"The Westerners" by Megan Kate Nelson

The old west came at us in a rush on 50s TV: So many shows; so many cowboys; so much history; and so much left out.

Megan Kate Nelson attempts to fill some of the gaps in our frontier history in The Westerners, a book that chronicles the lives of seven remarkable individuals never depicted on TV or a lunchbox.

You learn more about Sacajawea, the Native American woman who helped guide the Lewis & Clark expedition. Sacajawea overcame illness that incapacitated her for 10 days, bringing the expedition to a halt. The men knew that their survival depended on Sacajawea’s, noted Nelson. She later gave birth to a baby on the way. 

William Clark understood the importance of having a Native American woman serve as a guide. “The wife of Charbonneau, our interpreter, we find reconciles all the Indians as to our peaceful intentions,” he wrote in his diary.

Also featured in The Westerners are Jim Beckwourth, Maria Gertrudis Barcelo, Ovando Hollister, Little Wolf, Ella Watson, and Polly Bemis. Each makes a distinct contribution to frontier history.

Beckwourth’s life is one for the books. Born into slavery with a white father and a Black mother, Beckwourth headed off to find his fortune once he received his freedom in St. Louis. He becomes a successful fur trader before joining the Apsaalooke tribe, part of the Crow nation, where he spent almost a decade, earning various names in battle such as Big Bull and Red Wing. Along the way, he married several Apsaalooke women while relentlessly pursuing a young woman named Pine Leaf, who often joined him in battle, stated Nelson.

After giving up the Indian life, Beckwourth returned to his native St. Louis but didn’t stay long. He headed west once again, trading with Native Americans along the way, winding up in Los Angeles, a town of 2,500, in 1844. That’s where Beckwourth took the side of Californians who were fighting off Mexican soldiers. Now in his 40s, Beckwourth traveled east to Taos—not to join the U.S. Army that looked to take over the New Mexico Territory (as well as California) but to sell the army horses.

“What I loved about Beckwourth was that he was hitting on all cylinders from the 1820s to the 1860s, where he was involved in a lot of major events in U.S. history,” said Nelson. 

“He was involved with both the California Gold Rush and the Colorado Gold Rush,” she said. He also remained close with Native Americans in their growing disputes with white settlers determined to take over what had been Indian land. The conflict culminated in the Sand Creek Massacre, where U.S. Army soldiers killed 160 Native Americans, two-thirds of whom were women, children, and old men.

Beckwourth, close to 70, died of a possible heart attack a year after the conclusion of the Civil War. “He died in an Apsaalooke Lodge while doing what he did best: negotiating the boundaries of Indigenous and white worlds in the American West,” stated Nelson.

You might think that the story of a former slave who forged a successful life in both the white and Native American worlds at a time when those two cultures were colliding might be just the material for a television show when the cowboy craze was on. “Beckwourth’s Blackness made him invisible to white historians, novelists, and later filmmakers,” stated Nelson.

Consider the case of Maria Gertrudi Barcelo, who became one of the most famous people in the Southwest during the 1830s and 40s, said Nelson. “Americans visiting Santa Fe set out to find her because they had read so much about her in newspaper and magazine accounts of New Mexico Territory,” she wrote.

Barcelo amassed a fortune by dealing cards. She ran a saloon where the game was monte, in which the customer plays against the dealer, as in blackjack. Yet despite being a celebrity in New Mexico during the 19th century, by the 20th century, Barcelo, like Beckwourth, was little known, said Nelson.

“(The frontier myth) has, from the beginning, marginalized, ignored, or entirely erased the actual people who explored, fought over, excavated, and built the American West in the nineteenth century,” the author said.

“The frontier myth’s erasure of their lives was no accident. Politicians, newspaper editors, surveyors, artists, writers, and historians did it deliberately. Removing people from a central national narrative effectively eliminates them from the body politic, making it easier to take their property and civil rights away,” noted Nelson.