identity, preordained for white Americans to dominate in a crusade to supplant savagery with civilization. For well over a century, Turner’s thesis has overshadowed the historiography, as well as popular culture, and is principally responsible for that very amnesia identified at the outset of this discussion. It was presented to me as received wisdom when I was an undergrad in the 1980s. And it lingers still.
The Westerners is an effective rebuttal to Turner, whose thesis is not only flawed but in fact mistaken, and even harmful. Sure, there were plenty of white Americans who were, for better or for worse, significant to the development of what would become the western part of the United States. But there were lots of others—among them blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and especially Native Americans—whose contributions were just as critical. Millions, in fact. Sadly, most of their identities were erased. If we can give a pass to the movies for colorful stereotypes, and for only carving out screen time for the white guys with the white hats, the truth is that the texts from my grade school classroom were—if decidedly duller—not that far removed from the celluloid. The likes of Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Polly Bemis, Little Wolf, and so many more simply did not make the cut. In a superlative, meticulously researched work that will appeal to scholars as well as delight a general audience, Megan Kate Nelson succeeds brilliantly in resurrecting not only these lives, but the spirits of a multitude long lost to time.
I reviewed this previous book by the same author, here:
