A Review Of David Murdoch's Letters From An American Farmer

Ever since the American colonies became a new nation in 1776, the United States of America, Americans have been wondering about and trying to define their nation and national identity. The people who composed the majority of this new American population “were European by ancestry, by language, and by religious and literary heritage,” (Slotkin, Regeneration 5) and seemed to exist a very strong wish to define what it meant to be ‘American’ because of this as well as create a history they could call their own. In Letters from an American Farmer from 1852, the French-American writer J. Hector St. Jean de Crévecoeur asked in the question that would continue to haunt Americans: “What, then, is the American, this new man?” (qtd. in Lemay, 120) From

In an effort to answer this question and understand how Americans think about themselves and their nation, David Murdoch found himself coming back to the American West again and again. Murdoch notes that no other nation “has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination equal to American’s creation of the West,” (vii) and suggests that a study of the West will open up to an understanding of Americans because of the remarkable role it has been

It requires little effort to picture the American West in our minds and certain images almost automatically appear: the heroic cowboy chasing the barbarous Indian, wagon trains slowly but steadily moving across the country ultimately reaching their destination in a picturesque and idyllic Western landscape, and yeomen farmers cultivating the wilderness into an agricultural garden. But how is this mythic West central in a study of an American search for identity? Because few other narratives have held such an impressive hold on the nation’s imagination and way of thinking, the West is according to John G. Cawelti one of the “central defining factors of our national identity.” (5) And Murdoch and Cawelti are not alone in their assumptions; interpretations and discussion of the West have “spilled over from academic conferences and journals to newspapers and news magazines,” (Blaser, 67) making the amount of literature available on the topic astonishing . Because the mythic version of the American West has been the subject in a substantial amount of academic works, the thesis will primarily focus on the scholars that argue that the mythic West has been nation-building and essential in the creation of an American identity. Although the academic debate of the West’s