JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
As America turns 250, historian Megan Kate Nelson has turned her attention to people typically overlooked in the story of the western frontier. At a recent public event in Crested Butte, she spoke to Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Warner.
RYAN WARNER, BYLINE: Nelson's suggested revisionist history is the history we learned in the first place.
MEGAN KATE NELSON: It's basically the narrative of white Easterners moving westward in covered wagons with a nuclear family in tow, engaging with a series of challenges - Indigenous peoples, nature sometimes, disease - and overcoming all of those challenges, and that they are the ideal Americans.
WARNER: In "The Westerners," Nelson profiles people who don't fit that mold - pioneer Polly Bemis, trafficked from China to Idaho; 19th century Santa Fe saloon owner Maria Gertrudis Barcelo; and Sacagawea.
NELSON: I read through the Lewis and Clark journals. They mention her more than 150 times. And she is always doing something or saying something - digging for vegetables. She was bringing botanical specimens to Clark and explaining what they were. My favorite part - when they arrive on the western coast, they set up camp a couple miles away from the ocean, and she yells at William Clark - you are going to take me to go see the ocean. I did not travel all...
WARNER: Yeah.
NELSON: ...This way not to see the ocean.
WARNER: Nelson says it's more important than ever to elevate a fuller picture of the frontier.
NELSON: This erasure of history is really common with authoritarian regimes. They want one version of history, and the frontier myth helps with that. There's only one white pioneer. There's only one kind of story of American greatness.
WARNER: Two and a half centuries in, a chance to ask, what stories do we carry forward? For NPR News, I'm Ryan Warner in Crested Butte, Colorado.
(SOUNDBITE OF RHIANNON GIDDENS' "MOUNTAIN BANJO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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