Legacy of Conquest
Patty Limerick, 1987
There’s obviously a good deal of information and conceptual work in this book – it’s after all, a whole history of the whole West, and Limerick positions herself as trying to move the entire field beyond 1890 and the Frontier Thesis. Of the many points of interest in the book… Limerick finds pioneers of the religous-missionary type to be fairly logical and explicable individuals: extraordinary faith inspires extraordinary action. It’s the gold-rushers, land-claimers, uranium-hunters (like the pair Abbey describes having a shootout in Desert Solitaire, btw) who should strike us as downright odd. She uses a variety of extraordinary examples to make them strange, and concludes:
“Neither the Western past nor the Westen present will make sense until attachment to property and attraction to profit find their proper category as a variety of strong emotion” (76)
… I’ve been mulling this over, trying to decide what we get by reclassifying this commercial activity, placing it within the scope of natural human emotion. Compare to other ways of shelving it – as the bedrock of a socio-capitalist-Darwinism; in a moral plane as greed or lust for profit; in a pathological framework as a madness for money. So. Emotion instead.
Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is running through my head, too, in relationship to this idea, as I think about the treatment of Jimmy Blevins’ need to get his horse – and then his saddle and gun – back from the town, followed by the more admirable/reasonable John Grady’s need to do the same.
