The American West as a site of righteous possibility–of a manifest destiny–for the incipient United States in the nineteenth century is often the conventional tale of American continental expansion taught in high school history classrooms. But in the era of expansion, some Americans also considered the West to be a place that inspired abject terror, brought on insanity among even the most God-fearing people, and provided a hellish refuge for sinners and other deviants. Bringing insights from the history of emotions to the history of the American West for the first time, my dissertation explores this overlooked story of the westward expansion of the United States, recasting this region as a landscape that often inspired dread among westward-gazing Americans instead of promise. Without denying the extraordinary power of expansionist rhetoric and ideology during the height of expansion, my project demonstrates that there existed in tandem with “Manifest Destiny” a compelling and widespread fearful counternarrative that anxiously questioned the project of expansion west on the grounds that the lands west of the Mississippi River were irredeemable spaces that promised to permanently pervert and corrupt the young nation just as it was coming into its own. Starting from this premise, my dissertation argues that we should consider the United States’ brutal expansion West as a process that entailed not only a material conquest of the region’s peoples, land, and resources, but also an emotional conquest of a settler nation’s fears concerning both itself and this place. I aim to reframe the American colonization of the continent in the nineteenth century as an overlapping task of territorial and emotional management of this fearful landscape.
The research I carried out at the Clark during my fellowship introduced me to a widespread anxiety many contemporaries of this period had about the “wild and ungovernable passions” of the people living in the Rocky Mountain West that threatened the project of American continental expansion. Thomas J. Dimsdale’s 1866 account of the violent activities of the Montana Vigilantes during their hanging spree in the first few months of 1864 articulated a concept that has greatly informed my understanding of the emotional dimensions of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century: that the unregulated emotions of Americans living in the Far Western territories threatened the success of this project. Dimsdale articulates an anxiety that I have since identified in other sources that if the western territories ever hoped to enter the Union as states, their first order of business would be to calm the inflamed and wild passions of the people living there that made the West ungovernable. This concept was new to me when I first encountered it in the Clark’s Montana collections, and it has transformed the way I have conceptualized my dissertation.
I am very grateful for the generous support from Ken Karmiole to spend an extended period of time with these materials at the Clark Library last fall. Thank you, Ken, both for your donation to this fellowship and for your thoughtful engagement with my project during my fellowship presentation. This fellowship helped me significantly advance in further shaping the parameters and clarifying the intellectual stakes of my dissertation.
Abigail Gibson received her PhD from USC. She has continued her research at the Clark Library through the generous support of the 2024-25 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Fellowship. Her research, Fearful Land: Managing Terror in the American West, 1820-1920, lies at the intersection of the history of U.S. continental expansion and the history of emotions, with a particular focus on the fear and the functioning of American empire in the 19th Century West.
During her time at the Clark, she consulted the vast holdings in material related to Montana and the Rocky Mountain West, particularly the Montana Manuscript Collection, 1878–1900 and Thomas J. Dimsdale’s 1866 book, The Vigilantes of Montana!
-Abigail Gibson, Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Fellow