University Press of Kansas Logo

Promised Lands

Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West

David M. Wrobel

New in Paperback: September 2011
xii, 322 pages, 25 photographs, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1204-8, $34.95
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1823-1, $19.95

Book cover imageWhether seen as a land of opportunity or as paradise lost, the American West took shape in the nation’s imagination with the help of those who wrote about it; but two groups who did much to shape that perception are often overlooked today.

Promoters trying to lure settlers and investors to the West insisted that the frontier had already been tamed—that the only frontiers remaining were those of opportunity. Through posters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other printed pieces, these boosters literally imagined places into existence by depicting backwater areas as settled, culturally developed regions where newcomers would find none of the hardships associated with frontier life.

Quick on their heels, some of the West’s original settlers had begun publishing their reminiscences in books and periodicals and banding together in pioneer societies to sustain their conception of frontier heritage. Their selective memory focused on the savage wilderness they had tamed, exaggerating the past every bit as much as promoters exaggerated the present.

Although they are generally seen today as unscrupulous charlatans and tellers of tall tales, David Wrobel reveals that these promoters and reminiscers were more significant than their detractors have suggested. By exploring the vast literature produced by these individuals from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, he clarifies the pivotal impact of their works on our vision of both the historic and mythic West.

Wrobel shows that these works were vital to the process of identity formation among westerners themselves and to the construction of a “West” in the national imagination. He also sheds light on the often elitist, sometimes racist legacies of both groups through their characterizations of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans.

Wrobel suggests that the West has not really changed much: promoters still tout its promise, while old-timers still try to preserve their selective memories. His book shows us that the West may well move into the twenty-first century, but our images of it are forever rooted in the nineteenth.

“Promised Lands traces the origins of the California dream to a singular struggle that defined us and shapes us still. . . . Wrobel shows how Western mythmaking begins at a deep place in human consciousness. . . . He has tapped into a ‘mountain of printed promises’ and succeeds in wringing new meanings out of these mostly-overlooked sources.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Wrobel has some of the best ideas of any western historian of whatever generation. . . . His marvelous argument in this book advances significantly our understanding of how the West was created.”—David M. Emmons in North Dakota History

“Promised Lands will prove indispensable to all future students of western memory and identity.”—Journal of American History

“Moves beyond the endless debates between Old and New Western Historians to raise issues and address concerns that cross historiographical boundaries and set different and challenging agendas. . . . A fascinating book.”—Journal of American Studies

“A new and important look at the cultural history of the American West and a greater appreciation of just how history and myth intersect.”—Nebraska History

“Offers important lessons that are urgently applicable today.”—Montana The Magazine of Western History

“A major work in the exploration of American civic boosterism.”—Journal of Arizona History

“A fine synthesis and an original, exceptionally intelligent contribution.”—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“A pathbreaking work that enlarges Wrobel’s strong reputation as a superb cultural historian of the American West.”—Richard W. Etulain, author of Reimagining the Modern American West

“Original and significant. While it can be considered part of the myth-busting genre, and thus owes an intellectual debt to Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, among other books, Wrobel’s stands by itself and should appeal to anyone interested in Western history and literature, as well as to a broader audience beyond that.”—Walter Nugent, author of Into the West: The Story of Its People

“A superb book and terrific reminder that the American West is at once region and many regions, and that it is made up of places imagined, real, remembered, and misremembered—all of them historically important.”—William Deverell, coeditor of Metropolis in the Making

Finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award

DAVID M. WROBEL is the Merrick Chair in Western American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal and coeditor of Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity and Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West. He is a past President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society.