Incorporating Individuality: Nineteenth-Century Statemaking in the Far West

Abstract

In the century after the Civil War, fourteen new states were created out of America's western territories. Although their exuberant founders shared goals and assumptions about how these new states would function, David Alan Johnson argues that statemakers in California, Oregon, and Nevada took a course in the Far West in the decades before 1865 which differed significantly from the process of creating states in the East and later in the other trans-Mississippi western territories. The result was three very differing societies, which at the end of the nineteenth century still bore their founders' indelible imprint. Johnson divides his study into three sections: California, Oregon, and Nevada's territorial period; the statemaking process in each state; and the founders' legacies in the generation after statehood. While he draws comparisons to the earlier trans-Appalachian experience in the process by which these three territories achieved statehood, the emphasis is on the roles of ideology and political culture. He elucidates these two concepts by drawing finely wrought portraits of the writers of the three state constitu-tions who had a dramatic impact on their respective societies. Their greatest achievement, the author finds, was successfully incorporating their creations into the larger milieu of nineteenth-century America. The Far West region differed significantly from earlier frontiers. The three new states were isolated from their eastern contemporaries, not contiguous to them as earlier territories had been, so people who migrated to the Far West were often permanently cut-off from their original societies. Primitive transportation and communication networks afforded them few opportunities to remain in close contact. The new societies that resulted reflected this sense of separateness. They also reflected their founders' shared political, cultural, and religious