Manifest Manhood on the Santa Fe Trail: Trapping and Trading in the American Southwest, 1821-1847

This study begins in 1821 when the first Anglo parties made their way from the newly created state of Missouri to Santa Fe along the Santa Fe Trail, and it ends in 1847 with the Taos Revolt -- the most significant and bloody fighting that occurred in New Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Informed by a growing literature that in the past two decades has redefined the study of empire, this work focuses attention on the transnational and trans-imperial flow of people, commodities, and social meanings which occurs in a larger, more fluid imperial process. While traditional scholarship identifies the war and the cession of the northern one-half of Mexico to the United States that followed as a turning point in U.S. imperial history, this essay shows how a group of Anglo-America fur-trappers and merchants first set that imperial process into motion. Through the lens of culture, this study examines the Santa Fe Trail and New Mexico's market places as a "cultural contact zone" -- what language scholar Mary Louise Pratt has described as social spaces where diverse people and cultures encounter one another in unequal power relationships. Drawing upon letters, biographies, memoirs, and ephemera, this essay examines the lives of men like Kit Carson and Charles Bent, and it translates how they viewed themselves and the cultural "others" with whom they traded, fought, courted, and married. Reexamining the history of the Santa Fe Trail-scape as a cultural contact zone gives a better accounting for how and why the United States came to conquer and dominate the American Southwest, rather than the other way around.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History (UMKC)

Grantor

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• McGee, Jason Phillip

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Merrill, Dennis

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10355/46653

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/46653