American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone; The Three-Cornered War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Ruin Nation; and Trembling Earth.
Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, and shared the following:
Page 99 of The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier puts readers on the ground in Santa Fe in the chaotic winter of 1846-47. The U.S. Army had arrived in this trading center in northern Mexico a few months before, and General Stephen Watts Kearny had issued a proclamation annexing the territory of Nuevo México on behalf of the U.S. government. Kearny’s Army of the West was a component in the American invasion of Mexico, and the events I describe on page 99 reveal that Nuevomexicanos did not passively accept the U.S. Army’s occupation.Visit Megan Kate Nelson's website.
On page 99, in December 1846, one of The Westerners’ protagonists—a Mexican citizen named María Gertrudis Barceló—hears rumors that an uprising against the U.S. Army will take place on Christmas night. The revolt will begin in the town of Taos, seventy miles north of Santa Fe. Barceló, who is the wealthiest woman in Nuevo México, had already made her choice in the conflict with the United States. A keen observer of geopolitics, she had welcomed General Kearny and his officers to her home and her gambling saloon when they arrived. In mid-December, Barceló passes along the information about the uprising to the Army’s officials, and they make arrests.
New Mexico’s newly appointed American governor, the fur trader and entrepreneur Charles Bent, believes that these arrests mean that the revolt is over before it even started. Despite warnings that Taos residents resent Bent’s presumptive authority over them, Bent travels there to see his wife and children early in the new year. On January 19, 1847, rebels surround his house, and Bent goes out on the porch to try to talk them down while Ignacia and the children seek safety next door.
Browsers will have to turn the page to find out what happens next.
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Anyone who opens The Westerners to page 99 and starts reading there would likely be confused. Because the book is a narrative history, they will be immersed in these scenes immediately, without much context or argumentative signposting to guide them. Sort of like dropping into a novel mid-chapter.
However, this page does exemplify my approach to U.S. western history throughout the entire book. I put readers on the ground with the book’s protagonists and give them a way to see and understand events they thought they knew well (like the Mexican-American War) from a vantage point that is likely new to them.
Just by reading page 99 of The Westerners, they will understand that this American war of conquest was contested, despite the U.S. Army reports that suggest the contrary.
They will understand this moment as a struggle for control over Santa Fe, a city whose position at the intersection of the Santa Fe Trail to the east and the Chihuahua Trail to the south made it a vital center of economic and political power in the American West in the 1840s.
And given that this page is part of a larger chapter that focuses on Gertrudis Barceló’s experience of the invasion and occupation of her city, they will get a sense of the important role she played as a cultural broker during a volatile and violent time in Santa Fe’s history.
This is one of the themes of the book: Westerners in the nineteenth century tended to be adaptable, and they used their extensive community networks to survive and often thrive during a volatile time in American history.
The Page 99 Test: The Three-Cornered War.
--Marshal Zeringue