|
JESUP W. SCOTT AND A WEST OF CITIES by CHARLES N. GLAAB |
Nineteenth-century writing about the meaning of the American westward movement often emphasizes primitive, romantic, or agrarian sides of this national experience. In the West, the American casts off the bonds of Old Europe, struggles against elemental forces of nature, finds republican virtue in the freehold, and adopts the values of an agricultural society. Scholars, justifiably, have paid considerable attention to these conceptions; themes to be found, for example, in such ephemeral western fiction as the dime novel have been submitted to meticulous analysis. Yet there remains another side of the western experience to be evaluated. Just as historians long failed to recognize the importance of town and city in the economic development of the West, interpreters of the character of our national culture have tended to overlook the impact of a western urban experience on American thought. A whole body of promotional material, widely read in its time, that celebrates the rise of western cities has been generally ignored. Quantitatively, at least, this kind of writing more than likely outweighs any other about the West, and to ignore it, for its lack of literary grace, is to neglect an important source for understanding another dimen- sion of the cultural meaning of the American westward movement.1 From the first days of settlement across the Appalachian Mountains, every region of the West had its newspaper editor, hired promoter, or local intellectual predicting greatness for a primitive hamlet or a city that NOTES ARE ON PAGE 56 |