The Anomaly: Elliott West’s Continental Reckoning and its Latter-day Saints

Review of Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023). 704 pages, $39.95 (hardcover).
Abstract: This review explores how Latter-day Saints are portrayed in a new landmark history of the American West. Noting the author’s generally accurate portrayal of the Saints, this review focuses on some areas that were missing in this Bancroft Prize winning book that has numerous implications for Latter-day Saint studies.


Elliot West, a prolific historian of the American West and author of numerous works including The Contested Plains1 and The Last Indian War,2 explores an expansive history of the Greater Reconstruction in the American West in his recently published prize-winning work Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion.3 “Greater Reconstruction” is a larger temporal framing of the United States’ effort to “reconstruct” the nation following the Civil War. West argues that the process of Reconstruction began not in 1865 with the end of the Civil War but instead in the 1840s, as [Page 98]American forces marched into Mexican territory. This view prioritizes the American West not only as a laboratory for society and empire, but as a place of dramatic change that influenced the eastern United States far more than scholars have previously suggested. West skillfully argues throughout his book that the birthing and growth of the American West led to dramatic changes in the rest of the United States. As he notes near the beginning of his text, “the remaking of the nation . . . unsettled it more profoundly than ever in its history” (p. 2).
Following explorers, settlers, soldiers, Native Americans, politicians, and miners across the wide expanse of the American West, Continental Reckoning is a tour-de-force that will be generative of many important discussions in coming years. Stretching across twenty-three chapters, West explores the familiar and the less well known as he suggests that “the American West was both the child and the midwife of the new United States” (p. 454).
While there are numerous aspects of this work that will be of interest to scholars of Latter-day Saint history, I will focus primarily on the role that Latter-day Saints play within the text itself. The idea of expanding Reconstruction beyond the eastern United States with a longer temporal framework will likely receive a warm welcome by Latter-day Saint scholars, some of whom have already sought to push the timeframe of Reconstruction to include the federal government’s campaign against the Latter-day Saints in the 1880s and 1890s.4 Scholars of Latter-day Saint history will readily note that the Latter-day Saint experience of Reconstruction could be said to have started long before the final shots of the Civil War, as eastern politicians sought to remake the Latter-day Saint faith to match a broader American Protestant tradition. Latter-day Saints were an “other,” demonized and racialized as a sub-human group throughout America and the broader...