Icons of the American West: From Cowgirls to Silicon Valley
edited by Gordon Morris Bakken, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 2008, $175.
Noah Webster defined icon as “an object of uncritical devotion.” But don’t let that dissuade you from reading this two-volume set. Icons offers greater latitude than the term might suggest, profiling the good, the bad and even a few inanimate icons of the American West.
The books are pitched as a “port of entry” for students and researchers, and in that capacity they serve as a useful resource. The set opens with a timeline of Western history and closes with a selected bibliography. Each profile provides a shortlist of suggested further reading and is chockablock with dates and historic details, albeit to the detriment of the narrative in places. Visually driven readers should look elsewhere, as illustrations are limited to an opening portrait per profile.
Volume 1 covers the Old West, with requisite entries on Buffalo Bill, Custer and Geronimo alongside more surprising profiles. Kicking off the volume is an account of infamous Californio bandits, notably Joaquin Murieta and Tiburcio Vásquez, in which author-archivist Paul Spitzzeri questions the reinterpretation of such men as folk heroes, given the lack of historical documentation. Such objectivity is a welcome break from modern emotional revisionism.
Complementing a biography of John Muir are essays that relate the environmental wrangles over Yosemite and its neighboring valley, Muir’s beloved Hetch Hetchy. Despite Muir’s lobbying efforts and the support of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Congress in 1913 authorized plans to dam Hetch Hetchy. The decision broke Muir, who died on December 24, 1914, a year after Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Act, approving the reservoir.
Icons also gives Western women their due, though the preface preaches a bit on their role in the Old West. Profiles include a scholarly summary of Sacagawea’s story (“one that changes with the needs of the time”), a nod to cowboys and cowgirls (both rodeo and real-life) and a detailed account of Annie Oakley’s rise from Ohio farm girl to “Little Sure Shot” of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West fame.
Volume 2 picks up the action in the New West, profiling such disparate icons as Disneyland and Las Vegas, Ann Richards and Ronald Reagan.
Originally published in the February 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
