Continental Reckoning

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the 2024 Spur Award Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story and The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and PEN Center Award.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Maps Series Editor’s Introduction, by Richard Etulain Prelude: 773,510,680 Acres Acknowledgments Part 1. Unsettling America 1. The Great Coincidence 2. Division and Multiplication 3. Letting Blood 4. The Horse and the Hammer 5. Conquest in Stutter-Step 6. Carnal Property 7. The Fluid West 8. Continental Reckoning 9. Civil War and the “Indian Problem” Part 2. Things Come Together 10. Iron Bands and Tongues of Fire 11. Connections Real and Imagined 12. Maps 13. The “Science of Man” and the American Sublime 14. The World’s Convention 15. Crew Cultures, Cribs and Schoolhouses, Women on the Fringe Part 3. Worked into Being 16. Cattle and the New America 17. Wind, Fever, and Indians Unhorsed 18. Breaking the Land 19. Domination and Extinction 20. When the West Turned Inside Out 21. Legal Wrestling, the Land Convulsed 22. The Final Undoing 23. Creating the West Notes Bibliography Index