ABSTRACT
The history and mythology of American westward expansion is mostly associated with the movement into the trans-Mississippi regions beginning in the antebellum period, to some extent concerns about the prospects and risks of westward expansion predate the intensification of expansionism in the first half of the 1800s. From the perspective of many nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, Western horizons were coextensive with horizons of animality, of becoming animal or unbecoming human, which means that in the context of westward expansion there was a distinctly spatial element to both "animality-as-loss" and "animality-as-escape". George Frederick Ruxton's account is typical of the vagueness of nineteenth-century distinctions between the conceptual dualisms of animality and humanity and savagery and civilization. More virulently than Charles Wilkins Webber, Francis Parkman points to the ways in which Western environments functioned as imaginary–experiential spaces from which conceptions of civilized Man and its human and nonhuman Others emerged through the discursive dynamics of race and species.
