BY THEN THE WEST OF MUIR’S YOUTH, AND OF ROOSEVELT’S, was a memory. The West still existed as a geographic zone, of course. The Great Plains still formed its eastern boundary, the Pacific its western. The Rockies and the Sierra Nevada were as tall as ever, the sky over the basin between the ranges as stingy as ever with moisture. The Missouri, Columbia and Colorado rivers still ran toward the sea.
But things had changed. The Great Plains were dotted with farms, including the bonanza spreads of Dakota and the debt-ridden parcels of Kansas and Nebraska. Railroads crossed the mountains, making the journey from St. Louis to San Francisco pleasant and swift. Dams were beginning to modify the aridity of the Great Basin and would soon restrain the flow of even the most powerful rivers of the West.
Something more essential had changed, too. The earlier West had been a zone of conflict; from the explosion of the Tonquin to the campaigns of U.S. soldiers against Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Captain Jack and Joseph, violence and armed conflict had characterized the American West. This hardly made the West unique in world history. Conflict has always marked the borderlands where peoples and cultures abut, and especially where one group has intruded on another. The Greeks fought their way across Asia Minor under Alexander; the sword of Caesar brought Gaul under the dominion of Rome; Spanish conquistadores, rather than Spanish friars, enforced Iberia’s will in the Americas; the Comanches dominated the southern plains, and the Sioux the northern, by killing or intimidating rival tribes.
But in the United States, by the nineteenth century such regular conflict was unique to the West. America’s earlier frontier had once been as violent: the “dark and bloody ground” of Kentucky saw more mayhem per square mile than any part of the trans-Mississippi West. Yet nearly all the tribes of the East had been destroyed or removed within a generation after independence. The conflict in the later West lasted longer, primarily because the region was so much larger. And while the organized violence continued, it was a defining characteristic of the West. When the violence ended, most brutally and definitively in the massacre at Wounded Knee, the West, in its historical sense, was no more.
THE WEST DISAPPEARED IN AN EMOTIONAL, OR PERHAPS sociological, sense as well. In American history the West had always represented opportunity; the West was the peculiar repository of American dreams. The dream of El Dorado had originated with the Spanish conquistadores, but it persisted deep into the American period of the West. The forty-niners were obvious descendants of Coronado; the cattle speculators of Dakota and the land-rushers of Oklahoma slightly less obvious. But material fortunes weren’t the only inspiration for Western dreams. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an easy water route from the Missouri to the Pacific. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman dreamed of Christian salvation for their Cayuse hosts. Brigham Young dreamed of a Mormon refuge beyond the reach of a gentile government.
The West had no monopoly on American dreaming. The entire American experiment in democracy was founded on a dream that ordinary people could govern themselves. And every immigrant to America came chasing a dream. But Western dreams were often larger, because the West was larger, and because for a long time it was largely unknown. In the American mind, the West was not so much a place as a condition; it was the blank spot on the map upon which grand dreams were projected.
Inevitably, the blank spot was filled in, by the very efforts of those seeking to attain their dreams. Some did attain them, at least in part. Many argonauts struck it rich in California. Many emigrants to Oregon were delighted at how their long journey ended. Theodore Roosevelt didn’t become a cattle king, but he became president, which was no small consolation.
More commonly, though, the reality fell short—often far short—of the dreams. The explosion of the Tonquin blasted John Jacob Astor’s dream of an American fur empire. The Whitmans died seeking their harvest of souls. The argonauts who ended up laboring long hours in the underground mines asked why they had ever come west. The cowboys who found themselves working the year around, at the beck of a cost-counting boss, wondered what had become of their freedom.
As the West passed from dream to reality, it became more like the East, until nothing significant distinguished the one from the other. A twentieth-century Horace Greeley might have sent his young protégé to Wall Street or Washington as readily as to the West.
Yet a residue remained. The gambling spirit of the gold rush found its echo in the venture capitalism of Silicon Valley. Hollywood was built by maverick filmmakers fleeing the constraints of Eastern cartels, much as American Texas was built by malcontents fleeing the constraints of debt and marriage. Dude ranches in Wyoming and Montana attracted cowboy wannabes in the twenty-first century in the same way working ranches in Dakota attracted dudes like Teddy Roosevelt in the nineteenth.
ROOSEVELT DIED IN 1919. THE MOST FAMOUS IMAGE THAT marked his passing was a sketch called “The Long, Long Trail,” which showed him in cowboy gear riding a spectral horse into a Western sky. Other figures from the earlier West had gone before. Joe Meek died in 1875, amused that having begun life in Washington County, Virginia, he was ending it in Washington County, Oregon. John Wesley Powell died in 1902, months after passage of the Newlands Act. Nez Perce Joseph died in 1904 on the Colville reservation of Washington state, still exiled from his beloved Wallowa Valley. Quanah Parker had crossed the cultural gap between his father’s people and his mother’s, and become a wealthy rancher; he died in 1911 in Oklahoma.
Black Elk outlasted them all. The Lakota visionary, witness to so much of his people’s history, and to the history of the West, never forgot what he saw at Wounded Knee, and what it meant. “A people’s dream died there,” he said many years later. “It was a beautiful dream.” Black Elk lived to the age of eighty-six, and died in 1950.