Dreams of El Dorado by H. W. Brands

Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West 
by H. W. Brands
Basic Books, 2019

Sooner or later – and it’s usually sooner – introductory histories of the American West have to grapple with the difference between the West that nineteenth-century Americans experienced and the West folks today remember. They are rarely the same, in part, because the West was sold before it was settled. The hucksters who hawked it played faster and looser with facts than later historians were allowed. Partly also the U.S. now stands behind a century and a half of pulp fiction, Wild West shows, and Hollywood hoopla that layered on their own distortions. Most of all, though, people don’t always want to remember the West as it was.

If all historians wrote as well as H. W. Brands, that might not be the case. Brands’ sweeping new overview Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West tackles familiar shibboleths but wears its revisionism lightly and never becomes pedantic. Despite the book’s ambitious subtitle, it is not a textbook-style synthetic history like Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher’s The American West or Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”. Instead, it is a tapestry of many stories, some familiar and some representative, grouped into larger narratives about the Lewis and Clark expedition, the fur trade, the origins of Texas, the Oregon Trail, the industrialization and corporatization of the West, and the settling of the semi-arid “Middle Border.”

Bracketing the lot, almost like an emcee, is a familiar face to Brands’ readers – Theodore Roosevelt. Brands was wise to choose him. Though for millions of Americans Roosevelt represented the personification of the “self-made man,” he actually was a skilled politician who knew how to get people to work together, and as head of the federal government, he did not blind himself to Washington’s role in the region. As such, he introduces two of the book’s most important revisions.

First, contra innumerable novels and movies, the West was the site of collective action at least as often – and often more successfully – than it was the playground of rugged individualists. Yes, there were loners, but they probably weren’t the folks who survived, and they certainly didn’t prevail. Migrants, for example, soon learned they had to rely on each other or on those who had gone before them. Neighbors tipped each other off to better routes, provided victuals, or replaced broken wagons. Sometimes they even set up formal arrangements like the Mormon Perpetual Emigrating Fund. Likewise, those who benefited from federal land, be they gold miners, ranchers, or farmers, soon realized that “anything goes” was not a viable business plan. Rules were needed to protect claims, grass, or water. Indeed, for a people often associated with anti-government attitudes, early Westerners spent a lot of time forming governments, including the pre-territorial Oregon Republic and the more famous Texas Republic, which, as Brands points out, was peopled by illegal American immigrants into Mexico.

Then there was the federal government itself, the subject of the book’s second important revision. Brands does not mince words:

The creation of the American West, as the American West, was arguably the greatest accomplishment in the history of the American federal government. The American East had been the handiwork of the original states, which antedated the Constitution and had claimed territory to the Mississippi. The West, by contrast, was called into American existence by the federal government. The overwhelming majority of land in the West was initially federal land; nearly all the Western states began life as parts of federal territories. In time many Westerners would become harsh critics of federal power – demonstrating the age-old habit of children being ungrateful to their parents.

Even early entrepreneurs, like the fur trader J. J. Astor or the cattle magnate Joseph McCoy benefited from prior investment or risk-taking by Washington. Astor’s experience was bittersweet – what he learned of the West from Lewis and Clark, and what he gained from U.S. diplomats who negotiated trade routes to the Far East and kept Oregon open (or open enough) for American trappers, he lost with the Treaty of Ghent in 1815. But McCoy benefited from government largesse unambiguously: the cattle that arrived in Abilene filled their bellies on free grass from Texas to Kansas, and the railroads that hauled them east were built with federal assistance.

In telling familiar tales in new ways, Brands succeeds at something that is hard to do – he provides a broad overview of a complex subject that doesn’t disintegrate into a mélange of disconnected anecdotes. Brands has a writer’s nose for good stories and a historian’s eye for connecting stories together. Along the way, he leads readers through mountain snowstorms, across endless grasslands, and down the rapids of the Colorado River. Dreams of El Dorado is a fantastic place to begin for readers who crave a picture of Western development peopled with famous characters and events, and it’s a fun overview for those familiar with the subject who want to watch a master historian sort fact from fancy.

—Kip Wedel is an associate professor of History and Politics at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas.