A sweeping attempt to match the widescreen landscapes of America's West; a book which is not unstirred by the myths, but also well aware of what they leave out, yet which still can't help feeling like it's landed a little behind the times (and not just because I got it from Netgalley 18 months ago and my progress through it has been more struggling wagon train than Pony Express). In so far as Brands has an overarching thesis beyond 'Big, isn't it?', it's a series of wry yet devastating digs at the West's obsession with itself as a land of individualism when really it has always been the great Federal project, right back to Jefferson coming in on a platform of small government and not going past the Constitution – only for the the Louisiana Purchase to be such a good deal he couldn't resist, meaning he then becomes the great expansionist, setting the US on the path which would lead not just to the Pacific but the Moon. As such, Brands justly compares the West's subsequent scepticism of Washington to children's ingratitude to the parents who purportedly never do anything for them except impose unfair rules. To some extent this was a part of the story I knew – by the end the book is dovetailing with Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, an exasperated history of irrigation that's one of the few other books I've read about the West. But I'd never quite grasped the depth of it – or, conversely, quite how short a span some of the standard images of the West were around for. The railway – again, federally bankrolled even if it was in private hands, which is another recurring theme – arrived only twenty years after the Forty-Niners; the cowboy had about as brief a moment in the classic mode, before they became just another bunch of employees of capital.

Of course, this was one of many times reading the book when I was aware that what seems surprising to me might be commonplace to American readers. Sometimes, the bits and pieces I did have were just enough to lead me wrong: I know the Oregon Trail was tough, and when the book follows one party along it, and a group led by a guy called Donner splits off, I though, oh aye, they're not going to be having a good time of it. What I hadn't realised was that the other group, thanks to a profiteering bastard called Jesse Applegate, were about to have nearly as much of a shocker. Set against which, the group who gave Death Valley its name only actually lost one person! Bloody whingers. I think I felt this most acutely in the chapters on Texas, where I'd never even considered that once Houston and Austin were players, not places – and Houston in particular seems like he could be the subject of a Shakespearean tragedy. Presumably he must already have had some grand retellings which I don't know, because I'm not Texan, even if I suspect none would catch the tone I have in mind. And possibly I'm only putting Austin behind him because the detail of Moses Austin not seeing the promised land is a bit on the nose. But in general, this feels like the section where Brands is the most unimpressed with the subsequent mythmaking. It's a cheap trick, but I still greatly enjoyed the passage where he talks about the border with Mexico, with all those immigrants crossing it illegally, and how some of them are good folk but there are also a load of criminals – and then, aaaah, he's talking about Americans flooding into what was at that point still Mexican territory, gotcha! He's emphatic that slavery, "Built into Stephen Austin's business model", was a key driver in the movement for secession, the illegal American settlers being worried that Mexicans would enforce their laws against it. The Alamo is played for maximum squalor, Jim Bowie's past "littered with land fraud, illegal slave-running and deadly knife fights" and the defenders bickering about precedence; the state's later pretence that it could have gone it alone is exposed as the ahistorical guff it is*, with its brief period as an independent republic not something chosen but an awkward hiatus because its slave status meant it got blocked from the Union membership it desperately wanted. Down the line, something similar would happen with Oregon, the first time a territory beyond the Louisiana Purchase, within which the matter of slavery had been settled, would seek statehood. The slave states knew that Oregon was never going to be a slave state, but were damned if they were going to let another non-slave state in and skew the maths against themselves; as with Texan independence, the complete undignified tangle and reversal of it all means the Civil War's arrival comes as no surprise.

Which brings us to what feels like the book's Achilles heel, or at least the thing which makes it read a little behind the times; there are places this can feel like quite a white version of the story. Certainly not in the sense of buying into or attempting to buff up the notion of Manifest Destiny (a phrase which, before reading this, I had never realised was meant to cover the whole of North America – John L O'Sullivan, who coined the phrase in 1845, was specifically talking about sharing Oregon with Britain/Canada). Not even in a way that brushes atrocities under the rug; the horror of the Indian Wars is only emphasised by a detailed account of how the first one, against the Cayuse, got underway, an account all the more tragic for how easily it could have been avoided, even if with hindsight it seems terribly inevitable. After all, by that point we've long since been warned that the 1811 destruction of the Tonquin "revealed the simple but ineluctable theme of violence in the history of the American West: of humans killing one another in the struggle for control of Western resources". Here too are the Chinese workers who made the transcontinental railway possible but were starved out of striking, not to mention the appalling treatment of Mexicans and the indigenous population in the gold rush. Particularly galling is the story of Mariano Vallejo, who endorsed US annexation of California because "We shall have a stable government and just laws". Instead he got arrested, robbed blind by vigilantes, squatters and lawyers alike, but with Job-like patience persisted and became a state legislator – only to find himself screwed over yet again. One can sympathise with the less forgiving reaction of his contemporary Joaquin Murrieta, who after similar treatment but with less faith in the system became a folk devil bandit instead – allegedly bulletproof, even if that turned out to be thanks to armour rather than anything spookier. As one correspondent said at the time, "he wears a coat of mail beneath his clothes. To what base use has the armor of the days of chivalry come!" Which seems a very naive assessment of a lot of the men who wore mail first time around, and would absolutely have seen a kindred spirit (albeit also perhaps a rival) in Murrieta. We hear about how the first cowboys were Mexican, about the 10th Cavalry; on the other side of the equation, former Methodist minister and genocidal bastard Colonel John Chivington is one of the undoubted villains of the book, and Custer isn't much better, even if he comes across as a damn fool glory hound more than a resolute exterminator. That he was talked about at the time as a possible future president remains a nightmare counterfactual, though, especially when counterpointed with how little even a more civil ex-military president, Grant, could do to stop the gold rush to the Black Hills.
(My other big presidential takeaway from the volume: I'd always had the assumption Millard Fillmore must have been a shit president, simply because he was called Millard Fillmore, which is such a butt-of-the-joke name. But no, he signed the Compromise of 1850 when slaveholder predecessor Zachary Taylor had been planning to veto it, so as these things go he was at least that much of a good lad)

Still and all: while being well aware that North America was not sat there conveniently waiting for Europeans to come and do stuff with and to it, this is a story largely told from their perspective, which is why I worry it may have missed its moment, too revisionist for one side in the culture wars and insufficiently decolonised for the other. Part of the reason I found this frustrating is that when Brands does dig into life in America prior to the inhabitants being forcibly informed they're in America, he has some great stuff. Albeit admittedly material which again risks pleasing nobody, in so far as it really fucks up any idea of a prelapsarian land despoiled by white colonialists and capitalists. Before she met Charbonneau, let alone Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea had already been captured from the Shoshone by the Hidatsas; the Sioux, amped up by horses, become an utter scourge on more settled tribes, compounded by their population quintupling from 1800-1850, in part because they had a smallpox vaccine. Oglala Sioux leader Black Hawk even made the comparison explicit, saying that his people were doing unto the others just as the whites did. The "flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the sky from horizon to horizon, and herds of buffalo that covered the prairie" are present and correct, but the latter at least are already under serious pressure from horses giving the Indian hunters a boost even before whites come along (which doesn't make the waste of white hunters taking only the hides and leaving the flayed corpses to rot any less sickening). The most memorable detail is the etymology of 'Comanche': a Spanish rendering of the Utes' name for them, literally translated as "anyone who wants to fight me all the time". And the final lines of the book take the story back to Lakota visionary Black Elk, who outlived all the rest of the players, not to mention his world and the one which followed, surviving to 1950, which I found as startling as it was poignant.

Still, however violent and unstable life might have been beforehand, of course things could get much worse, for such is history's way. The final encirclement and parcelling up of Indian Territory, subsequently Oklahoma, is particularly ignominious, not only screwing over its previous inhabitants but even the settlers who were rube enough to play by the rules and wait for the official deadline, when the authorities and other cheaters had already grabbed all the plum lots for themselves. The remarkable thing is that, for a book about a century or so of people being murdered, swindled and enslaved in order to privatise some land which is going to spend the coming centuries mostly on fire, it manages not to be a wholly depressing read. The book tempted me when I was insistent I wasn't requesting any more big non-fictions on Netgalley, so I feel some of the lure that title captures too, and I'm not even American (though my one trip there was to the south-western corner, which might help). Brands' turn of phrase helps, sometimes acid ("To be sure, many Bostonians still considered Ohio to lie at the western edge of America, if not the Earth"), but elsewhere propulsive or spellbinding, as appropriate. If it might have benefitted the book to draw its cast from a wider pool, I was nevertheless caught up in the stories of the likes of Joe Meek, who despite the jarring name, becomes a sort of embodiment of the West's transitions, in turn trapper, settler, diplomat, executioner and Marshal. John Muir may be here in his traditional saintly hermit aspect, with little hint of the more awkward side with which his Sierra Club heirs are currently reckoning, but the description of his delight at being caught in an avalanche still sings. Even in that traditional presentation, mind, there was a limit to what he could accomplish. The book more or less concludes with the massacre at Wounded Knee, its final chapters comprising an extended epilogue centred on Teddy Roosevelt, "the first Western president". His rise counterpointed with the Western itself moving from a purely pulp genre to one which, by introducing an elegiac note, could now be considered art. The emblematic book here is Owen Wister's The Virginian, which is almost too perfect for the role: dedicated to Roosevelt, it had previously been serialised, but because "Time has flowed faster than my ink", the tense in which it was told changed for the final publication: "Verbs like 'is' and 'have' now read 'was' and 'had'". But not all the power of a mythologised president befriending Muir could save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed – and this is one of those times the homophone there seems telling. And so the West, for better and worse, becomes simply America.

*The whole Texan section is so much the most savage of the book that I was surprised to learn, on the last page of the backmatter, that Brands has a chair at a Texan university, and has lived in the state for decades. You'd think if the local flavour of bullshit irked him that much, he might move, but bless him for staying and snarling instead.

I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I found this book fascinating and hard to put down. I can't wait to read more on the subject.

This nonfiction title was written very well! It kept me entertained the whole time. It was not dry, which I find common in nonfiction history novels. I highly recommend this to anyone who is remotely interested in the western US.

I enjoyed this book as I have with other ones written by the author. This is a high level overview of the exploration and settling of the American west. It is not meant to be an in depth detailed narration of the events covered. There are several excellent books covering each of the chapters in greater detail. This is an excellent book for anyone looking for a very good overview of the history of the American west.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook page.

Dreams of El Dorado by H. W. Brands- Beautifully written, well researched, and never a dull moment, this book about how the west was won is both thoughtful and exciting. From Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase with Lewis and Clark doing the first official exploring to wagon trains and Indian tribes, gunfighters and lawmen, to Teddy Roosevelt, the Cowboy in the Whitehouse, page after page details these thrilling accounts sometimes in the very words of people who lived through them. Brands doesn't romanticize the Wild West, but offers a realistic picture of how things actually happened. This is an excellent book which I am happy to recommend. Thank you NetGalley for this grand ARC.

I enjoyed this book titled Dreams of El Dorado. The book wasn't too long or technical. I thought it was an interesting page turner. I'm interested in books that following the beginnings of the western US. The Lewis and Clark expeditions, The founding of Texas, and California. The Donner Party. The establishment of the Columbia River Area. A fun read that covered the political, geographical, gold seekers in a fast easy read page turner. I would definitely recommend. Well written and numerous interesting facts that you will carry with you for a lifetime.

I was looking for a good book about the American West and so have spent the past few weeks reading H.W. Brands “Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West.” It is a solid —if not spectacular— retelling of the saga of the searching and settling west of the Mississippi River. Professor Brands is a noted historian and has written a number of popular histories. I was hoping for a more dynamic read: the anecdotes often did not connect to each other. The only “glue” amongst the stories was the general “bad guy” white European men treating the native Indians badly, either via monstrous murderous attacks, or via monstrous, evil land grabs in the Oklahoma territory. Then there was the murderous, evil white men (Latter Day Saints) who attacked fellow innocent white men, women, and children crossing through their land. In summary, the meta narrative is that the mythology of the settling of the American West needed to be corrected for the upper level college students at your local state university. I have no argument with Professor Brands’ research and scholarship but I just didn’t enjoy the tone of his book.

A sweeping history of the American West that is highly readable, There is a little too much focus on anecdotes meant to illustrate the general themes and not enough straight history for my taste, but I would imagine many readers will find this very appealing.

3 stars
This is a very interesting, highly detailed look at American history. This book will appeal to any history fan.

Dreams of El Dorado steps up to the plate to tackle an immense topic: The Westward Expansion of America. The American west is full of legends, of larger-than-life personalities, of excitement and drama, and underscoring it all is the hope that anyone headed westward can make it big, can find his or her own El Dorado.

History neither starts nor stops in convenient places, so the author of any work of history has to determine the jumping off point as well as where to conclude. H.W. Brands makes an excellent decision in choosing Teddy Roosevelt as his bookend. While this is not a book about Roosevelt himself, and he is absent from the majority of its pages, he was a man both typical and atypical of his time. He was a man attracted to the romance of the west and the chance to make it big, he was also a victim of this dream like so many others. And, like so many others, he was resilient and continued to carve new paths out of the malleable opportunities. Roosevelt's life also spanned the rapidly-changing atmosphere of the west; by his later years, much of the "old west" was fading into a sepia-toned memory.

Dreams of El Dorado is a fascinating read and moves at an engaging and rapid pace, which is something that historical non-fiction can struggle to accomplish. There are also certain fairly well-known facets of the early exploration and expansion - for example Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific at the bequest of President Thomas Jefferson, who was eager to uncover what exactly he had gained through the cheaply-acquired Louisiana Purchase - but even in these well-known facts of history, Dreams of El Dorado brings fresh insights, information, and first-person narratives that deepen the reader’s knowledge. In the case of the Lewis and Clark expedition, we learn that Jefferson himself never traveled further west than western Virginia, and that Jefferson and the entire party expected that they would run into ships on the Pacific coast and would be able to return to the eastern seaboard via a vessel. I had always thought of Lewis and Clark’s expedition as largely a journey of isolation. But of course there was an active contingent out along the Pacific Coast with long-established Spanish trading routes. This is just a small iota to provide a flavor for the thorough research that went into this book.

The breadth of Dreams of El Dorado is extensive and covers a range of topics, including the efforts of early Christian missionaries, the battles for territory and supremacy between the US, Mexico, and Spanish, the emergence of the railroad, the California Gold Rush, the complexity of relations between the US and various Indian tribes, and the charting of rivers and the natural wonders of Yosemite, brought to the public’s attention through the efforts of John Muir. All of these pieces make up a coherent whole of the story of the west and are largely told through first-person accounts that bring the tale to a personal, real level. I also found the balance between the voice of the white characters and the Native Americans to be well done, allowing neither to be a simplified deduction of itself.

As is stated in the book, while the American West is often told as a story of rugged individualism, nearly every aspect of its founding and the survival of its inhabitants were through collective action. Anyone with an interest in American history would find this excellent read.

When I think of the American West, it’s me as a kid masquerading as cowboy and Indian during carneval or playing games with friends. It‘s the fiction of Apache Winnetou by Karl May, Cooper‘s Leatherstocking Tales or watching countless Western flicks or the Bonanza series. It‘s a dream.
Not so this book which gives a real account of that famous time, as it is a history book written by a renowned specialist and multiple Pullitzer winning author.
This might startle some readers who waded through countless dry historical figures and dates during school.
Not so this book, which gives us a lively narrated description, explaining the daily life of settlers on their way or of the Natives using authentic voices. It draws a comprehensible picture of those times that fills the reader’s mind and keeps them engaged. At times, it reads more like a fiction when it uses direct citations from notebooks of historical persons, but it never makes up elements like a historical fiction would do. It mostly circumvents the historical stance of interpretation and doesn’t bother the reading flow with academic footnotes (it has all needed citations in the appendix).

The author narrows the scope: Quakers and Leatherstocking‘s time is way in the past. Instead, it picks up with Jefferson‘s acquisition of Lousianna (which isn’t that tiny state but the whole west of the Mississippi) up to Teddy Roosevelt as a cowboy in the President‘s seat.

I‘ve got a vast amount of insights and wouldn’t want to start citing, as it wouldn’t end soon. The book covered the exploration of the Missouri down to Oregon‘s Pacific coast, the first religious missionary, the migration of Texas from a Mexican district to an independent state ending as a US nation. You‘ll find the Californian gold-rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad binding the Pacific States to the main country, the question of slavery and the civil war, The cattle drives by cowboys, and many of those famous battles with Indians.

In summary: it has everything in it, what one would expect from an overview book. And it reads tremendously engaging, never letting you drop interest. It‘s done such a great job, that I fully recommend it to everyone interested in that time.

this was a really good biography of the American West, it was really informative and I really enjoyed reading this from start to finish.

this book was incredible it has some awesome historical perspectives, it is a book with correct information and in the future, it will surely serve as a guide for people who wants to understand better the event that happened in this book, I also loved the writing style and think this book is amazing