History Alums and Conferences

Professor Doug Sackman sends this as an account of an historian at the Western History Association Conference this past October.

I attended the Western History Association Conference in Denver last week, arriving Thursday afternoon to this high plains city at the base of the Rockies. Fittingly, snow was falling. The last time I flew to a conference was for the American Studies conference in Albuquerque a year ago; much to my surprise and delight, I had found myself sitting next to Jordan Hansen, Puget Sound alumnus, history major, extreme adventurer, and transatlantic rower extraordinaire. Jordan currently is pursuing a budding writing career. Little did I know, I would “see” another Puget Sound history alumnus in Denver (though not in person).

So back to Denver: some 800 Western historians (and a welcome smattering of western history aficionados and enthusiasts) convened there to share their scholarship on the North American West, broadly construed. I attended several excellent sessions—one on history in the Powder River basin, including one on “Feral Lands, Animals and People” (by Michael Wise) a fascinating examination of changing perceptions of wolves (Timothy Lehman) and one on the Cheyenne Indians’ agency in securing a reservation in that landscape (sometimes through militant action, sometimes through action, such as taking up agriculture, which was only accomodationist on its surface—in its roots, it was a strategy of maintaining culture and sovereignty rather than giving either up, Jaime Allison convincingly argued). My favorite session of the first day was on the “Pacific World in 19th Century Western and US History.” The panelists were all graduate students (one just completed his dissertation): Michael Black, of USC, argued that commerce—and commercial dreams of and engagement with China in particular—motivated American presence in the Pacific through the 19th century—certainly more so than any dreams of manifest destiny. Katherine Jenks (of UC Irvine) examined the curiously stymied business plan of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company during and after the Gold Rush, while Richard Ravalli explored the fate of the sea otter after the heyday of the otter trade (roughly 1795-1820). David Igler (Associate Professor at UC Irvine) provided the expert and lively commentary. This panel was especially interesting to me as my next book project will be explore how the “traffic in nature” in the 19th century tied far-flung places, peoples, plants, and animals together, forging a Pacific World (that was more “tumultuous” than “pacific” in terms of effects on natures and cultures)

Every conference will have a few blockbuster events, and one of those for this conference was the session on “Spatial History” featuring John Christensen, Matthew Booker, and the eminent and constantly path-breaking historian Richard White (William Cronon had been scheduled to chair the session, but he was not able to make it; his substitute kept the session going with a chiming marimba tone iphone keeping strict tract of time and a number of keen and aggravating interventions and comments. It almost seemed as if she was trying her best to through Richard White off his message, but he would have none of it). White is one of the leading historians of his day—a member of the so-called Gang of Four who trailblazed a New Western history in the 1980s, and a leader in environmental and Native American history as well (also, a “certified” genius, that is, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, like our own Mott Greene). As is his way, White extracted the core useful perspectives of a difficult yet rewarding text (in this case, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space), signaled how it could be of use to historians, and gave us a few glimpses of what he’s doing in a team effort (supported by a Mellon Grant that White used to establish a lab and spatial history project at Stanford) with a current project on transcontinental railroads. White spoke of the difference between maps and spatial information as illustration and as research tool. He is clearly more excited with the latter, as it can allow new questions—new ways of seeing and opening up the past—to emerge. But he said the work is inherently collaborative, as well as expensive (both in time and in the money to support the technology and collaborators). He also called GIS a clunky technology, and flatly stated that it was not a tool historians can expect to profitably take up by themselves. This was a conclusion I reached myself several years ago after participating on a workshop through on the technology, though it was useful in itself. Matthew Booker’s paper (on seeing the human-nature interactions in the SF Bay in new ways) and Jon Christensen’s paper (on butterfly conservation and mapping serpentine soils on which the animal has historically ranged) were also eye-opening and excellent.

I served as the chair for one session on Saturday, entitled “Railroads and Radios in the Making of the Canadian West.” As some of you know, I’m part of our Canadian Studies initiative at Puget Sound; we’ve received grants from the Canadian government over a number of years that have given us the opportunity to enrich curriculum in campus, often by bringing scholars and artists from Canada to speak or perform on campus. I was happy to be part of the Western History Association’s welcoming of Canadian topics and scholars into its program; in fact, while the US/Mexico borderlands has a rich and growing (and hot) historiography, the borders with Canada have been neglected, until recently. But an excellent session had focused on the US/Canada borders on Friday, with a great commentary by Andres Resendez and superb papers by Michel Hogue, Charlene Porsild, and Andrew Graybill (who has edited a forthcoming book comparing US/Mexico and US/Canadian borderlands).

My job was to introduce the panel, keep time (I refrained from aiming the iphone marimba at the speakers), and moderate the discussion. I used a bit of history people who have taken my History of the West and Pacific Northwest will recognize (as Annie Dillard tells a version of it in her novel The Living, but the event has been documented in The History of Whatcom County, and other sources). Here is what I said:

“I’m hoping that the WHA in the Western US has given a better welcome to our colleagues from north of the 49th parallel than the welcome Bellingham (then called Whatcom) gave to the Canadian Pacific Railway when it ran a train south of the border to that town in 1891 The officials at Whatcom apparently wanted to give the Canadian dignitaries a bang up reception—they erected a welcome arch, but they thought they would top it off by having two local volunteer fire departments create an archway of water, each department on the opposite side of the track shooting up a stream to meet majestically at a top. Unfortunately, these VFD’s were rivals, and they started hosing each other; when the train then rolled in, accounts say (and these may have been exaggerated over the years), they knocked out the windows and got the visitors drenched. To compound matters, someone thought the Canadian flag was flying higher than the U.S. flag on pole, and so tore it down.” The papers by Norm Fennema and Heather Longworth were quite good, as was the commentary by eminent historian Richard Orsi (author of Sunset Limited). In introducing Orsi, I joked that among his many, many contributions to Western history was his son Jared (who is a professor at Colorado State University and the author of an environmental history of water and Los Angeles, Hazardous Metropolis.

We historians love books, especially new books in our field. Many publishers came to the conference, exhibiting their new (and old) wares. We like to see the fruits of our colleagues’ research (indeed, the conference is a time to catch up on what our friends at other places are working on, and what they have coming out). Once in a while you get to see your own book for sale for the first time. (I should have something at the next conference I’ll got to in the spring, but at this one I was able to thank in person several of the contributors to a new book I’m editing and which has just been sent off to the press). But I found something at the book fair that I wasn’t expecting, and turned out to be one of the highlights of the conference (even though it was quite literally buried in a footnote). Thumbing through a fairly new book published by the University of California Press on the history of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, I found that the author cited a paper written on the topic written by a Puget Sound history major in History 400 in 2004—Tiffany Dyer! Congratulations to Tiffany! It’s a very nice honor to be cited by other scholars. It shows that our work here can contribute to something larger—the making and remaking of history as a constantly evolving product of our collective research and imaginations. Tiffany did a wonderful job on her thesis, even conducting archival research at the Bancroft library. He found her paper on my website (and I’m hoping to get more up once I shift over to the new web platform). .

All in all, it was a superb conference. It was also very nice to come back to Denver. The last time I came to town was just before I got the job at Puget Sound almost a decade ago. I had come to Denver for a job interview at another school. The first night, I was taken to a restaurant in the Cherry Creek area, and, as if the Wild West had come anachronistically to life right before my eyes, a fight broke out at the bar. It turned out to be a little bit of foreshadowing for the interview as a whole, but that’s another story for another time....

Postscript: the snow, unfortunately, meant that the excruciatingly early morning run I was hoping to do with Patty Limerick (another one of the Gang of Four and a certified genius to boot) and her husband Houston had to be called off (even the Rockies didn’t play that day). But I got a rain check (in the most literal sense): we’re going to go for a run, shine or probably rain, in Portland during the American Society for Environmental History conference in the Spring.