The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West

by Patricia Nelson Limerick

"Limerick is one of the most engaging historians writing today." --Richard White

The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Westerns, Grad School, American, Research

404 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 30, 1987

About the author

Patricia Nelson Limerick is an American historian, considered to be one of the leading historians of the American West. She was born and raised in Banning, California.

Limerick received a B.A. in American Studies in 1972 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1980 from Yale University. She worked at Harvard University as an Assistant Professor from 1980 to 1984. Previously she taught at Yale as a graduate teaching assistant, where she helped teach the highly-regarded 'daily themes' class. Since then Limerick has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is Professor of History and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West.

Limerick is a former president of the American Studies Association (1996-1997) and the Western History Association (2000). She is known for her 1987 book The Legacy of Conquest, which is part of a body of historical writing sometimes known as the New Western History. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Her essay on the Modoc War, titled "Haunted America" appears in the collection "Ways of Reading," a textbook widely used by undergraduate English students. She also co-edited a collection of essays, titled "Trails: Toward a New Western History," which relate to her famous 1989 Trails Through Time exhibit.

Reviews

[Antigone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Limerick's book is part of a relatively recent wave of studies by Western historians. It's less a standard account of the American frontier than it is an urge to move beyond the traditional tropes - the cowboys, the pioneers, the soldiers, the Indian Wars, the railroads, the cattle drives, the state-making - and into a more exacting analysis that presents an ostensibly truer picture of the frontier experience. It is a reasonable request to make. We should, I think, if we are serious about this, recognize, for example, the many stark and substantial differences between the tribes of Native America. It does not do to imagine these nations as essentially variations on a theme. That was not then, and is not now, the reality. Equally, it can only improve our sense of historical context to include, where they were quite certainly present, the many Western immigrants who entered the country from its Pacific side (the Spanish, the Mexican, the Chinese, the Russian, to name but a few), and took part in the settlement of this frontier. And yes, room must be made for those who came West and lost, and failed, and suffered for the choice. The Gold Rush is something I often compare to those many starry-eyed kids who climb off the bus at Hollywood and Vine, seeking fame and fortune. One shot in a thousand, and that's being generous. Those other nine hundred ninety-nine...is it or is it not important what wound up happening to them? (Welcome to the broken dreams my city was built upon.)

So the intent is laudable, and the effort to illustrate the argument is extremely well-researched. And that is just about the sum total of the nice things I have to say. Because Ms. Limerick got caught in a bit of a snarl here. And it was a snarl of her own making.

I mean, I get it. Elvis has left the building. Good-bye, John Wayne. Good-bye, Gary Cooper. Good-bye, Yosemite Sam. We're evicting the mythic Western figure who stands, if we're going to be exacting about this, more as a symbol of the American drive to self-determine than any sort of conqueror made manifest. And in this wide and empty space he's left we'll be admitting legions of "real" folk who, according to our author, were hopelessly misguided, naive, and profoundly hypocritical when it came to staking their Western claim. Not a single hero amongst 'em; just a bunch of fools and liars and cheats, and the occasional guy with a fine intention which, on any dreary day of sour luck, could be sold for a dollar and a dime. Okay. But it seems to me we're now talking more about the character of the American of that age than we are the Western emigrant, and it seems awfully convenient to me to throw all the hubris and thievery, violence and racism way out here to the left of where our author clearly pins the seat of this country's civilization. If the emigrant was deluded, his were cultural delusions that were not confined to those in everyday use of a compass and a Bowie knife. To insist otherwise is, I'm sorry, something I find rampantly elitist. I think if one wants to introduce reality into the American historical equation, one has to apply that reality across the board.

Which did not happen here.

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three decades after it was published, it's clear that The Legacy of Conquest fulfilled its mission to redefine the way serious historians think about my home region; there's still more than a little work to do in moving that academic awareness into the larger public sphere, work that Patty Limerick is pioneering in her role as State Historian of Colorado.

Most of Limerick's central insights can be transferred to the 21st century with only minor rephrasing. The notion of the west as a self-sufficient frontier where individuals can carve out new lives for themselves free of the cultural baggage they left behind--thank you Frederick Jackson Turner--is ethnocentric nonsense, although it maintains mythic power. Water use--which she images beautifully as a gun fight with "rivals converging from ten different directions instead of the more traditional two"--remains central, as does "the key role of federal money in the Western economy." The latter point's particularly important given the region's incessant whining about government interference. My solidly Republican home town of Colorado Springs wouldn't have the proverbial pot to piss in without federal dollars: yes, the military counts. Limerick is brilliant in presenting the centrality of the 'innocent victim" figure to the (white) West's self-image and does a nice job tracking the real complications of the battles over mining, farming, and nuclear waste disposal.

The Legacy of the West marked a sharp break from the approach to Western American history that was firmly embedded in the nationalist American narrative of the inexorable rise of freedom and progress. She drew effectively on the emerging fields of Native American, Border/Hispanic, Asian American, and Women's history as well as integrating recent developments in labor and environmental history. On top of it all, she writes beautifully, tying her analysis to deftly chosen and handled biographies of a fascinating cast of characters.

A towering achievement and still the starting place for anyone interested in the West.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

To my mind, The Legacy of Conquest is the single best volume on Western history, albeit I’m no historian but, rather, a mere kid from Colorado. It’s just such an engaging and succinct text, chock full of ideas that, at the time of writing in the 1980s, were groundbreaking and often controversial. A number of them still are, though, as proof of Patricia Nelson Limerick’s prowess and conviction, many have become far more commonplace in discussions of Western policy, history, and ways of life. For instance:

1. Nature, far from being ours to control and profit from, has always proved a fickle partner. It’s one of the greatest barriers to sustaining life in the American West and has long left many of those seeking fortune there to feel somehow betrayed.

2. The notion of property–especially land–was, and still is, one of the great conflicts between those living in the American West. Initially a mostly racially charged issue–the idea property to White settlers was wholly sacrosanct, whereas to the Native Americans it was, at least initially, fairly bewildering–property continues to be a source of class, race, corporate, and/or government-based conflict.

3. Contrary to the still dominant view of the American West as a place for those seeking independence, the settling of the region was only possible through heavy government subsidies. The distribution of land, the control of Native Americans, and the railroads were all only possible thanks to substantial federal funding and support. We can now add many more items to this list, notably resource and public land management.

4. Speaking of natural resources and public lands, in contrast to the prevalent ideas of the region’s bountiful and well-preserved landscapes, the West was founded on extractive industry: get in, get rich, get out. Touching on a couple of the earlier points: “The essential project of the American West was to exploit the available resources. Since nature would not provide it all, both speculation and the entrepreneurial uses of government were human devices to supplement nature’s offerings.” (p. 86)

5. The belief that there was some kind of pastoral “golden age,” which the West still conjures, is, and always was, a myth. In fact, Western settlers often experienced the same feelings, because there “…is a pattern in Western civilization, long preceding Jefferson, to attribute ideal values to rural life that reality cannot match.” (p. 131) The same goes for natural disasters, times of resource scarcity, and other events that cause people to feel that life was simpler, easier, and better in the past. “The fur trappers coming into the Rockies in the mid-1830s could regret having missed the real boom times of decade before…” (p. 152) This nostalgia for the past is one of the longest-running misconceptions in the American West.

That’s a pretty impressive array of ideas, all of which bolster Limerick’s central thesis that, far from being a long lost, nostalgia-inducing era, the nineteenth-century West is, in many ways, very much alive in the present. Which is not to say that Limerick always gets it right, nor have many of her insights lead to tangible resolutions in the decades since The Legacy of Conquest was written. Sadly, as the West continues to grow, many of these issues continue to give rise to a strange mixture of denial and stubbornness which, in turn, often leads to more conflicts and more exploitative policies and ways of life.

Limerick, I suspect, would be the first to concede this. History, she tells us, is never resolved, nor should it be. It’s a dialog, one that circles back on itself in light of new discoveries and modes of thought, always being reworked and, ideally, calibrated with each new generation of historians, readers, lawmakers, and Westerners. And the work is never done.

“The clashes and conflicts of Western history will always leave the serious individual emotionally and intellectually unsettled. In the nineteenth-century West, speaking out for the human dignity of all parties to the conflicts took considerable nerve. It still does.” (p. 221)

[Noreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As my fluids mechanics professor (Noel deNevers) warned graduating seniors confronted with problems, check your assumptions first.

False Assumptions about settling the West.

1. I was here first.

2. One policy applies to all Indians. All Indians want to kill and scalp whites.

3. Plentiful beaver 🦫 for fur trappers.

4. Plentiful game for meat eating.

5. Endless supply of timber.

6. Endless supply of salmon.

7. Enough gold silver to make all miners rich.

8. All land has good soil for farming.

9. All crops can be sold at prices to make farmers profitable.

10. Free plentiful grazing for cows and sheep.

11. We are hardworking settlers don’t need/want federal government interference/assistance.

12. Plenty of water, just get it to us at no cost.

When I finished the book I had 3 projects in mind.
1. Rain barrels
2. Hot Composting
3. Worm farm.

[Sean Chick · Rating 1 out of 5]

A series of essays in which Limerick disparages America. Books like this sadly give conservatives the ammunition they need to say that "liberal academics hate America." It does not help that the book is written as if Limerick was on opium, for much of this is simply musings around a vague idea of conquest. The research is bad; facts are sacrificed to support the idea. This book would be chucked aside but Limerick is from Yale, so we have to take her seriously right?

UPDATE: Conservatives were right it seems about liberal academics (they now support things like the CIA since America is being remade in their particular vision) but then again there is a growing unease for America with the neoreactionaries. At any rate, I think Limerick's central thesis is right but the book is still a god awful mess.

[Henry Schaller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seminal book on the frontier and American history. A little out of date, but the essays provide context and opened new doors into understanding the American West in reality and myth. Highly recommend!

[Billy Marino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to review this book for class, so I might as well share that as my comments:

Patricia Limerick impressively synthesizes an array of secondary sources, supplemented with primary sources, to demonstrate that the American West is characterized by the continuity of conquest. “Reorganized, the history of the West is a study of a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences.” (26) This dense and well-written book is broken into two, five chapter, sections: “Conquerors” and “The Conquerors Meet Their Match.” Limerick’s argument hinges on the complex relationships between diverse ethnic groups and the power ascribed to property. According to Limerick, the conquest for more land created interactions in a culturally pluralistic region that led to cultural power struggles throughout the West. The central aspect of this complicated interaction is the way conquest entered national memory: “In the popular imagination, the reality of conquest dissolved into stereotypes of noble savages and noble pioneers struggling quaintly in the wilderness.” (19)

Limerick first focuses on the shared internal world of the “Conquerors.” She deftly draws on the anthropological lesson of cultural persistence to explain how, “the values [white Americans] attached to westward expansion persist[ed], in cheerful defiance of contrary evidence.” (36) By analyzing traits such as innocence, power of property, denial of dependence, and the gathering of resources she makes an exceptional case for the importance of how pioneers saw themselves in the world and how that allowed them to shine a positive light on conquest. Limerick impressively exhibits how white Americans viewed themselves as victims of outside forces that hindered them, ranging from Indians to natural resources. This pressure created a desire for help, often financial, from the federal government, yet they held strong to their self-reliance while they became increasingly dependent.

The second half of the book expands to the world the conquerors ran up against. Limerick’s goal is to demonstrate how American West history’s previous focus on white Americans missed the complex world of “others” they ran into, including Indians, Mexicans, and nature itself. An important concept that she convincingly establishes is how, for many white Americans, “emotions carried [them] to places where logic could not follow.” (183) They simplified the things around them to fit their ideals, whether it was “uncontaminated Indians” or scientific conservation over preservation. The complex world that surrounded white Americans consistently tore down their beliefs, yet those values continued through to present day.

Limerick does an incredible job synthesizing American West history and displays how presentism has effected thought in the field. She wrote as the Cold War neared an end, and showed an awareness of how the conquest of her time has revealed the continued past of conquest from the Old West frontier. A major strength of her work is how well she examined the mythological western world that persists in American culture and demonstrated how it influenced economy, social-interactions, and use of the natural world. However, she fails to include any reference to Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, which is peculiar for how much of her work draws on his groundbreaking study of the American West as myth.

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has its flaws. Particularly the fact that her main argument, that the West was characterized by conquest, still claims that the West is a special region and also ignores the fact that other regions of the country and the world underwent or are undergoing the same conquest process.

Otherwise, Limerick's work is the quintessential, other than Richard White's "Its Your Misfortune...", example of New West History. She artfully tears apart Frederick Jackson Turner and does so in an easy-to-follow and well-organized manner.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book when it came out in 1987, with an updated preface by the author in 2006. Limerick takes a vast look at the history of the U.S. West, with many of the same issues from the 1980s still commanding coverage today (borderlands, environment, race). Her ultimate goal was to move away from the binary focus that is usual in histories of the West (white vs native, untamed environment vs tamed land use), and and take a deeper dive into what is a very complicated, interwoven and patchwork quilt of history. In this she has succeeded.

[William Wyckoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic definition of what the "New Western History" is all about. A book that helped defined that genre. This book looks at many traditional topics in western history in fresh ways. A must-read for those interested in western history! A reminder that "conquest" is a key concept in understanding how Euro-Americans transformed the land and people of this region.

[Richard Ripamonti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written, but permeated with hatred of Anglo-Americans.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his 1893 speech, The Signicance of the Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the process of settling the frontier shaped the American character. Settling the West made Americans exceptional, that is, different from Europeans. Jackson argued that the frontier and its transformative properties would soon be lost to immigrants. His ideas became the cornerstone of Western American history. In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Limerick argues against the Turner theses. She argues that Turner’s use of population density to define the frontier is arbitrary. She also establishes a middle ground between adherents of Turner who view the frontier as a process and those who view it as a place. In her work, Limerick pulls from a wide variety of sources including newspaper articles, political speeches, and private journals and correspondence to demonstrate that the frontier is a place and a process that remains open.
Limerick contends that by deemphasizing the “frontier and its supposed end” historians can “conceive of the West as a place and not a process, and [give] Western American history… …a new look.” (26) First, the American West was a place where different cultures and peoples collided. It was a place “where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-American and Asia intersected.” (27) Second, the history of the west is characterized by the meeting of these groups that forged a linked history in a shared space. Competition between these groups for the benefits of economic development in the west formed one of the main forces for historical change in the region. The minority groups that formed such a pivotal part of western history are completely absent from Turner’s theses. Turner also argued that the frontier was an area of free land, meaning that it was not occupied, and therefore, was open to settlement. The presence of people in the west prior to the arrival of Anglo-Americans also demonstrates that freeland, defined as such, simply did not exist.
Another aspect of western history that is missing in Turner’s history is the cycle of economic boom and bust. The frontier was a place of intense economic activity, often followed by collapse. Population density in the West was constantly in flux based on the most recent economic boom. Mining, logging, and high-tech all created new frontiers to be conquered long after 1890. The frontier, as such, remains open today in the oil fields of the Dakotas and the tech firms of the Silicon Valley.
Limerick contends that the ideal image of independent American setters supported by the Turner’s is a fantasy. In fact, western settlers depended on outside help in their efforts to settle the land. For example, the Federal government removed native inhabitants from the frontier prior to settlement by Anglo-Americans. The government also helped to build the infrastructure that made the irrigation of western lands and for transportation of western products to markets in the east and throughout the world possible. Additionally, when private enterprise failed, the Federal government stepped in with loans, subsidies, and bailouts. The Federal government has invested a great deal of capital into western economies to regulate the cycle of boom and bust and western states continue to be the largest recipients of Federal money.
Turner also argued that the West formed a safety valve for America’s growing population. Anglo-Americans left the crowds and corruption of the East and rejuvenated the American spirit in the West. Westerners neither broke their ties to the East, nor did they produce a fully new society in the West. Westerns also depended on eastern markets. Westerners depended on eastern industry for the materials, tools, equipment, and capital needed for economic development. Westerns needed large supplies of food to feed miners, loggers, and settlers which was also imported from eastern sources. Western economies were largely based on the extraction of commodities such as minerals, oil, and timber. Since the region lacked markets large enough to consume these products, westerners also needed eastern consumers. This dependence on outside markets hardly fits Turner’s ideal of independent settlers transforming the landscape on their own. Furthermore, the most successful settlers of the west did not move to the region alone. They settled the area in kin groups or communities. Once in the West, these people worked together to rebuild the communities that they had left behind. This image of reality contradicts the ideal of the rugged, individualistic settler.
Limerick’s work demonstrates some flaws in Wood’s book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood argues that Americans developed an ideal of independent farmers and laborers after the revolution. Limerick demonstrates that this ideal never became anything more than just that, an ideal. Americans failed to live up to the ideal that they set for themselves. Instead, in the West, Americans became even more dependent on the government, eastern markets, and others for their economic survival. Limerick also demonstrates that the system of patronage, which Wood argues disappeared in the wake of the American Revolution, remained intact in the West. The system of patronage and dependence had been transformed, however, from one in which patrons had a personal relationship with their dependents to an impersonal one in which the Federal government provided individuals with support. In return for this support, westerners resented their new patron. Similar to the men in Stansell’s work, City of Women, who beat their wives because they were failing to meet the middle-class ideal of providing for their families, Westerners blamed their failures on the same government that made their survival possible.

[Christian Collier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being nearly 40 years old at this point, this book is an incredibly engaging history, in which Limerick challenges the stereotypes of the American West. She urges the reader to look at the history of the West not through a lens that is simply black and white, Cowboy and Indian, but one that cedes to the complexities of the West and its history. Limerick argues that there is not one linear, simplified way of approaching Western history; rather it is a melting pot of different people groups and cultures who share the same region but have very different mindsets and beliefs. Limerick presents a well crafted argument, and posits that the traditions of the American West are still very much alive today, though they may take different avenues. An excellent and fun read

[Abraham Gustavson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traditional histories of the West tend to focus on and idealize the heroic frontiersman, alone in the wilderness, forging a path that others like him will follow. This traditional view, serialized in paperbacks and reimagined on modern television and movie screens highlights the courage, daring, hardness, and independence of the white male Protestant of European descent. This image was enshrined in the study Western American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, who presented his paper The Significance of the Frontier of American History for the American Historical Association at the World’s Colombian Exposition in 1893. Patricia Nelson Limerick completes and elaborates on Turner’s Frontier Thesis by conjuring a wide variety of characters that Turner failed to recognize. Included in this new conquest are women, Mormons, Native Americans, Hispanics, Free African-Americans, Chinese and Japanese, Conservationists and Preservationists, ranchers, bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen. Limerick has given these diverse groups what they had previously lacked—historical agency. Limerick also has the ability to reflect upon how the twentieth century impacted Western development. Since its publication in 1987, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, has become a deserved classic of the new school of Western history.

Limerick, a native Californian, wrote Legacy of Conquest in response to field of American history that had become stale and somewhat neglected by scholars. She was inspired after witnessing “government and business officials” who “complained about the current problems of the West, and the prevalent presumption seemed to be that these problems were quite recent in origin and bore little resemblance to the distant frontier West” (11). Limerick, a highly regarded professional historian who took a sabbatical from Harvard to write the book, sought to bring Western history back into popular scholarship. Her work displays an excellent ability to jump from the nineteenth century frontier days to problems facing twentieth century Westerners. In Chapter Five, “The Meeting Ground of Past and Present” she begins her chapter by highlighting turn of the century conflicts over water and oil use, but later examines modern debates over nuclear waste disposal. Limerick quotes a Texan who quips, “You damned Yankees got what you wanted, to dump your nuclear trash on the West.” (164). This disgruntled Texan, powerless to stop the influence of the East, acts as a stand in for how Limerick might have felt while writing Legacy of Conquest. The influence of Eastern historians had tilted the national focus away from the West and toward events such as the American Revolution or Civil War. The style of the book is thematic history at its best. There is no narrative, but there are consistent themes and overarching meanings that shape the region as a whole.

In Legacy of Conquest, Limerick reimagines a West that is so diverse, that it makes the West relevant for all Americans as well as people across the globe. Limerick writes in Chapter Eight, “Racialism on the Run” that “it is perfectly possible to watch a play and keep track of, even identify with, several characters at once, even when those characters are in direct conflict with each other and with themselves” (292). Though the reader may not be of Japanese origin they can sympathize with the immigrant Japanese farmers who lost their land as a result of wartime government policy during World War II. Though the reader may not be a African American, they can hope that Free Blacks who left the South and East will find success in mines or on the farm. And though the reader may not be Mormon, they can cringe at President Buchanan’s decision to fight a war against the upstart religious group in the desert wilds of Utah. Limerick constructs and connects the reader to the wide array of Western experiences is completed with grace and eloquence not found in many traditional social histories.

Legacy of Conquest does not solely focus on social history. Limerick spends a respectable amount of time focusing on the economic issues that shaped Western history. While Legacy of Conquest is not an economic history by any means, it does highlight the impact of business on the region. One of the crucial questions is that of Western identity of independence versus the sometimes dire need of government assistance in the form of farm subsidies, land grants, the federal implementation of favorable tariffs, and ability to use natural resources of the West. Limerick quotes a Western businessmen, “We in this business have cried forever, Washington, please leave us alone, God knows it’s hypocritical to say stay out of our business till we get our tail in a crack.” (146). Limerick rightly concludes that the West is the region that most depends on government help, all the while maintaining an identity curated around independence and freedom from the strictures of society. Chapter Nine, “Mankind the Manager” highlights just how much of Western land is maintained by the federal government in and traces the origins of the National Park Service. The author highlights the both success and failure in the federal maintenance the West and comes to the conclusion that “the goal is to get humanity’s role in nature back to the right size, neither too big nor too small, neither too powerful nor too powerless” (321). This theme of balance persists throughout the monograph.

Economic exploitation is one of the major themes of Legacy of Conquest. Limerick highlights that Westerners took advantage of the land through manipulation of politics and the machinations of government, but also through land speculation and boosterism. Limerick argues that the connection between businessman and politician overlapped and became blurred on the frontier. She corrects the early twentieth century political historian Gilman Ostrander by arguing that he made an error in arguing that the politicians and businessmen were in league with one another. Limerick writes, “Ostrander’s only error of phrasing was the suggestion that businessmen and politicians were different people; in fact they were often the same” (85). The author then lists various Westerners who gained immense riches through their exploits in the West. Exploitation could also take racial dimensions. Limerick quotes Leland Stanford’s defense of the Chinese as “quiet, peaceable, industrious, economical—ready and apt to learn all different kinds of work required in railroad building” (264). The author rightly points out that Stanford was exploiting Chinese for economic benefit. She later finds a modern comparison in the twentieth century debate over illegal Mexican laborers, who “had little to lose and everything to gain” when crossing the Mexican-American border (340). The conquest of the West was not simply the winning of wars or the taming of the land, but a conquest of international—or at least North American—economics and labor, whose impact can still be felt in the modern day.

Limerick highlights distinct subgroups that earn their own chapters in Legacy of the West. She writes in Chapter One, Empire of Innocence, “Exclude women from Western history, and unreality sets in. Restore them, and the Western drama gains a fully human cast of characters—males and females whose urges, needs, failings, and conflicts we can recognize and even share” (52). Her main argument consists of a more detailed understanding of the distinct social spheres women engaged in throughout nineteenth and twentieth century. Limerick rejects the innocent women of the prairie for a more detailed picture that includes suffragettes and the first female governors and senators. Limerick also asks the reader to understand Native Americans not as the antagonists who were conquered, but as a population of American citizens who are still with us today. She emphasizes the plight of Western Native American groups at the start of the twentieth century, “after the conquest, Indians were a population in trouble, with massive unemployment and poor prospects for economic recovery…unemployment can devastate both individual and group morale.” (210). The relationship between the Federal government and the various Native American tribes has been prickly and full of government manipulation. She calls for Native Americans to continue to write their own history based on their customs and religious beliefs. This focus has since allowed for greater depth in the field of social history.

Limerick has written a highly readable account of the new American West. Legacy of Conquest book easy to digest. The author breaks the text down into ten distinct chapters that contain subsections that help the reader anticipate a new subtopic. Readers could easily jump from chapter to chapter depending on their interest without feeling lost. This book has no doubt inspired countless social histories of the West, as scholars look to comprehend a region of growing political, economic, and historic importance. Her work will even call into question the meaning behind such valued terms such as “progress” and the political philosophy known as “Environmentalism” (148). Limerick concludes her work on a call for diversity in scholarship. It is sentimental, “the unitary character of ‘the white man’ has never existed, nor has ‘the Indian’…we share the same region and its history, but we wait to be introduced. The serious exploration of the historical process that made us neighbors provides that introduction” (349). This call for empathy in both action and scholarship not only gives Western history its rightful a place in the history of the United States, but a place in all the world’s history.

[Ava Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

THANK GOD IM DONE. this was for my history class that I’ve been reading all semester and sometimes it was sorta interesting but it’s still HISTORY😰🥴🤮pray for me for my final paper on this book

[Michael Elkon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a lark at Half-Priced Books, thinking that I would be taking trips to Montana and Utah in the summer, so a background in Western history would be nice. Out of that functional purpose, I came across something wonderful. Patricia Nelson Limerick is a wonderful writer. The introduction to the book is especially interesting as she describes the fact that Western history was a backwater when she started writing in the mid-Eighties and that it has become a far richer field ever since. She also describes a lot of the sexism that she faced as a female historian in a male-dominated field.

The book is not chronological. Rather, Limerick tackles certain themes. She does a great job of finding threads that are consistent over the course of the chapters. For instance, she points out that Westerners like to imagine themselves as being independent, but they are constantly asking for government assistance, whether it was protection from Native Americans, irrigation assistance (she points out that one of the dominant realities of life in the West is that it is an arid region, save for the Pacific Northwest), transportation to get goods to markets, or grazing rights. If you read this book and still believe in the image of the fiercely independent Westerner, then you haven't been paying attention. She also emphasizes the diversity of the region. Leaving aside the fact that it was originally settled by Native Americans, there was always a strong Latino influence coming from Mexico, an Asian influence on the West Coast (especially because of Chinese laborers brought over to work on the railroads), a Black influence as freedmen migrated to get away from Jim Crow, and some Russian influence in the Northwest as well. The notion that Caucasians swept West and made the region White is fundamentally wrong. Needless to say, Limerick is not a fan of the Turner Thesis that American democracy came from the frontier and then that the frontier was settled by the time that Americans finished migrating West, as the settling process was an ongoing phenomenon. Limerick is also not a fan of the idealized vision of Westward migration, as she often describes how con-men would hoodwink settlers into coming out West without describing any of the issues that happened as a result. She also talks about how competition for real estate is a consistent theme in Western history, such that lawyers and landholders ought to be seen as being as important as cowboys and miners.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Limerick doesn't pull any punches when she explodes myths of the West, although she deliberately avoids covering the Indian Wars, so if she wanted to stick in the knife with respect to American greatness, she would have written on that topic. She ends the book by talking about the debate taking place about immigration from Mexico. That debate took place 30 years ago and is essentially unchanged today. The same arguments are made with respect to immigrants "not respecting our laws" and "trying to change our culture," as if the West did not have substantial Hispanic influence for centuries prior. Limerick's point seems to be that history did not stop when Whites arrived and conquered most of the West, but rather that they represented one chapter of a constant competition for resources that is ongoing. Moreover, by covering Mormon migration, Limerick points out at least one division that existed among Whites. Limerick does a great job of conveying the mosaic nature of the West and I enjoy even more each trip to the region when I think about that context.

[Rob Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that may seem familiar to readers today who enjoy western and environmental history but was rather original when published in 1987. My ranking accounts for this—the book has become somewhat of a classic for western historians. Readers who are new to western history will gain a great deal from reading it.

All Western historians are familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner and his Frontier Thesis for explaining American development. For Turner, the frontier was a process; as it moved, so did the attention of Western historians. In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick offers a different approach to understanding the history of the American West. Limerick sees the history of the West as an ongoing, unbroken story, not the process from “savagery” to “civilization” that Turner perceived. The history of American West is also fundamentally a history of conquest. The importance of this fact is established immediately in the Introduction, when Limerick contrasts the treatment of conquest in American history with that of slavery. The dominant theme of conquest, as portrayed in literature and television, is adventure: “The subject of slavery was the domain of serious scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection; the subject of conquest was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for lighthearted national escapism.” (19)

Basing her story on these two themes in Western history, conquest and the West as place with an unbroken history, Limerick devotes the ten chapters of her book to recounting various aspects of the history of conquest in the West. She begins by describing the move West by American settlers. The prevailing attitude of these settlers was innocence: “Even when they were trespassers, westering Americans were hardly, in their own eyes, criminals; rather they were pioneers.” (36) As pioneers, Americans knew they were taking risks. As risk takers, they expected rewards, and if anything got in their way, the pioneers were sorely grieved. This held true regardless of whether the obstacles were Indians, the environment, or even their own government; any check on pioneer progress produced complaints that westerners were innocent victims. While pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in this argument, Limerick correctly asserts that acknowledging the inconsistencies does nothing to hurt Western history but instead serves to enrich it.

A second fundamental part of conquest for Americans was drawing boundaries and defining property. Limerick claims that “Of all the persistent qualities in American history, the values attached to property retain the most power.” (56) In support of this claim she offers the Jeffersonian belief in the virtue of the yeoman farmer. But less noble explanations are advanced as well. Speculation and its potential for profit is part of the story from the beginning. Everyone took part; railroads, town boosters, and miners, even Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, played the speculation game with enthusiasm. Property was also crucial because it legalized control of natural resources. Minerals, grazing land, oil, and water could be owned and controlled by virtue of occupying certain key locations. This control of resources was legalized by the doctrine of prior appropriation, or “first in time, first in use.” Unless, that is, the first in time was an Indian, in which case the potential property owner became an innocent victim of Indians selfishly hoarding natural resources.

Other aspects of conquest are discussed at some length in The Legacy of Conquest, including issues surrounding water use, labor problems, and the role of the federal government in subsidizing Western economic growth through irrigation and private use of public lands in the National Forests. But to provide a more complete discussion of the history of the American West, Limerick also tells the stories of those groups influenced by the westward march of American society. Native Americans play a prominent role in this part of the story. Their experience, from Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, to the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, to John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act, is recounted briefly. But in addition, Limerick explains some of the reasons that Indians have been stereotyped in Western history. She points out that most tribes had an oral tradition of recording their history, as opposed to Americans in the West who wrote about Indians constantly. This lack of written history from the Indian viewpoint not only handicaps the public but makes the task of historians more difficult as well.

Limerick is at her best when describing the complexities of racism in the West. Certainly, the Native Americans faced prejudice from American society. But they were far from alone in this aspect of the Western experience. In the late 1800s, East Asians, largely Chinese, faced discrimination from whites who feared their presence would drive down wages. Japanese also faced persecution at times, most notoriously during World War II when they were suspected of disloyalty and herded into internment camps throughout the West. Black Americans sometimes fared poorly in the West. Oregon’s original state constitution contained a no slavery provision, but contained another provision attempting to prohibit blacks from entering Oregon in the first place. Hispanics were valued by Southwestern fruit and vegetable growers as field labor, but were otherwise perceived as stupid, squalid, vile, and miserable. Even whites could be victims of prejudice. Mormons constantly came under attack, most notably for condoning polygamy but also for the communal, socialistic aspects of their society. Labor and strikers, of any nationality, lived in a society where management, law enforcement, and the national government were all arrayed against them for much of Western history. Finally, radical organizers faced prejudice and the threat of violence in the West, as illustrated in San Diego in May of 1912 and Everett, Washington in November 1916. After weaving this complex web of racism and prejudice in the West, Limerick concludes this excellent synthesis by admonishing historians and readers to pay attention to both the parts and the whole when describing Western history.

High praise is in order for The Legacy of Conquest. By including many issues and points of view in her narrative, Limerick demonstrates that Western history is both colorful and complex, and that our understanding is enriched by both of those facts. The Legacy of Conquest includes tales of many interesting individuals in Western history, some prominent, some not. Each of these individual stories serves to highlight the ways in which the story is both complex and colorful, while also providing a human touch. Consider the example of a Californian named William Walker. Convinced he was destined for greatness, in 1853 Walker attempted an invasion of Sonora, on his own authority, with the goal of liberating the provinces of northern Mexico. His lack of success in Mexico did not stop him from turning up in Nicaragua two years later with the same goal in mind. Such stories cause the reader to alternately laugh and shake their head in dismay. The photographs in The Legacy of Conquest are excellent and well-chosen. And Limerick demonstrates a knack for using cute phrases that manage to make her point exactly. Though most of the story is not new to active readers of Western history, there is little to criticize about the way the story is told. Readers in search of fine detail may be slightly disappointed because the scope of the book allows for extensive detail on only a few topics.

[Vel Veeter]

Not the most exciting audiobook I could have listened to, but a very worthwhile overview of not only American Western history but also historiography of the field too. Patricia Limerick was at the time a historian working in a Western American university. She tells a story of a colleague getting a job with a Southern university and he declares that he should learn a little Southern history to supplement his expertise. She asks him if he learned Western history before taking this current job, but it's taken as a joke.

This little moment works to illustrate a few facets of received wisdom of Western history:

*Frederick Jackson Turner is all ye need to know.
*Teach the myths.
*It all ended in 1890s, but also was never super important in the first place
*Remember to remember the Alamo, but also Wounded Knee and any other battles.
* Make sure to ignore Native American history as much as needed/possible.

This book then decides to do two main things: 1) poke a big hole in the basic assumptions about both Western history but also the mythologies surrounding it 2) acknowledge and cite repeatedly where previous scholars have already said as much, but been ignored.

One of the funniest moments is where she describes reactions to the books a) false because untrue! but b) unoriginal because we already said all that!

The book itself spends a lot of time with political documents, legal histories, land disputes, town charters and the like. It's deeply fascinating, if a little dry, but worth the time.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a classic in the field of American western history, and it's easy to see why. Limerick's primary goal in writing this book seemed to be to demythologize the American west and de-center Frederick Jackson Turner's "Significance of the Frontier" thesis as the apogee of the field. She does both masterfully.

What impresses me about her approach to Turner's work is that she recognizes the value that Turner brought to the field (namely, its creation), and doesn't simply ignore its influence because of her disagreements with his assumptions and conclusions. Clearly, he's had an outsized effect on Americans' views of the west, which she engages, rather than rejects out of hand.

Three of Limerick's own arguments most stood out to me: continuity of the history of the west, the often times complicated relationship between westerners and the federal government, and the multiracial diversity of the west. The first of these runs through her entire work, recognizing that while the frontier may have closed in 1890, the west didn't close then, and the 19th century problems of the west are no less present today. The second challenges the notion of the rugged bootstrapping western rancher or farmer, disgusted with the overbearing federal government. For example, Limerick notes the many ways the federal government subsidized western economic development, whether through artificially low grazing fees, subsidies of water distribution, or New Deal-era spending that was about three times higher per capita in the west than it was across the country as a whole. Finally, her positioning the west as a diverse meeting place of the descendants of Europeans, Africans, Indians, Latinos and Asians forms the basis of a compelling argument that western history may need to break away from Turner's domination, but is a field worth exploring on its own merits, and that doing away with the ethnocentricity of western history doesn't mean doing away with the field as a whole.

I highly recommend this book for those interested in history.

[David Koerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colorado's state historian, Patricia Limerick, established her reputation as a western historian in 1987 with the publication of "The Legacy of Conquest; The Unbroken Past of the American West." In it, she deconstructs the popular narrative of western history in which a western "frontier" is closed in ~1890. In this perennial myth, pre-frontier America was empty and for the taking; Anglo-europeans moved in and replaced a negligible "savage" population with "civilization." Limerick shows, instead, that westward expansion is the story of a continuous land development grab of an already inhabited country for property and profit. There never was a "frontier" boundary that subsequently vanished. Western struggles of the late 19th century - against indigenous Americans, non-anglo-european colonials, and Nature, and combined with internecine class struggles - have evolved continuously to be the struggles of the modern American West. Politicians and settler-descendants who hold to the perennial frontier-conquering myth tend to see themselves as innocent victims at the mercy of a variety of scapegoats while the true causes of their plight go unrecognized. This book provides a scholarly remedy. It constitutes a classic pillar of literature relevant to the ongoing white nationalistic racism inherent in the American West's "Sage Brush Rebellion."

[David Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw a video of a conference where the author sat on a panel. I found the discussion very interesting and made a note of the panelists' names. A couple of years later, I finally got around to reading this book. I didn't look that closely at what the book was about, so I started off with some misconceptions.

What is The Legacy of Conquest really about? You might think it would be pretty straightforward. That was one of my misconceptions, I guess. If you think about "conquest" you might realize this is ambiguous. What conquest? The Anglo-European conquest of the Indians? The conquest of the land? The conquest of Mexico by the US in 1848? Something else? It is all these things, and more.

This book isn't about theses conquests. You won't learn about any battles between the US Army and any of the tribes, or about the Mexican-American war, or the explorations of Fremont or Pike or Coronado. The book is about what has happened since then, how things have changed or not changed. Originally published in 1987, the book covers topics up to that time.

I found it all very interesting.

Includes index, notes, photographs, and a very thorough and well-organized bibliography.

[Ben Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An uninhibited deconstruction of the Mythic West with a focus on intersectionality. Essential reading for dispelling the saccharine nostalgia for empire and bloody conquest. In short, a long overdue refutation of the Turner thesis.

The frontier did not “close” and the America of today still wrestles with the ongoing effects of Westward expansion. This encompasses everything from complex identities, environmental policy, to land ownership, religion, and labor disputes.

This book’s freewheeling organization of time periods and topics is winding. The rage that Limerick described as her fuel for writing the book, at times, does tip into a broader feeling of cynicism that reduces all actors as either suckers or bastards.

One cornerstone takeaway:

Americans have long harbored a strong sense of grievance against misfortune. Preferring to cast themselves as injured innocents, Americans will opt for a self conception of innocent victimhood and shirk responsibility rather than take any responsibility or blame. The Federal government and Indigenous communities have historically been the scapegoats when things didn’t turn out as well as hoped.

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subverts a number of widely held beliefs about the American West that start with but exceed beyond the expected topics: The Native American vs Whites dichotomy, the libertarian dream of independence and self-made manhood, the "virgin land", the perception of separating from East Coast forms of corporate greed, etc. It is tough reading, not because of its writing (which is smooth and accessible) but because of its ceaselessly frustrating subject matter: Exploited laborers, hypocritical immigration policies, omnipresent racism, dependence on the federal government, the devastation of a boom-bust economy, etc.

There's so many terrible things about Western history that have been glossed over by Zane Grey mythologizing about the West. It ultimately isn't that shocking though because, as the subtitle of the book suggests, this is all the sort of stuff we see today, just in a different, more modern form.

[Elsie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Limerick proposes an alternative to "Frontier" as a way to look at the West through both its past and through current issues. By exploring the reasons, both stated and unstated, people moved West and the multiplicity of cultures involved, Limerick provides us with a deeper understanding of the truth that "history is written by the victors." The book is divided into two main parts; the first looks at the those coming West, their expectations, and the stories they and others tell when things don't turn out as expected while the second focuses on history from the other sides - Native Americans, Hispanics, Black Americans, Mormons, and others, on efforts (governmental and other) to manage the resources of the area, and the attempt to reconcile the various histories into a coherent overall history of the West.

This is the first book in ALA's Let's Talk About Series called The West. My Read and Discuss (RAD) Texas group picked this for our first 2021 series.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those classic books that turns a discipline upside down. Unlike the myth-making boosterism of earlier histories, as well as many still being written today, Patricia Nelson Limmerick takes seriously the enduring challenges in Indian and Anglo relations, in Latino and Anglo relations, especially at the border, the ongoing edginess of Mormons, and the continuing, all out-battle for natural resources. Written in 1987 Limmerick's chapters read like a great collection of intertwined essays - it is hard to believe and sad to reckon with that it is almost 35 years old and still relevant.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

i SLOGGED through this, but i can’t tell if that was because it was assigned reading (and therefore my adhd kryptonite), or if it was boring, but i lean toward the assigned reading explanation.
i feel like i learned a lot about the west and definitely came away with thoughts about my home. i particularly liked how much attention was paid to various racial, ethnic, and religious groups and their different perspectives and experiences. the west has always been a diverse landscape and i feel that is not highlighted enough!!

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an overview of themes in Western history over time. Organized by theme, it looks at the role of property, resources, labor, race (etc) and the multiple contradictions between myth, perception or theory and how things played out in the West. it's wide ranging, sometimes startlingly, moving from late 19th century examples to Reagan era examples. It's thought provoking and has a great topical further reading section for each chapter.

[Spencer Willardson]

An interesting look at the history of the western United States through a lens of Conquest. There were some interesting points made, but it was not a lot of new information for those who live in the West. One thing that I think it gets right is the tension between Federal handouts and sentiment against the Federal Government in the West. The sheer volume of area that is controlled by the Federal Government in the West makes it so different from other parts of the US.

[Arin · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much information. Such a conglomeration of all the different areas and issues of western history. But fascinating and handled the organization well to make manageable. A very big overview or a lot of little things. Enjoyed the focus on particular people and moments to paint the bigger overall picture. Would definitely want to read more detail accounts on a lot of the issues.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was fine but it wasn't for me. It provides a good overview of western history as the field has generally been thought about for the last 20-30 years and would be a great book for someone who isn't familiar with the topic, but most history friends will already be aware of most of the book's contents and framing