The Role of the Traitor
"The traitor-whose presence will be foregrounded if he exists, and invented if he does not-serves at least two purposes. First, he is a foil created to further heighten the noble…
The Gratification of Slaying an Enemy
"In his correspondence with Einstein, Freud argued that each of us derives a very basic and profound gratification from slaying an enemy, however imaginary the act, and from viewing him…
The Custer Paradigm
"The Custer paradigm has nearly twenty segments, or motifs, within it. Yet the likelihood is that the creation of this paradigm was polygenetic; that is, each society, each author or…
The Vehicle of Liminality
"The train had other dramatic possibilities for use in folk and popular culture. It seems to have been for some observers in the nineteenth century in many ways like the…
Infinite Wealth of the Land
"The idea that the wealth of the American West was inexhaustible drove prospectors back and forth across the plains, and fostered these legends about the life of the gold-hunters: their…
Manifest Destiny
"[I]n 1845, [journalist John] O'Sullivan wrote another essay titled Annexation in the Democratic Review, in which he first used the phrase manifest destiny. In this article he urged the U.S. to annex…
Day of Rest
"Captain Stansbury is not less scrupulous upon the subject of traveling proprieties. One of his entries is couched as follows: 'Sunday, June 20 . . . The camp rested: it had been determined,…
Ants on the Prairie
"[Ant] mounds were like inverted mild pans, six to eight feet across and six inches high, and often hels a fair amount of Indian beads about the size of tiny…
Local Knowledge
"I have always wondered why it is that all information extant on any given historic spot is always somewhere else and the immediate neighborhood is in complete and blissful ignorance."
The Element Most Essential to Survival
"It was on the freighting trains that Slade developed a fierce hatred of hose thieves–a characteristic he shared with most frontiersmen. On the plains the element most essential to survival…
Constructing a Cache
"'A proper place being selected, which is usually near the border of some stream, where the bank is high enough to be in no danger of inundation, a round hole two…
South Pass, the True Northwest Passage
"South Pass provided the key to a continent and made possible the transformation of the American West in a single generation."