THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Biographically based history of westward expansion by a well-published scholar of that movement.

Hutton, a retired University of New Mexico historian, brackets his narrative of the westward growth of the United States with the once-famed, now out-of-fashion scholar Frederick Jackson Turner, who declared the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century. (It would quickly be reopened with an overseas empire in such western extremes as the Philippines.) Less arguably, Turner held that “the true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.” From that observation, Hutton proceeds to relate a story that begins even before the founding of the nation, when an unlucky George Washington inadvertently touched off the Seven Years War in North America, “as well as the forty-year conflict between the Americans and the Native tribes for possession of the Ohio Country.” That country was the first west, but it would be followed by many others. One was Texas, whose breakaway from Mexico Hutton relates through the familiar figures of Davy Crockett (“you may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas”), Jim Bowie, and Sam Houston. That “great man” approach is itself old-fashioned, and while Hutton doesn’t uncover much in the way of previously unknown material, he tells a good and vivid story that’s abundantly sympathetic to the Indigenous people who stood in the way of that westward movement, such as the Apache and Comanche Tribes, whose stories are central to Hutton’s. On that score, some of Hutton’s less savory characters include the likes of a former officer who mounted a one-man war against Native peoples, claiming that a pack of wolves followed him “because they’re fond of dead Indians and I feed them well.” It’s not John Wayne’s West, that is to say, but one that lends itself to revisionist accounts.

A sturdy, readable survey, aimed more for buffs than for the author’s fellow historians.