Elliot West’s Continental Reckoning is a massive book about a massive topic. West has already proven his ability to treat such topics brilliantly in his earlier works—The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado; Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier; and The Way to the West. He expertly combines economic, environmental, political, and cultural history, weaving each into a profoundly complex and compelling narrative. West is a good historian who knows his names and dates, but he never shies away from taking a larger, more sweeping view of the historical process. In this sense, he is at once mythic and judicious.

His newest book focuses on the years 1846 to 1877, a “Greater Reconstruction,” that also examines the years leading up to 1846, and to 1890. As such, this is a history of a moving and somewhat fluid nineteenth-century American West. To comprehend fully the American Civil War, the author persuasively argues, we must understand not only westward expansion but also the wars against the American Indians. For example, there’s “Bleeding Kansas” in every national narrative but where is “Bloodier California” in our textbooks? In addition to the white-only Jayhawk struggle for freedom, we must also understand the white American conquest of California and the domination of native lands. 

In so many fascinating ways, West has implicitly undone the thrust behind the 1619 Project with its myopic southern-centric worldview. “What about Hispanics, Asians, European immigrants, and Native Americans?” Continental Reckoning cries from every page. None of this should lead to the conclusion that West is somehow ignorant of black or southern (“Southeastern,” as he puts it) history, but only that each must be understood in a broader context and not made into a politicized fetish.

And yet, one might ask, is West undoing the anti-Americanism of the 1619 Project, or is he simply extending it? That question doesn’t give a simple answer. West is certainly attentive to the hardships suffered by often marginalized groups, but his discussion is nuanced, and he seems genuinely interested in understanding the varied motivations of different parties.

None of this—my praise or my questioning—should suggest that West is somehow timid or tepid in his book. The language describing the rape of the Californian Indians by white settlers was so detailed as to make this reviewer somewhat physically sick. The same can be said of his account of how the US Army viciously murdered thousands of horses during its many and varied campaigns against the Plains Indians. Such is the irresistible power of West’s research and writing.

With mythic eyes, West imagines just how much and how quickly our knowledge of western land changed across the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. By the time Western explorers came along, such as John Wesley Powell, there was already a rich tradition of mapping and detailing the West. “Only seventy years earlier the West had been a land of almost pure speculation—a place where Thomas Jefferson, probably the most widely read American, could expect to find wooly mammoths and descendants of ancient Welsh immigrants,” the author explains. By the eve of the American Civil War, then, “much of the country west of the one-hundredth meridian had been roughly described.” As West so wisely and stoically notes, men such as Lewis and Clark or John Wesley Powell were not mere spectators, but were interpreters. “Discovery is a creative act,” West claims, and “to enter new country is always to invent it.” 

As analytical as this all sounds, one must also recognize West’s ability to tell stories. At one point, he describes life in a western dugout, quoting at length from a frustrated mom.

As I sat beside my sick baby a bull snake fell [out of the ceiling] beside her on a flour sack. I killed it. A few minutes after I almost stepped on a rattlesnake by the bed in my bare feet. I killed it. An hour ago, a great long striped one darted out of the corner. I killed it. A few minutes ago an enormous bull snake got away from me and ran into the dirt. 

As the above indicates, there is never a dull moment in West’s writings, but he’s also quite the employer of facts and statistics. That is, he makes the numbers come alive. One could indeed become rather lost in what might have been the sheer, overwhelming data he presents. I can offer only a sampling of some of the most intriguing data points.

Here is the opening line of the book: “Between February 19, 1846, and July 4, 1848, the United States acquired more than 1.2 million square miles of land. It was far and away the greatest expansion in the nation’s history.” 

In his harrowing chapter on white abuses of California native Indians (mentioned above): “By one estimate ten thousand Californian Indians were kidnapped or enslaved between 1850 and 1863, twenty thousand if children are included.” Because of such horrors, the Californian Native “population dropped from around 150,000 in 1845 to about a third of that six years later, and to as few as 16,000 in 1880, a plunge of 90%. There, at least, the story developed into genocide, an open and concerted effort at ethnic annihilation.” 

Or, imagine the European horse, first loosed on the Great Plains by Pope’s rebellion against Spanish authority in Santa Fe, 1680. “By 1780, a scant hundred years after they began to spread across the West and coincident with the other American revolution cresting in the East, horse cultures were in place wherever they would take hold. What followed was an American version of a very old story. Its most obvious feature was a burst of affluence and a quickening pulse of life that by the time the United States expanded to the Pacific had spawned a standard of living that, two authorities suggest, was literally and visually rising. Plains equestrians stood taller than the soldiers they would fight, and Cheyennes may have been among the tallest people on earth.” 

Or, consider the void created by the sheer chaos of expansion and the lack of any meaningful authority. “As 1848 opened, nearly half of the United States had no formal government. California and Mexico were under temporary military rule, and the Oregon Country had an informal provisional government, but most of what the nation had acquired in 1846–48, plus all of the Louisiana Purchase north of the Missouri Compromise line, save Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, was beyond Washington’s effective authority.” 

Whatever the Thirteenth Amendment proclaimed at the end of the Civil War, forms of slavery still abounded in the Hispanic Southwest. “No one can know the extent of unfree labor in New Mexico by the 1860s, but a judge reported that the few thousand Americans were vastly outnumbered by ‘forty-four thousand peons.’ As for Indians living in forced servitude, New Mexico’s chief justice, testifying on Independence Day 1865, estimated between 1,500 and 3,000.” 

One of West’s most intriguing insights—echoing those of fellow historian Daniel Walker Howe—is that America expanded so readily and effectively, in large part, because it could communicate with and connect to its extremes. Technology, in essence, conquered time and space. “The nation’s 4,377 miles of railroads in 1844 multiplied seven times by the Civil War, and at the end of 1877 it was nearly 100,000 miles.” What, then, did this have to do with slavery? Arguments for and against slavery also extended to the farthest reaches of the frontier, with frontiersmen overwhelmingly embracing free labor rather than slave labor.

From any perspective, America’s conquest was outmatched and somewhat beyond imagination. “From the founding of Jamestown in 1607 until 1870, roughly 407 million acres were settled, and of that, 189 million were brought under cultivation,” West explains. “Between 1870 and 1900, 430 million acres were settled and 225 million acres improved. More land was converted to farms during the thirty years when Americans were shifting away from agriculture than during the previous 263 years of full-tilt agricultural absorption.” 

Yet, it wasn’t just land conquered, but land remade and, to use the terms of the time, “improved.” After all, “between 1866 and 1880, the nation’s output of wheat tripled and that of corn more than doubled.” 

This radically changed the environment, leading to a form of American exceptionalism, whether for the good or the bad. “The best estimates today put the population of the plains bison at its height, around the time of [Stephen] Long’s expedition, at about twenty-eight million. A close count in 1889 found 1,091, a decline of 99.999965 percent.”

Again, though, just as American Indian and bison populations declined, American capitalism flourished. “The San Francisco Mining and Stock Exchange opened in 1862, with a few members buying seats for fifty dollars each. Within a year 1,300, mostly mining concerns, were trading there.”

If I had one complaint against Elliott West, it’s simply that he avoids labeling Progressives as Progressives. Rather, he refers to them as nationalists who embraced science, racism, and the laboratory. To me, there is no better definition of a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Progressive—a nationalist who embraces science, racism, and the laboratory. 

At one point in the book, he notes that environmental heroes such as John Wesley Powell and his numerous allies argued that Indians “would have to be set apart in places akin to social laboratories and workshops where benevolent directors would conduct them up a ramp of progress through those ‘ethical periods.’” For Progressives (my label) like Powell, reservations would serve as laboratories. After all, “they assumed the cultures they studied were, and should be, doomed.” 

West even admits, that these people were involved in a “collective act of breathtaking arrogance.” 
A book this massive deserves a massive review. Whatever its faults, they must be set alongside its many and overwhelming virtues. Indeed, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, is a model book. Buy it, nurture it, cherish it. Such histories appear only infrequently in our impatient age.