Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression by David M. Wrobel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression by David M. Wrobel Susan Roberson David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2013. 312 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $29.95. Guided by travel books into rhetoric about the American West from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, David Wrobel aims to help readers rethink their “assumptions about western mythology and American exceptionalism” (22). Because of their extreme popularity, travel books provide access to an era’s way of thinking about place. Not only does Wrobel read a wide range of these narratives, he also takes on postcolonial theories of travel writing to give a nuanced reading of travel writing about the American West. Moreover, by placing travel writing about the West in a global context and amid the ambivalences about empire, he brings into question assumptions about the imperializing gaze of travel writing and American exceptionalism. Along the way he introduces readers to some long-forgotten narratives, telling fascinating stories [End Page 175] about travel in the American West and abroad to other “frontiers” in Africa, the Pacific, and South America. To illustrate the tension between empire and exceptionalism in the mid-nineteenth century, Wrobel looks at narratives of global travelers like George Catlin, usually remembered for his paintings of Native Americans. Wrobel examines Catlin’s narrative of the Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians (1852) who traveled with him through Europe, noting the comparisons Catlin makes between American and British colonization and the extermination of Native peoples. Wrobel’s discussion of the German traveler Friedrich Gerstäcker’s depiction of gold-rush California illustrates the degree to which “California was a global stage” (40) by recounting an incident involving an East Indian from Bombay, American Indians, and a gang of “Yankees, French, Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, and men from other nations” (41) that emphasizes the “consequences of white conquest and the limitations of American democracy” (42). These two narratives show how the American West was a member of a global community and how travel writers questioned ideals of American expansion, democracy, and exceptionalism. In another chapter, Wrobel explains how world traveler Richard Burton used “collateral knowledge” (56) gained from his experiences to describe “nonwhite peoples and landscapes” (56), including those of the American West. Burton’s travels illustrate the global context in which nineteenth-century writers situated the American West and discussions of frontier, empire, and colonization. Wrobel argues that the “variety of perspectives on conquered and conquerable peoples” (80) as well as on American imperialism asks us to step outside academic theories of postcolonialist “othering” to listen more carefully to the conflicting voices that emerge from travel narratives. When the American frontier “closed” at the end of the nineteenth century, adventurers like Jack London, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt searched for “the West in the world” (86), for the “hardships, dangers, and discoveries” (86) associated with the American frontier. And in doing so they evinced the political ambivalences of the era, whether traveling as an “agent of empire” (101), like Roosevelt in his Africa narrative; as a “cultural ambassador” (91), like London, who sailed the Pacific Islands; or as an indifferent naturalist, like Muir, simply interested in seeing the trees of Africa [End Page 176] and South America. This search for the frontier also compelled early twentieth-century motorists to take to the transcontinental road. Seeking the pioneering experience in a motor car and looking for the “authentic” in the West, many of these moderns were disillusioned by what they found—“a West despoiled by modernity” (116). While adventures on the road were real, travelers’ ability to relive and rediscover a “true West” was not. The volume’s last major section examines the Depression-era Federal Arts Project guidebooks to the western states, demonstrating how the idea of the “western frontier heritage and pioneering tradition” (144) persisted in most of them. Celebrating the regional, these guides represent a retreat from the global perspective of the nineteenth century and in many cases present a history of the frontier that belies the...