Review of Go West and Grow Up with the Country': An Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Guides to the American West in the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

Authors

Martha H. Kennedy, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1992

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 12:3 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

George Miles, curator of western Americana at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has written an excellent catalogue of an exhibition of guides to the American West in the American Antiquarian Society's collections. In his introduction, Miles notes that in addition to the traditional notion of guides as "books or pamphlets that described how to go west," the term can be usefully expanded to include "literature that helped guide them [western pioneers] in establishing their homesteads, in setting up their businesses, in educating themselves and their children, and in creating new territories and states." He then presents annotated entries on forty-four fascinating, varied documents, including rare and ephemeral items such as advertisements, broadsides, fliers, and the like. Many of the pieces concern western mining, but one also finds such material on the Great Plains. Among the latter are the official history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, an Iowa land agency's broadside offering help in locating homesteads, a guide to Nebraska's Santee Agency Normal Training School, the first business directory of Denver, a broadside entitled "Division and Admission! North and South Dakota," and "Montana as It Is: Being a General Description of its Resources ... " Black and white illustrations of seventeen entries enhance the whole. The sheer breadth of material impresses one with the multifarious endeavors involved in the settling and re-settling of the West.