By the time he became president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had
already been looking west for decades. He saw the country's
population expanding and he judged that America's territory must
expand too, lest America become as crowded and conflict-prone as
Europe. He started modestly, by seeking to purchase New Orleans
from the French. Napoleon Bonaparte answered with a breathtaking
proposal: would the Americans care to purchase all of Louisiana?
Jefferson said yes and soon enough had dispatched two explorers,
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to find a passage across the
new territory to the Pacific. In Dreams of El Dorado, the
bestselling author H. W. Brands captures the experiences of the men
and women who headed into this new territory, from Lewis and
Clark's expedition in early 19th century to the closing of the
frontier in the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain
men, cowboys, missionaries, and soldiers; he takes us on the Oregon
Trail, to John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in the Pacific
Northwest, to Texas during its revolution and California during the
gold rush and to Little Big Horn on the day of Custer's defeat at
the hands of the Indian general Crazy Horse. Not every American who
went West sought immense wealth but most expected a greater
competence than they could find in the East. Their dreams drove
them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their
stay-at-home cousins to shame; their dreams also drove them to
outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples, foreigners
and one another. Throughout, Brands explodes many longstanding
myths, reorienting our view of the West and of American history
more broadly. The West was often viewed as the last bastion of
American individualism but woven through its entire history was a
strong thread of collectivism. Westerners sneered, even snarled, at
federal power but federal power was essential to the development of
the West. The West was America's unspoiled Eden but the spoilage of
the West proceeded more rapidly than that of any other region. The
West was where whites fought Indians but they rarely went into
battle without Indian allies and their ranks included black
soldiers. The West was where fortune beckoned, where riches would
reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the
railroad man's enterprise, the bonanza farmer's audacity; but El
Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the
East. A sweeping, engrossing work of narrative history, Dreams of
El Dorado will forever change how we think about the making of the
American nation.
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Review This Product
Carefully researched, compellingly written
Mon, 18 Nov 2019 | Review
by: Kelly H.
After coming to love historical novels, I discovered a large gap in my knowledge of the development of the United States. The historical fiction series The Daughters of the Mayflower began the journey raising so many interesting questions and giving me a snapshot of what really transpired at the close of each novel. Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands is the continuation of that journey for me and it’s been a great education!
“Any work of history must have a beginning and an end. This one commences with the Louisiana Purchase at the start of the nineteenth century, when the United States first gained a foothold—a very large one—beyond the Mississippi. It ends in the early twentieth century, when the West had become enough like the East to make the Western experience most comprehensible as a piece of the American whole rather than as a place apart. Western dreams didn’t die; Hollywood and Silicon Valley would be built on such dreams. But the dreams were no longer as distinctively Western as they once had been.” - Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands
And this book does exactly that! Brutally honest (I read with my eyes closed over some of the carnage left by the wars fought during this period), the author doesn’t flinch from sharing what took place during this land-grabbing mania. I knew anecdotally what happened in major movements such as the Californian Gold Rush but, without context, it didn’t have any meaning to me. Walking through this history, the sequence of events which lead to the end of the “wild” west, was fascinating and tragic!
“The destruction of the Tonquin dealt a heavy blow to the Astor project; it also revealed the simple but ineluctable theme of violence in the history of the American West: of humans killing one another in the struggle for control of Western resources. As time would prove, violence would be the defining characteristic of the West. When the violence diminished to the background level of the rest of the country, the West would no longer be the West but simply another part of America.” - Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands
Living in South Africa, land claims is a sensitive subject and I found it interesting to reflect on how land was handled just a century and a half earlier in the Americas! I had no idea the Mexicans and Spanish were in Texas so late into the 1800s nor how the Chinese were essential to the building of the railroad nor the way cowboys calmed thousands of longhorn cattle by circling them as they crossed the plains…All these nuggets of fascinating happenings! This book is jam-packed full of them and yet the narrative thread is so strong, it pulls the reader through intrigued to know how the politics will unfurl! In fairness, this may partly be due to my ignorance and those more familiar with the history may find it less astonishing but the reviews I’ve read suggest H.W. Brands really has written something quite exceptional!
If history interests you, this is one to pick up and relish! Whilst I flew towards the end, I was relieved to be reaching the end of this bloody period of time, I was sad to see the end of this book and I’ll be looking for more form H.W. Brands! Carefully researched, beautifully compiled and compellingly written, I highly recommend it! It’s a five out of five on the en-JOY-ment scale.
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