Megan Kate Nelson. The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. Scribner, 2026. $31.00. 464 pp.
The history of the frontier has been central to the American imagination and our identity. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, we are a people made by our frontier. Historically we find the people who were out on that frontier interesting. We are fascinated by Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and George Armstrong Custer. Americans are also captivated by the leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who resisted the American westward expansion. Lewis and Clark never found the Northwest Passage, but we have never lost interest in their general project. Consider the prominence of the Oregon Trail video game in the memories of the millennial generation.
Yet for all our fascination with the American West, our knowledge of the manifesting of manifest destiny is often quite thin. The Westerners aims to improve our knowledge of the American frontier, by introducing us to historical people and places left out of the familiar narrative. We start with Sacajawea, but from there Nelson weaves together the stories of less familiar people. These are figures who existed on geographical and cultural frontiers. Jim Beckwourth was a biracial fur trader who spent time living among the Apsáalooke (Crow) and seems to have been everywhere a trading outpost was ever established in the West. Polly Bemis was a Chinese woman who began in rural obscurity in China, was trafficked to the US, and wound up in Idaho and eventually even somewhat famous. María Gertrudis Barceló ran a gambling saloon in Santa Fe, where she became rich and connected.
Nelson is trying, very explicitly, to highlight people who have otherwise been absent from the conventional narrative of the West. You might know about Crazy Horse, but what do you know about Northern Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, who sometimes did cooperate with the U.S. government? Even if they were known in their own time and had published accounts of their lives, many of these figures don’t fit the conventional story of the frontier. Ella Watson was a woman who had her own ranch and was killed by rivals and then degraded in the press. Ovando Hollister grew up a Shaker and then became a Western booster, but he was a newspaper man and an anti-Mormon in Utah. Essentially, the people profiled in the book are not the type of people who would be main characters in a John Wayne film.
The Westerners is often an entertaining read. The people that Nelson has chosen are very interesting. Jim Beckwourth arguably deserves an entire book. Most readers would probably like to know more about María Gertrudis Barceló and Polly Bemis. The passages on Sacajawea are also very rich and leave one wanting to know more about her son. Sometimes the characters somewhat cross paths by covering familiar ground. In the process, Nelson is attempting to complicate the narrative of the Western frontier, and she offers us a somewhat complicated structure, with overlapping character narratives. Sometimes this works well. Other times passages that serve as breadcrumbs for a future section of the book can be frustratingly placed.
The Westerners is written for a general audience, and it takes us to the past through something more akin to creative nonfiction than traditional history. The scenes are built on research and historical accounts but sometimes have a creative element. For example, in a passage describing Barceló’s card games, Nelson describes the game, based on historical record, but framed as though it’s a specific moment in time. “The games probably went like this. Barceló shuffled her deck. Four suits, ten cards each. She signaled to the players that the game was about to begin. The men leaned forward, palms gripping the wooden edges of the table, staring intently at the cards Barceló laid down.”
The stories in The Westerners are easy to read, but the analytic side of the book can sometimes be grating. Nelson does not dive into the academic disputes about the West or the frontier, but at times she focuses quite sharply on the “frontier myth.” According to Nelson, in that myth, the pioneer is always white and men are always dominant. Nelson writes that the white Americans who settled the West, “justified their actions using the ideologies of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream. Most did not care that these national narratives, bolstered by the frontier myth and its exaltation of white pioneer families, led to the political marginalization and social oppression of large populations of Americans.” She argues that the “whitened” West of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream not only oppressed specific people, it is still used “to shore up white supremacy today.”
Manifest Destiny and the American Dream are widely considered problematic by many people, of many political and historiographical stripes. The problem with Nelson’s argument about them isn’t so much the argument, it’s that she doesn’t sufficiently make it. Most of the time, The Westerners reads like an inclusion narrative. It resembles late twentieth-century conventional women’s and minority history. It is highly readable and interesting and clearly communicates the importance of non-white and unconventional people on the frontier. The trouble with the occasional attacks on the American Dream and Manifest Destiny is that Nelson does not demonstrate how they were crafted or how we ought to understand them. She simply asserts that they are problematic in specific ways. Yes, she does demonstrate how these specific people were affected by exclusion laws and social codes, but that is not always obvious analysis. Ultimately, she does not offer skeptical readers the opportunity to be convinced. That has the potential to turn off many readers. On the other hand, her sharp critiques of the frontier myth are more occasional than you would expect, so readers skeptical of that aspect of the book can essentially skip those paragraphs and still get a great deal from the book.
As Americans, we will probably never tire of our own history. And it does not seem to matter how many times people tell us that the West isn’t what we think, we will still read another book about it. The absence of David McCullough’s prose and his soothing baritone is deeply felt. His mantle remains to be taken up. Nelson is not yet an obvious successor, but she offers us a well-researched, lively book about real people in the West. Whether or not readers agree with her interpretation of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream, many will find the people in this book worth reading about.