Reconsidering Western History [via Stewart Udall]

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunterbear:

I'm always interested in anything the Udalls say about the Real West -- and
Indian people.  I may not agree with all of it, but this book by Stewart
Udall is one I'm getting.

The Udalls -- and there are a number of them -- are among Northern Arizona's
oldest  Anglo families.  Traditionally, they've been based at the
Northeastern Arizona Apache County seat of St John's -- a small town in the
Little Colorado River / White Mountain country.  They've generally been a
very political family -- liberal Democrats -- and are Mormon [LDS.] In a
rapidly growing state population-wise  which has swung wildly in interesting
ways on the political yardstick -- but often much into the conservative
right -- the Udalls have held consistently to a kind of democratic populist
perspective.

Stewart Udall did a good job as Secretary of Interior during the Kennedy
period -- pretty solid on Native issues and Labor -- and has for many years
fought vigorously for justice for those many, many victims of hideously
on-going tragedy: Navajo uranium workers and their families.  His brother,
Morris, long a Congressman, died recently. Years ago, when I accompanied the
regents and president of Navajo Community College [now Dine' College] to
Washington, DC to spend many days lobbying for college funding, we of course
met with all of the Southwestern political folks.  I recall the meeting with
Morris Udall as being a bit strained -- though not as much as our meeting
with the top BIA honchos! -- since Morris was aligned with the Hopi Nation
in the still-burning Joint Use Area dispute between the Navajo and the Hopi.
[Our family, I should add, has always supported the Navajo.]

In the Southern struggle, I was often venomously attacked -- sometimes
during various Congressional hearings on civil rights legislation -- by
segregationist politicians and their racist allies.  The two Northern
Arizona congressmen of those days -- Duke Senner and Morris Udall, who knew
our family  -- came very vigorously to my defense on a number of occasions.
They consistently supported the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.

Anyway, he may be a Democrat [albeit a pretty liberal one] but I'm glad
Stewart Udall is still around and active.  He was one of the few in the
Kennedy administration that I, always a socialist,  was inclined to like and
trust.

And, like myself, he's a Real Arizonian -- and a Northern one as well.

Hunter [Hunterbear]


Reconsidering Western History

By MARTIN NAPARSTECK
Special To The Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com
Sunday, October 6, 2002

The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West
By Stewart L. Udall; Island Press


Revisionist history has a bad reputation that it does not always
deserve. Much of what some historical texts have taught us is wrong. And
damaging. And needs to be rewritten.

Stewart L. Udall, former Arizona congressman and secretary of the
Interior in the Kennedy administration, helps in the rewriting with The
Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West.

Much of what Udall rewrites has been rewritten before, but his book
serves as a useful summary of the ways in which so much of what we think we
know about the history of the American West is wrong.

Among his arguments: While much of the European settlement in the East
was by men and women seeking freedom from religious persecution, much of the
European settlement of the Southwest was by a European people, Spaniards,
seeking to impose their religious views on people living there for
centuries. Udall cites an example of the conflict: "Forty-seven native
religious leaders had been accused of sorcery, three shamans had been hanged
and others whipped, and performances of native religious rituals had been
banned. . .The Pueblo Rebellion of 1680 was a whirlwind of terror. . .in the
end Santa Fe had been sacked, 21 Franciscan friars and 380 colonists had
been killed." The Pueblo Indians would not allow their religious beliefs to
be oppressed.

Udall criticizes many historians of the West for not giving enough
attention to Indians and to depicting them as savages (he does have praise
for Alvin Josephy, author of 500 Nations and other books about American
Indians) and for underplaying the role "of groups animated by religious
beliefs" in settling the West (he notes that many of the earliest Spanish
settlements in what is now the American Southwest were led by Catholic
clergy and that Mormon settlements had nothing to do with Manifest Destiny
-- a political doctrine Udall disdains -- and that "Mormons demonstrated
what could be achieved in the nineteenth century when an ardent Christian
community strove to fulfill a destiny promise[d] by its religious leaders."

Generally, Udall calls for more emphasis by historians in telling us
about community-building in the 19th-century West and less emphasis on
shootouts and cowboys and violence.

He devotes most of one chapter to his ancestors, Mormon pioneers who
settled first in Utah and then, at the behest of Brigham Young, in Arizona.
He discusses, also, the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre; Udall's mother was a
Lee, a descendant of John D. Lee, the only man punished -- by execution --
for the massacre. Udall helped organize the 1990 meeting in Cedar City
between LDS Church leaders and more than 200 descendants of the
approximately 120 men, women, and children murdered at Mountain Meadows. He
includes a poem he wrote for the occasion ("love,/the only ointment God
offers/To heal wounds too deep for healing").

Much of this "new" interpretation of the West is, of course, old. Even
in the 19th century, many writers decried what they saw as a mythologizing
of the West. And, in that sense, The Forgotten Founders is most useful as a
summary of an alternate way of thinking about the history of the West.

There is one unusual, but not unprecedented, point made by Udall, a
denunciation of one of the West's literary icons, a writer often praised for
his courage in telling unpopular truths (especially on environmental
issues): Bernard DeVoto. Udall, in fact, devotes an entire chapter to
criticizing DeVoto, the only individual so singled out; every other chapter
is devoted to groups.

He says DeVoto "the son of a Mormon mother and Catholic father . . .
came to manhood with contempt for both religions and their role in the
West." He writes, "DeVoto's frontier trilogy -- The Year of Decision (1943),
Across the Wide Missouri (1947) and The Course of Empire (1952) -- won
prizes and established him . . . as a leading authority on vital aspects of
western history." The problem for Udall is, largely, that DeVoto accepted
the concept of Manifest Destiny as a real doctrine that inspired westward
national expansion, and that is inconsistent with Udall's view that religion
and community-building were far more important.

Although he does not specifically mention it, a related problem with
DeVoto for Udall is that DeVoto, unlike, say, Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey,
both of whom helped shape the popular conception of the West, helped
intellectuals form their view of the West's history.

More about DeVoto and a direct discussion of the conflict between a
popular and an intellectual view of the West (as opposed to the conflict
between a popular and an informed view) would have made The Forgotten
Founders more original. Still, what Udall does give us is both a readable
and useful summary of the major revisionist view of the American West.
-----
[Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt
Lake Tribune. His latest book is Saying Things, a collection of short
stories.]


© Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune






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