Continental Reckoning Quotes

“In 1849 about five thousand persons followed the Gila River route to Santa Fe and then across the southwestern deserts to Southern California, but most crossed by the Platte River route.39 From various towns along the Missouri River they converged on the Platte in what is now east central Nebraska and moved along the south bank before ascending the river’s north fork to the continental divide at South Pass, a broad saddle between the northern and middle Rocky Mountains. Some would then branch off to the northwest to Oregon, while the California-bound would take a southwesterly route across the Great Basin, following the Humboldt River until it sank into the earth and then crossing forty miles of desert before ascending the Truckee and Carson Rivers to the Sierra Nevada. Unlike the Rockies, the Sierra had no easy gateway. In the journey’s final and most difficult stage immigrants urged their spent oxen over Donner or Roller Pass before laboring down the western side.”
― Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

“Historical writing about the American West has undergone dramatic changes in the past half century and more. Specifically, historians have moved away from the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and turned in new directions: earlier authors such as Henry Nash Smith and Earl Pomeroy helped us understand how the mythic West and western imitations of European and eastern American traditions shaped the history of the region.”
― Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion

“More land in the nation was pulled into connection with other places during the mid-1800s than during the previous two and a half centuries, much of it during the fifteen years after the onset of Civil War. The most impressive accomplishments were in the lands added to the nation, just as those transformations were underway. The process redefined topology itself, at least in its practical realities. North America's western half lies naturally north and south. Its borderlands run up and down on a standard map, and so do its plains and open spaces, and most of its great rivers. The new systems of rails, wires, and roads took that orientation and wrenched it 90 degrees around. Now the dominant flow of people, things, and information was east to west. A continental American state was made in defiance of the continental grain. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences. New technologies created a kind of endoskeleton that permitted every broad change that followed, while giving shape to both an emerging region and an idea, the West. As they did, they would help bind its plains, mountains, and deserts even more broadly into a global pursuit of new understandings of the world, of its peoples, and of life itself.”
― Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion