American History (westward expansion)

In his painting , Against the Sunset , Frederick Remington plays on the stereotype of the American West as man against the environment , a lonely quest taken on by nothing more than a man and his horse . His painting depicts the lone rider against a setting sun , shown by the yellow to red wash beyond the horizon . The color choice of reds and yellows instead of traditional sky blues is meant to show the unrelenting heat of the West . Coupled with the foreground sagebrush , it depicts the harshness of the climate that was fit for

neither man nor beast . Remington 's painting is itself a myth of the West , leading the viewer to assume that life in the West was a solitary pursuit . He shows the environment as much more harsh than it truly was , using blurring of the foreground to again imply extreme heat and dusty conditions . In this piece , as in mch of his work , Remington chooses to focus on the cowboy and imply that the West was a lonely place where men fought the elements by themselves . Nothing could be further from the truth

In general , the American West was an environment best faced in groups As Frederick Jackson Turner writes , the frontier was divided into isolated settlements , not a line of frontier towns as some might have thought . Unfortunately , Turner perpetuates the myth of the American West saying that the distance from the settlements to civilization forces people to adopt the ways of the natives and accept the trappings of the region as the best that is available , whether that be hide clothing or other trends adopted from the natives (Turner 201 . Of course , the problem with this is that Turner is not very familiar with the region he writes about . He compares the adoption of native dress , using hides and furs , to the Iroquois and Cherokee , tribes not found in the region traditionally considered the American West Like many Easterners of the time , he makes no differentiation between the Eastern native tribes and the Western native tribes , assuming that all are as civilized and generally peaceful as the Iroquois and Cherokee , though he fails to acknowledge that these tribes are civilized at all

Turner further argues that as the population centers moved further West the West became more American , that is to say more likely to conform to eastern modes of dress and speech and behavior . He approximates that all the land west of Missouri is arid and hostile , failing to recognize the lush grasslands and fertile ground of the area that would become American 's bread basket . Instead , he likens the natives to savages quoting others who have travelled there and using their observations to decry the way certain native tribes treat their children . As such Turner 's value as a primary source of American history is somewhat lower . He certainly used the scholarly method available to him at the time , but his writings are wrought with judgments , both his own and from others , that evaluate...