As promised, the “something new” this week is our new Westward Ho! exhibit, which opened on Wednesday. The exhibit got a nice shout out in the City Paper yesterday, so thanks to them for that. This show, like pretty much everything we do here at the Rosenbach, was a real team effort:it was co-curated by myself and our registrar Karen Schoenewaldt; the art design was done by illustrator and all around nice guy Alexander Stadler, who delved into exhibit design for the first time after working on a variety of Rosen-projects over the years; and the graphic design for all the printed materials was done by our multi-talented Visitor Services Manager and I.T. Coordinator Lauren Abshire.
The young scalp hunters. New York: George Munro. [1872]. DN 25
I’ve talked a bit about Westward Ho! on the blog already (including my Mammoth Tree post from last Winter) but basically it is a show about the idea of the West. It grew out a desire to explore our dime novel collection, which hadn’t been showcased in a while. Dime novels are cheap paperbacks, produced in series, that began in 1860 and persisted into the early twentieth century. About 3/4 of them were set on the frontier, although there were also romances, detective stories etc.
I spent many hours last summer reading through the bulk of our dime novels, which was often an exercise in sheer willpower as the books were often incredibly repetitive. But out of the repetition I could see themes emerge in the way that the authors talked about the West and many of these themes (e.g. the West as a place where everything was larger than life; the West as a place to escape and start over; the west as a place to build character) seemed awfully similar to rhetoric I’d heard about the West in non-fiction sources such as political speeches, travel books, and pioneer journals. So that was the starting point for this exhibit, as Karen and I have worked worked to tease out the “Lure and Lore” of the West in both fiction and non-fiction. To find out more, you’ll have to come see the exhibit for yourself.
I can’t resist throwing in a couple of semi-related links, since the West is such a large and wonderful topic. One is to the National Museum of Wildlife Art, where our Sendak exhibit Wild New Ways is currently running. I just think it’s great that we have a show in Jackson Hole Wyoming, at the same time as we have a show here about the idea of the West.
Another random link is to the classic Oregon Trail game, which anyone who grew up in the eighties will undoubtedly remember from elementary school. It is a very simple game, originally played on the Apple IIe, in which you are trying to get yourself to Oregon without running out of food or dying in some other awful way. 
If you need some tips, you can always check out Charles Preuss’s maps of the trail,featured in the exhibit, which provide useful information on water, fuel resources, and the disposition of local Indian tribes. A very small detail is shown at the left. Sarah Vowell actually a did a piece on Preuss for This American Life which is well worth a listen. Anyway, I briefly toyed with the idea of putting a kiosk with Oregon Trail in the exhibit, as yet another way in which the West has permeated American culture, but decided it was too much of a stretch. But you can enjoy it online. I also just heard this week that someone has come out with a faux movie trailer based on the Oregon Trail game. I took a look and it’s pretty funny, although to warn you there are a couple of very minor scatological references.
So enough already, come see the show. It will be up through the end of November, but don’t delay, be the first on your block to see it! Who knows, you might be inspired to hit the trail for yourself…