Lawyers and Legislation

Lawyers were the glue that held much of the American West together. As they moved west, the trappings of regularized business transactions and criminal justice moved with them. The transmission of legal knowledge from one generation to another, the nature of judicial craftsmanship, and the gendered nature of law in the West followed their paths.

For historians, it is easy to understand that Indiana is in the East and Montana and California are in the West. But Indiana at one time was what historians called “the frontier.” It was the cutting edge of civilization, where white northern Europeans confronted the savagery of wilderness and American Indians. In this new century, that formulation of “frontier” has passed to some degree, and historians are trying to determine where the West is today in the historical profession.

When University of Wisconsin history professor Frederick Jackson Turner announced his frontier thesis in 1893, most Americans had no doubt where the West was. It was simply across the Mississippi. Turner's frontier thesis, positing that the process of civilizing the West from the colonial period until 1890 produced American democracy and the American character, started historians down the path of proof to find evidence either supporting or debunking it. The process continues. Early supporters of Turner found settlers from the East finding greater democracy in the West. Detractors found evidence that eastern urban factory workers did not migrate to the West in any great numbers, and the West was not a safety value for labor unrest. So it went. Turner argued that the existence of free land, its continuous recession, and the process of settlement from east to west explained American history. Turner cast his net broadly and caught the American character as well as democracy in the seine. Books and articles offered proof on both sides until the New Western historians arrived with publication of Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West(1987). Limerick shifted the debate by noting Turner's Eurocentric focus on an east-to-west process of which the viewpoint was strictly that of the pioneers, not those experiencing the process and seeing the pioneers as conquerors, from their perspective looking to the east from the west.

Limerick's call for inclusion in western history was not the first but was clearly the most noticed. Herbert Eugene Bolton already had suggested the utility of borderland studies noting the richness of cultural interaction in New Spain's northern territories. Bolton appreciated the fact that Europeans and Indians had occupied lands together for generations in the American Southwest. Limerick's argument acknowledges the need for such studies but rejects Bolton's [Page 384]emphasis on the opening and closing of Spanish and English empires in favor of the continuity of conquest. Further, Limerick tapped into the scholarly dissatisfaction of the 1960s with the political synthesis in American history. He joined the legions of historians, including women, persons of color, and marginalized classes, in the general fabric of American history. Most important, Limerick called for studies of place. Here the West as a region needed recognition and definition.

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