Western United States History

The fine focus is gone from the memory now. All Pat Ramsey can recall is an indistinct image of a picture hanging in her grandparents' house in Sacramento. "I remember somebody saying that behind the picture frame was something my grandfather didn't want to talk about," says Carmel resident Ramsey, 68. In Mary Murray's case, it was not a photograph but a book she wasn't supposed to discuss.

Ah, the wedding cake, that elegant tower of white confection. It seems like an age-old tradition, but it's only been on the marital scene since the mid-1800s. That's when finely ground white flour, baking powder and baking soda arrived on pantry shelves in the U.S. Until then, the newlyweds usually cut into a dark, spicy fruitcake. For the matrimonially curious, historical tidbits like this are served up in a wedding exhibit at the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park.

Through an encampment of white canvas tents and tepees strode groups of rough-looking men dressed in buckskin and furs. Accompanying them were sturdy women sporting bonnets and ankle-length cotton dresses. From the other side of a nearby pine forest, rifle shots that sounded like cannon fire reverberated off the sage-covered hillside. At a mountain-man rendezvous, they walk the walk and talk the talk of one of the most colorful periods of American frontier history.

There have been Jews in the West as long as there have been Europeans here. Not just Levi Strauss, of course, who is generally credited with inventing blue jeans, but Jacob Youphes as well. As historian and writer Harriet Rochlin explains, Youphes, or Davis, as he was also known, was a Russian Jewish tailor who lived in what is now Reno, Nev. In 1872, Youphes wrote to the Levi Strauss Co.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. When profit-hungry white settlers, heavily subsidized by the federal government, invaded the West--ravaging the environment, depleting natural resources, conquering the various other peoples who had arrived there before them, and planting the seeds for many of the problems the region faces today.

The wide open spaces have been bound and tied with ropes of blacktopped highway and the great American cowboy has devolved into a red-eyed truck driver with a gut full of bad coffee, but the myth of the American West continues to cast its spell. That true grit myth has now been burnished to a lustrous glow by the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, which opens this week in Griffith Park.

The notion that "Dances With Wolves" is unique for its positive depiction of Native Americans does not stand the scrutiny of film history. There have been strongly pro-Indian Westerns since the silent era. Many are undercut by incongruous casting and many treat Indian culture in a shallow or formula-bound way. But each of the following films embodies social attitudes that form a direct line to "Dances With Wolves." The Vanishing American (1925).

It's the kind of thing a historian lives for: coming across never-published letters and postcards written in the field by an officer of the 7th Cavalry who fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The battle, in which Gen. George Armstrong Custer split his men into three battalions, resulted in the deaths of Custer and more than 200 of his men. The correspondence, chronicling the battle on June 25, 1876, and the Army's monthslong campaign against the Plains Indians, was written by 2nd Lt.

Ken Burns counts out on the fingers of both hands, in order, his films for PBS. They are 10--from "Brooklyn Bridge" in 1981, which drew an Oscar nomination, through "Civil War," which made him rather rich as well as famous, "Baseball" and now "The West." But "The West," which kicks off PBS' fall season Sunday, is different from the rest.

Worried that you can't get to the TV set at 8 every night for "The West"? Doubtful that you'll remember--and remember how--to set your VCR to tape it? Not to worry: PBS is making it easier for you to watch the 12 1/2-hour centerpiece of its fall season. The noncommercial network is airing each episode twice a night, back to back. It's the first time PBS has tried this with a series.

It's the kind of thing a historian lives for: coming across never-published letters and postcards written in the field by an officer of the 7th Cavalry who fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The battle, in which Gen. George Armstrong Custer split his men into three battalions, resulted in the deaths of Custer and more than 200 of his men. The correspondence, chronicling the battle on June 25, 1876, and the Army's monthslong campaign against the Plains Indians, was written by 2nd Lt.

Bowers Museum officials said Friday that they will not change a program planned for later this month about African American soldiers who fought Indians, despite a protest and hunger strike by a Newport Beach Cherokee. Six members of the African Cultural Arts Council, which is sponsoring the program, and a spokesman for Bowers met Thursday night at the Santa Ana museum with August Spivey, 53, of Newport Beach, who argued that the program should present the battles as a "dark spot" in history.

Worried that you can't get to the TV set at 8 every night for "The West"? Doubtful that you'll remember--and remember how--to set your VCR to tape it? Not to worry: PBS is making it easier for you to watch the 12 1/2-hour centerpiece of its fall season. The noncommercial network is airing each episode twice a night, back to back. It's the first time PBS has tried this with a series.

It appears that the manifest destiny of PBS is to be the nation's unofficial historian. Where else on television, at least, are there so many historical documentaries covering the country's evolution, so many big-budget, thick, glossy slabs resembling posh picture books on coffee tables?

Ken Burns counts out on the fingers of both hands, in order, his films for PBS. They are 10--from "Brooklyn Bridge" in 1981, which drew an Oscar nomination, through "Civil War," which made him rather rich as well as famous, "Baseball" and now "The West." But "The West," which kicks off PBS' fall season Sunday, is different from the rest.

The fine focus is gone from the memory now. All Pat Ramsey can recall is an indistinct image of a picture hanging in her grandparents' house in Sacramento. "I remember somebody saying that behind the picture frame was something my grandfather didn't want to talk about," says Carmel resident Ramsey, 68. In Mary Murray's case, it was not a photograph but a book she wasn't supposed to discuss.

Johnny Green had taken all he could bear. They had hanged his brother as a horse thief, and Johnny sought to avenge his death. Walking through the center of the small dusty California mining town with a gun on each hip, Johnny felt his hands itch. Three men--the sheriff and two deputies--faced Johnny from the other end of town. They were armed and ready, but Johnny kept walking toward them. "You yellow-bellied cowards killt my brother in cold blood," Johnny shouted.

"Bowery Buckaroos" is hardly a classic Western film, but it is a good example of the philosophy behind the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum--that learning about Western history should be informative and fun. Thousands of people--many of them schoolchildren--file through the museum each week, and the films are just one way the museum's education department differentiates between myths of the Old West and reality.

Either from his book-lined home office or the quiet confines of some public library, Roger McGrath regularly consorts with stage-robbers and scalawags, highwaymen and hangmen, sweaty sodbusters, gunfighters and saucy saloon girls. Rapid-fire, the local historian can quote from the letters of Black Bart--the infamous San Francisco gentleman-stagecoach robber--as well as discuss the deeds of a young Jesse James, the Earp boys or a host of gunslinging High Noon street duelists.

A scholarly dust-up among academic historians over the history of the American West is turning nasty, with one respected senior professor likening his younger colleagues to Stalinists and Nazi propagandists. The decidedly un-collegial charge by Gerald Nash of the University of New Mexico has set off a chain of recrimination and gossip among Western historians. The Western history field has been invigorated in recent years by a much-publicized revisionist movement.