Anschutz’s “Out Where the West Begins, Vol. 2”

NONFICTION By Philip F. Anschutz with William J. Convery (Cloud Camp Press)

When he wrote Vol. 1 of “Out Where the West Begins,” Denver oilman Philip F. Anschutz profiled 50 entrepreneurs and business leaders who influenced Western development from 1800 to 1920. All of them were men.

Vol. 2 is broader and more inclusive. It profiles more than 100 people who contributed to the making of western America, many of them minorities and women. Virtually all of the subjects are well known. Anschutz breaks no new ground here. In fact, Vol. 2 is a sort of laundry list of famous Americans who related to the West, from John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone and Mark Twain to Judge Ben Lindsey and Helen Hunt Jackson. The brief biographies — written with his co-author, Colorado State Historian William J. Convery — are breezy and interesting but contain little that has not been published before. The book’s value is that it is a single reference to the most important men and women who developed the West.

The second volume is divided into five sections: Leaders and policymakers, religious leaders, image-makers, explorers and inventors. Included in the many subsections are Indian leaders, civil rights pioneers and suffragists.

The book begins with Thomas Jefferson, whose “vision of an ‘Empire for Liberty’ … had far-reaching consequences,” Anschutz writes. Other politicians, including Adams, James K. Polk and Theodore Roosevelt, also promoted their visions for the West.

All that is pretty tame stuff. More interesting is the section on chroniclers of the Old Frontier. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote the romantic novel “Ramona” to protest treatment of American Indians. It became a sort of a Native American “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and has never been out of print. Owen Wister’s “Virginian,” the most famous novel of the American West, enshrined the cowboy as America’s super hero and established the “Code of the West.” It has spawned thousands of cowboy novels.

Equally intriguing is the section on Western inventors. “The challenges of the West inspired a culture of new ideas and adaptability that encouraged innovation and experimentation,” Anschutz writes. Among those innovators was John Deere, whose steel plow allowed farmers to rip up the prairie, and Joseph F. Glidden, who pioneered barbed wire. The wire, called the “devil’s rope” by freerange cattlemen, allowed settlers to protect crops by fencing bison and cattle out and keeping their livestock in. By 1880, Glidden was manufacturing 40,000 tons of the stuff.

At the end of the 19th century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the frontier closed, but “it never really ended at all in some parts of the American West as far as I can tell,” Anschutz writes. Indeed, the subjects profiled not only developed the West but left a culture of independence and inventiveness that still exists.

These Westerners, Anschutz concludes, “shaped and sculpted the American West’s political, economic and social identity into the forms we recognize today.” @msn.com.

Sandra Dallas is a Denver author. Reach her at sandradallas