Re-living the American Frontier

Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900

Nancy Reagin

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781609387914
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The historic and mythic elements of the American Old West—covered wagon trains, herds of buffalo, teepee villages, Indigenous warriors on horseback, cowboys on open ranges, and white settlers "taming" a wilderness with their plows and log cabins—have exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years and became the foundation for fan communities who have endured for generations. This book examines some of those communities, particularly German fans inspired by the authors of Westerns such as Karl May, and American enthusiasts of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series.But the Old West (like all visions of the past) proved to be shifting cultural terrain. In both Germany and the U. S., Western narratives of white settlement were once seen as "apolitical" and were widely accepted by white people. But during the Nazi period in Germany and in East Germany after 1945, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed. Then, during the late twentieth century, understandings of the West changed in the U. S. as well, while the violence of white settler colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in the culture wars between right and left. Reagin shows that the past that fans seek to recreate is shaped by the changing present, as each new generation adapts and relives their own West.

CHAPTER ONE

Who Owns the West?

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.

—FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, 1893

The American West is a region whose boundaries and ownership are still disputed. In both an imaginary and material sense, it is an alluring and strongly contested intellectual, cultural, and political property. The West’s historic and mythic elements—covered wagon trains, stockade forts, herds of buffalo that stretch as far as the eye can see, teepee villages, Indian warriors on horseback, men who make their own justice with their guns, cowboys on open ranges, “vanishing” Indian cultures, and white settlers “taming” a wilderness with their plows and log cabins—have spread across global culture and have been used in every type of art and story form over the last two centuries. All of these images and ideas came to form a storytelling archive of images and concepts, which both academic historians and Western entertainment creators drew on in their work.

For American audiences, Western stories were rooted in a shared understanding of American history that explained and often justified white settlers’ displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the seizure of their lands. The frontier was crucial to this understanding of the West, and to white Americans’ national identity and historical narratives. As the first academic historians of the West depicted it, the frontier—constantly receding as white settlement progressed westward—formed the boundary of a United States that ultimately expanded to incorporate land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a transcontinental nation. Historians and politicians also argued that the frontier was the site of a special American experiment in democracy and freedom. The Indigenous peoples who found themselves located on this frontier, and ultimately inside the United States, disagreed and resisted. Their cultures were engulfed and decimated by white settlement, which entailed successive waves of settler immigration and the imposition, often by violence, of white Americans’ legal and economic systems.

The elements of the frontier mythology that developed in dialogue with the advance of white settlement and Indigenous resistance were not only the property of academic historians and politicians. They were free for people both inside and outside of the United States to draw on as well, in constructing their own stories about the American West. Western entertainments were enormously popular in Europe, although European audiences developed their own interpretations of Western stories. Artists, writers, stage performers, modern media producers, and ordinary people around the world have mined frontier images, tropes, and settings since the early nineteenth century, often with joyful absorption and fascinated attention to the artifacts and cultures of the West. In recent decades, the historiography of the West has changed, and Western films and television shows have declined in popularity; but for almost two centuries, Westerns dominated American entertainment markets and were extremely popular around the world.

The imagined West proved to be an unstable cultural territory. Today, American popular culture more often looks outward, creating and exporting stories of other worlds and galaxies rather than stories of the American frontier. Throughout the period when mass entertainments were emerging, however, Westerns were the most popular American entertainment genre, attracting large communities of fans. Each community developed its own interpretation of the history of the West, the history that it wanted or needed. And what audiences and fans needed, changed over decades.

The Historic West and the Frontier in American National Biography

Where is the West? The American frontier was a moving target for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an imaginary line that white Americans used to divide the established states of the United States from the unorganized and lightly governed territories where white settlement and the displacement of Indigenous peoples was still underway. This line moved steadily westward over two centuries, as white settlers seeking land pushed past the boundaries of the original colonies during the eighteenth century to the Old Northwest (the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan), and still later to the trans-Mississippi territories.¹ The Homestead Act of 1862 facilitated this process by allowing any white adult citizen or immigrant to claim 160 acres of public (government-owned) land if he or she settled and cultivated it for five years.

The lands coveted by white settlers were not uninhabited, of course. Sometimes, would-be settlers squatted on land that had not yet even been taken by the federal government, hoping to file homestead claims in the future. Indigenous cultures consistently resisted white encroachment, leading to endemic conflicts or outright warfare between white settlers, the US Army, and Indigenous peoples, and (in the far west and southwest) with Hispanic communities that often predated the foundation of the United States. Before the Mexican-American War, the American government pursued a policy of removal of Indigenous cultures to a point past the frontier’s imaginary line, pushing them to territories farther west, some of which were promised to Indigenous tribes in perpetuity. But the acquisition of territory from Mexico and the creation of a United States that spanned the continent doomed the earlier federal policy, which had envisioned the Plains as “Indian Territory.” Like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family, white settlers squatted on land inside of territories promised to Indigenous peoples; the US federal government then shifted to a policy of forcing Indigenous tribes off their lands and into diminishing, often resource-poor reservations, surrounded by white communities. By 1890, the population was sufficiently dense across the continent that the US Census Bureau declared that the frontier was now “closed.”²

The imaginary boundary between settled and unsettled territories might no longer exist, but the frontier’s importance to American national identity and mythology continued to grow for decades, even as the United States became more urbanized. The frontier’s role in shaping American identity and democracy was articulated in scholarly terms by the influential work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose research founded the field of American Western history and presented one of the most influential master narratives in American history. Turner first offered his “frontier thesis” at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association. His arguments developed, in a more detailed and scholarly form, the ideas that had been circulating even before Turner gave his presentation, e.g., in Theodore Roosevelt’s popular history, The Winning of the West.³

Turner argued that frontier conditions had shaped both American national character and the development of American democracy. Experiencing both the challenges and the personal liberty that characterized frontier life, he claimed, pioneers from European cultures were released from the hierarchies and constraints of the Old World: European aristocracies, state-supported churches, standing armies, and habits of deference to one’s social betters. The frontier, Turner argued, “is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” a sort of melting pot that accepted people from many cultures and transformed them into a new composite but English-speaking nationality. The frontier experience also promoted egalitarianism and democracy. The American mindset that resulted, Turner concluded, featured “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom, these are the traits of the frontier.”⁴ Turner’s description fit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s depiction of her father, “Pa” Ingalls, almost to a T. Wilder came to adulthood in a culture that had absorbed Turner’s understanding of the frontier, and her own depictions of frontier communities reflected Turner’s paradigm.⁵

In Turner’s conception of American history, “the frontier is truly American because at some time, all of America has been the West,” due to the fact that the frontier was first located in the East Coast colonies, and moved westward, while “interaction with the conditions of the frontier made Americans American.”⁶ Frontier life thus produced men who were free of European traditions of deference and social hierarchy, while the conditions of frontier life required that frontiersmen participate in public life, and in participatory democracy. Turner’s farmers had conquered a wilderness, and simultaneously expanded the realm of liberty and democracy. His arguments ultimately shaped the teaching of American history for more than a generation: by the 1930s, 60 percent of leading American universities taught Western history in ways that reflected Turner’s thesis.⁷

In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch discusses the development of the “national biography” of the United States, a folk history or story that Americans share about their origins and foundational heroes.⁸ In present-day America, the musical Hamilton is a good example of national biography; in the 1950s, the television series Davy Crockett represented another version. National biography is not rooted in a strictly factual account of a nation’s history, but instead it reflects people’s affection for and pride in their national heritage. It is a form of popular mythology which helps a people explain themselves, to themselves, and to foreigners. At the same time, national biographies often align very well with (and indeed, can function as popularized segments of) the master narratives that create a framework for a nation’s academic historiography, codified and passed down in school textbooks.

Nations are rather abstract concepts; they can have disputed or fluctuating boundaries. Their territories are often (but not always) governed by nation-state entities. But nations are also identity categories that seek to unite quite diverse populations and geographies, even those that are not currently governed by the same state entity, e.g., the concept of Germany and Germanness, which long predated the creation of a united German state.⁹ The nation provides a framework for assembling collective memories, creating national myths and national biographies, and for teaching history to the citizens of a nation.

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical scholarship and teaching, the nation—its origin, growth, national struggles for unification or liberation from other nations or empires—often formed the center and focus of historical narratives. Nation-focused historical master narratives became pervasive, developing in step with the professionalization of academic historians. As two scholars who studied this process in Latin American national histories observed, “national master narratives act as both official and general interpretations of the past, but also legitimize the present and set an agenda for the future [for each national state].”¹⁰ Turner’s frontier thesis offered a national master narrative that provided an explanation and justification for the expansion of the United States and for the origins of American identity that integrated Americans from diverse European ethnic backgrounds while celebrating the creation and growth of American democracy.

It was a description of American identity that was inherently white, although Turner did not acknowledge this. In his telling, the settlers who homesteaded and developed frontier communities came from diverse European communities. Once in the United States, they were all re-socialized by the frontier experience, emerging as white Americans. Indigenous peoples, Hispanics, and other nonwhite peoples in the West were implicitly excluded from Turner’s narrative of American identity and participation in frontier governance not only because of the origin cultures he traced Americans to but also because of the laws and theories that regulated land development and ownership in the United States. Under the Homestead Act white adults, whether they had obtained American citizenship yet or not, were allowed to homestead land on the frontier. Indigenous Americans were generally excluded from citizenship throughout the nineteenth century, and thus could not file claims on lands that their ancestors had lived on.¹¹ Property rights, nineteenth-century American legal theorists and jurists argued, were linked to the cultivation and development of land according to European standards, and were thus tied to the white forms of agricultural production and community structures celebrated by Turner. These writers did not recognize Indigenous methods of collective land stewardship and use, instead seeing such land as “unused wilderness.”¹² This view of land ownership and property rights would be echoed by some of the characters in Wilder’s books and by the protagonists of other Western entertainments.

Turner’s arguments about the frontier as a crucible of American national character were well aligned with the popular visions of the American West promoted by Theodore Roosevelt, and by leading writers and artists like Owen Wister and Frederic Remington, all contemporaries of Turner. This understanding was carried forward in the work of a host of lesser-known writers, artists, and historians.¹³ Turner thus named and articulated a theory of American history and identity that remained hegemonic for decades.

As Boyd Cothran noted in Remembering the Modoc War, the collective contributions of these writers and artists transformed “memories of the violent conquest of American Indians into the ‘red-blooded realism’ [of Western settlement tales] . . . Americans celebrated the open spaces, autonomous individualism, personal sacrifice, and masculine heroism endemic to the narratives of the American West.”¹⁴ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these overlapping understandings of the frontier experience contributed powerfully to a national biography that was ultimately reflected across American popular culture. As Robert Hine and John Faragher observed about the frontier myth: “myth, like history...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Living in Someone Else’s Past
• Chapter One: Who Owns the West?
• Chapter Two: Buffalo Bill and Karl May: The Origins of German Western Fandom
• Chapter Three: A Wall Runs through It: Western Fans in the Two Germanies
• Chapter Four: Little Houses on the Prairie
• Chapter Five: “And Then the American Indians Came Over”: Fan Responses to Indigenous Resurgence and Political Change after 1990
• Conclusion: Indians into Confederates: Historical Fiction Fans, Reenactors, and Living History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List