A little over two years ago, The Scrapbook was pleased to welcome a new work of history from Philip F. Anschutz, chairman and CEO of The Weekly Standard’s parent company. In The Scrapbook’s words, Out Where the West Begins profiled “an astonishing variety of business entrepreneurs, visionaries, inventors, and all-purpose risk-takers [who] headed toward the Pacific to build, swiftly and largely from scratch, a frontier empire and distinct American region.”
Now, with an energy, insight, and skill both infectious and rewarding, the author has expanded his horizon beyond the realms of business enterprise to the men and women—the explorers and statesmen, artists and writers, soldiers and reformers, inventors and conservationists—who recognized the limitless potential of the American West in the larger enterprise of building a nation. Anschutz is a genuine scholar of our evolving frontier, and Out Where the West Begins, Volume 2: Creating and Civilizing the American West (Cloud Camp, 384 pp., $34.95) tells the story of the idea and reality of the nation’s westward expansion in a series of essay-biographies both astute and accessible.
At the dawn of the republic, he writes, “far-thinking Americans . . . understood that the West offered limitless political, economic, and social potential.” But translating vision into reality was a complicated matter, inevitably bound up with the national growing pains—the question of slavery, the expansion of territory, the status of Native Americans—of 19th-century America. Appropriately, Anschutz’s purview is as wide as the continent, and in exploring every aspect of the growth and settlement of the expanding West, he not only revives our interest in neglected actors in the American drama—Stephen A. Douglas, Marcus Whitman, Tecumseh, George Catlin Sr., Blandina Segale—but treats them, in engaging style, with perception and fairness.
