American Frontier and West

The careers of the senior Army officers at the end of the nineteenth century were highlighted by extreme self-sacrifice and devotion to duty and country, but history has largely forgotten these patriots. One of these officers was Brigadier General Samuel M. Whitside, a distinguished cavalry officer who faithfully served his nation from 1858 to 1902. He commanded at every level from platoon to department for thirty-two of his forty-three years in service, including Army posts, such as Camp Huachuca, Jefferson Barracks, and Fort Sam Houston, the Departments of Eastern Cuba and Santiago and Puerto Principe, Cuba, a provisional cavalry brigade, the 10th and 5th Cavalry Regiments, a squadron in the 7th Cavalry Regiment, and a troop and platoon in the 6th Cavalry Regiment. The pinnacle of his career was serving as the Commanding General of the Department of Eastern Cuba before retiring in June 1902 as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army.
Despite his many contributions to the Army during his forty-three years of service, most history books record only two events during his career: the founding of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and his role as a battalion commander at the Battle of Wounded Knee Creek. While these two events are arguably the most noteworthy in Whitside’s four decades in the U.S. cavalry, a look at his entire career provides an insight into the great personal sacrifices that the officers and their families made in the frontier Army in the later half of the nineteenth century. This thesis will show that a century after his retirement from the Army, Brigadier General Samuel M. Whitside’s lifetime in uniform stands as a hallmark of selfless service to not only his descendants, but more importantly, to all military officers serving and yet to serve.

The frontier which means an imaginary line has been associated with American history since the early ages of English settlements. In his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, Frederick Jackson Turner suggests that “At the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant” (Turner 9). In other words, beyond the frontier, people will adopt a new way of living, so when they reach the frontier, the settlers leave the old habits behind and transform themselves into something new. In this context, the frontier promises setters opportunity, dreams, and fruitfulness. However, this new way of living does not mean a prosperous life but carries many risks. Therefore, frontier also means uncertainty and obscurity.  It is open for development and proverbs adventure and discovery. Considering the social, political, and economic situation of women in America in the 19th century, the frontier experience was simply for " for white, heterosexual, able-bodied men to carve out the future of the human race in a political, social, and military reiteration of nineteenth-century desire" (Gurr 32). Because women had "few political, legal, or social rights and were expected to be subservient to their husbands and fathers in all matters," (Curtis 1) the frontier meant to reinforce masculinity, so the frontier thesis was directly associated with masculinity by social norms. First coined in R. W. Connell's 1993 article “The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History,” the term “frontier masculinity” (Connel 612)  means the performativity of hypermasculinity that men constructed on the frontier. The myth of American cowboys exemplifies frontier masculinity in this context because the cowboys constantly heading to the West took all of the masculine codes with them. For example, they favored gun violence, they were aggressive and "wise" figures. Moreover, they acted on impulses and they felt that they had to civilize nature because they were superior to "uncivilized". In his essay “The Rodeo and the West,"  Kimmel says "West is a world of men, a world where they test themselves against the forces of nature and tame it" (Kimmel 1). The frontier era in America came to an end in 1890 when the U.S Bureau of the Census said that the frontier was now closed and there would be no further white settling.

Welcome to the "Ways In" section of this Macat analysis. This is an introductory section, summarising the most important points of this work in one 10-minute read.

Macat's Analyses are definitive studies of the most important books and papers in the humanities and social sciences.

Each analysis is written by an academic specialist in the field. Each one harnesses the latest research to investigate the influences that led to the work being written, the ideas that make it important, and the impact that it has had in the world.

A powerful resource for students, teachers and lifelong learners everywhere, our analyses are proven by the University of Cambridge to improve critical thinking skills.

Read the whole of this analysis and explore our library at www.macat.com.

This thesis proposes an existential analysis of the ethical dimension of film. Its goal is to illuminate the role of fiction in creating and testing moral worlds. It does so by examining Unforgiven, a Western film by Clint Eastwood. This examination provides the grounded analysis of a specific moral universe, relating it to earlier analyses of the Western genre. In doing so, the thesis stakes a claim for ethical textual analysis as an alternative to formalism and other established approaches to analyzing film. This thesis examines film as an ethically significant art form. It argues that film is a crucial laboratory for ethical discussion in which the lifeworld, and the representation of lifeworld are interdependent. This interdependence creates a locus of ethical obligation requiring ethical consideration.

One issue inherent in film as a locus of ethical obligation is Paul Ricoeur’s concept that relations among human beings are symmetrical. This symmetry is intrinsic to the relation between film viewers and the characters in the films they view. For films to have emotional and intellectual meaning, viewers must understand film characters as persons who confront the audience with ethical dilemmas and actions. These characters are important precisely because the ethical dilemmas they face and the actions they take resemble those of viewers who watch a film.

In this perspective, films participate in constructing the nomothetic universe of the viewer, enabling the viewer to reflect upon the nomos a film evokes. The viewer experiences film as an ethical and existential text, enabling the viewer to reflect in ways similar to Ricoeur’s description of philosophy as reflection on human existence. The symbolic form of film experience renders the ethical and existential issues of human experience accessible. This permits the viewer to grasp these issues in human concrete terms. Film genres present human experience by representing a lifeworld that permits engagement and reflection.

In this thesis, scene-by-scene analysis of the unfolding narrative recapitulates the experience of viewing the film. The temporal experience of viewing emulates Ricoeur’s narrative structure of ethical decision as well as the structure of interpretation. As narrative, Unforgiven creates a world to tell a story. As philosophy, Unforgiven highlights the ethical and existential problems of human responsibility and the status of the subject. As a work of art, Unforgiven creates a surplus of meaning that meets each viewer on a hermeneutical horizon as individual and different as one viewer is from the next.

This catalogue published by The State Historical Society of Missouri (Columbia, Mo., 2007), discusses the art historical significance of the lithographs that appeared in Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s nineteenth-century book, the "The History of the Indian Tribes of North America," (1836 to 1844), a three-volume publication that included lithographic portraits of 117 Native Americans.  This catalogue includes illustrations and short essays on twenty-nine of these portraits.  The images are discussed as records of diplomatic contact between cultures in which clothing, jewelry, expression, and point-of-view all provide information about Euro-American's understanding of native peoples during the nineteenth century.

Cowboys as nomadic people are closely related to nature, so they have recently become the focus of ecomasculinity studies apart from men’s studies. Cowboys, one of the pioneers of Manifest Destiny, turned the West into a feminine or uncivilized concept and they saw the land as a virgin, or as a piece waiting to be tamed. Thus, in a way, nature became the victim of male domination. Under ecofeminism, some people have wanted to stop and dwell on this "man-made" exploitation. According to them, women, like nature, are victims of male domination, so as nature is liberated, women will also be liberated. However, for those who support equality in social, economic, and political life, these kinds of images caused by toxic masculinity are damaging.  They think like women and other people men also are aware and sensitive towards nature. They reject being put into one specific box again created by hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, they have tried to change this perception, men’s exploitation of women and nature, by creating a new field of gender studies which is ecomasculinity. While masculinity studies mirror the social and gender repressions that men queer men or those who identify themselves as men experience in daily life, ecomasculinity studies show the relationship between men and nature and work to break the perception of domination that men establish on nature. Nowadays, ecomasculinist studies have been a part of everyday life which means there are not just scholarly articles about ecomasculinity, also people start to come across theories about ecomasculinity in literature, popular culture, and cinema.

(1) The nativist leader called the "Shawnee Prophet" is claimed to have predicted the eastern North American solar eclipse of 1806. This appears to have been true, but I argue that knowledge of this coming eclipse was widespread on the Illinois frontier and the Prophet could have learned of it from any number of people. There is no arguing, however, of the dramatic effect that viewing this eclipse had on both Native American and white American viewers.

The second article discusses the presence of celestial images (moon, stars, and solar images in Illinois rock art). Although these could be eclipse representations, other explanations are possible.

“Boys, be ambitious.”  The parting words of William S. Clark, agricultural educator, to his students at the Imperial College of Agriculture in Sapporo, Hokkaido echo the frontier spirit of his own country, the United States, in the nineteenth century.  Having just emerged from a Civil War, Americans like Clark came to a Japan newly-emerged from the Meiji Restoration to help settle Hokkaido, known as Japan’s “Wild West.”  In doing so, the Americans took the lessons they learned from settling their own frontier, including exploitation of Native Peoples and nature, and applied it to Japan, which had for centuries exploited its own native people, the Ainu.  The closing of Japan’s “last frontier,” Hokkaido, home of the native Ainu, in the nineteenth century under former samurai mirrors the closing of America’s “last frontier,” the West, at the expense of its Native Peoples, as Americans like William S. Clark and Horace Capron helped the Japanese colonize Hokkaido and imparted the American frontier spirit on the island.

The romanticised Wild West costumed motif of folk-rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y) on the cover of their Déjà vu LP album from 1970 evokes the American Civil War rebel and Wild West outlaw, along with the rifle-toting heroic frontier scout, the Spanish/Mexican vaquero, and the Native American. Three photographs, taken during a single Déjà vu photo session by the photographer Tom Gundelfinger O’Neal, have been line-drawn for the present article by the design technologist and illustrator Marianne Bloch Hansen to enable a close analysis of details of dress, weapons, props, and the shifting positions of band members. The costumed images are considered as artefacts with a view to revealing the motivating circumstances behind that which is seen in the photos. This is accomplished by considering the costumes and staging within the Déjà vu cover motif on three distinct levels, as a genre item, a performance, and a product. The focus is on a specific political, social and cultural space, America of the late 1960s-early 1970s youth rebellion. Contemporary editorials, interviews, articles, and advertisements in the music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone magazine are utilised as sources. The imagery raises intriguing questions about its underlying style prototypes and patterns of style influences. I also query whether the costuming of CSN&Y amounts to a pastiche of the sort originally suggested by Fredric Jameson in ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984). In answer to this, I show that, as pastiche, the Déjà vu motif constitutes a self-conscious and emotional refiguration of the received Hollywood myth of the Wild West. Whatever significance the Déjà vu album cover motif has as a source for fashion history depends on ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ questions asked by the historian which can shed light on circumstances that explain the motif. It is thereby made evident that the Déjà vu cover motif with its costumed and heavily armed ‘outlaws’ is in response to an America rent by social tensions contiguous with the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, as well as fears of revolutionary violence and of notorious murders committed by the Charles Manson ‘family,’ for example, while also suggesting an ironic sense of failure of the youth counterculture. The broadly heuristic objective of the article is to demonstrate methodological sourcing and analysis of images of costumed rock performers as a witness to history.

From the time of the Latter-day Saints' arrival in the Great Salt Basin in 1847 to the dispatch of U.S. Army troops in 1857, the Mormons were very close to establishing their prophesied temporal Kingdom of God. The isolation of the Mormon settlement and the commitment of the settlers who made the overland journey to the Church made it possible to build the theocracy that had failed in Missouri and Illinois. The ten years between 1847 and 1857, free of serious outside interference, allowed the Saints to assume control of all aspects of life in the territory. The total power over the physical, spiritual, and civil realms enabled the Saints to stand against outside influences until the end of the nineteenth century. Non-Mormon's were not part of the Church's plans for the Kingdom and those who were not willing to be part of the theocracy were harassed, threatened, or physically driven out. The systems of government that existed in other parts of the United States were used to further the Saints' designs for their perfect millennial state. The decade of 1847-57 is pivotal in understanding how a marginal sect grew to be the influential international organization of today.

Contained within this volume, number 29 in our series of Publications in Cultural Heritage, is the story of the Carrizo Creek Station and the once heavily traveled Southern Emigrant Trail. The Carrizo Wash is located on the far southeast boundary of Anza–Borrego Desert State Park and where a small underground current rises to the surface forming a meandering stream and spring. This desert oasis was the first reliable source of flowing water west of the Colorado River and thus became the focal point of all those who would brave the southern crossing to and from California. No doubt it was known to the indigenous prehistoric people and was a way station along the trail system used to traverse the Colorado Desert and the Cuyamaca Mountains. It was along these same ready-made paths that the late 18th century Spanish entradas of De Anza and Fages followed. The first known European penetration of the “Carrizo Corridor” was in 1772 by Fages traveling east from San Diego in pursuit of Army deserters. Following the Yuma uprising of 1781 the trail network was effectively closed until the 1820s when Mexican herders and later overland fur trappers began regularly using the southern route into California. By the 1830’s new branches of the trail were established one of which after passing through the Carrizo Wash threaded the mountains through the San José and San Felipe Valleys. This route became the preferred route by the late 1840s after American settler Jonathan Warner had established his “ranch” and it would be the same route used by the American military expeditions of both Kearney’s Army of the West and the Mormon Battalion during the brief Mexican/American War. It would be the Carrizo Corridor and “Warner’s Pass” that, beginning in 1848, thousands of gold seekers would travel in route to the placer mines of the Sierra foothills. The travails of this flood tide eventually led in 1855 to the establishment of a small adobe Army outpost at the Carrizo Creek Spring which by 1857 became an important link in the first overland transcontinental mail service along the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line. In 1858 the Overland Mail Company better known as the Butterfield Line was using the Carrizo Creek Station as part of its much larger and complex string of support stations. The Civil War and intercontinental railroad effectively put an end to this mail service and the Carrizo Creek Station, although still occupied and witness to cattle drives, went into a steady decline. Historical and archaeological evidence present a picture of the Carrizo Stage Station as an isolated frontier outpost. The small adobe and jacal buildings were constructed of materials found on or near the site. Based on vernacular architectural designs common to northern Mexico, they were well-suited to life on the desert frontier but appeared as rude “backwoods” dwellings to travelers from the eastern United States. The station’s isolated location in an unsettled and dangerous frontier required an increased emphasis on weapons for personal protection as well as hunting. The situation of difficult supply lines and an increased need for fire arms is reflected in the decreased percentages of consumer and kitchen items and the high value for munitions when compared to artifact assemblages representing households on the California coast. Also reflective of its situation was evidence of the blending of multiple culinary traditions. The American Southwest at this time had recently been annexed from Mexico and remained largely unsettled. It was a land where Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo-American cultures were mixing and blending. Evidence of the combining of the dietary traditions of these cultures was seen in the faunal analysis, bottle glass assemblage, and Native American ceramics at the Carrizo Stage Station. In recognition of the importance of this isolated frontier outpost it has been included as part of the Southern Overland Trail Cultural Preserve within Anza Borrego Desert State Park.

Was haben ein Western-Film und ein Science-Fiction-Film gemein? Auf den ersten Blick scheinbar nichts. Beide operieren mit komplett unterschiedlichen Topoi: Der Western mit Cow- boys, Pferden und dem Wilden Westen, Science-Fiction hingegen mit Astronaut*innen, Raum- schiffen und dem Weltraum. Und doch bestehen mehr Gemeinsamkeiten, als der Schein trügt. Ikonographisch wie auch erzählerisch evozieren US-amerikanische Science-Fiction-Filme wie THE MARTIAN (Ridley Scott, US 2015) und INTERSTELLAR (Christopher Nolan, US 2014) das ursprünglich dem Western intrinsische Frontier-Narrativ. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es daher, zu untersuchen, in welchem Ausmass der Frontier-Mythos auch in Science-Fiction implementiert wird. Wie wird in THE MARTIAN und INTERSTELLAR die an den Western-Mythos angelehnte Weltraumeroberung narrativ als auch ästhetisch dargestellt und welches Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Kosmos wird dadurch etabliert?

A discussion of the Imaginary Wild West and the European country and western music scene, published in The Western Way, the official publication of the International Western Music Association. It's drawn from a longer paper and research, versions of which I presented at UCLA, the American History Association, and elsewhere

The total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017 has been called the Great American Eclipse. But it is not the first eclipse to deserve that title. In the summer of 1878, when the American West was still wild, hundreds of astronomers and thousands of tourists traveled by train to Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas to witness America's first "Great Eclipse."

America's First Great Eclipse tells the story of a country, and its scientists, on the brink of a new era. Near the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States was barely a hundred years old, American astronomers were taking the lead in a science that Europeans had dominated for centuries. Scientists like Samuel Langley, Henry Draper, Maria Mitchell, and even the inventor Thomas Edison, were putting America at the forefront of what was being called the "new astronomy."

On July 29, 1878, having braved treacherous storms, debilitating altitude sickness, and the threat of Indian attacks, they joined thousands of East-coast tourists and Western pioneers as they spread out across the Great Plains and climbed to the top of 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, all to glimpse one of nature's grandest spectacles: a total solar eclipse.

It was the first time in history so many astronomers observed together from higher elevations. The Rocky Mountain eclipse of 1878 was not only a turning point in American science, but it was also the beginning of high-altitude astronomy, without which our current understanding of the Universe would be impossible.

22 illustrations.

The Lewis and Clark expedition  was camped at Pillar Rock on the Columbia River on November 7th 1805, and some historians have interpreted Clark's writings as to suggest they could see the Pacific Ocean from there. This paper demonstrates that a view of the Ocean from Pillar Rock is not possible. This article was published by the Lewis and Clark Heritage Trail Foundation in their journal "We Proceeded On", May 2009.

This essay uncovers the environmental and historical conditions that played a role in cyberspace’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Tracing both fictional and critical constructions of cyberspace in a twenty-year period from the publication of William Gibson Sprawl trilogy (1984) to the telecommunications reform act (1996), I argue that cyberspace’s infinite, virtual territory provided a solution to the apparent ecological crisis of the 1980s: the fear that the United States was running out of physical room to
expand due to overdevelopment. By discursively transforming the technology of cyberspace into an electronic frontier, technologists, lobbyists and journalists turned cyberspace into a solution for the apparent American crisis of overdevelopment and resource loss. In a period when Americans felt detached from their own environment, cyberspace became a new frontier for exploration and an “American space” to which the (white) user belonged as an Indigenous inhabitant. Even William Gibson’s critique
of the sovereign cyberspace user in the Sprawl trilogy masks the violence of cybercolonialism by privileging the white American user. Sprawl portrays the impossibility of escaping overdevelopment through cyberspace, but routes this impossibility through the specter of racial contamination by Caribbean hackers and Haitian gods. This racialized frontier imaginary shaped the form of internet technologies throughout the 1990s, influencing the modern user’s experience of the internet as a private space under their sovereign control. In turn, the individualism of the internet experience
restricts our ability to create collective responses to the climate crisis, encouraging internet-users to see themselves unattached to larger conditions.

One of the characteristics which most marks the Uncharted series of video games is its traversing of global space, reprising the classic tropes of Imperial adventure stories in which the rest of the world is available for Euro-American quest narratives, masculinity-proving scenarios and the establishment of hierarchies of value in which local inhabitants’ priorities are written over by those of white males from the centres of metropolitan power.  This chapter investigates the residues of imperial and colonial fictions in the game’s treatment of the different cultural and geographical spaces represented, and its own attempts to critique them in terms of updated priorities which necessitate that this becomes the last game in the series.

This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrangement of narratives and frontier aesthetics invites audiences to attend to the mythic relationship between conquering frontiers and subjugating women’s bodies. Purity represents a subversive deployment of metonymy and enthymeme to infer spectator complicity in the associative connections between frontier mythology and purity culture.

Nineteenth Century circuit rider Peter W. Gravis’ autobiography reflects the mythological and historical quest of ideological contradictions between the borders of wilderness and civilization. He challenged the boundaries of justice and morality in life and war through his encounters in an unsettled land and country. His personal creed and experience tested myths of regeneration through violence, where one side must perish in a combination of blood and cultural conflict (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 12).  The changes and attempt at Reconstruction after the Civil War brought more challenges to Gravis’ worldview. Culture and society once again began to specifically reshape American democracy and identity as the lines between “savage” and “civilized” became blurred. Gravis defined what he referred to as the “jumping off place” (96) from civilization to savagery in his itinerant work in the Texas Panhandle during the 1880s. His letters written from the Panhandle exhibit a historiographical testing of frontier theories that promoted freedom from civilization that, in turn, propagated individualism, unique national American democracy and character.

Sheldon S. Wolin's theory of fugitive democracy has been both lauded and criticized for its radical departure from the mainstays of democratic theory: formal institutions, political offices and constitutional arrangements of power. For Wolin, democracy is correctly understood as an ephemeral event that appears unexpectedly when ordinary citizens, united by a shared grievance, collectively interrupt normal political proceedings and reject constitutionalism. This article critically analyzes Wolin's theory in light of a historical phenomenon in which citizens collectively interrupted politics: frontier vigilantism in the American West from 1850 to 1900. Critical of Wolin's wholesale rejection of constitutionalism, the article reveals the potentially legalistic patterns of extra-legal collective action, and it argues for de-fetishizing democratic practice that occurs outside of institutional channels.