Elliott West

Patrón Leadership at the Crossroads: Southern Colorado in the Late Nineteenth Century

ALTHOUGH HISTORIANS have given increasing attention to the study of ethnic minorities, many gaps remain in the story of Mexican Americans and the places they have inhabited. In surveys of the Southwest, for example, the meager historical information on the early settlement of southern Colorado often is superficial, misleading, or wrong.The history of Mexican-American communities in particular has been neglected. We know little of their local politics, their changing problems, and their interaction with state and national societies. The truncated Mexican-American past represents more than a gap in ethnic history, for it leaves us with an incomplete understanding of all facets of regional and national life influenced by Spanish-surnamed Americans. In the literature on

A Historian Who Has Changed Our Thinking: A Roundtable on the Work of Richard White Introduction

Four panelists from a special session at the 2001 conference of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles, California, reprise their assessments of Richard Whites work. Whites response to their statements also is included along with a selected list of his publications.

The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. By Elliott West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. xxiv + 422 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.

There are many visions that construct the history of the American West. One popular myth consists of the American nation’s expansion from east to west and includes romantic stories of goldseekers and mining towns, cowboys and gunslingers, and a Jeffersonian perspective toward land. Other visions tell a different story—one of American Indian peoples and their use of landscapes and pre-contact trade networks in shaping the region long before Euro-American settlement. These groups maintained intricate inter-tribal and intra-tribal relationships, adapted to environmental challenges, and dwelled within a complex socio-economic and cultural world—a perspective looking east from the west. Yet, these two narratives converge under a third ecological vision where interactions with geography, animals, insects, weather, climate, and other forces worked to shape and dictate the experiences of both Euro-Americans and American Indian peoples. All of these visions are, according to Elliot West, important in understanding the Great Plains’ past and are quite familiar to the more recent works of plains historians. But as settlers expanded west looking for gold, God, or land, and as American Indian peoples worked to exploit these relationships through visions of their own, a greater story emerges, one about power and energy that incorporates 1850s visions of Euro-American conquest and indigenous agency and resistance with an “old world” of the Pleistocene era and Clovis societies. Thus, for Elliot West, professor of history at the University of Arkansas, the history of the Great Plains is more than “chasing the story of Indians and the gold rush”. Rather, he argues “nowhere else on the continent can we see more dramatically the human envisioning of new lifeways and routes to power, the effects of that search on physical and social environments, and the dilemmas and disasters that so often follow.” In the beginning chapters, West traces these lifeways and energy networks through visions of power. The central plains in pre-contact North America were experiencing myriad changes in social, economic, and ecological relationships long before Anglo-Europeans arrived. Clovis societies hunted megafauna, specifi cally Bison Antiquus, participated in and maintained trade networks throughout the plains, and battled increasingly drastic climate and environmental changes. These groups did exploit resources, but ultimately proved to be remarkably successful in establishing “a sustaining way of life”. However, these diverse cultures living in an equally complex ecological community would meet competing visions toward the plains with the intrusion of Europeans. Thus, the plains “as a system of users and used and as