1. Quoted in David Lowenthal, "Geography, Experience, and Imagination: Towards a Geographical Epistemology," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (1961): 241. [BACK]

2. I refer to the "southwestern Plains" as an area comprising the eastern third of Colorado and of New Mexico, the northern extension of Texas, the Oklahoma panhandle, western Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska. The "Southwest" embraces present-day New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah, southern Colorado, and the southern tip of Nevada—perhaps half of the Mexican Cessation of 1848. [BACK]

3. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931), 488. [BACK]

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." In The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 1-38. [BACK]

5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 53. [BACK]

6. David Lowenthal, "Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory," The Geographical Review 65 (1975): I2. [BACK]

7. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (London: Putnam, 1937). Quoted in Lowenthal, "Past Time," 9. [BACK]

8. Ibid., 54-55. [BACK]

9. Lawrence Wright, Saints and Sinners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xii. [BACK]

10. See, for example, Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). [BACK]

11. The term American is fraught with difficulty in a work like this book. Where I term a group or person who resided in the United States something other than American, it is only for the purpose of pointing out some affiliation with another group that is pertinent to the book. In some cases I have employed hyphens to achieve this kind of differentiation, as with Euro-Americans and Anglo-Americans. In a number of instances, I have fallen back on the term Anglo to designate persons from the eastern United States, especially those who arrived in the vicinity of Bent's Old Fort just prior to and after its demise, when in fact a group so designated may have included African-Americans, Native Americans from eastern groups, Hispanics, and members of other groups.

      As to other group nomenclature, in general the collective nouns I use here to designate the human groups that appear in this book are those I think to be ones most frequently employed to refer to those groups. I depart from these common terms only where I think that to not do so would be misleading or when I know their use to be objectionable to the groups involved. I use the terms Native American and Indian interchangeably because both are typically employed in the literature from which I drew for this work. I have used Cheyenne instead of Tsis tsis' tas because the former is not objectionable, so far as I know, to the group in question, and again because a large body of literature is attached to the term Cheyenne.

      In the first draft of this book I took care to employ the plural form when referring to more than one member of any Native American group (for example, "a party of Cheyennes" instead of "a party of Cheyenne,") in order to be consistent with the usage of plural forms for other ethnic groups (Germans, Americans, etc.). This proved to be so distracting to those who looked over the early manuscript that I changed all such references to the singular forms ("a patty of Cheyenne") that are used by most anthropologists for Native American groups.

      I speak of the Spanish as the citizens of the country immediately to the south of the United States prior to 1821; after that date I refer to them as Mexicans. Spanish-speaking persons residing in the United States I term Hispanics, and in some cases this term is also used to refer to Spanish-speaking people who might have lived at least part of the time south of the border.

      I ask the pardon of any I may have offended in my efforts not to be pedantic and so to move the book along. I invite your reactions to my use of the terms I have described above, and any others. [BACK]

12. Anthony McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses (Evergreen, Colo.: Cordillera Press, Inc., 199o), 4. [BACK]

13. Frank Gilbert Roe, The Indian and the Horse (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955). [BACK]

14. Quoted in Marc Simmons, Coronado's Land: Essays on Daily Life in Colonial New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 127-161. [BACK]

15. David J. Weber, The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 35. [BACK]

16. Ibid., 28. [BACK]

17. Thomas F. Schilz, "Ponies, Pelts and Pemmican: The Arapahos and Early Western Trade," Red River Valley Historical Review 7, no. 9 (1982): 28-38. [BACK]

18. Howard R. Lamar, "Foreword," in Susan Shelby Magoffin, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into New Mexico, ed. Stella Drum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ix-xxxv. [BACK]

19. Mark Simmons, personal communication, 1992. [BACK]

20. The United States termed New Mexico a territory and appointed a governor, Charles Bent, before the area was ceded by Mexico in 1848. [BACK]

21. David Lavender, Bents Fort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954), 281. [BACK]

22. John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far From God: The U.S. War With Mexico 1846-1848 (New York, Doubleday, 1989), 68. [BACK]

23. Similar cultural changes had occurred in California, but the circumstances of these are beyond the scope of this book. The social mechanism that effected these changes were quite surely the same, however. [BACK]

24. Karl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). [BACK]

25. David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 50. [BACK]

26. Simmons, personal communication, 1992. [BACK]

27. Quoted in Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 15. [BACK]

28. This is discussed as it relates to the fur trade in Eric R. Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 158-194, and treated as it deals with Bent's Old Fort in chapter 4 of this book. [BACK]

30. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (New York: Vantage Books, 1970), 125-139. [BACK]

31. That these terms are highly problematic is a major theme of this book, and there will be much discussion of how these terms have been used, what they have meant in various contexts, and how they have been misleading. In general usage pertinent to the topics discussed in what follows, traditional refers to belief, practice, or statement transmitted from generation to generation, and often implied is that the transmission was oral, carries the force of convention, has persisted from time immemorial, and is largely uncritical; modern is used to refer to that which departs from or repudiates tradition, especially in its use of science and especially critical thought, and the practice of market capitalism, as well as the ideologies associated with science and capitalism. It is in the assumption of the fundamental departure of the modem from the traditional that the central problem lies. [BACK]

32. Weston La Barre, Shadow of Childhood (Norman: University, of Oklahoma Press, 1991), II-51. Also, as La Barre suggests, Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Belnap Press, 1977); and Ashley Montagu, "Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man," in Culture and the Evolution of Man, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 324-342. Yi-Fu Tuan not infrequently alludes to neotenic influences, as in his Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 19-33. [BACK]

33. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 39-45. [BACK]

34. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 218. [BACK]

35. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), 102. [BACK]

36. Ibid., 108. Sennett quotes Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 59; and Polybius, Histories, VI.31, trans. E Hultsch and E. S. Shuckburgh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 484; quoted in Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 108. [BACK]

37. Lavender, Bents Fort, 136. [BACK]

38. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 71. [BACK]

39. See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (New York: Basic Books, 1969); and Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Exchange was also carefully treated by Karl Marx, of course; see his Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International, 1967). [BACK]

40. Mary Douglas, "Foreword," In Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Ancient Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990), xiv. [BACK]

41. Yi-Fu Tuan, Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 7-8. [BACK]