Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
By Elliott West
University of Nebraska Press 2023

Historian Elliott West opens his impressive new book Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (part of the “History of the American West” series from the University of Nebraska Press) by pointing out to his readers that his book is about a radical, unprecedented explosion. The formerly-independent Republic of Texas was admitted to the United States in 1845, and that “land gulp” was a harbinger of the astonishing growth to come. As West writes, between February 1846 and July 1848, the United States acquired more than 1.2 million square miles of land. “If you prefer to think more globally,” West writes, “imagine that during the twenty-eight months and fifteen days after you read this sentence, the United States will add to itself land just short of that in modern India.” 

It’s inevitable that an explosion of this magnitude would lead to chaos, plunder, and tragedy, and the same settler impulse that prompted westward expansion almost simultaneously prompted an equivalent impulse to tame the narrative, to smooth out the sequences and motivations to fit a self-justifying stories like those included in Theodore Roosevelt’s The WInning of the West only 40 years later. Many of the kinds of characters and cultural landmarks in such old-fashioned traditional narratives of the West are present in Continental Reckoning, but in these pages they’re wonderfully enhanced, enlivened, and changed. 

West writes about frontier politics, massive mining operations, increasingly savage and duplicitous warfare against native populations, and ruthless exploitation of immigrant labor to make it all happen. But West makes plenty of time for all the familiar picturesque elements readers might be expecting in any narrative of the Old West … including rowdy mining camps that epitomize what West refers to as “the testosterone West.” “From the start literary tourists described hell-roaring, brawling, whoring, hard-drinking cowtowns and other moral sinks,” West writes. “This West was a land both rootin’ and tootin’.” 

And ultimately, despite warfare and bravery and squalor and unexpected glints of comedy, the most basic element of West’s story remains the same and becomes increasingly obvious:

Two points were clear at the end. Control of the underground wealth gravitated to those with the pools of capital needed to stay in the legal games that quickly became as much a part of the business as sinking shafts and pumping water. And that litigation brought a decision – the triumph of the single-ledge view – that by its essence gave the nod to concentrated control of whatever wealth was, in fact, there. In courtrooms, as in the mechanics of mining, whether of placer gravels or the deep sleeping veins  and depositions, a single reality emerged: capital ruled.

West’s book is immensely scholarly, rounded off with extensive notes and a generous bibliography, but its most noticeable feature is its readability; Continental Reckoning might have a boring title, but that title is the only boring part of its 600-page length. For a new standard history of the so-called winning of the West, readers could scarcely do better.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.