The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West by Stewart L. Udall

Abstract

measure because farmers specialized inwheat and did not follow Hill's advice to diversify into livestockmight be a topic for some future historian's efforts. Whether Hill's ideas about livestock were worth thefarmers'time toponder isdebatable. Strom convincingly shows that,by the end of his life, Hill's advice on suchmatters was given littleattention.Yet James J. Hill rarely made bad decisions in the railroad business. He was foremost among the railroadmen who saw theplains as a gigantic field of golden grain that could provide revenue foreveryrailroad serving the region, indefinitelyinto the future. A centuryafterhe leftthe scene,very fewof the miles of railroadHill constructed have been abandoned. Whenever U.S. or Canadian railroads are in themood to sellpart of their trackage in grain-producing regions to smaller rail operators, there isno lackof investorseager to get into the business.What worked inthe latenineteenth cen turyseems towork justaswell inthetwenty-first. Can one thinkof any other region or any other agricultural specialization thathas changed as little ? thathas been as "sustainable," in current jargon?as theoneHill put inplace? That, surely, is the true measure of the man's insight. The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the Historyofthe OldWest By Stewart L. Udall Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2002. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, index. 267 pages. $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stephen Haycox University ofAlaska, Anchorage In The ForgottenFounders: Rethinking the His tory of theOld West, Stewart Udall has written a deeply personal plea fora fuller, more careful understanding of theWest's history. Hollywood, novelists, social critics, and even historians, Udall argues, have created myths thatdistort historical reality. Most particularly, theyhave obscured the"ordinary folk" whom he calls "wagon settlers," courageous families who trekkedwest before the railroads to break the land and produce small aggregates of agricul tural surplus (pp. 4-5). Udall favorablyquotes the lateGeorge Ellsworth,who called the settlers' cultivated farmsand ranches "small footholds of civilization."Udall's western forebearsbuilt such footholds, and he recounts their sacrifices and achievements with great love and respect. Udall distinguishes clearlybetween thepre railroad West and thatfollowing the technologi cal impact of investorssuch as theGuggenheims inLeadville, Jay Gould and Andrew Mellon in Coeur d'Alene, and E.H. Harriman and J.P. Mor gan in Sonora and Chihuahua. Udall castigates William G. Robbins forascribing the character of allwestern history to the influenceof absen tee, corporate, capitalist exploiters of the region's natural wealth in Colony and Empire. Such broad outlines, Udall insists, led Robbins and others to overlook thehuman faces and stories of thepre-railroad settlers, which would reveal "what animated individuals and families" and would help "develop a sense ofwhat thesemen andwomen faced and an idea of the magnitude of their achievements" (pp. 10-11). Thus, Udall names several pre-industrial pioneers and recounts their travels and efforts. Among those whose contributions Udall cel ebrates are Edward Milo and Amelia Owens Webb, forexample, aswell as William Bailey and Lucretia Bracken Maxwell, JacobV. and Louisa Bonelli Hamblin, Levi andMargery Wilkerson Stewart, and JohnDoyle and Emma Batchelor 648 OHQ vol. 105, no. 4 Lee. JohnLee, who was made the scapegoat for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was Stewart Udall's great-grandfather. Udall statescategori cally that thevictims of themassacre bore no responsibility for it whatsoever, and he recounts his own role inhelping tobring descendants of victims and perpetrators together to dedicate a monument to the event near Cedar City,Utah, in 1990. In his own poem carved on the monu ment, Udall asks, "how to cleanse the stained earth,how to forgiveunforgivable acts" (p. 72). Historians have forgotten, Udall writes, that religionwas a central factor in shaping the early settlersand their culture. It led them to create caring societies with the shared goals neces sary for social progress.Not just the Mormons, but Catholics and Protestants also accepted religious society's restraints on their material appetites. Udall contrasts those societies with thatproduced by theCalifornia gold rush, one of themost "hare-brained ventures" inhistory (p. 132).The gold rush encouraged a self-cen tered, socially destructive individualism that was uncharacteristic of the pre-railroad west. That individualism was particularly manifest both in the racism directed against Hispanics, Chinese, and Indians and in the"environmental havoc" wreaked on California and otherwestern landscapes. Scholars...