The initial Anglo-American move westward occurred during a time when two ways of viewing the world—either through the ancient authority of the classics or a newer, more personally based romanticism—were prevalent, and sometimes in conflict. For several centuries in Europe, the classical world had been plumbed for its authority and aesthetics. By about 1790, neoclassicism still dominated, but romanticism, which represented a way of experiencing the world through emotion and imagination, now became a factor in the way westerners viewed the world. By emphasizing nature and encouraging individuals to react emotionally to what they experienced, romanticism shaped the...

In 1776, an exploring expedition headed by Spanish friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Silvestre Escalante reached the canyoncarved country of present-day southern Utah. Here, in the rugged, heavily eroded landscape along the Virgin River, they were intrigued by the towering, fantastically shaped landforms that loomed on every horizon. Like many places that European explorers encountered in this western North American wilderness, the countryside here was both awe-inspiring and confusing. These topographical features were so spectacular that the Spaniards named the river along which they were traveling “Río de las pirámides del sulfuro,” or River of the Pyramids of Sulfur....

To appreciate the power of Orient-inspired religion in John Charles Frémont’s time, consider yet another part of the interior West—the eastern edge of the Great Basin, where the Great Salt Lake forms one of the West’s most prominent landmarks. In the early 1840s, the entire Great Basin was the home of Native Americans, and no whites lived there. At exactly this time, however, this huge, stark, interior region was poised to become a place of refuge for a religious group seeking deliverance from tribulations more than one thousand miles to the east. They too would Orientalize the landscape. In...

The earliest part of western North America to be Orientalized was what Anglo-Americans now call the Southwest and Mexicans call “el norte.” However, it was the Spaniards, not the Anglo-Americans, who deserve credit as the first Orientalizers of the region. We must go back in time nearly five centuries to see how this occurred. The Orientalization of the entire North American continent appears to have begun with Estevanico (circa 1500–1539), who was called “the Moor” by those in the Narváez expedition of 1528. That name Moor—a more or less reflexive Spanish figure of speech for someone dark and...

The discovery of gold in the winter of 1848, followed by official confirmation of the gold strikes a few months later, bound California to Asia as surely as it bound it to the rest of the United States. In California, the real Orient, in the form of Chinese immigrants, was destined to meet the fantasized visions of the Orient carried westward by Anglo-Americans. Stories of mining wealth brought both the Asians and the Americans face-to-face for the first time. For their part, the Anglo-Americans were primed by literature to conceive of such fabulous wealth in Oriental terms.

Consider again the...

In addition to developing an Asian identity in the nineteenth century, California also became closely associated with the Near East in the popular mind. To Anglo-Americans who first encountered Mexican California in the 1830s and 1840s, the place seemed to be paradise, especially when they looked at their calendars and realized that balmy days could occur year-round. If part of the spell California cast came from its climate, which seemed to have banished winter, especially along the coast and in the low-lying areas, part of the spell also related to a beautiful, idyllic landscape populated by traditional peoples who seemed...

By the late 1870s, when Choir’s Guide Book to the Pacific Northwest was published, the Chinese presence was palpable throughout this large region lying north of California and south of Canada. Choir’s took the opinion that Chinese people per se were not to blame. They were, after all, victims of ageold oppression. As the writer of the guidebook asked rhetorically: “Did not the emperor of China wall in his kingdom and declare it locked up against all foreign association? And did not the latter break down these barriers and invite and encourage immigration?” By this the writer meant the Treaty...

In the previous chapters, I demonstrated that portions of the American West were Orientalized in various ways and for various reasons during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of this Orientalization was a result of travelers and would-be settlers coming to grips with the overwhelming geography here, a process that called for analogies to be drawn between new and old, and East and West. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, the West began to take on a different demeanor as people began to conceptualize it as uniquely American. Nevertheless, Orientalism had become such an important part of the image...

In the Far West from California into the Pacific Northwest, the Far East has remained a major theme throughout the twentieth century. China and Japan, in particular, are the major areas of Asia represented, but other Asians are increasingly becoming part of the region’s identity. California was a leader in perpetuating an Asian character for the West, and it developed in two major centers there. As Asian American art historian Gordon Chang recently noted, “San Francisco may be unique for the degree to which it has embraced an Asian cultural identity.”¹ In that city, Asian art and culture flourished despite...

As historian David Wrobel recently noted, what we know as the West today was not really the West at all throughout much of the nineteenth century. Instead, it was widely perceived “as a global West, as one developing frontier, one colonial enterprise, among many around the globe.”¹ In this conclusion I would like to portray the Orientalized American West as a fragment of the larger United States. Like portions of the earth’s crust that are part of the American mainland but were once fragments of Europe, Africa, and Asia, this region has a complicated past that can be understood only...