Ritual Ground: Bent’s Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest

Description

Author: Comer, Douglas C.

Publisher: University of California Press

Pub Date: 1996

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Good.  Binding tight.  No marks, tears, bends or folds.  Smudging to bottom text block.  Very light edge and corner wear.  Appears unused.

Notes: Comer’s much revised and expanded dissertation.  Bent’s Old Fort in southeastern Colorado played a pivotal role in the relations between Spanish (Mexico), the Indians (Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, et al), and the Americans–trappers, traders, explorers, colonists.   It was, in its own way, neutral ground, and the “Ritual” the author writes of was not religious, but social.  “This book is about a time and place on Turner’s ‘frontier’ where alienated groups, ‘strangers in a strange land,’ met and interacted in ways that I call ‘rituals’ to form a common world for a time….alienation was rife on the frontier, not only among those of European ancestry like the Bents and their partner Ceran St. Vrain, who were scrambling for a secure position in the burgeoning capitalistic order that was replacing that of inherited privilege, but also among the Native American and Hispanic populations.  The world that was jointly constructed by these three cultural groups was eclipsed, eventually by the ambitions of political and business interests in the East.  Tragedy befell the architects of the common world, especially the Plains tribes, who, in the perception of Eastern immigrants in the latter half of the nineteenth century became the demons that dwelled in the Nietzschean abyss….The ‘middle ground’ constructed during the years of Bent’s Old Fort’s occupation has been diminished, but is still firm enough so that no serious attempt to separate the Southwest from the United States has been made since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”  (Page 7)