One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West) Review

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(More customer reviews)Colin Calloway has written an impressive debut volume for the University of Nebraska Press' History of the American West series. It weaves the latest archeological discoveries together with Native American oral history into cotemporary European accounts to produce a panoramic overview of 15,000 years of human existence is western America. His narrative ends at the point where coventional school textbooks begin -- with Lewis and Clark. This book has expanded my understanding by showing me that "The West is not a land of empty spaces with a short history..." Calloway wants us to see western history as a "long and unbroken continuum" that stretches backward in a vast spiral of years and forward beyond our own lifetimes.
Most of us have a static view of Native American culture in the West; a 19th century snapshot with tribal characteristics and territories frozen in place. Calloway gives the reader a motion picture full of swirling migrations and altered identitites -- the result of altered climate, technology, as well as of European intervention. He integrates important events in native history into the timeline of world history in a way I have not previously encountered. As the Revolutionary War raged east of the Appalachians, a great smallpox epidemic that reduced native populations by 50-75% was raging to the west. The land Lewis and Clark explored was far emptier than it had been just a generation earlier.
The diffusion of corn-growing into cooler regions of North America, starting in the sixth century C.E. initiated a revolution in Native American life. At the time the Normans invaded England, the Cahokias were building monumental earthworks and plazas amid fields of corn at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi. It was probably the largest city North America had seen until New York surpassed it at the end of the 18th Century. The Cohokias, like the Anasazi of the Southwest, had vanished before Lewis and Clark pushed west. The arrival of the horse on the plains in the 16th century coicided with climatic changes that expanded buffalo populations. Some native groups that had adopted the agrarian life forsook their cornfields, moved out onto the plains, and morphed into nomadic warrior cultures. The Sioux, Apaches, and Cheyenne were farmers before they were buffalo hunters.
Although ONE VAST WINTER COUNT is unapologetically academic, it is well written and very readable. Without interrupting the narrative flow, Calloway identifies his sources and earmarks points of scholarly disagreement. The book devotes less space to native cultures of the Pacific coast than to others. Calloway's explanation is that he had to rely heavily on the record created by Europeans (who came later to that region). He says he chose to make his primary focus "centers of action and interaction". He ends the book by pointing to the depopulation of the rural West, the exhaustion of water resources, and the return of the buffalo as signs that the endless spiral of winters may be making another turn.

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