Elliott West

Elliott West opens by describing the scale of Continental Reckoning in the least dramatic way possible: eight to ten years of writing, more than twenty years of research behind it. Rogan calls it a big book, and West agrees without defending the length.

a hell of a book

The subject is the American West between roughly 1845 and 1880 — thirty years in which, as West puts it, an extraordinary amount changed in a very short time. The frame he sets at the outset is deliberately double: an amazing story and a tragic one, and one most people understand very poorly.

The hook is a delegation, not a battle. In the 1720s a group of Native people from the Kansas–Missouri region was received by the French court, and the reason was commercial: France wanted to extend the fur trade up the Missouri after the Spanish had suffered a serious military defeat in what is now eastern Nebraska. The envoy was Étienne de Bourgmont, who already had contacts there — including a son by a Missouri woman.

To seal the arrangement he took about six Indians back with him — Missouri, Illinois, some Osage — down the Mississippi to New Orleans, across to Le Havre, and by coach to Paris, where they spent months, were received by Louis XV, and attended the opera.

Their impressions are the most arresting part. The opera they described as a place full of sorcerers — West's reading is that the performers seemed to transform before their eyes into other people. A puppet show on the Pont Neuf they reported as inhabited by small dwarfs. At Fontainebleau they demonstrated hunting by riding bareback and shooting pheasants, and by most accounts enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

What they did not admire was French men, whom they judged effeminate and said smelled of alligators. West dates the whole episode to the 1720s — roughly eighty years before Lewis and Clark reached that country — and uses it to establish the book's central corrective: this was not an empty continent waiting for explorers. It was a mixed world, with interpreters, kinship, trade and travel in both directions.

The chronology is the argument. Spaniards came up from the south — Cabeza de Vaca in the 1520s — and the French were early in the northeast and eastern Canada, long before the English began their slow, timid expansion beyond the Appalachians. The public, West notes, tends to compress all of this into the nineteenth century.

Against that, he sets Lewis's own rhetoric. Leaving the Mandan villages in 1805, Lewis compared himself to Columbus and announced that they were entering country where no civilized foot had trodden.

the foot of civilized man has never trodden

It was not true, and West is careful about why the claim could still be made in good faith. Information travelled badly and was treated as a state secret; imperial rivals had every reason to keep what they knew from each other. The ignorance was strategic as much as it was real.

Rogan raises Andrés Reséndez's A Land So Strange, which documents how the Cabeza de Vaca expedition spread disease across the Southwest without intending to, and asks the obvious comparative question about the Maya. West declines to overclaim — the Maya declined well before contact, and the evidence is thin — but agrees that disease was decisive in the conquest of both American continents.

He then tells the journey itself: a shipwreck on the Texas coast, enslavement by Indians, and a slow walk across the Southwest and down into Mexico.

He was the first movement to encounter what we know today as the Southwest.