Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West (review)

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• Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansionby Elliott West
• Matthew Babcock

Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. By Elliott West. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. Pp. 628. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index).

In Continental Reckoning, historian Elliott West presents a compelling, expansive, and exceptionally well-written history of the American West, placing it in both national and global contexts, from the 1840s to the 1880s. Historians commonly refer to the period from 1865 to 1900 as the “Age of Transformation” because of the dizzying social, economic, and political developments occurring across the United States in that era. West contends that the nation’s transformation began much earlier and was intensified by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and the acquisition of California and the Southwest in 1848, when the West was born “as a region” (p. xix). Rejecting an east coast-driven, Civil War-centric conception of American history, West employs his Greater Reconstruction thesis, convincingly arguing “The Civil War and the birth of the West” were linked and equally important for understanding the cascading changes in “national life” from the mid-1840s to 1880 (p. xx). Offering insights into everything from hydraulic mining to locusts, West’s book is significant for its extraordinarily rich synthesis of California and Great Plains history during this age of expansion.

West’s well-researched twenty-three-chapter study is divided into three chronological sections. Part I, “Unsettling America,” describes the “continental unsettling” that the nation experienced from 1845 to 1865, fueled by westward territorial and economic expansion, violence against ethnic minorities and native peoples, and the Civil War (p. 2). During that conflict, the federal government asserted firmer control over the West, the author posits, by turning back the Confederate invasion of New Mexico and subduing and confining Native Americans. The next two sections primarily address the postbellum era to the 1880s. Part 2, “Things Come Together,” shows how the United States government constructed an infrastructure of roads, railroads, and telegraph wires across the West, binding it to the nation and facilitating its exploration and scientific study. Einally, Part 3, “Worked into Being,” focuses on the exploitation of western resources and the region’s environmental and scientific transformations through ranching, agriculture, and mining.

Any historian looking to update and enliven their lectures on the nineteenth-century American West, particularly on California and the Great Plains, will find a mother lode of material here. Readers learn that San Erancisco’s mint [End Page 463]processed so much gold in 1856 that its smokestack gilded surrounding rooftops, and that by 1880 the value of the Golden State’s wheat and wheat flour exports exceeded that of gold and silver from its mines. Given West’s previous award-winning works, it should come as no surprise that he excels at discussing the rise of the horse cultures on the contested plains, their ecological impact, and the Army’s subsequent efforts to defeat them in the so-called ”War against Indian America” (p. 57). Demonstrating his broad command of recent historiography and penchant for quantitative research, West extends that war to California, calling the ninety-percent decline in the native population genocidal, and arguing that thee forty-niners’ post-1848 racist violence against Hispanos was even more intense than that against African Americans in the Southeast after 1880.

Some readers may take issue with West’s assumptions. Although it is a historical fact that the United States first became a transcontinental nation in 1848, development in the far west has much deeper roots. New Mexico and California Hispanos mined for precious metals long before that. Hispanic influence on cattle ranching went beyond the ”longhorn” to include terminology from rodeo to lasso, and Indian reservations had earlier origins in the United States and Europe. Given that 5,000 troops pursued Geronimo and Chiricahua holdouts in the Sierra Madre prior to 1886 in conjunction with Mexican forces, West’s assertion that this was an “extensive police action” and not a war also seems questionable (p. 420). Nevertheless, this work is an effective analysis of a compelling subject, adding to the author’s record of producing such...