Brian W. Dippie

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Brian W. Dippie | Drawn to the West | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.1 | The History Cooperative

Drawn to the West

Historic western American art is best understood as myth in visual form. My essay argues that art enshrines the ideals of nineteenth-century white Americans who saw the West as a promised land. Western art's contested reputation today results from its tendency to celebrate frontier expansion as fundamental to the shaping of a distinctive national character.

OUR CONFERENCE THEME THIS YEAR is "The Boundless West: Imagery and Popular Culture." It reflects my own abiding interest in the art of the American West. My work has focused on imagery. I like words and love pictures. To paraphrase Paul Klee, "Art does not reproduce what we see. Rather, it makes us see."¹ As a historian of the American West, my interest turns on what western art makes us see—what it shows, and what it means. To see a feathered Indian is to encounter an allegorical premise. The Trail's End is near. A single buffalo skull is an entire historical narrative. An Indian with raised tomahawk validates Manifest Destiny. A wagon train creaking into the setting sun is the future washed in gold. Western art, to put it baldly, is western myth in visual form. And that western myth remains an essential part of any history of the American West. [See Figure 1.]

Brian W. Dippie
Forty-first President of the Western History Association

Figure 1. George Catlin, "Wi-jun-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head, going to and returning from Washington," engraving in George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians (New York, 1841), vol. 2, plates 271–2. Photo in author's collection.

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