The Chapters of the West

In 1784, Abel Buell published the first map of the newly independent United States compiled, printed, and published in America by an American.¹ It presents a young nation still concentrated along the Atlantic, with most of what we now call the American West lying beyond its edge.

That absence is striking.

It is not an empty land. Indigenous nations, established territories, trade routes, and generations of history already existed far beyond the boundaries shown. What is absent is the West as it would later enter the national record: explored, mapped, contested, settled, industrialized, photographed, mythologized, and performed.

The paintings ahead will examine that transformation through eight chapters.

Into the Unknown

Exploration, traders, and the Rocky Mountain fur trade

Go West

Overland trails, mail routes, and the movement west

Forging the West

Railroads, buffalo hunters, and the transformation of the frontier

A Contested Frontier

Native nations, soldiers, scouts, and frontier conflict

The Cattle Kingdom

Cowboys, cowgirls, ranchers, and cattle barons

Where Fortunes Were Made

Boomtowns, saloons, and the streets that rose around sudden wealth

Law & Legend

Lawmen, outlaws, and the Pinkertons

The Greatest Show in the West

Wild West shows and the birth of rodeo

These chapters do not divide the history of the West into tidy boundaries. Their people, events, and consequences overlap. The structure gives me a way to study each period closely and develop it into a distinct collection of paintings.

Some chapters contain figures whose names have become inseparable from the mythology of the West. Others hold people whose lives remain largely outside the familiar record. Both are essential to understanding how history became legend.

Each collection will begin with research: historical photographs, newspapers, firsthand accounts, museum collections, clothing, tack, personal objects, and the work of historians. The resulting paintings will not be literal illustrations of the record. They will be interpretations built upon it.

This is a long undertaking by design. Each chapter will be given the time and depth required to become a substantial body of work.

The framework is established.

The first chapter has been chosen.

Kim Randleas

¹ Abel Buell, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America: Layd down from the Latest Observations and Best Authorities Agreeable to the Peace of 1783. New Haven, Connecticut: Abel Buell, 1784. On deposit to the Library of Congress from David M. Rubenstein.  Image Credit

Abel Buell, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (1784). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.