Empires, Nations, and Families

The subtitle of Empires, Nations, and Families is A History of the North American West, 1800-1860. That's a big subject. And Anne F. Hyde's book is sprawling, covering the West from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles to Taos to Texas. But her focus is on something more domestic than the tales of the West after the Civil War. Her thesis is that the West grew based on the influence of the three nouns in her title.

The book, as one might expect, covers so much ground that it's hard to summarize. She starts with the fur trade, which was the single most important commodity in the early days after Lewis and Clark: "Fur and Indians, which have moved into the realm of quaint now, were at the center of local, national, and international concern between 1800 and 1860. And family enterprises operated at the trade's core. In a world of political revolution, nation building, and international rivalry, business and family life thrived in spite of these potentially destabilizing distractions."

Hyde discusses the major players in the fur game, from the Chouteaus and Sublettes of Missouri to John McLoughlin of Fort Vancouver on the Columbia (in what was then Canada). It's interesting to read about what St. Louis was like in 1800. Eighty percent of the people born there had some percentage of Native blood. It was very cosmopolitan, so much so that Washington Irving, on a visit, was disgusted: "Irving's vision, littered with descriptors like 'squaw,' 'half-breed,' 'negroes,' and 'blacks,' has the feel of world gone culturally mad, with Indians inside, people and animals sleeping in inappropriate places, a sign of what happens when whites mix."

Indians, of course, is the other dominant feature of Hyde's book. In 1800 in St. Louis, for the most part Anglo-Americans, the French, and Indians lived in harmony, trading and intermarrying. But things wouldn't last that way. We learn about Comancheria, the most successful Indian nation of the continent, in which Comanches had domain over most of what is today Texas for over a century. As I have learned in other books, Hyde notes that Comanches were by far the scariest Indians on the plains. We also learn about the turf war between the Osage and the Cherokee. The latter were removed from their ancestral home into Oklahoma, where the Osage already lived. This was not welcome to the Osage.

There is also a great deal about the Indian wars in the Pacific Northwest, about which I knew nothing about except I had heard of the Whitman massacre, in which missionaries trying to convert the Klamath Indians were wiped out. In fact, there are a lot of massacres discussed in the book, including the one in Taos, where one local official was beheaded, the Sand Creek massacre (in 1864, technically outside of Hyde's parameters) and the Mountain Meadow massacre of 1857, when Mormons slaughtered a party of pioneers on their way to California. Mormons were a big thorn in the U.S. government's side for ages. Hyde gives us a short but vivid history of them, from Joseph Smith onward.

Also covered is the Mexican War, and before that Stephen F. Austin's founding of Anglo colonies there, and the settling of California, which only came to the U.S. after the Mexican War. One amusing anecdote is a U.S. naval warship taking Monterrey without a shot, as the commander believed that Mexico and the U.S. were at war. When he was informed otherwise, he apologized and left.

The book is a tad on the academic side, but Hyde interjects at various points, particularly in discussing the violence of the period, and the lack of respect for land ownership: "A nation of squatters who used violence to establish rights and to dispossess other people needs to recognize itself in these actions. Anglo-American settlers, however laudable their individual intentions, chose to settle on land owned by others and demanded that the U.S. government use all of its power to remove them, making these 'ordinary nineteenth-century frontiersman' into killers."