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Capitalism killed the American West Bernard DeVoto: ‘Across the Wide Missouri’

We used to be a proper country (NBC Universal)

We used to be a proper country (NBC Universal)


August 19, 2022   6 mins

I spent a long time being told to read Bernard DeVoto before I got around to it. People who loved him often seemed surprised I hadn’t already read his histories. There’s a very specific type of person who tends to read these books, and in general you could say I’m one of them.

The makeshift labels these people give themselves often have an implicit note of self-satisfaction: “4Runner Environmentalists”, “Green-necks” or “literary Westerners”. The terms denote a mix of cultural and political tendencies that cut across some of America’s great divides. They tend to be pro-gun but pro-environmental regulation, to have deep faith in the American experiment but a deep awareness of its flaws, to be suspicious of both big government and big corporations, and, above all, to hate the twinned power of government and business, which is the force that mostly shapes the West as we know it.

DeVoto is the high priest of this sect. Born in 1897 in Ogden, Utah, he spent most of his adulthood in the East, writing for Harper’s, teaching at Harvard, and occupying a tenuous middle ground in the political wars of his time: he was called a fascist in the pages of The Nation and the Daily Worker, and a communist by the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association. He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated. His monumental 1947 Harper’s essay, The West Against Itself”, may be the single most significant piece of periodical writing in the history of the American conservation movement. It exposed and almost singlehandedly blocked a vast scheme to sell off hundreds of millions of acres of public land. It also elaborated DeVoto’s thesis of the West as a “plundered province”, a story retold in Nate Schweber’s recent This America of Ours, a long-overdue first biography of DeVoto.

“He described how the wealth of the West’s natural resources had been systematically siphoned to the East,” Schweber writes, about DeVoto’s first use of this term. “And how — contrary to popular myth — it was Western settlers who learned to work together who halted the liquidation.”

This is the difficult and illuminating thing about reading DeVoto today, because in all of his writings he is resistant to the idea that settlers and small-time workers of the West were the engines of the genocide and despoliation that came to the region in their wake. In DeVoto’s telling, these people were complicated moral agents and often victims themselves, caught up in a churning machine of capital and government that, by the 20th century, had created a Western system defined by “laissez-faire capitalism with socialism, ownership rights without responsibility, investment but not regulation”. It was a picture of the corporatism that now colours every single part of American life, and DeVoto saw it as emerging in its first clear form in the government protection of powerful extractive industries in the Mountain West.

DeVoto’s most disturbing, poignant, and rich account of how we got to this point can be found in Across the Wide Missouri, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. It took me several tries to actually finish the book. It is long, frustrating, and at times confusing, both hard to follow and hard to put down once you get into its flow.

It is easy to see why the book is largely forgotten today. It reads like a history in the old American tradition of Francis Parkman or William H. Prescott, with dense, high-diction prose, and an implicit expectation that the reader is familiar with a set of characters — John Jacob Astor, Jim Bridger — who might have been familiar to Americans in 1947 but are much less so today. It also unfolds in a confusing set of braided personal narratives, telling the story of everyone from a wayward Scottish noble who found his calling in the West to the legendarily beautiful missionary Narcissa Whitman, one of the first two white women known to have crossed the Rocky Mountains, and who ended up living such a brutal and tragic life that it’s shocking no one has made a movie of it yet.

Across the Wide Missouri is so complex and iterative that attempting to describe its “plot” is a fools’ errand. But the book takes shape around a conflict between Astor’s American Fur Company and Bridger’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, over the wealth of pelts that was beginning to flow from the mountain streams and valleys of the Interior West. This trade was the American West’s first great extractive industry, and it was what drove the exploration of the region. And in this story, you can see the whole blighted future of the region, and to some degree, that of America.

The fur trappers on whose labor the industry relied lived some of the most difficult lives anyone has ever lived, and almost none of them made much money. They were always hard men, often cruel. But they were also joyous, and the best parts of the book involve a series of retellings of the annual summer rendezvous, when trappers and native tribes gathered in drunken comity to trade, party, have sex and marry (intermarriage between whites and natives was the defining social structure of the mountain trade), and load up supplies for the winter.

The picture here is very different from the one we get about Western history today, one that focuses on whites as the agents of genocide and “settler-colonialism”. DeVoto is interested instead in the brief period when the whites who came into the West did so without an eye to conquest or even settlement. “May we assume that enough has been said about release and debauch at the summer rendezvous?” he writes about one of the last such gatherings. “The trappers drank as many pints of alcohol as ever at five dollars a pint, sang as many songs, held as many horse races, bought as many squaws…. Rendezvous was the mountain man’s Christmas, county fair, harvest festival, and crowned-slave carnival of Saturn — this year as always.”

But it was not to last. The rabid competition between the fur companies kept the trappers in debt and wrecked the supply of beaver pelts. And it brought the tribes they lived and traded among into a system of dependence on the manufactured goods and alcohol that the companies proffered in exchange for the furs. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 was carried up the Missouri River on an American Fur Company supply boat, and the ensuing epidemic killed 90% of some of the tribes the trappers were most intimate and friendly with, like the Mandans, and almost as many among tribes they feared and fought, like the Blackfeet. It destroyed the market structure that the freewheeling trapper culture depended on, and by destroying native populations it laid the ground for the settler conquest and extractive pillage of the West that was to come.

The enduring power of DeVoto, one that makes him vital and not a little subversive today, is in his ability to tell the story of the birth of the extractive Western machine that doesn’t admit for easy culprits: “This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”

For anyone who has the tenacity and time to finish it, Across the Wide Missouri ends up being almost inexpressibly rewarding and inexpressibly dark — a portrait of a moment in a part of America that only a few hundred or so Americans ever experienced and that very few Americans today know much about, but that did more than any other to shape our idea of a freewheeling Western frontier. It understands both the trappers and Natives who participated in the Western fur trade in the context of a system which “converted property, manipulated credit, and stripped the plundered province to the sole end of canalising eastward whatever wealth the West might produce”.

DeVoto’s purpose was not to absolve the trappers of their complicity in a system that ended up destroying the free West they inhabited and loved, but to show how the engines of capital and commerce coopted them into that destruction, against their own desires and interests. DeVoto acknowledged and even emphasised the violence between trappers and Native tribes during the fur-trading era. But he understood this violence, which caused many personal and bloody feuds but little wholesale carnage, as something different than what was to come — “the less murderous [and more state-directed] violence that was a condition of white society in the West”.

This was the state-engineered extractive regime that DeVoto spent his career railing against, and it is the force that has lead so many Americans in recent years to conclude that the settlement of the West is a single history of evil acts committed by evil men. But there is another story — one of the strange middle-ground reality that fur-trading era represented — that has hardly had any retelling since DeVoto’s difficult, annoying, brilliant magnum opus.

“This narrative calls attention to the fact that historical judgements must be peripheral or inane,” he wrote, uncannily anticipating the politico-historical debates of our current time, “until the preliminaries of historical statement have been made. And now feels free to return to its job.” We can only hope that more historians of this stripe will emerge today.


James Pogue is a journalist and essayist. His first book is Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West.

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Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
2 years ago

Great article. I used to know quite a few of those “4Runner Environmentalists”. It is unfortunate that they are a dying breed. They were a varied lot that broke stereotypes from environmentalist cowboys, Democrats with massive gun collections, and weed smoking Republicans to Libertarians who distrust corporate power. They tended to be fiercely independent and distrustful of the government and corporations. Right now most of those that are left consider themselves politically homeless. One more thing about them that I find rather amusing. They understood that if you want to protect the environment, you get a bunch of old cowboys, hunters, fishermen, forest rangers, and outdoorsmen together and put them on it, instead of a city boy yuppie right out of college.

Jason Highley
Jason Highley
2 years ago

Excellent piece. This is why I read Unherd. Going to snatch up some of these writings immediately.

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago
Reply to  Jason Highley

Totally agree. I’ve already ordered “Across the Wide Missouri” and I also found “A Survivor’s Recollections of the Whitman Massacre” by Matilda Sager, one of the orphaned Sager sisters mentioned in the piece.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

you could also try Mountain Men by Vardis Fisher and Robert Bunkers biography of John Johnson, “Crow Killer”

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

Thanks.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
2 years ago

I would recommend checking out True West Magazine. It is a publication by old west history buff for old west history buffs. They have also been publishing for over six decades and now have a digital archive of every issue going back to 1952.

Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
John 0
John 0
2 years ago
Reply to  Jason Highley

Good article. But many of the valuable truths are actually standard local culture in Western states where natives and mining history are present.

Colin MacDonald
Colin MacDonald
2 years ago

Reminds of what happens in parts of the Scottish Highlands, where overfunded environmental charities in concert with government agencies generally get in the way of local’s attempts to scratch a living. Read Ian Mitchell’s “Isles of the West” for an idea of what goes on there. The antics of the RSPB are particularly bad. And read “Isles of the North” to see how the more bolshie folks of western Norway have resisted the incursions of the Green Blob.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago

“He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.” That “but” is rather telling, isn’t it? I suppose it would be too much to hope for a sentence like this: He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

Spot on. To be fair to the author, I suspect he’d agree with your sentiment.

Lee Cadaver
Lee Cadaver
2 years ago

maybe he wanted to underline the stereotypical dichotomy between the two?

Aaron James
Aaron James
2 years ago

This book is great to get the feel of the Rendezvous, and is just an excellent book.

”Scotsman in Buckskin: Sir William Drummond Stewart and the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade” by Mary Reed Porter
In a rather badly thought out few years of my life I lived the sort of Mountain life, living in remote camps making my living off the North, and Far North, bush. There was still a pretty remarkable world still hanging on out there in the remote places where the misfits who are drawn to nature, and repelled by normal society, make their precarious living off the forests and remote lands.

It is a world still tinged with the same qualities, a pale shadow maybe, but remaining, of men (and it is mostly men by a large percent) who always have found their way out to remote lands – an unusual kind, ones whose main trait is the inability to have anyone telling them what to do.

The scene out there in it is one I can recall so clearly; this kind of barely visible people eking their way out in remote camps, mostly solitary, very rugged, very harsh life, who have some comradery, some very scattered sense of community. It is odd, like say the solitary creatures in the wild – they all can see each other, know each other in meeting or passing, but are largely invisible to any not of their ilk. You know immeadeately who is real, and who is just pretend, who is a visitor in the bush who thinks they know it – but are just tourists, and who is actually one of them.

When you do become of the bush people you can see the network, the others, the odd life’s out there – and they see you, like it is some alternate reality you are in, looking out you see the real world, but those who live in the real world do not really see you; you have become an outsider and are off in some other world.

The sad thing is modern age is gobbling up the wild places at an ever accelerating rate. California has taken Idaho and Montana…… GPS and more and more outdoor hobbyists (who think they are outdoors men) are taking the remote places… and that kind is disappearing I would suspect.

E. L. Herndon
E. L. Herndon
2 years ago
Reply to  Aaron James

Nice writing. But not all exiles from California to the Intermountain West are there to import post WWII Californication. Many are true Westerners, recognizable by their respect for the land, more than for any government. Mother Nature is an incorruptible judge.

William MacDougall
William MacDougall
2 years ago

A confused review of what sounds like a confused book. Nearly all of the deaths mentioned were from European disease, inevitable once Columbus came to America; nothing to do with capitalism. The other evils appear to come from indigenous practices like Indian slavery and from large corporations, which is not synonymous with free enterprise capitalism, and often caused by government action. An individual trapper going to the wilderness to collect pelts and returning to markets to sell them would appear to be the ultimate in free enterprise capitalism.

michael stanwick
michael stanwick
2 years ago

I didn’t find the review confusing but I agree with your observations regarding the spread of disease into new environments and the nature of indigenous practices.
“This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”
And I was surprised to read this sentiment that describes the fallacy of historical presentism. When combined with moral presentism we have the scourge of the rape and pillage of history for contemporary political activism – usually in race marxism and sometimes in feminist marxism.

Deborah H
Deborah H
2 years ago

I agree with the other commenters. Excellent article. As a Mayflower descendent with a 400 year history of ancestors in Plymouth and Chatham, Mass, I learned something new about American history here! I will be getting this book “Across the Wide Missouri” and fancy myself a Green-neck.

Rita Falwell
Rita Falwell
2 years ago
Reply to  Deborah H

Oh! Goodie goodie!….an opportunity to let everyone know that I am a Mayflower decendent!

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
2 years ago

Humans produce industry, its how they survive and flourish. People who are good at it share the industry around so those who help provide it continue that support.
Some people dont like other peoples industry, you know, over there.
That is as long as they have their needs taken care of.

Justin Binks
Justin Binks
2 years ago

Jason Manning covers the fur trade of the time in his very enjoyable books about the West.

David Yetter
David Yetter
2 years ago

Are we sure it wasn’t the Federal Government in the form of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service that destroyed the American West. The conflict between the Bundy family, attempting to exercise their traditional open-range grazing rights, and the BLM which had usurped them was much in the news when it happened. It was a cause célèbre with the American right, and not just the “far-right”, as an example of government overreach.