Elliott West > Quotes

“In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" The question is always open. How we treat our world and each other grows from our vision of how we have come to where we are. Ultimately, of course, the issue is not survival but decency and common sense. Everything passes, the psalmist reminds us. No one escapes. The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.”
― Elliott West, The Essential West: Collected Essays

“In 1849 about five thousand persons followed the Gila River route to Santa Fe and then across the southwestern deserts to Southern California, but most crossed by the Platte River route.39 From various towns along the Missouri River they converged on the Platte in what is now east central Nebraska and moved along the south bank before ascending the river’s north fork to the continental divide at South Pass, a broad saddle between the northern and middle Rocky Mountains. Some would then branch off to the northwest to Oregon, while the California-bound would take a southwesterly route across the Great Basin, following the Humboldt River until it sank into the earth and then crossing forty miles of desert before ascending the Truckee and Carson Rivers to the Sierra Nevada. Unlike the Rockies, the Sierra had no easy gateway. In the journey’s final and most difficult stage immigrants urged their spent oxen over Donner or Roller Pass before laboring down the western side.”
― Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

“Historical writing about the American West has undergone dramatic changes in the past half century and more. Specifically, historians have moved away from the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and turned in new directions: earlier authors such as Henry Nash Smith and Earl Pomeroy helped us understand how the mythic West and western imitations of European and eastern American traditions shaped the history of the region.”
― Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

“Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“As they lived into the plains, the Cheyennes named its parts according to how they saw and used them. Rivers were especially telling. Nebraska’s Niobrara was the Sudden or Unexpected River. The Platte was the Moonshell or Musselshell, the Arkansas was the Flint Arrowpoint, and the South Platte was Fat or Tallow River. They named the Solomon by its prolific game bird—the Turkeys Creek. The Smoky Hill went by its most welcoming feature: the Bunch of Timber River.21”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado