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Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the listener through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the listener through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
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First published February 1, 2023
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About the author
Elliott West
17 books63 followersA specialist in the history of the American West, Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas (1967) and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (1971). He joined the U of A faculty in 1979. Two of his books, Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far-Western Frontier (1989) and The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (1995) received the Western Heritage Award. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (1998) received five awards including the Francis Parkman Prize and PEN Center Award. His most recent book is The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (2009).
In 1995 West was awarded the U of A Teacher of the Year and the Carnegie Foundation‘s Arkansas Professor of the Year. In 2001 he received the Baum Faculty Teaching Award, and in 2009 he was one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award recognizing the outstanding teacher in the nation.
In 1995 West was awarded the U of A Teacher of the Year and the Carnegie Foundation‘s Arkansas Professor of the Year. In 2001 he received the Baum Faculty Teaching Award, and in 2009 he was one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award recognizing the outstanding teacher in the nation.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
September 13, 2025
“The American West was both the child and the midwife of the new United States. The emerging West and modernizing America both have their stories and each deserves its own telling, yet each story is inextricable from the other. Each at first was a story of unsettling and disruption, and together, the two nearly tore the nation apart, but three decades or so after the stories began, the Northeast and Southeast were stitched uneasily back together, and roughly one-half of the expanded nation had coalesced into what was by far its largest and most diverse section. The changes running through the two stories – continental connections, steep economic grown and conversion, the Pacific turn, the land made over, scientific and technological acceleration, and racial reordering – weave into and build on one another…Any comparable stretch of years…can have no clear balance between gain and cost. The particulars here are obvious: a nation’s surge of power and affluence, hundreds of thousands dead or dispossessed, widening opportunities for millions, millions living out promises denied, land turned to homesteads and to Denver and Phoenix and Salt Lake City, land stolen and turned into poisoned grotesqueries. The consequences remain; yesterday makes today…”
- Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
Perhaps no aspect of American history has been more glamorized and mythologized than the American West. Through hundreds of books, television shows, and movies, a rather complex and tragic period has often been boiled down to little more than intrepid settlers, marauding Indians, self-reliant cowboys, masked outlaws, and white-hatted sheriffs.
In Continental Reckoning, the aptly named Elliott West does his best to recomplicate matters. With incredible detail, he shows how America’s westward march remade not just a region, but the entire country. While West’s tale features fewer cavalry charges and street-set shootouts than one might expect, it is no less dramatic.
***
At 455 pages of text, Continental Reckoning is a hefty book. It is divided into three big sections covering a wide range of issues. The important thing to know going in is that this is not a typical chronological narrative history, which starts at one point and ends at another. Instead, West’s coverage is thematic, with topic-specific chapters and more time-jumps than Quantum Leap.
The downside to this method is that you lose a bit of the hell-for-leather feeling you’d get with a book placing more emphasis on scene setting and characterizations. Of course, there are more than enough titles out there to scratch that particular itch.
The upside is that aspects of the West that might be skimmed over – or overlooked completely – receive the focus they deserve. A non-exhaustive list includes the railroads and the telegraph, the destruction of the bison, gold strikes and silver mining, mass immigration, homesteading laws, the shift from free labor to corporate regimes, the diversity of peoples and cultures, and the role of the West in the coming of the Civil War.
Obviously, many of these subjects will be familiar to anyone who has watched a John Ford movie. But in Continental Reckoning, West looks at them from different angles, and at greater depth. For instance, the building of the transcontinental railroad is typically viewed as a heroic achievement of man over nature. Parts of it were, especially the guys using dynamite to blow their way through literal mountains. Yet the railroads were also a boondoggle, in which self-dealing executives took risk-free gambles with taxpayer money to enrich themselves, leaving in their wake hollowed-out corporations and useless lines that had to be rescued by government bailouts. In addition, workers were consistently exploited, especially Chinese laborers brought into the country for the sole purpose of laying track.
One of the biggest myths of the American West is that of the violent, taciturn independent contractors – be they cowboys, miners, or mountain men – who gave all future generations an enduring lesson on pulling oneself up by their bootstraps with some grit, some gumption, and a Colt Single Action Army revolver. Alas, the mountain men never turned a profit; the cowboys became wage earners for men who owned plots of land the size of European nations; and the miners ended up going down into the pits for distant shareholders.
***
Nothing in Continental Reckoning is uninteresting. On almost every page, West asks you to revise your assumptions, or to look harder at events you think you understand. The sections on mining, for instance, move far beyond the archetypal iconoclast panning for gold dust, and paints a far grimmer picture of environmental degradation in service to corporate profits.
There is also a great sequence on ranching. As a fan of Lonesome Dove and Open Range, I appreciated the coverage of the short cattle drive era, and how simple strands of twisted wire brought it to its end:
Continental Reckoning is filled with such sharp insights, sharp writing, and the occasional humorous aside. Whether dealing with the geological process that creates gold, the requisite pastureland for twenty-five people and their horses, the essence of a journey by stagecoach, or the relatively modest homicide rates of Old West towns, West has it covered.
***
Unsurprisingly, the overarching theme of Continental Reckoning is the dispossession of the Indian tribes, and the destruction of their traditional ways of life. Rather than trying to cram the whole saga into a single chapter, West parcels out their experiences throughout the whole of the volume. During coverage of the California Gold Rush, for example, he describes how the influx of miners from all over the world led to the virtual annihilation of the preexisting tribes.
As elsewhere, West has a unique take on the ugly process of wresting land away from its original occupants. In particular, he argues that the role of the United States Army has been greatly exaggerated, and that its small numbers meant that it amounted to a glorified police force. According to West, the roles played by famed soldiers such as George Custer, George Crook, and Nelson Miles paled in comparison to intra-Indian divisions, the commandeering of their resources, and the brute fact of overwhelming population disparities.
***
Recently, I finished These Truths, Jill Lepore’s masterful one-volume history on the United States. In an otherwise exceptional book, Lepore made the jarring decision to skip the opening of the trans-Mississippi West in its entirety. While elisions have to be made in any work of history, this one was pretty big. As in the size of half the country. Without knowing what went into this choice, it seems to me that there’s a faint air of disreputability in the study of the American West, as though it is unworthy of academic inquiry.
Thankfully, Continental Reckoning is there to fill in the gap. It is erudite, heavily researched, fully sourced with annotated endnotes, and fairly accessible, if a bit dense at times. It is not only a marvelous counterpoint to the hundreds of westerns I’ve watched, but a serious argument that the opening of the West stands as one of the most important events in the life of this country.
- Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
Perhaps no aspect of American history has been more glamorized and mythologized than the American West. Through hundreds of books, television shows, and movies, a rather complex and tragic period has often been boiled down to little more than intrepid settlers, marauding Indians, self-reliant cowboys, masked outlaws, and white-hatted sheriffs.
In Continental Reckoning, the aptly named Elliott West does his best to recomplicate matters. With incredible detail, he shows how America’s westward march remade not just a region, but the entire country. While West’s tale features fewer cavalry charges and street-set shootouts than one might expect, it is no less dramatic.
***
At 455 pages of text, Continental Reckoning is a hefty book. It is divided into three big sections covering a wide range of issues. The important thing to know going in is that this is not a typical chronological narrative history, which starts at one point and ends at another. Instead, West’s coverage is thematic, with topic-specific chapters and more time-jumps than Quantum Leap.
The downside to this method is that you lose a bit of the hell-for-leather feeling you’d get with a book placing more emphasis on scene setting and characterizations. Of course, there are more than enough titles out there to scratch that particular itch.
The upside is that aspects of the West that might be skimmed over – or overlooked completely – receive the focus they deserve. A non-exhaustive list includes the railroads and the telegraph, the destruction of the bison, gold strikes and silver mining, mass immigration, homesteading laws, the shift from free labor to corporate regimes, the diversity of peoples and cultures, and the role of the West in the coming of the Civil War.
Obviously, many of these subjects will be familiar to anyone who has watched a John Ford movie. But in Continental Reckoning, West looks at them from different angles, and at greater depth. For instance, the building of the transcontinental railroad is typically viewed as a heroic achievement of man over nature. Parts of it were, especially the guys using dynamite to blow their way through literal mountains. Yet the railroads were also a boondoggle, in which self-dealing executives took risk-free gambles with taxpayer money to enrich themselves, leaving in their wake hollowed-out corporations and useless lines that had to be rescued by government bailouts. In addition, workers were consistently exploited, especially Chinese laborers brought into the country for the sole purpose of laying track.
One of the biggest myths of the American West is that of the violent, taciturn independent contractors – be they cowboys, miners, or mountain men – who gave all future generations an enduring lesson on pulling oneself up by their bootstraps with some grit, some gumption, and a Colt Single Action Army revolver. Alas, the mountain men never turned a profit; the cowboys became wage earners for men who owned plots of land the size of European nations; and the miners ended up going down into the pits for distant shareholders.
***
Nothing in Continental Reckoning is uninteresting. On almost every page, West asks you to revise your assumptions, or to look harder at events you think you understand. The sections on mining, for instance, move far beyond the archetypal iconoclast panning for gold dust, and paints a far grimmer picture of environmental degradation in service to corporate profits.
There is also a great sequence on ranching. As a fan of Lonesome Dove and Open Range, I appreciated the coverage of the short cattle drive era, and how simple strands of twisted wire brought it to its end:
Barbed wire was delineating a new regime – economic, ecological, cultural. A world of semi-nomadic hunters had given way to one of businessmen, large and small, intent on rationalizing nature. They replaced millions of indigenous animals with millions of an alien species. They then used new technologies, including billions of pieces of sharpened metal in partnership with railroads and telegraphs and slaughterhouses, to redesign an incomparably complex natural system eight times the size of New England. They partitioned that system into artificial parts shaped not according to practiced use but by bottom lines of ledger sheets. They did all this, and more, to turn the land toward purposes never tried there, those of a modern pastoralism. This was a wholly imagined ideal, one unfettered from experience and inspired by claims of the purest gas. Many of the men in charge directed affairs from a distance with as much understanding of local realities as a chicken has of a warranty deed. In an audacious era, this was audacity of a rare order, made from sudden opportunity amplified by western dreaming. Its regime could hardly have been better positioned for disaster.
Continental Reckoning is filled with such sharp insights, sharp writing, and the occasional humorous aside. Whether dealing with the geological process that creates gold, the requisite pastureland for twenty-five people and their horses, the essence of a journey by stagecoach, or the relatively modest homicide rates of Old West towns, West has it covered.
***
Unsurprisingly, the overarching theme of Continental Reckoning is the dispossession of the Indian tribes, and the destruction of their traditional ways of life. Rather than trying to cram the whole saga into a single chapter, West parcels out their experiences throughout the whole of the volume. During coverage of the California Gold Rush, for example, he describes how the influx of miners from all over the world led to the virtual annihilation of the preexisting tribes.
As elsewhere, West has a unique take on the ugly process of wresting land away from its original occupants. In particular, he argues that the role of the United States Army has been greatly exaggerated, and that its small numbers meant that it amounted to a glorified police force. According to West, the roles played by famed soldiers such as George Custer, George Crook, and Nelson Miles paled in comparison to intra-Indian divisions, the commandeering of their resources, and the brute fact of overwhelming population disparities.
***
Recently, I finished These Truths, Jill Lepore’s masterful one-volume history on the United States. In an otherwise exceptional book, Lepore made the jarring decision to skip the opening of the trans-Mississippi West in its entirety. While elisions have to be made in any work of history, this one was pretty big. As in the size of half the country. Without knowing what went into this choice, it seems to me that there’s a faint air of disreputability in the study of the American West, as though it is unworthy of academic inquiry.
Thankfully, Continental Reckoning is there to fill in the gap. It is erudite, heavily researched, fully sourced with annotated endnotes, and fairly accessible, if a bit dense at times. It is not only a marvelous counterpoint to the hundreds of westerns I’ve watched, but a serious argument that the opening of the West stands as one of the most important events in the life of this country.
July 14, 2023
A great book, providing an expansive history of the American West and its importance in the country’s 19th century development. The author, historian Elliott West, presents a topical history of the American west in the second half of the 19th century. A broad range of topics are covered: the political and military history of American expansion, the economic and technical drivers of this expansion, and the social and cultural forces which shaped its outcomes. Connecting these various topics, West delivers a systemic view of history across a broad scope - even the geography and ecology of the West are major players in this book. Especially interesting are the individual stories West peppers throughout the work; though loaded with facts and figures, the book retains the human component. I especially appreciated the balance West found in writing about the social and ecological costs of Western conquest alongside the expansion and expression of American nationhood, the “reckoning” of the title. A great book for understanding the forces, many bad, many good, all pervasive that created the America we know today.
May 27, 2024
Long. Thorough. Stimulating. Filled with cogent observations and paradoxes. Like this one: "education didn't kill the Indian, it created it." Were it not for the discovery of gold in California the settlement of the West would have proceeded more slowly. No doubt. West covers everything in an evenhanded manner. Probably the definitive history of the West. The irony of a man named West writing about the West was not lost on me.
December 7, 2024
“Looking forward from 1848, the most remarkable thing about the west in 1880 was that it WAS.”
In this grand account of America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Elliott West attempts to recenter the defining moment of the century away from the American Civil War, towards the birth of the American West in the age of expansion. He does this convincingly in three parts, “Unsettling America, Things Come Together, and Worked into Being.” West’s biggest strength is his ability to point out ironies and paradoxes that defined this messy and tumultuous era. One noteworthy example was how while the thirteenth amendment was used in the East to free the enslaved, it was used in the West to limit and exclude the Chinese. This is one example among dozens. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that this book was written by a man named “West.”
West covers a broad range of topics, the scope of this book is astounding. I found the exploration of the natural sciences discussed in Part Two fascinating. The West essentially became a laboratory for emerging scientific fields, paleontology, meteorology, geography, and more shaping the world’s understanding of these fields to this day.
One theme that persists throughout West’s book is government ineptitude. This seemed to begin with the creation of the West, and the challenge of governing such a large area. It culminated at the end of the age with tragically flawed policies that annihilated Native American cultures.
Washington was incredibly ill-informed and ill-equipped to govern the West, but this did not stop the West from becoming a populated and powerful economic engine for the United States. Flawed and exploitative as they were, large scale mining and agriculture made the country wealthy. Here too we can find a tragic irony. The romanticized image of the “cowboy” and “49er” were mostly mythic, the reality was more “corporate” than we would like to think.
West implores the reader to quite literally “reckon” with our own past and the way we think about the West in this impressive feat of history.
In this grand account of America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Elliott West attempts to recenter the defining moment of the century away from the American Civil War, towards the birth of the American West in the age of expansion. He does this convincingly in three parts, “Unsettling America, Things Come Together, and Worked into Being.” West’s biggest strength is his ability to point out ironies and paradoxes that defined this messy and tumultuous era. One noteworthy example was how while the thirteenth amendment was used in the East to free the enslaved, it was used in the West to limit and exclude the Chinese. This is one example among dozens. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that this book was written by a man named “West.”
West covers a broad range of topics, the scope of this book is astounding. I found the exploration of the natural sciences discussed in Part Two fascinating. The West essentially became a laboratory for emerging scientific fields, paleontology, meteorology, geography, and more shaping the world’s understanding of these fields to this day.
One theme that persists throughout West’s book is government ineptitude. This seemed to begin with the creation of the West, and the challenge of governing such a large area. It culminated at the end of the age with tragically flawed policies that annihilated Native American cultures.
Washington was incredibly ill-informed and ill-equipped to govern the West, but this did not stop the West from becoming a populated and powerful economic engine for the United States. Flawed and exploitative as they were, large scale mining and agriculture made the country wealthy. Here too we can find a tragic irony. The romanticized image of the “cowboy” and “49er” were mostly mythic, the reality was more “corporate” than we would like to think.
West implores the reader to quite literally “reckon” with our own past and the way we think about the West in this impressive feat of history.
July 13, 2025
If you want to read a self loathing white male academic’s take on the US westward expansion this might be your book.
I started this book after seeing the author a couple of times promote this book on talk shows. I had high hopes because of the topic but would never read from this author again.
He discusses some interesting facts such as the development of the railroad, telegraph etc but then will throw in nonsense takes on things, most egregiously about Native Americans-US relations (but for sure other topics as well, and sprinkles them throughout the book).
One example was giving a diatribe about how unfair, dishonest, ruthless americans were and then describing an incident with Native Americans as just being “curious” when they first encountered the white man and saw a train so they threw trees on the tracks to stop it, and then scalped and raped the passengers. 🧐
Another was explaining the genius of Native Americans in their combat tactics by…stealing horses? (No, it’s just stealing).
Another is praising Native Americans for using horses once Europeans reintroduced them to the continent but then condemning Europeans for bringing animals in the first place?
Etc etc etc
He also sometimes will drone on about some topics e.g. mineral rights in the Sacramento area.
This by far has been the most challenging book to finish for me this year (actually started last year). History should be more impartial but I think authors like this one prefer to rewrite history and deceptively use their knowledge of the events to do so
I started this book after seeing the author a couple of times promote this book on talk shows. I had high hopes because of the topic but would never read from this author again.
He discusses some interesting facts such as the development of the railroad, telegraph etc but then will throw in nonsense takes on things, most egregiously about Native Americans-US relations (but for sure other topics as well, and sprinkles them throughout the book).
One example was giving a diatribe about how unfair, dishonest, ruthless americans were and then describing an incident with Native Americans as just being “curious” when they first encountered the white man and saw a train so they threw trees on the tracks to stop it, and then scalped and raped the passengers. 🧐
Another was explaining the genius of Native Americans in their combat tactics by…stealing horses? (No, it’s just stealing).
Another is praising Native Americans for using horses once Europeans reintroduced them to the continent but then condemning Europeans for bringing animals in the first place?
Etc etc etc
He also sometimes will drone on about some topics e.g. mineral rights in the Sacramento area.
This by far has been the most challenging book to finish for me this year (actually started last year). History should be more impartial but I think authors like this one prefer to rewrite history and deceptively use their knowledge of the events to do so
November 5, 2024
An undeniably impressive piece of scholarship, but the writing is redunant and in some places sloppy--I ran into more typos in this than any book I've read. More a textbook than anything.
January 1, 2026
I hesitate to give this book three stars because of the author’s clear erudition. I learned things. But this was one of the driest, most boring books I’ve read in a while. I had to force myself to finish it before 2026.
December 27, 2025
Filled with amazing archival and delightful anecdotal detail, this is a comprehensive synthetic interpretive narrative history of the American West in the second half of the 19th century that deserves its extensive accolades. The essential argument is that the postwar West would serve as a “national unifier” by providing “images and experiences that rose beyond sectional differences.” (252) One of its signal virtues is that it integrates the story of the displacement of the Native peoples into every thematically organized chapter, rather than treating it literally or figuratively as just one chapter in a larger story. It also breaks all genre boundaries, moving seamlessly between environmental, political, social, economic, and intellectual history. “Re-peopling involved de-peopling. Native populations were dropping, both from outright assaults, and even more from the environmental and social disorder brought on by the in-flooding of others from the east and around the world.” (255) If there is an underlying theme it is that the destruction of the Indians was less racially or ideologically motivated (though it was so justified) than it was an inevitable byproduct of the ecological imperialism that “conquering” the west entailed. West is perhaps at his best in conveying through a wealth of detail just how rapid the transition was over the second of the 19th century from a space that was essentially terra incognito to the white man, to a space wholly subjugated to his economic and political project — a project above all epistemic in nature, ergo the title about “reckoning.”
“The picture is of an immigrant swell into country wholly unprepared for it, a federal presence near comically inept and authorities deeply at odds, thousands of Indians displaced and dispossessed, with fully a fourth of Kansas, ‘and by all odds the best fourth,’ passing from Native hands. The story is of contests over landed property, fired by passions around race and free labor, with the balance shifting from hardscrabble squatters to politicians and business and corporate kingpins.” (134)
“The picture is of an immigrant swell into country wholly unprepared for it, a federal presence near comically inept and authorities deeply at odds, thousands of Indians displaced and dispossessed, with fully a fourth of Kansas, ‘and by all odds the best fourth,’ passing from Native hands. The story is of contests over landed property, fired by passions around race and free labor, with the balance shifting from hardscrabble squatters to politicians and business and corporate kingpins.” (134)
September 17, 2024
The author is to be commended for telling the compelling story of the development of the American West; I just wish he had used a proofreader. Man, there were a ton of typos!!! Other than that a very interesting book. The author focuses on the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill as a major turning point, along with the acquisition of land leading to the Pacific as the two pivots on which all else rotates. He also chronicles America's wars against the native peoples and their impact on the course of history. A very good effort.
May 3, 2025
L A N D
nothing much to write home on here
nothing much to write home on here
December 20, 2025
Super informative but a bit dry at times.
July 24, 2025
Do yourself a favor and be the beneficiary of Elliot West’s lifetime of acquired wisdom. You will better understand America, not just ‘the West.’
Admittedly not a quick read, but also not dry - few academics possess West’s ability to write lyrical prose as impressive as their research.
Give Elliot West a National Medal of the Arts already.
Admittedly not a quick read, but also not dry - few academics possess West’s ability to write lyrical prose as impressive as their research.
Give Elliot West a National Medal of the Arts already.
December 18, 2024
This was a great book about the settlement/conquest of the West from the 1840s until roughly the end of the 1880s/90s. West divides it into three parts: 1) Unsettling America, when the west was still mostly frontier to the US in the pre-Civil War era, 2) Things Come Together, when the US goes through its post-Civil War Reconstruction (which West terms Greater Reconstruction, looking at not just how the North and South came together but the west as well), and 3) Worked Into Being, when the post-west frontier is domesticated for the usage/interest of the overall US.
Some various notes and items that caught my attention .. . .
In 1848, it was quicker to get to San Francisco from Tasmania than from New York City. Folgers, STudebaker, Levi, and Wells Fargo (express shipping) all began from the California gold rush. Because California got so big quick, it needed to develop agriculture and industry to feed and care for itself. The '49ers forced out foreign miners who came in 1848 - Asians and South Americans, who got their earlier. European immigrants didn't count as foreign in tihs cirumstances, though. Placer mining gave way to more intensive and heavier capital methods like hydraulic mining. Mexicans were lynched and murdered. Nativer Americans were massacred individually and in organized raids by the state militia. Native Americans were sometime kidnapped with the genders housed separatedly, further lowering birth rates. The environmental costs of mining was huge and also hurt Native Americans. They suffered a 90% decline in pouplation from 1845-80.
Horse culture relied on grass, which was plentiful on the Great Plains. It led to the spread of smallpox and killing of buffalo, whose numbers went down in the 1850s. There was often little actual government out west. We shift from Indian removal to reservations as now Oklahoma isn't on our fringers any more. Proposed railroad routes went along modern interstates.
Western territories discouraged slavery, even when they allowed it by their codes. Utah, for instance, allowed slavery, but their codes meant the owner had to treat his slave properly or face punishment himself. New Mexico created a slave code as a political gimmick to get a railroad. THey had virtually no slaves there. Popular soverignty was popular out there. The South felt you needed to expand slavery for it to survive. For all the talk in the east about slavery out west, there were virtually no slaves out west. At least of blacks - many Native Americans were enslaved. Sumner's speech in 1856 was about Kansas.
NOTE: West overstates his case on the rarity of slavery in the West. Was the New Mexico slave code really just a political gimmick? He dismisses slavery in Kansas, which -- really? He says slavery was on decline in Missouri- well, it was still fairly common there.
There was bad blood between Utah and the US, leading to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In the Civil War, he recaps the Glorietta Pass campaign. Native Americans generally sided with the Confederacy. Their cattle herds were ruined during the war. Man Sioux from Minnesota die when they're shipped to Dakota. The Sand Creek Massacre led to a rare Native American winter counterattack. The Navajo were attacked into near-starvation. The rise of Indian Schools.
That's all from the first part of the book. Now, for the middle part:
The telegraph and railroad bound the nation together. The Pacific Telegraph Act was passed due to mining strikes and the line was completed by 1861. That's way better than pigeon communication. Telegraphs allowed for more economic corporatization of the West. Railroads were financed by the government and to be paid back with land grant revenue. The first transcontinental railroad went through the old Donner Party area. Chinese were used due to labor shortages. Nitroglycerne was also used. The railroad was a symbol of unity. We had four by 1889. Wagon trains still continued. Camels were tried and failed. Stagecoaches still existed.
Powell explored the Grand Canyon. There were other expeditions. Those expeditions in part wanted to evaluate the economic opportunities there. They also studied geology and paleontology of fossils. There were studies of Native American culture, in part to help end their tribal identity. SKulls were collected. Yellowstone and Yosemite helped create national parks. They became sacred spaces for the nation, and we denied Native American involvmement there.
The west was very diverse, though northern Europeans were preferred. Chain migration occurred. There were laws to discriminate against Chinese: mining taxes, and they couldn't testify in court. There was the image of opium dens. There weren't many blacks out west, but some soldiers, cowboys, and farmers. Only Wyoming and eastern Montana were over 1% black. Whites still saw blacks as a threat. The west skewed heavily male, with jobs like ranching, mining, and railroad construction. The old frontier had farmers come as families. Some women waited back east while others came. They could run boarding houses, teach in schools, or become prostitutes. Some were homesteaders, which wasn't possible before the Civil War. The status of Hispanic women eroded. Chinese women were very rare.
NOW, for the third/final part of the book.
There was a big rise and fall of the cattle industry. Terrible weather in the 1860s hurt it. Pigs resist herding. Texas cattle had the big drives up north. Cattle were part of modern industry. But there was an oversupply leading to overgrazing. Barbed wire hurt, too. The Great Die-Up in 1885-87 of a drought and blizzard. Texas cattle brought disease up north. People take Pasteur's germ theory and link it to ticks and go after them.
The Weather Bureau was created, to help monitor temperature and wind. They noticed some very particular patterns on where storms came from. More acres were converted to farmland from 1870-1900 than from 1607-1870 (225 million acres vs 189 million acres). The biggest gains came in the Great Plains. Plenty more came in California. Elsewhere was more piecemeal - but still added up. Those ones were to feed soldiers or mining communities or Mormons. From 1866-80, wheat production tripled and corn production doubled. California used lots of irrigation.
Native Americans were de-horsed. Agriculture was seen as inherently superior to Native American ways. We promoted them to farm, even if the land wasn't fit for it. The Dawes Act gave families 160 acres, and gave others 40 to 80 acres. 2/3 of their land was lost by 1934. It undercut Indian society and structure. Half the bison were gone by the Civil War. Many more die after it. He doesn't buy the theory that it was intentional. It was mostly for economic/market demands. There were 15 TRILLION Rocky Mountain locusts - which overall OUTWEIGHED the buffalo. A huge swarm went from 1873-77. But they were extinct by 1900ish. They bred in riverside areas that became settled/farm areas.
Mining became larger scale. Hydraulic mining used mercury (it bonded with gold) which was poisonious. Oops. Mines were VERY hot down below. There was a shift from free labor to corporate employee. There were fights of mining claims as miners rarely got legal claims before they began mining. Mines hurt the air, land, and underground, including underground water.
Mining strikes hurt Native Americans. We pit tribes against each other. It was most effective to attack them in winter and hurt their food storage supplies. There was tighter federal control in reservations. Boarding schools sought to "kill the Indian, save the man." There's zero evidence the Ghost Dance was about calling for violent resistance.
The west ended up part of the US. You could easily get bananas in Ely, Nevada for example. We wanted the land for its resources. We had more contact/trade with Asia. We remade it all for people's usage. It advanced science. It transformed race as we freed slaves and caged native tribes.
I got the most out of the first section, but it's all very strong.
Some various notes and items that caught my attention .. . .
In 1848, it was quicker to get to San Francisco from Tasmania than from New York City. Folgers, STudebaker, Levi, and Wells Fargo (express shipping) all began from the California gold rush. Because California got so big quick, it needed to develop agriculture and industry to feed and care for itself. The '49ers forced out foreign miners who came in 1848 - Asians and South Americans, who got their earlier. European immigrants didn't count as foreign in tihs cirumstances, though. Placer mining gave way to more intensive and heavier capital methods like hydraulic mining. Mexicans were lynched and murdered. Nativer Americans were massacred individually and in organized raids by the state militia. Native Americans were sometime kidnapped with the genders housed separatedly, further lowering birth rates. The environmental costs of mining was huge and also hurt Native Americans. They suffered a 90% decline in pouplation from 1845-80.
Horse culture relied on grass, which was plentiful on the Great Plains. It led to the spread of smallpox and killing of buffalo, whose numbers went down in the 1850s. There was often little actual government out west. We shift from Indian removal to reservations as now Oklahoma isn't on our fringers any more. Proposed railroad routes went along modern interstates.
Western territories discouraged slavery, even when they allowed it by their codes. Utah, for instance, allowed slavery, but their codes meant the owner had to treat his slave properly or face punishment himself. New Mexico created a slave code as a political gimmick to get a railroad. THey had virtually no slaves there. Popular soverignty was popular out there. The South felt you needed to expand slavery for it to survive. For all the talk in the east about slavery out west, there were virtually no slaves out west. At least of blacks - many Native Americans were enslaved. Sumner's speech in 1856 was about Kansas.
NOTE: West overstates his case on the rarity of slavery in the West. Was the New Mexico slave code really just a political gimmick? He dismisses slavery in Kansas, which -- really? He says slavery was on decline in Missouri- well, it was still fairly common there.
There was bad blood between Utah and the US, leading to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In the Civil War, he recaps the Glorietta Pass campaign. Native Americans generally sided with the Confederacy. Their cattle herds were ruined during the war. Man Sioux from Minnesota die when they're shipped to Dakota. The Sand Creek Massacre led to a rare Native American winter counterattack. The Navajo were attacked into near-starvation. The rise of Indian Schools.
That's all from the first part of the book. Now, for the middle part:
The telegraph and railroad bound the nation together. The Pacific Telegraph Act was passed due to mining strikes and the line was completed by 1861. That's way better than pigeon communication. Telegraphs allowed for more economic corporatization of the West. Railroads were financed by the government and to be paid back with land grant revenue. The first transcontinental railroad went through the old Donner Party area. Chinese were used due to labor shortages. Nitroglycerne was also used. The railroad was a symbol of unity. We had four by 1889. Wagon trains still continued. Camels were tried and failed. Stagecoaches still existed.
Powell explored the Grand Canyon. There were other expeditions. Those expeditions in part wanted to evaluate the economic opportunities there. They also studied geology and paleontology of fossils. There were studies of Native American culture, in part to help end their tribal identity. SKulls were collected. Yellowstone and Yosemite helped create national parks. They became sacred spaces for the nation, and we denied Native American involvmement there.
The west was very diverse, though northern Europeans were preferred. Chain migration occurred. There were laws to discriminate against Chinese: mining taxes, and they couldn't testify in court. There was the image of opium dens. There weren't many blacks out west, but some soldiers, cowboys, and farmers. Only Wyoming and eastern Montana were over 1% black. Whites still saw blacks as a threat. The west skewed heavily male, with jobs like ranching, mining, and railroad construction. The old frontier had farmers come as families. Some women waited back east while others came. They could run boarding houses, teach in schools, or become prostitutes. Some were homesteaders, which wasn't possible before the Civil War. The status of Hispanic women eroded. Chinese women were very rare.
NOW, for the third/final part of the book.
There was a big rise and fall of the cattle industry. Terrible weather in the 1860s hurt it. Pigs resist herding. Texas cattle had the big drives up north. Cattle were part of modern industry. But there was an oversupply leading to overgrazing. Barbed wire hurt, too. The Great Die-Up in 1885-87 of a drought and blizzard. Texas cattle brought disease up north. People take Pasteur's germ theory and link it to ticks and go after them.
The Weather Bureau was created, to help monitor temperature and wind. They noticed some very particular patterns on where storms came from. More acres were converted to farmland from 1870-1900 than from 1607-1870 (225 million acres vs 189 million acres). The biggest gains came in the Great Plains. Plenty more came in California. Elsewhere was more piecemeal - but still added up. Those ones were to feed soldiers or mining communities or Mormons. From 1866-80, wheat production tripled and corn production doubled. California used lots of irrigation.
Native Americans were de-horsed. Agriculture was seen as inherently superior to Native American ways. We promoted them to farm, even if the land wasn't fit for it. The Dawes Act gave families 160 acres, and gave others 40 to 80 acres. 2/3 of their land was lost by 1934. It undercut Indian society and structure. Half the bison were gone by the Civil War. Many more die after it. He doesn't buy the theory that it was intentional. It was mostly for economic/market demands. There were 15 TRILLION Rocky Mountain locusts - which overall OUTWEIGHED the buffalo. A huge swarm went from 1873-77. But they were extinct by 1900ish. They bred in riverside areas that became settled/farm areas.
Mining became larger scale. Hydraulic mining used mercury (it bonded with gold) which was poisonious. Oops. Mines were VERY hot down below. There was a shift from free labor to corporate employee. There were fights of mining claims as miners rarely got legal claims before they began mining. Mines hurt the air, land, and underground, including underground water.
Mining strikes hurt Native Americans. We pit tribes against each other. It was most effective to attack them in winter and hurt their food storage supplies. There was tighter federal control in reservations. Boarding schools sought to "kill the Indian, save the man." There's zero evidence the Ghost Dance was about calling for violent resistance.
The west ended up part of the US. You could easily get bananas in Ely, Nevada for example. We wanted the land for its resources. We had more contact/trade with Asia. We remade it all for people's usage. It advanced science. It transformed race as we freed slaves and caged native tribes.
I got the most out of the first section, but it's all very strong.
January 15, 2026
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion was the 2024 Bancroft Prize winner and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History for understandable reasons.
Historian Elliott West sought through this book to put together a comprehensive look at the population (and in, the case of Native American tribes, depopulation) of the American West which was set off by the acquisition of what would become all of part of seven new states from the Mexican-American War and the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California.
It would likely be difficult to find a better single volume account of this topic than what can be found between the pages of this book's cover.
A subtext throughout the book was the manner in which the newly opened west helped to, in a way, unify the sectionalism that had been ripped open by the likes of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. The debate over slavery that undergirded much of this, followed by a war with over a million casualties, emancipation, and Reconstruction, essentially called out for some sort of national project to unify north and south.
To hear the ironically named West tell this, settlement of the west proved to be such a project. Its locations on the margins during the Civil War meant that there was little in the ways of battles of strategy that came into play during the section from 1861-1865.
But there was a look at the composition of what sort of Americans were populating new territories like California and Oregon. Whether they emigrated from the southeast or northeast section of the country would play a big role in local votes taken on allowing/disallowing slavery and the settlement and voting rights of free African-Americans.
That anti-slavery sentiment existed solely due to a commitment to free white labor which paired itself alongside an unwillingness to accept settlement of freed blacks was a contradiction which the author did not shy away from acknowledging.
There was also an interesting look at the debate over whether slavery would ever really take root in the west and the extent to which this mattered less than the principle of the free state/slave state debate in the years leading up to the Civil War. West made the case that the frequently trotted out argument that slavery would never have taken root in the west was not accurate; to hear the author tell it, California's agricultural economy and to some extent gold and silver mining could have ended up utilizing slave labor had it been allowed to take root.
John Marshall's discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill kicked off the Continental Reckoning's narrative.
There was an informative portion looking at various types of mining which took off soon after. Hydraulic mining and the manner in which capital-intensive projects quickly ran mom-and-pop mining outfits out of business played a role in this section, as did the tremendous environmental destruction done by the large scale mining methods which ultimately took over.
The rise of cattle ranching, as well as the Great Die-up of the mid-1880s, were analyzed in the book. Cattle aside, beliefs like rain following the plow were dealt a major blow during this era.
Individuals who work in the ranching industry will find this section particularly interesting as it tracks the growth of areas like Abilene, Kansas, and the machinations behind longhorns and cattle replacing bison as roamers of the plains.
Although the Lewis and Clark expedition was largely outside of this book's purview, U.S. Geological Survey director John Wesley Powell played a big role in the story. The west's contributions toward enhancing understandings of geology and further advances in land and earth sciences in general were not overlooked by West.
Legislation like the Homestead Act (1862) for those moving west and native-centric laws like the Dawes Act (1887) were broken down over the course of the book.
The outright assault on Native American communities like the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Lakota is covered well in this book.
Through fraud, spread of disease, and outright genocidal killing, the horrors visited on the continent's native peoples was a crime which even in modern times has never full been-to borrow from the book's subtitle-reckoned with.
Colorado's 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as well as the Ghost Dance and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota provide sad flashpoints when it comes to examining the class between white and Indian civilization in the American West. Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph are also looked at within these contexts.
Also not overlooked is the growth of Mormonism from its rise in upstate New York under Joseph Smith to its movement toward Utah under Brigham Young. Both the light and dark sides of this religious movement are captured in Continental Reckoning.
This in-depth book should be commended for the amount of research and scholarship Elliott West poured into it. It is clear he cut few corners and turned over as many stones as possible when it came to gaining information and identifying the impactful individuals and movements of this era in American history.
But it was not the top notch tome it could have been.
There was just something lacking in the manner in which the narrative was laid out, and it honestly felt as it could have been multiple volumes instead of one.
West laid out things in a fairly easy to follow format, but it felt like the framework attempted to bring in so much in such a limited amount of space that many topics were given short shrift. Some chapters were so compelling that it was a disappointment when they reached a premature conclusion (although this is in a way a compliment as well). This was probably unavoidable, but it still prevented Continental Reckoning from reaching its full potential.
Readers who want to enhance their knowledge of the American West's settling will nevertheless still gain a lot from this book. They will complete it with a much better grasp of the story of how the western states came to have the cultures and institutions they have today.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
Historian Elliott West sought through this book to put together a comprehensive look at the population (and in, the case of Native American tribes, depopulation) of the American West which was set off by the acquisition of what would become all of part of seven new states from the Mexican-American War and the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California.
It would likely be difficult to find a better single volume account of this topic than what can be found between the pages of this book's cover.
A subtext throughout the book was the manner in which the newly opened west helped to, in a way, unify the sectionalism that had been ripped open by the likes of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. The debate over slavery that undergirded much of this, followed by a war with over a million casualties, emancipation, and Reconstruction, essentially called out for some sort of national project to unify north and south.
To hear the ironically named West tell this, settlement of the west proved to be such a project. Its locations on the margins during the Civil War meant that there was little in the ways of battles of strategy that came into play during the section from 1861-1865.
But there was a look at the composition of what sort of Americans were populating new territories like California and Oregon. Whether they emigrated from the southeast or northeast section of the country would play a big role in local votes taken on allowing/disallowing slavery and the settlement and voting rights of free African-Americans.
That anti-slavery sentiment existed solely due to a commitment to free white labor which paired itself alongside an unwillingness to accept settlement of freed blacks was a contradiction which the author did not shy away from acknowledging.
There was also an interesting look at the debate over whether slavery would ever really take root in the west and the extent to which this mattered less than the principle of the free state/slave state debate in the years leading up to the Civil War. West made the case that the frequently trotted out argument that slavery would never have taken root in the west was not accurate; to hear the author tell it, California's agricultural economy and to some extent gold and silver mining could have ended up utilizing slave labor had it been allowed to take root.
John Marshall's discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill kicked off the Continental Reckoning's narrative.
There was an informative portion looking at various types of mining which took off soon after. Hydraulic mining and the manner in which capital-intensive projects quickly ran mom-and-pop mining outfits out of business played a role in this section, as did the tremendous environmental destruction done by the large scale mining methods which ultimately took over.
The rise of cattle ranching, as well as the Great Die-up of the mid-1880s, were analyzed in the book. Cattle aside, beliefs like rain following the plow were dealt a major blow during this era.
Individuals who work in the ranching industry will find this section particularly interesting as it tracks the growth of areas like Abilene, Kansas, and the machinations behind longhorns and cattle replacing bison as roamers of the plains.
Although the Lewis and Clark expedition was largely outside of this book's purview, U.S. Geological Survey director John Wesley Powell played a big role in the story. The west's contributions toward enhancing understandings of geology and further advances in land and earth sciences in general were not overlooked by West.
Legislation like the Homestead Act (1862) for those moving west and native-centric laws like the Dawes Act (1887) were broken down over the course of the book.
The outright assault on Native American communities like the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Lakota is covered well in this book.
Through fraud, spread of disease, and outright genocidal killing, the horrors visited on the continent's native peoples was a crime which even in modern times has never full been-to borrow from the book's subtitle-reckoned with.
Colorado's 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as well as the Ghost Dance and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota provide sad flashpoints when it comes to examining the class between white and Indian civilization in the American West. Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph are also looked at within these contexts.
Also not overlooked is the growth of Mormonism from its rise in upstate New York under Joseph Smith to its movement toward Utah under Brigham Young. Both the light and dark sides of this religious movement are captured in Continental Reckoning.
This in-depth book should be commended for the amount of research and scholarship Elliott West poured into it. It is clear he cut few corners and turned over as many stones as possible when it came to gaining information and identifying the impactful individuals and movements of this era in American history.
But it was not the top notch tome it could have been.
There was just something lacking in the manner in which the narrative was laid out, and it honestly felt as it could have been multiple volumes instead of one.
West laid out things in a fairly easy to follow format, but it felt like the framework attempted to bring in so much in such a limited amount of space that many topics were given short shrift. Some chapters were so compelling that it was a disappointment when they reached a premature conclusion (although this is in a way a compliment as well). This was probably unavoidable, but it still prevented Continental Reckoning from reaching its full potential.
Readers who want to enhance their knowledge of the American West's settling will nevertheless still gain a lot from this book. They will complete it with a much better grasp of the story of how the western states came to have the cultures and institutions they have today.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
April 27, 2025
Absolutely loved this book. It was long and intensive but, still a nice read.
November 2, 2025
A rather long book that I had to read in starts and stops over a six month period, sometimes alternating this with Robert Merry's book, A Country of Vast Designs, about James K. Polk, which overlaps with the same time period that this book begins with (https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...). At times it is difficult, such as discussing the treatment of Native Americans and non-whites. The scope of the book is quite broad covering everything from changing demography to geology over a 50+ year time period in which everything in society and technology changes exponentially. Some of the more moving moments are about the ways assumptions led to misunderstandings, which led to tragic National policies.
The ending quote from Chief Joseph seems pertinent in the present discussions about immigration policy and racial disparities. He paraphrases:
Now they accepted that they were Americans, which after all, is what Washington had insisted, and they embraced American values. Liberty is good and great, including the liberty to go home if they wished. Then Joseph raised his sons. Washington now commanded the country, and as it felt out the way ahead, it ought to look for answers in the very places it had taken. They were as large as the people inhabiting them. And not just in the sense of having enough room for them all. He spoke of the Sun’s generosity and of the earth’s gifts, and implied that all that lived by them had capacities just as great. As the country opened itself it’s people, it’s people could enlarge it’s true possibilities through their own generosity of spirit and vision. Joseph was asking the men he now called his fellow Americans, how their story thus far had measured up to that standard. Nearly a century and a half later, the question is still worth asking. Both about the birth of the west and about all that has followed. In a Nation continental in scale, and with potential still unfold, how might the National character grow and deepen to match the promise of national expansion.
Josephs’ advice were his last words in any official record.
"The way is as big as the land"
The ending quote from Chief Joseph seems pertinent in the present discussions about immigration policy and racial disparities. He paraphrases:
Now they accepted that they were Americans, which after all, is what Washington had insisted, and they embraced American values. Liberty is good and great, including the liberty to go home if they wished. Then Joseph raised his sons. Washington now commanded the country, and as it felt out the way ahead, it ought to look for answers in the very places it had taken. They were as large as the people inhabiting them. And not just in the sense of having enough room for them all. He spoke of the Sun’s generosity and of the earth’s gifts, and implied that all that lived by them had capacities just as great. As the country opened itself it’s people, it’s people could enlarge it’s true possibilities through their own generosity of spirit and vision. Joseph was asking the men he now called his fellow Americans, how their story thus far had measured up to that standard. Nearly a century and a half later, the question is still worth asking. Both about the birth of the west and about all that has followed. In a Nation continental in scale, and with potential still unfold, how might the National character grow and deepen to match the promise of national expansion.
Josephs’ advice were his last words in any official record.
"The way is as big as the land"
February 13, 2025
The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat.
The middle of the book slumped a little bit for me. At the end of the day, this is still a modern history book. There are land acknowledgments at the beginning. There's definitely a major tendency to minimize native-on-white violence. The language shifts are subtler than your average twitter thread, but it's all still there and super annoying.
Another disappointment is that because it is such a rigorously researched book, 100 pages are eaten by citations and footnotes. It's a dense typeface but I bought a physical copy, and so there was a bit of a let down when a big fraction of the pages were not pure content. (The footnotes were still entertaining).
Probably the worst sin is that the last chapter read like a high school essay - a summarization of the sections before it. Unskippable because there were also great vignettes interspersed throughout that were one of the strengths of the book.
The bottom line is that it is still well-researched book, and entertaining for many reasons. The author does an extremely effective job of using facts and figures to underscore how the age of expansion/the gilded age was. I find the 19th century fascinating across the board, and the effects of the telegram, rail, steam power, and cheap firearm rifling on the world are a hell of a combination.
The middle of the book slumped a little bit for me. At the end of the day, this is still a modern history book. There are land acknowledgments at the beginning. There's definitely a major tendency to minimize native-on-white violence. The language shifts are subtler than your average twitter thread, but it's all still there and super annoying.
Another disappointment is that because it is such a rigorously researched book, 100 pages are eaten by citations and footnotes. It's a dense typeface but I bought a physical copy, and so there was a bit of a let down when a big fraction of the pages were not pure content. (The footnotes were still entertaining).
Probably the worst sin is that the last chapter read like a high school essay - a summarization of the sections before it. Unskippable because there were also great vignettes interspersed throughout that were one of the strengths of the book.
The bottom line is that it is still well-researched book, and entertaining for many reasons. The author does an extremely effective job of using facts and figures to underscore how the age of expansion/the gilded age was. I find the 19th century fascinating across the board, and the effects of the telegram, rail, steam power, and cheap firearm rifling on the world are a hell of a combination.
May 22, 2024
An unvarnished history of the West. "Reckoning" in the title is right--he shatters myths left and right. No heroes here. Just lots of immigrant scorn, Indian massacre, and rape of the land all in the name of progress. All true of course. And shameful. But maybe it's just me, but I wanted some of those parallel feats of human ingenuity and sheer perseverance too. There's some of it, but the teeter-totter is clunking down on the side of nasty.
The book could have been cut by about one-third by editing out the repetition, but I learned a lot. So there's that. Like many books, I'm so excited with the writing in the first chapter but then, whomp-whomp, it all gets rather ponderous. Histories come alive with people, not facts. More stories and diaries would have been welcome. He sprinkles those in, but not often enough. Why is it academics think that listing the increase in x by using percentage or quantities is a gut-punch to readers. "Wow," no one ever thinks, after reading that 'the number of cattle rose from 30,000 in 1865 to 450,000 in 1867' [not a fact in the book, just made it up]. That lacks the same impact as say, 'the number of cattle grew by so much in such a short time that the entire state of Kansas lost all its grass'...
But I don't want to bum-rush a piece of work that took 20 years to write. Kudos to the deep dive and brilliant research that went into this.
The book could have been cut by about one-third by editing out the repetition, but I learned a lot. So there's that. Like many books, I'm so excited with the writing in the first chapter but then, whomp-whomp, it all gets rather ponderous. Histories come alive with people, not facts. More stories and diaries would have been welcome. He sprinkles those in, but not often enough. Why is it academics think that listing the increase in x by using percentage or quantities is a gut-punch to readers. "Wow," no one ever thinks, after reading that 'the number of cattle rose from 30,000 in 1865 to 450,000 in 1867' [not a fact in the book, just made it up]. That lacks the same impact as say, 'the number of cattle grew by so much in such a short time that the entire state of Kansas lost all its grass'...
But I don't want to bum-rush a piece of work that took 20 years to write. Kudos to the deep dive and brilliant research that went into this.
July 23, 2025
The West was settled by brave pioneers who at the end of the 19th century helped shape the 20th and our current one. The greatest advancements in human achievement can easily be interwoven into the narrative of the settling of the West. Sadly, this work was more focused on scoring accolades from a certain class of intellectuals in academia. One telling example is the assertion that it was the underlying masculine mindset that caused harm during the settling of the West, and did so with the patina of being a pejorative. That, and the fact that it was Europeans (see White), that brought about this advancement. Anyone who has done a semblance of the work it took to endure the hardships of expansion would say that it was with a spirit of determination, resolve and grit, and done so with positivity rather than how this book portrays those who entered the wilds and came out the other side with the foundations of the greatest country the world has seen. We can discuss the vanquishing of the native peoples and some of the failures of absorbing a conquered people into the overall American society. Those criticisms should be exposed to societal norms, but only against their contemporaries and not the current confused paradigm. Would the author be able to find an example of a conquering culture assimilating its vanquished foes in a better fashion? Doubtful.
July 29, 2025
Listened to on hoopla. fascinating progression of the history of the settling of the US west from 1840s to 1890s. The author really stresses what he calls the great coincidence that days after the US officially takes over California and the west from Mexico gold is discovered in Northern California that discovery drives very rapid expansion of the Northern California area first and the West Coast developing somewhat independently of the east, but driving many people and resources to go to the west to strike it rich. The author conventionally argues that the tremendous wealth to be gained in California rapidly drives the sibling across the planes and the mountains to the west of course, just the graphically display the many people who have lived their generations. He Moves back-and-forth from different topic areas, such as many of the problems that the native tribes suffer at the hands of the white settler in the US government in US Army, how the Civil War factored in how immigration from Europe and then from Asia rapidly developed the US. He covers the traditional view of the West Cowboys and covered wagons, but more, so in the context of the bigger picture of how US population and financial centers moved west driven by gold and silver, and secondly, by expansion of new lands and new agriculture I’m very glad to have read this history history.
November 4, 2023
This is an exceptional book that provides a wide-ranging assessment of the settling and development of the West by the United States in the nineteenth century. The author chooses a variety of themes to help tell the history of the geography, ecology, economy, its people, and the country as a whole as the West is explored, settled, extracted, and transformed. The degree of transformation and the conflicts within (a "reckoning") are central to the premise of the book. Overall, I enjoyed this book more than any other I've read in a long time; my primitive brain repeatedly made me feel like the book was written specifically for me. I found the text finely balanced between data, personal vignettes, selected minutiae, and broad conclusions. While the scholarship is extraordinary I have to gripe and feel a little disappointed about the number of typos and some inconsistent use of commas, or the lack thereof, which disrupted my reading in want of comprehension. Other than that, and in summary, one of my considerations for a 5-star rating is whether I would consider re-reading this book many years from now and this is one that I am actually looking forward to doing so.
September 16, 2024
There’s a passage in War and Peace where Tolstoy goes on a fantastic digression about why Moscow burned. As residents evacuated, the tenuous infrastructure that kept the city together systemically collapsed—making fire inevitable, even if no one lit a match. In a sense, Elliott West makes a similar case for how the West developed. He seems to imply that no one person or policy dictated the course of events; the simple fact that non-native peoples arrived en masse (and fully “modern”) was enough to tip the balance and forever alter the biological, cultural, and geographic landscape of the continent. Like most historians, he doesn’t present events as inevitable, per se, but he widens the context around well-known narratives and myths that have become foundational to America’s national story. It’s a very good, expansive, and thoughtful history of the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century. I appreciated how it knits together the many stories and perspectives of the American experience into a unifying vision of what happened, and why it happened.
January 17, 2024
This superb book is a great survey of the history of the American West from the discovery of gold in California (1848) to the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast.
If something important happened in that area during that time, it is at least briefly covered here. West doesn't just recite the facts - he connects them in meaningful ways. Grand topics include the railroad and telegraph, bison and cattle, race and gender, water, disease vectors, gold and silver mining, agriculture, and many more.
Why were the bison hunted so extensively? What happened to the forests and why? Was the "Wild West" a murderous place? How did the native peoples use their environment and how was that environment altered by European settlers? And on and on. Fascinating stuff.
Includes notes, index, photos and maps, and an extensive bibliography.
Highly recommended.
If something important happened in that area during that time, it is at least briefly covered here. West doesn't just recite the facts - he connects them in meaningful ways. Grand topics include the railroad and telegraph, bison and cattle, race and gender, water, disease vectors, gold and silver mining, agriculture, and many more.
Why were the bison hunted so extensively? What happened to the forests and why? Was the "Wild West" a murderous place? How did the native peoples use their environment and how was that environment altered by European settlers? And on and on. Fascinating stuff.
Includes notes, index, photos and maps, and an extensive bibliography.
Highly recommended.
June 23, 2025
Everything you wanted to know about American westward expansion centering mainly on the second half of the nineteenth century. Of course West goes into detail on the Gold Rush the native American wars and the building of the transcontinental railroad but there is so much more. He emphasizes the underexposed role Asians played as well as the influence of the Mormons and the bugs an and weather people struggled with in their lives. This is a long book with other great nuggets of information on every page.
July 5, 2024
Fairly comprehensive synthesis of the American West with just a few glaring omissions. Offers detailed analysis of various themes specific to the West, showing how the region was incorporated into the US before and after Reconstruction. Discussion of Native Peoples deserves a bit more analysis, possibly bringing in recent scholarship regarding the reality of Native power. Overall an engaging read and a "one stop shop" on the history of the region and its impact on the US as a whole.
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September 3, 2024A really interesting synthesis that several of my grad students have thoroughly enjoyed. It would definitely be useful for historians who want to think about the periodization of US history, as well as the role of transportation and communication technology.
It cannot stand in for a more textbook-type survey for a person who doesn't know much about the United States in the mid nineteenth century.
It cannot stand in for a more textbook-type survey for a person who doesn't know much about the United States in the mid nineteenth century.
July 14, 2025
I really enjoyed the depth of this book. It goes into detail about so many things that I never really considered, and paints a picture of the complexity of the expansion of the American West.
My issue was that I found the book to be inconsistent throughout. Some sections were fascinating, well paced, and engaging. Others felt dense, and kind of boring.
Overall though, something I’m glad I read and I’d recommend this to people who are interested in American history.
My issue was that I found the book to be inconsistent throughout. Some sections were fascinating, well paced, and engaging. Others felt dense, and kind of boring.
Overall though, something I’m glad I read and I’d recommend this to people who are interested in American history.
July 26, 2025
If you’re looking for a book that broadly covers Westward expansion in the U.S., this is the one to read. It is thoughtful, sobering, balanced in view, and does an amazing job in taking a chaotic and complicated time period and showing how it all binds together. The 15+ years Elliot West put into this book shows. Truly a joy to read. I can’t recommend this more.
September 4, 2025
Frankly, a masterpiece. I love reading some of the negative reviews here that basically say, “but it didn’t make me feel good,” and for that crowd, I could see how West’s magnum opus here could be skewed as iconoclastic. I found it to be thorough, nuanced, and coming from a mouthpiece that is clearly pulling through decades of scholarship. 10/10 recommend.
December 24, 2025
I remember the feeling of driving on I-80 through Wyoming, looking at the mountains and listening to a description of how the railroad workers blasted their way through those mountains at a speed of one foot per day.
A truly terrific book to read as you drive across the western US. But I can't say that much of the book stuck with me. Probably my own failing more than the book's.
A truly terrific book to read as you drive across the western US. But I can't say that much of the book stuck with me. Probably my own failing more than the book's.
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