Libraries and the Immigrant

Immigrants in the American West brought with them a vibrant print culture and an abiding appreciation for [Page 404]books and reading. Once settled, they pooled their resources to establish libraries to ease the isolation and tedium of pioneer life. In recreating cultural institutions they had left behind, western community builders considered libraries significant to a town's coming of age and instrumental in promoting growth. Later, as immigration expanded and diversified, local officials augmented their libraries' mission to help with assimilating and “Americanizing” the foreign born. Today public libraries continue to provide books, newspapers, and services to new immigrants, serving as a passage to their fuller participation in civic life.

Soldiers and missionaries who began the westward migration in the 17th century established the first libraries in the West. Territorial administrators were often educated, wealthy men, and they gathered some impressive book collections despite primitive frontier conditions. French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, built one of the earliest private libraries at Fort St. Louis in Texas. When Spanish soldiers found the fort's ruins in 1689, they discovered more than two thousand books, many with original fine bindings, strewn in the mud. In New Mexico and California, Franciscan padres established small reference and religious libraries in missions built in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Mission Santa Barbara houses the oldest surviving mission library, with about four thousand original books, manuscripts, and musical scores. Protestant missionaries, migrating to the Pacific Northwest in the 1830s, also brought books. By 1870, nearly every county in Oregon had one Protestant library or more serving the local community. In similar fashion, Mormon refugees in Utah created libraries as a cornerstone of their religious mission. In fact, Brigham Young required every Mormon stake to set up a library of “useful and instructive” works to help solidify the Latter-Day Saints' distinctive social order.

In the mid-19th century, the U.S. government added to this steady westward stream by dispatching administrators and soldiers to secure American interests in the West. Recognizing that official emissaries depended on books to inform their work and occupy their leisure, Congress funded legislative libraries in each territory and small regimental reading rooms in every fort and garrison. Additional monies for the latter came from the United States Military Post Library Association, formed by eastern philanthropists in 1861 to ensure that “the soldier on our most remote frontier is… regularly supplied with the best reading.” Garrison libraries contained four hundred to five hundred books, although a large outpost like Texas's Fort Davis might have more than a thousand books. Territorial libraries could be quite extensive. For example, in 1876, the territorial library in Olympia, Washington, had nearly sixty-five hundred volumes. Its counterpart in Salt Lake City, Utah, had at this time nearly seven thousand volumes.

Despite these early efforts by the church and state to supply books in the West, literate immigrants suffered from a lack of reading matter, triggering what historian Don Walker describes as a “crazy intensification of their interest in anything printed.” Walker relates how a Texas cowboy grabbed for a piece of paper caught in a fence, hoping it was something to read. Walker also tells of another range rider who stumbled on an abandoned shack with its ceiling and walls lined with newsprint for insulation. Hungry for print, he read each wall and was reading through the ceiling when he was ordered to move on. Some men working on the range read and reread can labels to the point of memorizing them. Indeed, the expression one “knew his cans” came to signify a seasoned trail rider who spent his leisure time absorbed in a can label.

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