Although historian Anne F. Hyde was born in St. Louis, she grew up in Nevada and now teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Those settings surely influenced her decision to specialize in the history of the American West.
She goes in depth in the subject in her new book, “Born of Lakes and Plains,” subtitled, “Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West.”
The mixing began when White fur traders married Native American women, with mixed-descent children following. Although the fur trade dwindled over the decades, the mixing persisted as buffalo hunters moved in.
Hyde tells her story in terms of real people, some of them — like her — with roots in St. Louis. She says that in the early 1800s, “when the population of the United States doubled every twenty years, that of St. Louis grew even faster. As opportunity and ambition moved west, however, so did their twisted twins, ruin and doubt. The city’s commercial frenzy raced just ahead of economic calamity. Even as St. Louis businesses advertised land and goods for sale, newspapers like the Missouri Gazette, the first newspaper published in English west of the Mississippi, filled its back pages with long lists of creditors who threatened to jail people fleeing from debt.”
People are also reading…
As Hyde fills her pages with tales of those people heading west, the family trees form a forest of detail. And that’s the problem with “Born of Lakes and Plains” — detail piled on detail piled on details. The index lists at least 400 named individuals. Her compendium of footnotes eats up 76 pages, all in agate type .
Her book will find fans among fellow historians, Westerners with a taste for local history and Native Americans, who will probably nod sadly at some of the passages.
But Hyde may have trouble finding readers among the general population. That slice of America wants its history told simply and sharply. Think of Walter Lord’s “Day of Infamy,” about the Pearl Harbor attack, or Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” a rollicking account of America’s 1920s.
Any critic has to salute Hyde for her meticulous research, even though some of it contains phrasing like “it is possible that,” “we don’t know much about,” “we can surmise” and “may have.”
But history that bores as deeply as this book also — well, bores.
Harry Levins of Manchester retired in 2007 as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.
Leave a Reply