Anne F. Hyde - Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860

Adventures in the Land of the Dead

This book has its own history. I grew on it, and life interfered with writing it, so it took a while. I have a particular perspective that is partly training, partly experience, and partly personal. Ive been a historian, a teacher, a parent, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and Ive been embedded in various communities for a long time. These relationships form my relationship with the past. I can, I think, empathize with Marguerite McLoughlin as she watched her young children head off for school, knowing she might not see them for years at a time, or with the worry Island Bent felt about what might happen to her children if she were not there to protect them. I teach at a small liberal arts college where research is important, but the intellectual and personal relationships I build with students matter more. We spend a lot of time talking about what history is and why it might matterdaily practice in perspective taking and in endless revision. These conversations have certainly influenced how I chose to tell this story.

The progressive historian Charles Beard gave us good advice in his presidential address to the American I read that essay almost every year with my students, and it still resonates deeply about the responsibility we have to the past to retell it with faith in the present.

The nexus of families and relationships that undergirds this book has its own structural supporta dense web of scholarship that has emerged over the past twenty-five years. I have the privilege of donning lenses that literary theorists, ethnographers, critical race theorists, gender scholars, and anthropologists have designed for us to have a new view. How we have thought about power, nations, and families has shifted seismically, and I have benefited from my opportunity to read and think broadly. I have a long list of what I call just-in-time books that I read just at the right moment to understand what I was seeing in the record and what I was trying to describe. Im grateful to all of those historians who worked so hard to make the trans-Mississippi West such an untidy place and all of those scholars who had no idea that their work on Australia, Morocco, France, China, Chile, or England would make the North American West look so different. Im very grateful to those western presses that continue to publish the books and documents that make this research possible and exciting.

I got much support from Colorado College. The Social Science Division funded much of this research, as did the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies and Cosgrove Funds in the History Department. Dean Susan Ashley helped me out with a leave for writing and provided resources to hire two fabulous research assistants, Tessa Cheek and Kelsey Speaks, who checked footnotes, typed bibliographies, and organized me.

More specifically, I need to thank the people who helped me imagine, research, and write and rewrite this book. Librarians at Colorado College have provided me with a place to work and wonderful help and have always made my life easier and better. Robin Satterwhite, Julie Jones-Eddy, and Diane Brodersen patiently tracked down materials from everywhere, and LaDreka Davis and Mike McEvers found books and work space with grace and humor. Beyond this home turf, I worked at four wonderful institutions and, with the help of their talented and knowledgeable staffs, found incredibly rich materials. Close to home the Denver Public Library and the Colorado Historical Society provided many resources. George Miles and the Beinecke Library at Yale offered a great place to begin my research, and the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis yielded innumerable treasures about the fur trade and its cast of characters. In California I worked mostly at the Huntington Library, making three different research trips there. Finally I had the gift of a two-month fellowship at the Huntington as a Caughey Western History Fellow that allowed me to finish a full draft. On each visit Peter Blodgett and Jenny Watts provided timely and wise advice about materials and approaches, and Suzi Kraznoo and Roy Ritchie made the visits possible and fun.