Notes
Introduction
1. Karlinsky, California Dreaming.
2. Barrett, “Servants of the Map,” 1–43.
3. Doughty, At Home in Texas, 4.
4. Grammer, “‘April in Andalusia,’” 222–33.
5. Twain, The Innocents Abroad.
6. Walker, Irreverent Pilgrims, 174–75, 180.
7. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 30–34.
8. Harris, The Artist in American Society, 158–60.
9. Borges, Seven Nights, 48, 51.
10. Weiss, Translating Orients, 22.
11. For a more complete discussion of this, see Francaviglia, “Crusaders and Saracens.”
12. Note that the first definition seems objective despite the fact that identifying these traits (etc.) and the people who exhibit them involves considerable subjectivity. The second definition also seems objective, but the decision to use something from another culture again involves subjectivity, as choices have to be made as to what is studied and how it is used. The third definition—imitation or assimilation of that which is Oriental—is clearly subjective.
13. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts.
14. Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters, 8–9.
15. Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier,” and “Exceptionalism and Globalism.”
16. Said, Orientalism.
17. Adopting Said’s use of limited sources while opposing his conclusions, some Orientalist scholars restrict the definition of Orientalism to the serious academic scholarship about the East (and Easterners) and thereby disregard any popular interest in the Orient. This is regrettable. Using this type of restricted definition led British Orientalist Robert Irwin to entirely dismiss American Orientalism: as he put it categorically, “There is little to say about American Orientalism in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.” Irwin believed this because, in his opinion, America offered little substantive study of the Orient at this time. Irwin urged that “the American Oriental Society, founded in 1842,” be disregarded because it “was at first an association for interested amateurs.” Irwin, The Lust of Knowing, 213–14. Only in the later twentieth century could Irwin grudgingly admit an American scholar into the ranks of the Orientalists. Irwin misses the point. Simply because scholars have not studied something does not mean it is not significant. My point here is that there is indeed much to say about how Orientalism has functioned in the United States from the late eighteenth century into the early twenty-first century. Moreover, I shall show that amateurs as well as professionals were involved in making Orientalism an important factor in American life for at least two centuries. My point here is not to establish boundaries but rather to suggest that we have much to gain by considering how those American “amateurs” reacted to the East. By being more inclusive than Edward Said or Robert Irwin, my definition of Orientalism includes voices that are less often, and less seriously, considered.
18. MacKenzie, Orientalism.
19. Orientalism thus reflects the dualism embedded in our own “western” culture. The binary thought system—light vs. dark, good vs. evil, saved vs. damned—that underlies much Western thinking, has roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition that originated in the Orient. Christianity (and, for that matter, Judaism and Islam) are inheritors of this tradition. Orientalism, it can be argued, reveals the Orient to be the ultimate source of the Western world’s most basic cultural values and beliefs.
20. See Leal, Wilderness in the Bible.
21. Lears, No Place of Grace,142–43,168, and 225–41.
22. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.
23. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 15–22.
24. Hernán Cortés (as quoted in Watkins, Gold and Silver in the West.)
25. Grabar, “Roots and Others,” 3–9.
26. See Francaviglia, Believing in Place.
27. The late Edward Said might have considered the Orientalization of the American West’s landscapes by writers, artists, and others as one more appropriative and racist act. However, as The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing makes clear, “over recent years students of British travel writing have contested the Saidian paradigm and modified it considerably.” These scholars include Ali Behdad, Charles Issawi, Billie Melman, and Lisa Lowe—all of whom “have pointed out that travelers’ representations were not homogenous but were inflected by gender, class, and nationality.” A growing number of scholars also believe not only that Orientalism changes (that is, has changed) over time but that simple binary interpretations (for example, good vs. bad) of the East do not hold up under closer scrutiny. Melman, “The Middle East/Arabia,” 105–21.
28. Orientalism in the United States certainly deserves greater study by historians and historical geographers. The Orient’s grip on the West, including the United States, is very powerful and quite enduring. In fact, no understanding of American culture is complete without factoring in the Orientalist impulse.
29. Adair, The History of the American Indians, 366–67.
30. A Lieutenant of the Left Wing, Sketch of the Seminole War, 121.
31. Rafn, America Discovered in the Tenth Century, 18.
32. Sigourney, Scenes in My Native Land, 51.
33. Sanders, A History of the Indian Wars, 228.
34. Gilleland, The Ohio and Mississippi Pilot, 162.
35. Yu, The Great Circle, 26.
36. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 232–33. I thank former University of Texas at Arlington student Zachary Wingerd for bringing this quote to my attention.
37. Stowe, “Uncle Lot,” 31.
38. Russell, Pictures of Southern Life, Social, Political and Military, 17.
39. Russell, My Diary North and South, 157.
40. Martineau, Society in America, 127–29.
41. Trafton, Egypt Land, 16
42. Schoolcraft, Information Respecting the Indian Tribes, 38, 343.
Chapter 1
1. Brackenridge, Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri.
2. Tudor, Narrative of a Tour in North America, 41–43.
3. Ibid., 260.
4. Irwin, The Lust of Knowing, 2.
5. Irving, Astoria Or, Anecdotes Beyond the Rocky Mountains, 179.
6. Willis, American Scenery, 120.
7. St. John, The Trapper’s Bride, 39–40
8. Hall, The New Purchase, 281–82.
9. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 1–3.
10. Mason, Infelicities, 126–27.
11. LeMenager, Manifest and Other Destinies, 79, 110.
12. Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent, 268.
13. Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 206.
14. Pattie, The Hunters of Kentucky, 67.
15. Nuttall, Journal of Travels into the Arkansas, 54.
16. Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent, 287–88.
17. Ibid., 294.
18. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 33–35.
19. Ibid., 39.
20. The Sam Houston Museum at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, provides many examples of Houston’s eccentricities.
21. Matthews, “The Family,” 17.
22. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 29–30.
23. Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 65.
24. McLeod to Mirabeau Lamar, Red River Country, Below Clarksville 60 Miles, January 9, 1839, Papers of Mirabeau Lamar, vol. 2, 406.
25. Thorpe, The Mysteries of the Backwoods, 13–15.
26. Lanman, A Summer in the Wilderness, 58.
27. Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, Emigrants’ Guide to Texas, 30.
28. Brackenridge, Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri, 133.
29. Dodge, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, 378–79.
30. Dunraven, The Great Divide, 22, 169.
31. Leavitt, “California Again!”
32. Morgan, ed., Overland in 1846, 559–60.
33. Ibid., 485–87.
34. Journal of Horace K. Whitney, May 12, 1847; see also Bennett, We’ll Find the Place, 148–49.
35. Harmon, Appleton Milo Harmon Goes West, 22.
36. Spec, Line Etchings, 63.
37. Irving, Astori, Or Anecdotes of the Rocky Mountains, 232.
38. Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, 42.
39. Actually, as many as nine Egyptian obelisks existed in Egypt, and three were later placed in major cities (Paris, London, and New York). Cleopatra’s Needle(s) symbolized the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians, but ironically, these obelisks are actually associated with Tuthmosis III, rather than Queen Cleopatra herself. This was not the first time that powerful outsiders repositioned the venerable obelisks. Originally erected in Heliopolis, the obelisks were later moved by the Romans to Alexandria. They also found their way into Europe. As early as 1819, plans were made to move one obelisk to London as the pasha of Egypt had given it to England.
40. Historian Gregg Cantrell uses the term “divided mind” to characterize the American psyche in the early to mid-nineteenth century. By this he means the discrepancy between the present (a buoyant belief in the ascendancy of their Republic) and the past (all such Republics have crumbled, leaving only venerated ancient ruins). Cantrell suggests that Manifest Destiny worked to resolve this tension, and to dispel fears by sustaining enthusiasm and offering “self assurance.” So, too, did an Orientalizing of the American landscape, which offered a reassuring sense of antiquity in an otherwise new land. See Gregg Cantrell, “Manifest Destiny,” presented at The West and the Shaping of America, Institute for Texas Teachers, Texas Christian University, June 3, 2007.
41. Harris, The Artist in American Society, 192–99.
42. Despite initial concerns about obelisks, then, they soon became a cherished symbol for a new nation proudly rescuing ancient forms from the graveyards of history. With ease, the new nation now ingeniously employed them as American symbols for strength, power, and durability. With their acceptance came an ease in equating the richness of the ancient past with the vibrancy and enthusiasm of a new America.
43. Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, 108.
44. It is no coincidence that at exactly this time, American gravestones also emulated the obelisk, becoming a standard feature in cemeteries from coast to coast. See Francaviglia, “The Cemetery as an Evolving Cultural Landscape,” 501–9.
45. The social gospel movement, which urges action based on socially responsible Christian traditions, was yet another aspect of this impetuous American expansion. In the twentieth century, it required a renunciation of the isolationism that has characterized the United States from time to time.
46. White and Hopkins, The Social Gospel, 40–41.
47. Burton, The City of the Saints, 19–21.
48. Ibid., 25.
49. Ibid., 30–31.
50. Ibid., 45, 47.
51. Ibid., 57.
52. Ibid., 62.
53. Ibid., 62.
54. Given the tendency to Orientalize the western American landscape, it is not surprising that the native peoples here seemed to have a decidedly Oriental quality—at least in the eyes, and imaginations, of Europeans and European Americans. But some travelers sought to explore beyond mere visual connections; they searched for deeper, genetic connections. This, after all, represented the dawn of ethnography and anthropology. As an inveterate explorer in a world searching for connections, Burton was fascinated by the Native Americans—particularly their beliefs, which he sought to connect with Old World origins. “The religion of the North American Indians” he began, “has long been a subject of debate.” Burton was particularly interested in the sources of Native American religions. “Some see in it traces of Judaism, others of Sabaeanism; M. Schoolcraft detects a degradation of Guebrism.” In this statement, we can sense a common belief that native religions—and native peoples themselves—originated elsewhere. Yet, there was also an assumption of primitivism, for, as Burton clearly put it, “they have not yet risen to monotheism.” The Indians were “superstitious,” as if most Christians had totally shed this trait. Burton noted that “some tribes, as the Cheyennes, will not go to war without a medicine man, others without sacred war-gourds containing the tooth of the drum-head fish.” As a Christian, Burton believed that two things that elevated Native American religions—“namely, the Great Spirit or Creator, and the Happy Hunting Grounds in a future world—were the results of Christian missionary teaching.” See Burton, The City of the Saints, 84–86. By contrast, as Burton put it, the Indians’ fetishism “leads to Pantheism and Polytheism” and no belief in the human soul. Burton, though, was impressed by the depth of Indians’ belief in “Manitou . . . which gave the spark from the flint, lived in every blade of grass, flowed in the streams, shone in the stars, and thundered in the waterfall,” and yet he pointed out that this belief in the Deity was “particular and concrete” rather than the Judeo-Christian belief in a single God.
55. Lockwood, Locust.
56. The South Western Immigration Company, Texas: Her Resources and Capabilities, 14, 54.
57. John Runnels, untitled speech, Report of the Fourth Tri-State Reunion, 56–59, cited in Wrobel, Promised Lands, 143.
58. Howett, “Grounding Memory and Identity,” 25, 19–38.
59. See Kolodny, The Land Before Her, 8–10.
60. Worster, “Cowboy Ecology,” 3.
61. Leonard Collection, I:1:13, typed extract credited to Boston Traveler, Aug. 8, 1868, UPRR Archives, Council Bluffs, Iowa.
62. “Bryan,” National Republican, March 11, 1869.
63. Webb, Buffalo Land, 118.
64. US Congress, Railroad Reports, vol. 2, 62; see also Hyde, An American Vision, 56.
65. Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 104.
66. Winchell, Sketches of Creation, 205–9.
67. Ibid., 148.
68. In the introduction to his 1982 book Scenes in America Deserta, Peter Reyner Banham candidly confessed that “I have given this book a title that deliberately echoes Charles Doughty’s classic Travels in Arabia Deserta.” Banham admitted that he owed a debt to British travel writers who wrote such stirring accounts of the Middle Eastern deserts. See Peter Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta, 1. More to the point here, however, is that the American deserts were, and still are, perceived in terms of their Old World counterparts. In the nineteenth century, both were similar enough—sparsely populated, but possessing intriguing villages of either sedentary or seminomadic peoples, and landscapes that are ultimately stony, sandy, arid, exotic, hazardous—that they could serve as literary landscape surrogates. Even today, in the popular imagination, American deserts convey the mystique of the Sahara and Arabian Deserts. The key operative idea here is romanticism, which has long been an element in the American ethos.
69. Although the term “siesta” suggests a Spanish or Mexican location, the painting’s premise—a lounging odalisque—is far more Middle Eastern than Spanish or Native American.
70. Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 5–6.
71. This critique would seem to indict capitalism per se, but then again, imperial nostalgia may be part of a larger and fairly recent trend, what Jean Baudrillard saw as a “specieswide sense of remorse . . . inducing humanity to resurrect the whole of its past just when it is losing the thread of its memory.” Regardless, the quest still results in the same enigma: by trying to return fossilized cultural relics to life, “we shall turn them from something buried and living into something visible and dead.” See Baudrillard, “The Dance of the Fossils,” 72–77.
72. J. W. Dawson, Modern Science in Bible Lands, 349–53.
73. Morris, “When Corporations Rule the Llano Estacado,” 44–93.
Chapter 2
1. Varga, “Pyramids of the World, True or False,” A63.
2. Herodotus, History, 131.
3. Nisbet, The Mapmaker’s Eye, 110.
4. Frémont, Memoirs of My Life.
5. Dawson, Modern Science in Bible Lands, 336.
6. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 32–33.
7. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, xi.
8. Frémont, Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 217–18.
9. Calculated from longitude 112˚ to 120˚ west at 38˚ latitude.
10. Like the nineteenth-century British explorers, Frémont was engaged in expanding empire—in this case the American empire to the Pacific Coast. When Frémont experienced (and named) Pyramid Lake, he was, in fact, in Mexico, more properly the Mexican province of Upper or Alta California. Frémont was more than an impartial observer here. He was on a mission to obtain strategic geographic information for the US government. In this regard, Frémont was part of a broader mission to expand the territory of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Manifest Destiny is commonly referred to as the motive for such expansive American exploration, and it was both metaphorical and military. The passions it excited would ignite within two short years as the US-Mexican War broke out in 1846.
11. Ridgway, Geological Exploration of the Fortieth parallel, 343.
12. Said, Orientalism.
13. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 259–61.
14. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 152. That spelling, “Zahara,” was common among mid-nineteenth century Anglo-American explorers, who coined the term “American Zahara” for the driest parts of the American West.
15. Burton, The Look of the West, 273.
16. Ibid., 307–9.
17. Sacramento Daily Union, December 9, 1867, as cited in Hyde, An American Vision, 139.
18. The Sahara-as-quintessential-desert metaphor still works today in parts of the American West. In a 2007 opinion piece on how “the annual rite known as the family trip allows you to rediscover your heart, laugh deeply and skid closer than you’d like to the gates of hell,” columnist William McKenzie described various vacation trips to the West. Of a trip to Colorado, he recalled that “one Sunday evening, a cellist played for a handful of us in an amphitheater at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.” The music was probably fine, but what impressed McKenzie most about the experience was the sand dunes themselves: “The sun was settling down, casting a red glow against the chalk-like dunes that rise out of southern Colorado like towers in the Sahara.” It was, as he put it, an “overpowering moment.” By the early twenty-first century, it is impossible to separate the numerous factors that enabled McKenzie to so easily fall under the romantic spell of the dunes. Given cinema’s impact on us, the music probably helped, as did the fresh late afternoon rain that helped cool the air. Then, too, the spectacular lighting—almost painterly—may have helped. “But . . .” as McKenzie put it, “the combination of family, color, sound and sense was so strong” that they contributed to the experience. Interestingly, McKenzie seems to be describing something akin to the family watching a film (or television), but his point was that the experience was real—or so it seemed.
19. Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales, 40–41.
20. This plays out in interesting ways. In the days after 9/11, watching video footage of Osama bin Laden pontificating from some unidentified scrub-pine highland location in, most likely, northeastern Afghanistan, made it easy to imagine this fugitive holding court on a New Mexico mountainside somewhere northwest of Santa Fe—until, that is, one looked very closely at the species of pine trees in the background.
21. For more information, see Neil A. West, Ecosystems of the World, 279–421.
22. Monoghan, “The Dunes that Roar,” A64.
23. Curzon, Tales of Travel, 313–98.
24. Williams, Refuge, 109.
25. Chandler and Goldthwaite, eds., “Sound Ground to Stand On,” 81–94.
26. Robinson, Sinners and Saints, 280.
27. Ibid., 208.
28. Robinson continues the cultural comparison much of the way across Nevada. But the ever-critical Robinson did mention one redeeming aspect of the Silver State. Nevada’s desert wasteland, as he put it, “thus keeps apart the two American problems of the day—pigtails and polygamy.” Interestingly, both of those “problems”—the Chinese presence in California, and the Mormons’ practice of polygamy in Utah—were fodder for Robinson’s Orientalist impulses.
29. Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 441.
30. Fowler, Camels to California, 1–8.
31. Ibid., 18.
32. Ibid., 19.
33. Ibid., 30.
34. Ibid., 41–42.
35. Ibid., 54, 59.
36. See Jackson and Jackson, Dr. J. R. N. Owen, 2.
37. In Reel 59, Incoming Brigham Young Correspondence, Archives, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City.
38. Corinne Daily Utah Reporter, July 7, 1869.
39. Woodward, Camels and Surveyors in Death Valley, 8–11.
40. Ibid., 16–17.
41. Ibid., 21.
42. Lingenfelter, Death Valley & the Amargosa, 89.
Chapter 3
1. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.
2. Barlow, “Toward a Mormon Sense of Time,” 24; see also LeSueur, “The Community of Christ,” 9.
3. See John Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 13–16.
4. Grabar, “Roots and Others,” 4.
5. See Wood, The New England Village.
6. John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints, 306.
7. Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, 7–8.
8. Then, too, the Mormons were increasingly marginalized from an organization to which many of their leaders had belonged—Freemasonry. Non-Mormon Masons complained that the Mormons were making membership in their church a prerequisite for joining Masonic lodges in Nauvoo. After Joseph Smith’s death, the two organizations grew increasingly estranged.
9. See Richard Jackson, “The Mormon Experience,” 68.
10. Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape.
11. Burton, The City of the Saints, 240.
12. See Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 184–85.
13. The closest comparison in the twentieth century was the creation of Israel in 1947, which also associated a migration with “Zion.”
14. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 21.
15. O’dea, The Mormons, 1.
16. Doctrine and Covenants 133:25, 29.
17. Hyde, Journal of Discourses, vol. 2, April 6, 1853, 11.
18. Smith, Journal of Discourses, vol. 11, October 7, 1865, 157–58.
19. Pratt, Journal of Discourses, vol. 12, August 11, 1867, 93.
20. Pratt, Journal of Discourses, vol. 15, December 18, 1870, 58–59.
21. Jackson also noted that the Saints generally regarded the Great Plains as a rather attractive area for raising stock, though some did mention that the landscape became increasingly dry, dusty, and barren the farther west they traveled. Looking back on their journey across the plains in hindsight, though, many were tempted to claim it was a harsh desert that they traversed to get to Utah. Similarly, they rejoiced at the sight that greeted them upon their arrival to the Great Salt Lake valley rather than characterizing it as inhospitable desert. Wilford Woodruff described his joy in seeing “the most fertile valley spread out before us . . . clothed with a heavy garment of vegetation in the midst of which glistened the waters of the Great Salt Lake, with mountains all around towering to the skies, and steams, rivulets, and creeks of pure water running through the beautiful valley.” This, as Jackson put it, was typical of “the overwhelmingly favorable view of the Great Salt Lake Valley by the initial pioneer party and subsequent immigrants.” Within a few years, though, the Saints’ characterization of a fair land changed to a harsh place. Challenges and privations abounded, or so claimed the people writing in the 1850s. Had the environment really changed? The evidence that Pratt provided above suggests that a fluctuation in climate may have been significant enough to support the Mormons’ claims. But Jackson does make a good point when he suggests that people in the post–frontier period tended to look back to the early years and see them as a wilderness challenge.
22. Richard Jackson, “The Mormon Experience,” 41–58.
23. Epistle dated December 23, 1847, Millennial Star, vol 10, 82–83.
24. Historical records of Parowan, Utah, 1856–1859 (August 23, 1857) 25, Salt Lake City, Church Historian’s Office.
25. Micah 4:15.
26. The Mormons strongly supported the creation of Israel in the mid-twentieth century; their pro-Israel sentiment remains very strong in the early twenty-first century.
27. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 22.
28. Davies, “Israel,” 85.
29. Ibid. 86.
30. The belief that the American Indians were descended from the “lost” tribes of Israel actually predates the Mormons. In a seminal book on this subject—View of the Hebrews: or the Tribes of Israel in America—the Reverend Ethan Smith (no relation to the Mormon prophet) claimed in 1825 that the American Indians’ ancestry could be traced directly to the lost tribes of Israel. In yet another testimony to the importance of New England in such matters, Ethan Smith’s book was published in Vermont, the same state in which Joseph Smith was born in 1805. View of the Hebrews was published five years before Joseph Smith publicly claimed that the same belief was divinely revealed to him; this, as might be anticipated, led to claims of plagiarism, which Joseph Smith effectively refuted. Located in a frontier area, the young Mormon prophet was not likely to know about Ethan Smith’s book. More likely, both Smiths tapped into a growing belief that Native Americans were not really indigenous, but connected to an epic biblical history.
31. Although not normally considered in this light, the belief rectifies something that had long troubled religious people since Columbus reached the New World; if the Bible is God’s perfect word, how could it fail to mention the peoples of a hemisphere that he also created? The discovery of the Americas, which we take for granted, was truly disconcerting for theologians and common folk alike, who placed absolute faith in the Bible.
32. Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, the Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d’Anghera, translated by Francis August MacNutt, as referenced in Benjamin Mark Allen’s “Naked and Alone in a Strange New World: Early Modern Captivity and Its Mythos in Ibero-American Consciousness” (unpublished PhD diss., University of Texas at Arlington, 2008), 211.
33. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 34–35.
34. Stephens, Incidents of Travels in Egypt, 104, 223.
35. Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 348. I am indebted to University of Texas at Arlington student Greg Kosc for bringing this passage to my attention.
36. Noted by Farmer in On Zion’s Mount, 34; see also Walker, “Wakara Meets the Mormons,” 215–37.
37. Hamer, “Timeless Histories,” 281; see also Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 152.
38. Burton, The City of the Saints, 5.
39. Grabar, “Roots and Others,” 3.
40. Robinson, Sinners and Saints, 262–63.
41. Ibid., 170–71.
42. Ibid., 219.
43. Landon, ed., The Journals of George Q. Cannon, 43.
44. “The Joshua Palm abounds throughout certain sections of the Great American Desert.” (Los Angeles: Western Publishing & Novelty Co., C.T. Art-Colortone, n.d.).
45. Christensen, Nevada, 108.
46. Whipple, This is the Place: Utah, 84.
47. By one account, she was associated with the theater—some said she was a prominent actress of the day (Corinne LaVaunt)—but more likely she was a character of that name in a French novel. Another account holds that Corinne’s namesake was the “beautiful and accomplished daughter” of J. A. Williamson—the town’s founder.
48. The would-be “Chicago of the West” boomed for a while, but never became a large city. Being the “Only Gentile City in Utah,” as some ambitiously branded it, Corinne became a haven for anti-Mormons, including Irish-born Patrick Connor, “the archenemy of Brigham Young and the Mormons.”
49. Huchel, A History of Box Elder County, 123–45.
50. See Richard Bennett, We’ll Find the Place, 254; also, “General Epistle from the Council of the Twelve Apostles,” December 23, 1847 (LDS Church Archives).
51. Robinson, Sinners and Saints, 68–71. In Genesis 46:31–47, Goshen is described as a land where the Israelites could remain four hundred years until Moses led them to the Promised Land. In this passage, Robinson appears to be positioning the Mormons as Israelites, though one wonders just how “beautiful” Goshen really was.
52. Streit, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika (Map) (Leipzig, 1851), Virginia Garrett Cartography Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections #00157 @132/4.
53. Stansbury, Exploration of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, 129.
54. Sir Walter Scott, The Talisman.
55. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 74.
56. Burton, The City of the Saints, 210–15.
57. Stout, On the Mormon Frontier, 456.
58. Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 91.
59. Unbeknownst to Farandoul, however, trouble is brewing in paradise. The difficulties begin when Brigham Young becomes envious and orders Farandoul to be abducted by Apache Indians. During Farandoul’s absence, the disingenuous Young claims that Farandoul has neglected the women. To make matters even worse, Young declares that “after your incomprehensible flight, which showed that you were not a sincere Mormon, your spouses, blushing for shame at having ever, for one instant, been united to a man so bereft of convictions, are petitioning for divorce.” Young’s telegram continues to inform Farandoul that “an honorable Mormon, Matheus Bikelow, appointed Bishop in your stead, has afforded the shelter of his home to them.” Young concludes by stating that Bikelow “has married them and will not abandon them” and warns Farandoul that because he has “been unworthy . . . I would suggest that you never show yourself again in the city of the Saints.” The hijinks continue as Farandoul prepares to challenge Bikelow to a duel, reconsiders and renounces all claim to the Mormon women, and continues his journeys through the West with his sailors. Ultimately traveling to South America, Farandoul meets up with characters from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Robida’s book Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin de Farndoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du mondo et daris tous les pays connus et meme inconnus de M. Jules Verne, is discussed in Homer, ed., On the Way to Somewhere Else, 217–26.
60. Allen, “The Garments of Instruction From the Wardrobe of Pleasure.”
61. Ibid., 74.
62. Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, 75.
63. Stanfield, Diary of Howard Stillwell Stanfield, 1864–1865, 82.
64. Domenech, Voyage Pittoresque dans les grands déserts du Nouveau monde.
65. Domenech, Seven Years’ Residence, 269.
66. Ibid., 269.
67. Ibid., 269–70.
68. “Eugene Buissonet Diary,” 198–200.
69. Nelson’s Pictorial Guide-Books, the Central Pacific Railroad: A Trip Across the North American Continent from Ogden to San Francisco was also published with a paper cover, entitled The Scenery of the Central Pacific Railroad (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1871).
70. Nelson’s Pictorial Guide Books, The Central Pacific Railroad, 8–10.
71. Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, 101.
72. Ibid., 89.
73. McCormick and McCormick, “Saltair,” 168.
74. Ibid., 170–71.
75. Great Salt Lake lantern slides, PH 4579, Archives, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
76. See Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 73–84.
77. Stegner, “Xanadu by the Salt Flats: Memories of a Pleasure Dome.”
78. Deseret Evening News, Monday, January 1, 1917.
79. See Waite, “The Cedar City Branch and the Utah Parks Company,” 17–34.
80. For more about how natural features in Utah were given cultural identities, see Farmer, On Zion’s Mount.
Chapter 4
1. Flint and Flint, Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542, 596–97.
2. Interestingly, the Spaniards regarded turquoise with considerable contempt, as it was relatively soft and altogether opaque—unlike the clear, hard gems such as diamonds, emeralds, or rubies that they highly prized. The Spaniards’ haughty attitude was an affront to the native peoples who considered turquoise sacred, but at least the Spaniards were disinterested enough to leave the natives’ turquoise unmined rather than haul it back to Spain, as they did South American emeralds. Turquoise provides yet another example of the transfer of a material object’s association with a part of the world and its people to a new context, so much so that even today it is known by the Spanish term rather than the Indian.
3. Irwin, The Lust of Knowing, 62; see also Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, 100–27.
4. Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet, 21.
5. Howe, Historical Collections of the Great West, 375–76.
6. Justin Harvey Smith, The War with Mexico, 268.
7. Ibid. 35, 268.
8. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey.
9. Cozzens, The Marvellous Country, 19.
10. Ibid., 163.
11. DeJong, “‘Good Samaritans of the Desert,’” 457–96.
12. In the 1940 Wesley Ruggles film Arizona, a guide described the sedentary Pima as “good” Indians who “hate the Apache more than we do.”
13. James Martineau Diary, 38–39 and 42.
14. Ibid.
15. Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” 54. An example of this type of Orientalized sexuality can also be found in popular as well as adult (pornographic) films in the twenty-first century. The former feature mysterious women whose “charms” can introduce Westerners to a myriad of secrets guaranteed to enchant. The latter simply make explicit that which is covert in popular culture. Of these, The Lost Treasure of Ali Baba is a XXX-rated version of an old story. The plot (what there is of it) is familiar enough and may actually be closer to Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. In this film, an American globetrotter who returns home from world travels experiences some tough times and finds an old book revealing a legend about a lost cave laden with treasure. After securing an old map of Syria, he travels there to search the area and ultimately finds the treasure. The cave is strewn with coins and jewels, but the real treasure is Jessica, a veiled, scantily clad, and totally uninhibited woman whose sole dialogue consists of “your wish is my command.” After their explicit activities, he awakens in the United States. The encounter was but a dream—or was it? With a smile, he realizes that the coins he pulls from his pocket are from that treasure; hence, his encounter with Jessica was real though magical. Unwittingly, perhaps the producers of this video built on one of the most enduring aspects of Eastern identity—that it is both real and imaginary simultaneously. The Lost Treasure of Ali Baba, Nineteen, Video Magazine, Volume 45, Chatsworth, CA: DANE Productions, 2002. A couple of lines from Robin Cook’s 1979 novel Sphinx, which is set in Egypt, remind us how enduring these concepts are in literature. When Egyptologist Erica Barton of Harvard University is surprised by a man with “pure Bedouin features” in Cairo, she is powerless: he is like a terrifying sculpture in deep bronze. Although back home Erica had fantasized how violently she would react if she were ever threatened with rape, now she did nothing. Sphinx features many of the standard tropes about the Middle East—treasures and riches, murderous Arab thieves and wise Arab elders, intercultural romance, and sexual awakening. These, of course, reveal more about the Western imagination than they do about the real Middle East, but they confirm the power of combined stereotypical elements in conveying images of, and attitudes about, that region and its peoples. In Sphinx, the landscape is exotic and enigmatic, with treasure and danger lurking just below the surface, while the human encounters are either sexually charged, fraught with danger, or both. Cook, Sphinx, 65.
16. Poston, “Building a State in Apache Land,” 87–98.
17. Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise, 126.
18. Norris, Milligan, and Faulk, William H. Emory, Soldier-Scientist, 55–56.
19. Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 13, 17.
20. May, Oriental Odyssey II, 36.
21. Dunraven, The Great Divide, 117. This, as one might expect, led some Europeans to secretly sympathize with the plight of American Indians. Another British observer traveling through the West grudgingly admitted that “I can feel a sympathy for the red man” despite the fact that “it may be true that neither gunpowder nor the Gospel can reform him.” Why? In a moment of unusual candor, he admitted that “a people cannot be altogether worthless that in the deepest depths of their degradation still maintain a lofty wild-beast scorn of white man, and think them something lower than themselves.” This statement must be understood in its historical context. It is based on the premise that western European culture was the most advanced, and that all other cultures were below it in the natural order. Despite, or perhaps because of, this “fact,” the writer felt it chivalrous that “the red man holds sacred everything that his tribe is guarding.” Because he felt that American Indians were destined to disappear soon under American colonialism, which he felt was more brutal than the colonialism that other governments had initiated elsewhere, the writer asked a penetrating question that still resonates today: “Why should not this chivalry, common to every savage race on earth, and largely utilized by other governments in Asia as in Africa, be turned to account in America too, and Indians be entrusted with the peace of Indian frontiers?” (Robinson, Sinners and Saints, 271–72.) This, of course, is a question that has been asked many times since, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
22. Breeden, ed., A Long Ride in Texas, 52–53.
23. Cozzens, The Marvellous Country, 80.
24. Meline, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback, 151–52.
25. Twitchell, “An Old-World City in the New: the Place that gave Santa Fe its Name,” 2; see also Dye, All Aboard for Santa Fe, 25–31.
26. Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 5.
27. Ibid., 6.
28. Harmsen, Harmsen’s Western Americana, 56.
29. Brooks, Captives & Cousins, 18–22.
30. There is yet another similarity to military action in both places: in the American Southwest, the multiyear searches for Cochise, Geronimo, and other Indian leaders who seemingly vanished into thin air despite the fact that thousands of forces were bent on capturing them proved good (and sobering) training for American troops in pursuit of terrorist leaders in present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Given the tasks facing our military leaders, it is surprising that these early Indian feats of escape have not been studied carefully; they could provide valuable lessons in the difficulties of suppressing indigenous insurgencies among mobile populations in rugged areas.
31. Cozzens, The Marvellous Country, 15.
32. Ibid., 20–21.
33. Ibid., 22.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. Hyde, An American Vision, 198–202.
36. Ferguson and Coldwell-Chanthaphonh, History is in the Land, 31.
37. Alas, however, the original Orient railroad never even made it all the way to the Pacific. Nevertheless, its route into the United States was well planned enough to be incorporated into the lines of the Santa Fe Railroad, which purchased the Orient in the 1920s. But while it lasted, the KCM&O recognized that the “Orient” in its title was exotic enough to distinguish it from all the other railroads. For much of its life, the KCM&O painted the name orient in huge white letters on its cars and locomotive tenders. Even today, more than eighty years since the Orient was purchased by the Santa Fe, railroaders still refer to operating sections of the old KCM&O line as “The Orient”—a testimony to how evocative and enduring a name can be. Moreover, an independent short-line that took over a section of the line in Texas in the 1990s still proudly calls itself “The Orient” in the twenty-first century.
38. Although the origins of Phoenix are usually associated with only Anglo-Americans, the city also has a long and rich Hispanic past. See Oberle and Arreola, “Resurgent Mexican Phoenix,” 171–196.
39. “The Swastika cross of benediction and good will . . . copied from the red sandstone of Arizona, appears in the hieroglyptric inscriptions and decorative designs of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Scandinavians, Chinese and North American Indians.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, vol. 42, San Francisco, 1868–1935, 110.
40. Baudrillard, “The Order of the Simulacra,” 50–86.
41. West and Augelli, Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples.
42. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden, 20.
43. Ibid., 28–29.
44. Ibid., 57.
45. See Don D. Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 112–13.
46. Ibid., 213–19.
47. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden, 77.
48. Aleš Hrdlička, 1912, as quoted in Matthew Bokovoy, The San Diego World’s Fairs, 77–78.
49. Incidentally, Taylor dedicated his book about the Saracens (i.e., Muslims) to Washington Irving, who “more than any other American author, have [sic] revived the traditions, restored the history, and illustrated the character of that brilliant and heroic people” (Taylor, The Lands of the Saracens, 32). For their part, Saracens were people of Islamic faith who occupied the Middle East; some Christians despised them, but others lauded their long list of accomplishments. For his part, Washington Irving was now an important element in American Orientalism. He traveled widely through portions of the American West and portions of the East, in addition to serving as ambassador to Spain and thus imbibing huge doses of Moorish heritage.
Chapter 5
1. Wierzbicki, California as it is, and As it May Be, 24–25.
2. Fleming, California, 82.
3. Francaviglia, “The Treasures of Aladdin.”
4. See Dreams of the West, 17–18.
5. Conti, “Seeing the Elephant.”
6. “Seeing the Elephant,” Nebraska State Historical Society, http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/timeline/seeing_the_elephant.htm.
7. “First in the West,” 5.
8. See Evans, A la California, chap. 12.
9. GMD to A. Burlingame, Washington, June 15, 1866. (W) GMD papers, box 337, GMD & China. Union Pacific Archives, Council Bluffs, Iowa.
10. Parson, An American Engineer in China, 198.
11. Murphy, “Like Standing on the Edge,” 4–11.
12. Great Trans-Continental Tourists’ Guide, n.p.
13. H. T. Williams, ed., The Pacific Tourist, 166.
14. MacGregor, The Birth of California Narrow Gauge, 556.
15. Daniel, “‘The Various Celestials Among Our Town,” 93–104.
16. Maffly-Kipp, “Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry,” 60–88.
17. Lemon, The Harmony Borax Works of Death Valley, California, 13.
18. For example, Francaviglia, “Landscape and Cultural Coninuity,” The Changing Faces of the West.
19. Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire, 21–22.
20. Meriwether, Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 13, 1888.
21. Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 1.
22. Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926, 14, 18.
23. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Control.
24. Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 123, 236.
25. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, 133.
26. “Gems of Art Contributed by Local Painters,” San Francisco Call, January 21, 1900.
27. Goss, Gold and Cinnabar, 233.
28. Pine, Beyond the West, 433.
29. J. Russell Smith, North America, 587.
30. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles in 1870–71,” 109–58.
31. Yip, “A Time for Bitter Strength,” 4.
32. Leung, “One Day, One Dollar—Delta Heritage,” 41–43.
33. Hoover, Hoover, and Rensch, Historic Spots in California, 453
Chapter 6
1. See “Exploring Colonial Mexico,” Espadaña Press website, http://www.colonial-mexico.com.
2. Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past, 144.
3. Morgan, ed., Overland in 1846, 721–22.
4. See Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews.
5. See Manly, Death Valley in ‘49, 98–99.
6. Sidney Smith, The Settler’s New Home, 129.
7. Special one-sheet flyer [unattributed to any newspaper], “What the Religious Press of New York says of the Pacific Railroad” in MSC 159, Box 32, Levi Leonard Railroad Collection, University of Iowa Special Collections.
8. Browne, Crusoe’s Island, 172–77.
9. Ibid., 238–48.
10. Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 65.
11. In 1885, geologist Israel Cook Russell noted that the Great Basin was markedly different from other regions of the United States. Russell observed that “the traveler in this region . . . must compare it rather to the parched and desert areas of Arabia and the shores of the Dead Sea and the Caspian.” See Padget, Indian Country.
12. Stevenson, “The Silverado Squatters,” 31.
13. Taylor, The Lands of the Saracens, 99–100.
14. Worster, Under Western Skies, 56.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 55.
17. Wrobel, Promised Lands, 38.
18. Taylor, The Lands of the Saracens, 425–26.
19. DeLyser, Ramona Memories.
20. Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona, 43–45.
21. Helen Hunt Jackson, “Outdoor Industries in Southern California,” 257; see also Padget, Indian Country, 83–101.
22. Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 99–100.
23. Ibid., 109.
24. The Huntington Library: Thesaurus from Ten Centuries, 137.
25. McClelland and Last, California Orange Box Labels, 5, 20.
26. Walker Tompkins, “Santa Barbara, CA Samarkand History.”
27. Reid, “Original Sketch: The Entry of the American Army into Puebla,” 1.
28. We tend to associate such Spanish/Moorish architecture with California or the Southwest, but it could be built anywhere. Consider, for example, the spectacular Broadwater Natatorium in Helena, Montana, described by a Great Northern Railway writer in superlatives, including the “finest specimen of Moorish architecture in the world.” Chacón, “Creating a Mythic Past: Spanish-Style Architecture in Montana,” 46. The natatorium and hotel was the brainchild of Montana entrepreneur Charles A. Broadwater, who poured money into the place in an effort to make Helena one of the best, that is, most idyllic, places during the Gilded Age. What better way to achieve this than using exotic Oriental motifs? Locals believed that Broadwater’s spectacular hotel and natatorium, with their stained glass windows and dome, illuminated a “scene of Oriental magnificence such as we dreamed of when reading Arabian Nights.” The natatorium, with its “Moorish architecture,” was evocative and exotic. A postcard featuring a photograph of the natatorium as well as an ode to that building by Thomas Murray Spencer of Butte, Montana, noted: “Full well the sturdy master builder in wilderness Egyptian-like of old,” a place where those seeking “health, wealth and merriment achieve” could find a state of bliss. The ode was apparently to Broadwater the man (or master) and Broadwater the place. Rejuvenation was the theme. As Spencer put it, in a world where “Time—Death’s great derider, was spreading his dusty pall,” the Broadwater rose to experience “its palmiest day.” This amounted to “a day of resurrection surely,” for “its pristine glory is not past.” To people who sensed that time was fleeting, this building offered “a second time for playing.” Spencer, Helena, Montana, 58, 59, 117.
29. See Padget, Indian Country.
30. This play on regional identity needs just a bit of clarification, because “West” or “East” could refer to either the western or eastern United States (as in that line from the musical Oklahoma [1948], “East is East, and West is West”) as well as Western culture and Eastern (i.e., Oriental) culture.
31. Bokovoy, The San Diego World’s Fairs, 64.
32. MacCannell, “Ideological Castles,” 33.
33. Buel, The Magic City.
34. Findlay, Magic Lands.
35. Sackman, Orange Empire, 24.
36. Ibid., 92.
37. Ibid., 120, 133.
38. Ironically, this Eastern philosophy has as much to do with the training of rather wealthy, elite easterners in Western/American schools having strong anticapitalist, left-wing philosophies—which may explain the tendency of the left to support radical Occidentalists’ interests. See Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism.
39. Worster, “Landscape with Hero,” 29.
40. Smythe, “The Blooming of a Sahara,” 1261.
41. Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 22-23.
42. It should be noted that the Salton Sink has held water in earlier times, especially during the Pleistocene epoch when wetter, cooler conditions prevailed.
43. Gudde, California Place Names, 210.
44. Signor, Beaumont Hill, 42, 73, 126.
45. “Date Palms.”
Chaper 7
1. See McClain, In Search of Equality.
2. Nokes, Massacred for Gold.
3. Cover, West Shore, 42.
4. Cover, West Shore.
5. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 175.
6. American Baptist Home Missionary Society, Baptist Home Missions in North America, 113.
7. Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire, 27–28.
8. Oregonian, June 21, 1909; June 22, 1909; June 30, 1909.
9. Harvey Whitefield Scott, ed., History of Portland, Oregon. See also Dreams of the West, 66–67.
10. O’Connell, On Sacred Ground, 41.
11. Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 66–67.
12. Ibid., 93.
13. Ibid., 95–96.
14. Ibid., 133.
15. Anis, “Pacific NW Skiing at its Best at Mt. Hood Meadows.”
16. That not all imagery is as Orientalist-inspired as it might at first seem is evidenced in Rainier Fruit Company’s labels for Fuji apples (a variety introduced into the Pacific Northwest from Japan in the 1980s). The labels depict the company’s trademark, showing a snow-capped mountain (evidently Mount Rainier) in this case crowned by the name “fuji.” Although at first glance, the mountain appears to be the venerable Mount Fuji, one must realize this simply represents a way of identifying both the company and a variety of apples marketed by the company—and not the Orientalization of Mount Rainier. On the other hand, that juxtaposition of the Fujilike mountain profile and the name Fuji over the mountain works subliminally to reaffirm a connection between the Pacific Northwest and Japan.
17. Kessler, “Spacious Dreams: A Japanese American Family Comes to the Pacific Northwest,” 163–65.
18. Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 131–32.
19. J. Russell Smith, North America, 605.
20. “Seattle” in Choir’s History, Business Directory, and Immigrant’s Guide Book (1878), 10.
21. See Boswell’s account of this event in August 1896 in the Seattle Times, January 28, 1996, as recounted in “Partners Across the Pacific.”
22. Lee, “The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism,” 278–79, 302.
23. Panero, “Outside the Frame: How Asia Changed the Course of American Art,” 18.
24. Doyle, “The Oriental Limited.”
25. Shaffer, See America First, 74.
Chapter 8
1. Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, 10.
2. Baum, The Wizard of Oz, 3.
3. Ibid., 115–16.
4. Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz.
5. See “David Russell: Concept Illustrator/Storyboard Artist,” David Russell website, http://www.dynamicimagesdr.com/index1.php.
6. Fleishman, “It’s Love, Saudi Style,” Dallas Morning News, January 15, 2008, 10A.
7. Ironically, the United States was attempting to rid the Middle East of faux (or at least dictatorial) potentates and poppy fields in the early twenty-first century, as events in the War on Terrorism unfolded.
8. J. B. Jackson, “The Necessity for Ruins,” 101–2.
9. Malamud, “Pyramids in Las Vegas and Outer Space,” 31, 35.
10. Dodds, “Myst,” 180.
11. Papanikolas, American Silence, 78.
12. “Luxor Las Vegas,” http://www.luxor.com.
13. Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” 48.
14. See http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/b/brand_new_heavies/midnight_at_the_oasis.html. Consulted January 15, 2011.
15. This type of self-confidence and intense sexuality is, of course, very Western. Many Muslim men would find this woman to be disarmingly aggressive, even predatory, certainly more of a “whore” than a concubine or odalisque.
16. Year One, Columbia Pictures, 2009.
17. Miller, “Inside the Glitter: Lives of Casino Workers,” 237.
18. In the mid-twentieth century, Pyramid Lake’s setting doubled for the landscape of the desert Levant in a popular movie. In 1965, when international tensions kept film crews out of the Holy Land during the filming of The Greatest Story Ever Told, they sought a double for the Sea of Galilee, selecting Pyramid Lake as a credible substitute. Even though perceptive people who had actually been to the Sea of Galilee might have noted some discrepancies, the geographic feature in Nevada worked well enough. Filmgoers were none the wiser, and that intense blue sheet of water and its desert surroundings seemed credible enough to earn the film’s cinematography accolades.
19. Field, From Egypt to Japan, 82.
20. Moreno, Roadside History of Nevada, 169.
21. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 90, 103.
22. Lant, “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” 91.
23. David S. Boyer, “Geographical Twins A World Apart,” 848–59.
24. Ibid., 71.
25. In the interior West, Peery’s Egyptian Theater (Ogden, Utah) was one such copy, representing Egyptian revival at its finest. Opened in 1923 and recently restored as part of Ogden’s downtown revitalization, Peery’s Egyptian Theater possesses all the characteristic elements of the genre: viewed from the outside, its polychromatic, highly detailed Egyptian-style columns stand in contrast to the more mundane buildings in the streetscape. Just behind the freestanding ticket booth, a striking Egyptian vulture adorns the doorway into the theater. Once inside, the patron experiences an ornately decorated lobby, but the auditorium portion of the interior is the tour de force. The decoration here gives the patron the feeling that he or she is outside again, only this time under an Egyptian night sky, as the azure-colored ceiling is filled with lights simulating the stars. Then, too, the stage curtain is richly evocative of stylized Egypt, featuring seated statues of Ra, and the pyramids studding a sandy plain that is punctuated by date palm trees. The Egyptian revival architecture of such theaters (forty-two of which were built in the United States) is itself highly eclectic. As critic Gary Parks has observed, “So it is with Egyptian movie palaces, which often borrow shamelessly from [all Egyptian] Dynasties I - XXX in a single building, yet somehow . . . work.” Parks noted that both the interior and exterior of Peery’s Egyptian in Ogden is “Ptolemaic in feeling although painted scenes in the auditorium appear to be New Kingdom in flavor, with the Viceroy of Kush seeking audience with Tutankhamen.” Some of the Egyptian icons in this theater are authentic in appearance. However, as Parks also noted, the Peery Egyptian is decorated with Egyptian icons that never would have been placed together in ancient Egypt; these he calls “bits of humor that an Egyptophile who also loves old theatres can enjoy.” Some of the seemingly Egyptian icons in this theater’s decoration are more clearly whimsical, apparently depicting events surrounding the construction of the theater in the ancient Egyptian style. See Parks, “Pharaoh Comes to Main Street.”
26. The appeal of a building like Peery’s Egyptian Theater in Ogden, Utah, depends on its ability to convince (some might say deceive) those who enter it that it is just like the original. With its many Egyptian-style elements, the theatre convinced some theare goers that it was a copy of an actual Egyptian structure. Further conflating ancient Egypt with the American West was the film shown at the theater’s opening—Zane Grey’s Wanderer of the Wasteland—a dramatic Western film portraying love, greed, and spiritual challenges in the Mojave Desert.
27. “Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum,” Rosicrucian Order, http://www.egyptianmuseum.org.
28. One aspect of New Age religion and spirituality that deserves greater study is its close relationship to Orientalism in addition to its fascination with Native American spirituality.
29. Staton, “Wait Watchers,” 104.
30. Interestingly, Cher—like the Pyramids—endures: she is reportedly the only singer to have a top-selling original song in every decade since the 1960s.
31. “Sands of Oblivion,” Sci-Fi Channel premiere, October 13, 2007.
32. Bob Dylan, “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” words and music Bob Dylan, released on Biograph (1985) and on the CD edition of Shot of Love (1981).
33. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden.
34. See Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe.
35. Sorkin, Some Assembly Required, 55.
36. Austin, The Land of Journeys’ Ending, 228.
37. Alter, “Revising a Pulp Prodigy”; see also Finn, Blood & Thunder.
38. Howard, Conan the Barbarian, 10.
39. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 412.
40. “Rock Camel” postcard.
41. Sorkin, Some Assembly Required, 82.
42. Pronk, “Camels at Home on the Range,” 3I.
43. Garrigues, West of Babylon: A Novel, 3–6.
44. Ibid., 91.
45. A sexual encounter in Garrigues’s West of Babylon is as Oriental as anything out of the Kama Sutra.
46. Garrigues, West of Babylon, 15.
47. Estival, Stars Over the Desert, author’s profile on back cover
48. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden, 150–51.
49. At this point, however, Auerbach himself makes something of a problematic assumption about Orientalism: If not all visitors and explorers to the Southwest were exploiters, and not all southwestern natives were exploited, then how could the mind-set that the former possessed really be “Orientalism” in the Saidian sense? In order to be considered Orientalists, Auerbach suggests, these image builders would have had to process the negative views of racist appropriators. Auerbach here does not take the next step, namely, to challenge Said’s core assumptions and claims about Orientalism. In this book I claim that travelers who were entranced by and succumbed to the Southwest as “a land in which foreign people, with foreign speech and foreign ways” lived amid “spectacles which can be equaled in few Oriental lands” should be considered Orientalists in a broader sense of the term.
50. How direct is the connection observers have made between Asia and the Indian Southwest? Some nineteenth-century scholars believed that the Apache Indians’ ceremonies and language identified them as a mysterious group that had been driven from China in the twelfth century ad, thus making them very recent arrivals indeed. Of course, the fact that Native Americans do have Asian ancestry is not only apparent from the anthropological record but is also evident from the facial characteristics of Native Americans like the Hopis and Navajos. In early photographs of Native Americans in a southwestern village, it may be challenging to identify the location. Is it American, or is it Asian? That question is difficult to answer, as the scene, or rather the people, look so Asian. These similarities intrigued scholars and the public in the nineteenth century, when people were obsessed with origins and ancestry.
51. Eidel, Foreword to Portraits of Nature, by Roy Purcell; personal communication, author with Roy Purcell, June 9, 2010, Green Valley, Arizona.
52. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 19, 44.
53. Brooks, Captives & Cousins, 21.
54. Like the filmmakers who made Bordertown, filmmakers have long given the Mexican and Native American peoples here an Asian quality. When director Elia Kazan wanted to make Marlon Brando more Indian in appearance in Viva Zapata! (1952), he used makeup that gave Brando’s eyes “an Oriental look” and also imparted “a darker skin tone, especially early in the film” to help contrast the Anglo-American actor with his Anglo-American female love interest (Jean Peters). See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 423.
55. Arreola, “The Mexico-US Borderland,” 348-350.
Chapter 9
1. Chang, ed., Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970, 1.
2. “Bernheimer Residence and Oriental Japanese Gardens.”
3. Tolf, This Was San Francisco, 4, 32.
4. Mike Davis, “Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow,” 35.
5. Ibid., 38–40.
6. Hausladen and Starrs, “L.A. Noir,” 46.
7. Ibid., 47–48.
8. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 9, 27.
9. Ibid., 61–62, 79, 247.
10. L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, 66.
11. Ibid., 128–32.
12. Ibid., 147.
13. L’Amour, The Lonesome Gods, 45.
14. Ibid., 241.
15. Ibid., 264.
16. Ibid., 269–70.
17. L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, 72–74.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao,” poster used as the cover for the VHS package, dates from 1964.
20. Kung Fu, popular culture study guide, BookRags, http://www.bookrags.com.
21. “Kung Fu (TV Series),” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_fu_tv_series.
22. See Anderson, The Kung Fu Book; and Pilato, The Kung Fu Book of Caine.
23. Tasker, “Kung Fu: Re-orienting the Television Western,” 115–116.
24. Pilato, The Kung Fu Book of Caine, 7, 28.
25. Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 111-157.
26. “Shanghai Noon,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0184894; and “Shanghai Noon,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Noon.
27. Adopted Californian Walt Disney knew this when he selected Orange County for the location of Disneyland in 1951. In 2005, Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary, it still worked as Fantasyland, and the section called “It’s a Small World” offered a glimpse of the exotic.
28. The Huntington Chinese Garden, a two-sided card produced by the Huntington Chinese Garden Project, San Marino, California, n.d., ca. 2006.
29. Li, “Breathing Life into the Chinese Garden,” 13–17.
30. See Piyananda, The Bodhi Tree Grows in L.A.
31. “Japan, the land of picturesque gardens” postcard.
32. “The Five Gardens,” Portland Japanese Garden website.
33. “What People are Saying about the Japanese Garden,” Portland Citysearch website.
34. Portland Classical Chinese Garden, brochure.
35. Beaven, “Portland Classical Chinese Garden celebrates.”
36. “Things to See & Do [in] Oregon” brochure.
37. “My Favorite Place: Dennis Hopper, The Modern Renaissance Man tells Dan Shapiro about Vancouver, and its Mix of High Design and Natural Wonders,” Travelandleisure.com, October 2009, 202.
38. Nakane, “Facing the Pacific,” 55.
39. Johnson, Kenneth Callahan, 10.
40. “Mark Tobey,” Guggenheim Museum website.
41. Ament, “Morris Graves: The Bad-Boy Recluse of Northwest Art,” ArtGuide website.
42. “Jurassic Crocodile is Unearthed from Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon.” Science Daily website.
43. Kenneth Mark Levine, Northwest Visionaries.
44. Hayashi, Haunted by Waters, 7, 80.
45. Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End, 25.
46. Steuding, Gary Snyder, 18.
47. Ibid., 22.
48. Ibid., 32–33, 44.
49. O’Connell, On Sacred Ground, 146, 148.
50. Kizer, “Poetry: School of the Pacific Northwest,” as cited in O’Connell, On Sacred Ground, 98.
51. Starck, Journeyman’s Wages, 45.
52. Etulain, “Inventing the Pacific Northwest,” 25.
53. The film, based on the novel by David Guterson (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), was released in 1999
Chapter 10
1. Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier,” 1.
2. Knickerbocker Magazine, June 1853; see also Edwards, “A Million and One Nights,” 19.
3. “The 1876 Centennial Exhibition,” Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/orient/centen.htm.
4. See Goetzmann, When the Eagle Screamed, 92–103.
5. Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures, viii.
6. Ibid., 27.
7. Brintlinger, “The Persian Frontier,” 228.
8. “Four Relays . . . 14000 Miles.”
9. “Dream-Come-True!”
10. Rickman, “Japanese Cinema to 1960,” website.
11. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crouching_Tiger,_Hidden_Dragon.
12. These commercials were seen on The Closer (TNT Time Warner Network), August 21, 2006, and, in slightly modified form, continued into 2011.
13. See Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs.
14. Kruh, “Al-Qaeda Threat.”
15. Margolis, War at the Top of the World, 30.
16. See, for example, the review of Alexander in The American Conservative, December 20, 2004.
17. Etulain, Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?
18. See Toplin, History by Hollywood.
19. In more recent times, of course, the archaeologist may be a woman—a condition that sets up considerable sexual tension, as the locals she encounters are often Muslim men.
20. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, 544.
21. Landecker, “From Steppe to Campus, Maybe,” A56.
22. Mones, Lost in Translation, 239.
23. Sorkin, Some Assembly Required, 38.
24. McQuerry, “Tumbleweed Invasive, Tumbleweed Tough,” 19.
25. “Mount Rainier,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/mora/index.htm.