Hinterland Dreams

Eric J. Morser suggests that the portrayal of the development of the American West as a realm forged by “stateless people on the make” (p. 103) on a “stateless frontier” (p. 190) is an “alluring yet fundamentally flawed and incomplete vision” that frames too much of public policy debate today (ibid.). The development of western cities such as La Crosse, Wisconsin, is usually explained as resulting from the efforts of “local entrepreneurs” who took advantage of “geographic location” (p. xi). Yet at every step such development was facilitated by the powerful American state, which pushed the frontier west by moving Native Americans off their lands. It funded explorers and implemented a federal land policy to “pave the way for settlement,” and it supported internal improvements (p. 29). State incorporation laws limited risk and encouraged investment and entrepreneurial activity and thus “allowed” La Crosse's boosters to prosper (p. 71). When Wisconsin lawmakers permitted municipalities to fund railroads through bond issues, they gave boosters a powerful tool to shape railroads and urban development. Thus Morser shifts the conventional narrative surrounding urban boosterism by noting the impact it had on railroad development and regulation during the Gilded Age. La Crosse's elite employed a “palette of creative [public and private] tools” to provide and regulate public services that transformed the city into a “bustling ... entrepot” (p. 131

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