The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Mythology of the American West)

A two-time National Book Award finalist’s “ambitious and provocative” look at Custer’s Last Stand, capitalism, and the rise of the cowboys-and-Indians legend (The New York Review of Books).

In The Fatal Environment, historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of Native Americans helped justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the “savage” element be permitted to dominate the “civilized,” Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a mythos redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

“A clearly written, challenging and provocative work that should prove enormously valuable to serious students of American history.” —The New York Times

“[An] arresting hypothesis.” —Henry Nash Smith, American Historical Review