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ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the mountain man as a historical icon that illuminates how settler memory reverberates in the Rocky Mountain West and helps construct regional expressions of conservative political identity. Kevin Bruyneel’s analytic of settler memory describes a habitualized process of selective remembrance, ‘forgetting,’ and disavowal of settler-Indigenous relationships, where today’s settlers benefit from legacies of dispossession, violence, and genocidal policies. Using Carbon County, Wyoming, as a case study, I analyze mountain man symbolism in two contemporary contexts: regional tourism marketing and mountain man rendezvous (MMR) reenactment gatherings. Both contexts elevate the mountain man as a symbol of resilience and noble identity. Just as the construct of whiteness has provided a psychological wage against socioeconomic deficits for many Americans, I argue, settler memory of the mountain man compensates for much that settlers experience but won’t name, such as the role the U.S. state in removing Indigenous communities; the hardship of economic precarity in regions marked by boom-and-bust cycles and dependent on tourism; and the reality that government provides the greatest share of employment in the region. Adding mountain man symbolism to our understanding of settler memory expands scholars’ understanding of settler colonialism’s intertwinement with contemporary place-making and political identity construction.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Doug Radunich, ‘A Taste of Life,’ Saratoga Times, July 24, 2013. https://www.saratogasun.com/story/2013/07/24/entertainment/a-taste-of-life-in-the-old-west/1100.html See also https://gemuseum.com/museum-events/.
3 Kevin Bruyneel, Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
4 William H. Goetzmann, ‘The Mountain Man as Jacksonian Man’, American Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1963): 402–15.
5 Russell Belk and Janeen Arnold Costa, ‘The Mountain Man Myth: A Contemporary Consuming Fantasy’, Journal of Consumer Research 25 (December 1998): 218–40.
6 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).
8 I introduce my father here both to situate myself as a daughter of white settlers in the U.S. (though not originally Wyoming), and because the identity he has shaped is relevant to the argument I will make about the relationship between settler colonial consciousness and white conservative political identity in the RMW.
11 21.41% voted for Biden/Harris; 2.13% Libertarian candidates.
14 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 90.
15 How the mountain man became centered in Carbon County identity construction over several decades would be a ripe subject for further investigation, but is beyond the scope of this paper.
16 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
17 Ibid., 39–43.
18 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 84.
19 For complimentary treatments of how settler colonialism has been secured in the U.S. through the hand of the federal government in tandem with the claims and movements of ordinary settlers, see Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial Expansion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
20 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 75.
21 Ibid., 17. Veracini notes that mythic figures in settler colonial societies embody distinct symbolic imaginaries that enable societies founded on traumatic violence, to, ‘embrace and reject violence at the same time’. As descendants of European Enlightenment ideology, settler societies are invested in the notion that they are ideal political bodies, but such a fantasy requires repression of, or at least a justification for, the reality of their founding violence. Given that settlers were often escaping experiences of violence from the mother countries, arrived traumatized, and then are traumatized again (though they may deny it) through the perpetration and witnessing of violence, idealized founding imaginaries provide a kind of psychological balm (76-7). From the perspective of the collective ego, the need is to reduce the psychic conflict created by the fact(s) of foundational and ongoing violence by disavowing violence and imagining the settler society as settled, idyllic, and peaceful. So, to avoid acknowledging the violence that followed early-contact practices like (sometimes) relatively peaceful trading, the settler-colonial psyche works to fantasize ‘primal scenes’ that either depopulate the area or provide some moral justification for colonizing it (such as Lockean property theory or the notion that settlers were innocently defending themselves rather than colonizing) (82; 86). Such fantasies can only be maintained ‘after the closing of the troubled frontier, the cessation of hostility, and after the establishment of a purportedly settled/settler order’ (80). Even then, a fear of revenge haunts settler societies, who therefore maintain the tendency ‘to depopulate the country of Indigenous peoples in representations and especially in recollections’ (82).
22 2010, 79. On settler colonial inversion, see also Nicola Perugini, ‘Settler Colonial Inversions: Israel’s ‘Disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion in Jerusalem’, Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2018), 41–58.
23 ‘Settlers find a remapping of traditional territories to earlier names, boundaries, and stories by Indigenous peoples to be profoundly unsettling,’ write Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism’, Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 127.
24 Settler Memory, 2.
25 Ibid., 14.
26 Bruyneel reads the ‘amnesia’ framing as a problematic liberal rationalist conception of historical injustice that ignores real mechanisms of domination. For an elaboration, see Settler Memory, 16.
27 Ibid., 9.
28 Ibid., 17.
29 Ibid., 10–11.
30 Ibid., 7.
31 Ibid., 2.
32 Ibid., 6.
33 Ibid., 3 Analogously, Veracini (2010, 86) describes the phenomenon of rendering Indigenous people into ghosts or specters in settler narratives as a conceptual move in which everything Indigenous gets ‘reduced to reminiscence – a narrative transfer that restricts an actually existing Indigenous presence to temporary and instable pockets of past surrounded by future.’
34 2014, 2.
35 2014, 10, 37.
36 2010, 79.
37 Goetzmann, 408.
38 See for example, James Beckwourth, a mountain man born into slavery, who became a major ally of Crow Indians, but also an Indian agent and a military scout in a campaign against the Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864. https://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/digital-colorado/colorado-histories/beginnings/james-pierson-beckwourth-african-american-mountain-man-fur-trader-explorer/
39 In footnote 17 (408) he draws on a variety of sources including general histories of western states, fur trade literature, monographs and biographies of particular men, historical journals containing materials on the fur trade, U.S. Government reports, and newspaper periodicals.
40 Goetzmann, 402.
41 Ibid., 403.
42 Ibid., 405.
43 Ibid., 406.
44 Ibid., 407.
45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bridger [replace link with better]
46 Goetzmann, 409–10.
47 Ibid., 410.
48 https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807104.pdf [flesh out cite]
49 Goetzmann, 413.
50 Ibid., 414.
51 The cowboy as another settler memory figure who serves contemporary conservative identity production is the subject of a different paper I am writing.
54 For more on settler notions of Indians being out of time and space, see Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
55 Wind River does have its own web-based introduction to the area, but it is not generally mentioned on Wyoming or other county home pages, that I could find. ‘When settlers occupy the land,’ writes Veracini, ‘indigenous peoples are unwillingly transformed into neighbours, and, therefore, into intruders.’ (2010, 86)
58 Veracini 2010, 75.
60 Visions in Progress Marketing, ‘Get Your West on: Visit Carbon County Wyoming,’ Carbon County Visitors’ Council, 2022, design by Cindy Loose.
61 Ibid., 7, paragraph 1.
62 Ibid., 9.
63 Ibid., 23.
65 https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/carbon-county-wyoming For Van Pelt’s byline, see https://www.wyohistory.org/authors/lori-van-pelt
66 Shen Wu Tan, “Ranchers highlight major issues within agriculture industry,” The Wyoming Truth, December 9, 2022. https://wyomingtruth.org/ranchers-highlight-major-issues-within-agriculture-industry/
67 Will Walkey, “Why some farmers and ranchers refuse to give in to development pressure,” Wyoming Public Radio, November 3, 2023.
70 Headwaters Economics’ Economic Profile System (EPS), “A Profile of Socioeconomic Trends,” Carbon County, Wyoming, April 15, 2021. https://headwaterseconomics.org/apps/economic-profile-system/56007
71 Headwaters, 2021, 14, 18.
72 Ibid., 22, 26.
73 Ibid., 26.
74 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1903).
76 Similar summer mountain man rendezvous in Wyoming were held in Green River, Riverton, Pinedale, Teton County, Cody, Fort Bridger and elsewhere in 2022.
77 Belk and Costa, 1998.
78 Ibid., 219.
79 Ibid., 219.
80 Ibid., 223.
81 Veracini 2010, 79.
82 Field notes from casual conversation, Encampment MMR, July 23, 2021.
83 Belk and Costa, 227.
84 On this point see Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
85 Gary Roberts, Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy (Nashville: Abdingdon Press 2016).
86 Veracini, 2010, 86.
87 So too with the gendered aspects of settler memory at the rendezvous (which are beyond the scope of this article). MMRs package themselves as family-friendly events, showcasing a fantasy of ordered domesticity through booths selling domestic wares and heteropatriarchal gender roles, despite the reality that most mountain men lived alone or with other men. We might read the historically inaccurate gingham-clad ‘wagon train’ women and girls at the MMR as a kind of slippage within this forgetting, but it enables contemporary white women to play along in a traditionally feminine domestic role. The family system, where women and children are helpmeets to the central masculine father, is an essential part of settler memory construction, both at the MMR and in the larger worldview of American conservative identity, even if it almost never existed in that form in the real mountain man era. See Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Margaret Jacobs White Mother to a Dark Race : Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
88 Kerry Drake, “Fear and loathing in Wyoming’s politics, classrooms,” WyoFile, July 27, 2021. https://wyofile.com/fear-and-loathing-in-wyomings-politics-classrooms/