Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West by Robert L. Dorman

Abstract

 Reviews mary sources is the repeated mantra of“hostile Indians”and recurrent use of the generic term “Indians” with limited reference to the larger historical context or Native perspectives, cultures , and historical geographies. Given the lack of engagement with current historiographical trends in the literature on the fur trade, Native Americans, western history , and women’s history, this volume will be of limited value for scholars and graduate students. Perhaps most interestingly, The Perilous West raises intriguing questions that call for further investigation: What was the nature of the various“French villages”that the fur traders stumbled across in their journeys up the Missouri? What is the story of gender relations and domestic violence, which seems to pervade the primary sources on the French Canadian and French-Indian fur traders, but not the Euro-Americans? How did liaisons and marriages between fur traders and Native women structure intercultural relations and commerce along the upper Missouri? How did this region compare with well-documented areas in Canada? How have the well-known primary sources on the Far West colored the scholarship on western fur trade? How might we recover the multiple voices that seldom appear in the fragmentary record? And for general readers and scholars alike: What is perhaps the more engaging story of intercultural relations during the early 1800s — before the Euro-American juggernaut pushed its way westward during the mid 1800s? Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West by Robert L. Dorman The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $50.00 cloth. The word regionalism has had many meanings , and in Hell of a Vision Robert L. Dorman explores the term as it has been applied to the American West since the late nineteenth century. Dorman’s West is “the seventeen coterminous states” straddling, and west of, the hundredth meridian; hence, he includes the six Great Plains states but not Alaska and Hawaii (p. xii). The discussion toggles among the“nationalist”West (how perceptions of the region have shaped thinking about the entire nation); a variety of “localist” Wests (Mary Austin’s Inyo Country, for example, p. 11); and otherWests,including arid,agrarian,Hispanic, Native American, environmental, urban, the built (high-dam and irrigated), and of course, the cowboy or Old West. Dorman touches on about all theWests one can think of; the region is plastic and inclusive. For him, regionalism has three dimensions:spatial conceptualization as on maps, “its qualities and characteristics” or “regional identity,” and “self-identification” or one’s ties to the region (p. 3). Not all of these dimensions surface at every turn, but they appear often enough to contain a concept — regionalism — that otherwise threatens to become fuzzy and shape-shifting. The introduction opens with the regional ideas of John Wesley Powell and proceeds to discuss Josiah Royce and Frederick Jackson Turner — the West as nature and how people must adapt to it, the West’s cultural identity, and the West as synecdoche for the nation. Dorman then proceeds through six chapters, each covering fifteen to twenty years, to show howWestern regionalism took on different and expanding meanings in the context of those times.Chapter 1,“Back-Trailing”(from Hamlin Garland’s pullback from Minnesota toWisconsin ), begins with the 1880s land boom and the Purchase back issues of the Quarterly. Call 503.306.5230 or send an e-mail to museumstore@ohs.org.  OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 1890s Great Plains bust.Dorman’s comprehensiveness — and this is only the beginning — is evident as the first page and a half of the chapter positions Powell, Laura Ingalls (Wilder), Hamlin Garland,Theodore Roosevelt,Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Jules and Mari Sandoz , Walter Prescott Webb, Turner, and Ole Rolvaag as expressors of regionalism in one way or another. Such blanket coverage decorates every chapter; historians, literary figures, artists and sculptors (less often), city planners, and environmentalists stud almost every page. On this leisurely walk one finds many a good idea, many a novel observation, and many an arresting phrase. Readers who are not hurried will be rewarded. Chapter 2, “Walking” (beginning with Charles Lummis’s long walk to California), lays out...