In 1987 Patricia Nelson Limerick published The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, and the stormclouds of revisionist criticism of Turner's frontier thesis at last broke with full force:
Limerick's book eviscerates Turner's view of the settlement of the West. Walter Nugent, in a 1994 article, nicely summarizes the main thrusts of Limerick's argument, which were given more succinct shape as a "non-manifesto" for a New Western History at a 1989 Santa Fe symposium:
the West as a place, not the frontier as a process, should be our focus. “The term ‘frontier’ is nationalistic and often racist (in essence, the area where white people get scarce)” .... The history of European advance across North America is better expressed by “invasion, conquest, colonization, exploitation, development, [and] expansion of the world market.” Turner used “conquest” too, but the point is not the word itself, but rather the need to pay attention to the conquered as well as the conquerors. The second point follows: whatever it was that happened, it involved “the convergence of diverse people—women as well as men, Indians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, Afro-Americans. . . with each other and with the natural environment”.... The interaction of all these groups, whether in competition or cooperation, is the important thing. “The West was not where we escaped each other, but where we all met”.... White males were certainly present, but so were many others whom Turnerian history has slighted.
Third point: the interaction has continued and is still happening. The “frontier” did not end in 1890, as Turner claimed; another hundred years of rich western history has followed, and it demands historians’ attention. Fourth, the western story is neither one of triumph over adversity, with the resulting ennoblement of the American character, nor a unique and exceptional subjugation of an empty land (for Indians were virtually invisible in the traditional story except as enemies who resisted the inevitable). Rather, it is a great moral ambiguity. “In western American history, heroism and villainy, virtue and vice, and nobility and shoddiness appear in roughly the same proportions as they appear in any other subject of human history. . . . This is only disillusioning to those who have come to depend on illusions”
A couple of years later (1991), historian Richard White published two books, both of which reinforced Limerick's arguments:
In his magisterial ‘It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own’: A New History of the American West, White delineates the forming of a region...where racial tensions and discriminations, extractive industries, highly urban settlements and a common dependence on the federal government were at least as important as the traditional elements we associate with a rural and independent West.
In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, White
establish[ed] a meaningful new framework for the analysis of Indian-white relations. Rather than setting up easy victim-exploiter categories or glorifying Native American resistance, White examines how violence, cultural innovation, confrontation, and accommodation worked on the ground, in specific interactions and conflicts between and within settler and indigenous groups. The author views Native Americans and Europeans soberly, showing the deep divisions on each side in relation to questions of power, legitimacy, and meaning.
Thus, the history of The Wild West is increasingly a work-in-progress. Folks nostalgic for the John Wayne version...
..., which adherents of the New Western History insist is but one facet of a many-faceted story, can always limit their collecting focus to Turner and his disciples....
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