Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

by Anne F. Hyde

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

 
Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Westerns, American, Research, Native American History

628 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2011

Reviews

[Greg Strandberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to skip through sections of this book. It's very detailed, but also quite dry most of the time.

The parts I liked the most were the beginning sections that gave a good overview of how the American fur trade in the West was able to get going, so you get a lot of recaps from the 1700s.

I skipped about 100 pages after that and got up around page 230 where you get a good look at the early start of St. Louis and Fort Osage and some stuff on the Arikara War.

I didn't finish the book as I just lost interest in it at that point.

[Kathryn Mattern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm loving this book. It's history at its best - very readable, like a novel. I've read a fair amount about early European contact with Native Americans on the eastern seaboard, and feel like I understand much more the true history of that part of our country, yet I've felt very much undereducated about the situation in the middle west and everything west of the Mississippi. This book is helping to correct that lack. Anne Hyde presents insights into cities and areas as diverse as Saint Louis, Vancouver, Santa Fe and California, and helps me to make sense of the western expansion in a new way. Her focus is on the leading men in these areas in the context of their families (mostly mixed 'race'), and in the setting of their 'racially' diverse communities. She presents the many diplomatic, trade and violent interactions among these diverse groups, while tracing the rise and fall of fortunes, technologies, and dynasties at the same time. The true history of the Native peoples of America and the Europeans who did business with them seems to me to be relatively unknown, and I find it very meaningful to learn about it. I'm learning something new on nearly every page of this book. I got this book out of the library, but liked it so much I bought it.

[Kim Adamache · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for a history course on the American West. Hyde presents history in a way that is different from the traditional way of writing history. She opens a world of personalties and interconnected families and communities that are often overlooked, barely written or completely recast as something quite different than it really was.

If you enjoy history, this book is worth a read whether for a class or just pleasure.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good

[George Dziuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our traditional view on the history of the American west often follows along these lines: the settling of a vast unknown wilderness done at the expense of those who had previously lived there. In this stereotypically re-telling, the white man is seen as aggressor and the native population is portrayed as the abused party that had absolutely no control over the hand they were dealt.

Dispelling that stereotype is part of what Anne Hyde is trying to accomplish here and she largely succeeds. She does this through focusing on the economic realities of the fur trade that dominated the entire region from the time of the Louisiana Purchase through the late 1830s/early 40s. This includes willful participation by a vested group of native nations that benefits significantly from this trade. This economic reality leads to anglo traders becoming enmeshed in native culture through marriage as an inroad to encourage trade, but chiefly to make a living. The result is these border regions becomes places where nationality matters less than who you know and who you are married to….personal relationships supersede national identity.

To provide context, Hyde focuses on a few key families that developed into successful traders and were key points in the massive trading empire of the American west. It’s a smart decision. It personalizes the story, thus making the narrative more readable, and it helps you follow along a fairly long 60 year history across a very wide swath of territory.

Are familiar themes hit upon? Yes. They have to be. You can’t talk about the history of these native cultures without mentioning the terrible destruction wrought by disease or the dangers that anglo settlers faced as they tried to find a living in very hostile environments, but what Anne Hyde argues very successfully is that these peoples were largely willful participants…at least until the Mexican-American War and the American occupation of the entire west completely changed all that. It’s only once we get to the 1850s that we see a return of the native American tribes seen as the abused party, but the blame is place on filibusters and settlers that had a different expectation about the places that they were going to inhabit.

Overall, I recommend this book. It is a solid and engaging read. I enjoyed it very much and it has made me want to read other books that focus on some of the places highlighted….the history of northern California and the Pacific-Northwest in particular.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many years ago, I read, adored and recommended over and over a huge tome called Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone. Hyde is covering much of the same territory here, though she starts in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase and covers St. Louis founders, mountain men, and early settlers (not to mention Native Americans who married into settler families) in all parts of the trans-Mississippi West. The chapters on the Sublettes, the Bannings, Wilsons and Vallejos were especially interesting to me, but I also found the sections on Mormon "handmaidens" and the Pacific Northwest fun. I dipped in every chance I got during the holidays and enjoyed immersing myself in the 1800 to 1860 period. Hyde writes compelling prose about fascinating people meeting all the challenges of settling a huge swath of American wilderness.

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sprawling account of the Trans-Mississippi West between the consummation of the Louisiana Purchase and the outbreak of the American Civil War, the author uses the fur trade (at least initially) as a lens to illustrate how the West could have developed in a more organic fashion, without the near annihilation of the Indian nations in the face of the massive waves of settler colonialism; none of these frontier merchants achieved much without a willingness to take the cultural norms of the First Nations seriously. I'm not quite as impressed with this work as I thought I might be, in the sense that it could have used more focus. Still, the author does do the popular historiography of the West a service by reminding the reader of the violence and chaos and injustice of it all.

Originally written: October 30, 2017.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was just named a Finalist for the Pulitzer prize!

[Noah Piwonka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book that challenged the way I thought of the West and of America's nation-building effort. My experience with American history is naturally filtered through the jingoistic lense of American public education (even in the highly left-leaning town I grew up in), and the process of 'Manifest Destiny' is presented as just that, an inevitable, all encompassing migration westward, like expanding your borders in a strategy game. Even when education does acknowledge the existence of people before American settlers west of the Mississippi (thank you, 10th grade history curriculum, for making us read Zinn), they are usually presented as A) entirely Native American and B) either hapless victims of American aggression or barbaric savages unable to cope with the tide of civilization.

In contrast, Hyde paints a picture of a West that was highly developed, interconnected, and populated, just not in the ways that we think of development and connection today. She paints a picture of the broad relationships and the trade economy that made the West a place of opportunity and innovation far before the railroads reached it. Most importantly in my mind, she spends quite a bit of ink on the non-Native American inhabitants of these lands - Spanish, British, and American - and how they integrated into the existing social and cultural landscapes of the Native Americans. It paints a completely different picture of what the West was like, one of cultural exchange and tenuous co-existence, not just unbridled conquest.

Of course, as the 1800s roll on, that way of life does give way to unbridled conquest; while it would take nearly half a century after the Civil War for the United States to fully establish control over the continent, Hyde does an excellent job of crafting a narrative where more and more elements spin out of control in the years leading up to 1860, at the expense of both new white settlers but most especially the people who had lived in the West for generations. She takes an intimate approach to broad geopolitics, identifying several families from the Mississippi river, to Texas, to Oregon, California, and Utah who were integral in the pre-US western landscape and diving into their stories and experiences. This approach creates opportunities for a more personal history of the West, but may lose some of the broader social and political nuances that set the back half of the 19th century in motion.

Broad in scope and intimate in details, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the Real Wild West.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hyde offers a highly engaging and informative history of the western United States through the first half of the 18th century. The major players comes to life as Hyde tells the story of how settlement of the west evolved from familial, interracial and mutually respectful relationship development into national (and racially conflicted) program.

One interesting theme I noticed was how racial conflict was inflamed by politics, not vice versa. Contrary to the popular myth that racism in the populous should be controlled by political intervention, Hyde’s history shows that people were quite capable of connecting meaningfully across racial lines until conflict escalated to a political level. Political efforts tended (as they still tend) to harden racial tensions rather than assuage them.

In any case, this is a fascinating tale, well worth the read for the story as well as the history it provides, and well worthy of the Pulitzer Prize nomination it received.

[Luke Eure · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gives a nice feeling for the texture of life there and then, and I feel I leave it with a better understanding of the relationship between white settlers and native Americans at the time.

But I give it a low rating because there were a lot of detailed facts in the book - about individual people as well as overall historical events - but very few of them stuck with me. I'm not sure the exact problem - but I feel the book didn't have enough of an overall framework for me to be able to mentally organize and hang onto all the content.

Or maybe I was just bad at reading it.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brain Food: Hearty Salad
Scandal Level: nihl
Violence: meh
Must be ___ old to read: 16
Read if you liked: the truth of the wild west
Re-readability: I will have to read it again
Thoughts: A fascinating book about life on the frontier after the Louisiana Purchase. I learned a lot about the structure of families and interpersonal relations during the time. An interesting read and fun for a history textbook.

[Susan Tryforos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the content fascinating (being a Northeasterner, I haven't been deeply exposed to the history of the Western US) and the narrative style easy to follow. But I really wish that the book had been better edited - typos and grammatical weirdness drove me nuts.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

So repetitive. This book could've been a pamphlet.

[Joe Holt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow boring and not boring at the same time. I learned a lot. Did you know we did some bad stuff to these Native American folks?

[Sandra Oldfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a feat of research and writing. I read it mostly for the part on Fort Vancouver and the Oregon territory but the whole book was fascinating.

[Brad Hodges · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The world of river and maritime trade effectively decentered traditional political power, locating knowledge outside of traditional military and diplomatic circles and firmly int the hands of local people, both Native and newer residents." (5-6)

"We think of the barons of the fur trade as the nineteenth-century equivalents of modern corporate raiders -- steely-eyed individuals, unfettered by personal ties, who cornered markets and lusted after conquest. This is an inaccurate view of a setting in which no one could operate alone. ... [T]he people in this world needed relationships -- marriage, adoption, bondage, partnership, apprenticeship, and friendship -- to make business and life possible in the face of imperial rivalry and warfare." (97)

"Native nations, which had been essential assets to trade, became dangerous impediments to land acquisition and settlement. Building relationships with Native people, so crucial to the world of trade, became anathema in the last part of the nineteenth century." (225-6)

"Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans saw race as a very malleable characteristic, much as Native Americans did, though their ideas had a powerful progressive bent. In the period when race was flexible, Indian people especially could somehow be improved. They could become more noble and less savage by contact with civilization. However, as race became a 'problem' and categories sharpened and hardened, nonwhite people became innately inferior and progression impossible." (275)

"The Indians that [anthropologist Lewis Henry] Morgan admired for wearing ties and running stores had only made themselves targets by succeeding..." (483-4)

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look is very well researched and quite interesting. It gives good insights into life on the planes in the west post 1800 This book is a magnificent piece of scholarship and well deserving the Bancroft Prize. Dr. Hyde presents a reality of races merging, clashing, and separating in the West. She follows the Fur Trade and its role in dominating much of the early part of the 19th century in the West. Beyond that, she examines how the West was settled and torn asunder. The books is about families, traditions, cultures, and economic and social development.

While the book is not "exciting," I think I have finally learned and understood more fully "How the West was Won" It is not a pretty picture.

[Ben]

A massive New Western History that shows the scope, complexity, messiness, bloodiness and contingency of the North American West in the period. Rather than indulge the obviously out-of-date image of white settlers moving west into vacant land, or just writing about the westward expansion of anglo-Americans as a tragic loss for native tribes (which it of course was), Hyde focuses on the kinship and trade networks, and imperialism and land-grabbing from Russia, Spain, Mexico, the US, France, England, Texas, Indian Tribes (especially the Comanche), Mormons...and more, with an emphasis on the choices made by these different groups as the navigated the fur trade, discovery, competing interests, family, and empire.

[Katie Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Empires Nations and Families, Anne Hyde undergoes an incredibly ambitious project; providing a history of the American West from 1800-1860. She does so in an ingenious way, using an original interpretive framework to cope with a large volume of material. By looking at individual family units and tracing their connections over different spaces and at different times, Hyde provides an engaging and interesting look at the history of the American West.

Read Full Review: https://mybookbagblog.wordpress.com/2...

[char · Rating 4 out of 5]

Multiethnic families and webs of relationships is such a fascinating way to look at the American West, and Hyde's use of storytelling really made it come alive. Readable and frank, though honestly it could have been a little bit shorter, haha. I really enjoyed this, and hope to return to it when I can devote a little more time to reading it thoroughly!

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of interesting work here regarding the overlapping imperial claims to the trans-Mississippi West and the ways in which people lived under and outside of these official political categories, especially within interracial communities (whose identities are upended by the continued westward push of the American state), but it ultimately spreads pretty thin

[Josh Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterful in its scope. Families & networks = useful lens of analysis. Sometimes got a little lost among the myriad historical actors, but this due more to me reading it over a long period of time than her writing.

[Gregory Pedersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tremendous historical account of the American West and the development of the various nations and empires that aided in the shaping of the West. This is top notch history that is both scholarly and accessible to the amateur historian.

[Lashonda Slaughter Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written and interesting perspective about how these family empires controlled parts of the West but on very shaky ground.

[AnneKristine Norris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information but too thick.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some interesting early western American history told by following the families that built early trading empires and their relationships with the native Americans.

[Dutchermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it is lengthy, students in my History of the American West course enjoy this book and the way it complicates their understanding of westward expansion.

[Carolyn Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not the book I thought it would be.