Ohio History Journal


    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