Reconstructing Fort Union
I finally read John Matzko’s Reconstructing Fort Union (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). I have no particular expertise in the history of the West or in public history, but since the author is my uncle I do have a compelling personal interest.
The book is a linear narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of an distant, though important, trading post in western North Dakota. Fort Union was the longest serving fur trading post in the American West, but Matzko devotes just a chapter to describing the fort while it was actually in operation during the mid-19th century. The preponderance of the book is devoted to describing how an unlikely mixture of amateur historians, community boosters, and government largesse transformed the fort from ruins into a full-scale reconstruction.
Matzko’s story of Fort Union’s reconstruction will be of greatest interest to students of public history, especially those focusing on the debate over preservation versus reconstruction. Preservationists oppose rebuilding historic sites because the reconstructions are inevitably flawed, inhibit the imagination, and are expensive. Reconstructionists support rebuilding because reconstructed sites often attract more visitors, more funding, and allow them to indulge in romantic, firsthand “experiences” of the past. Matzko is sympathetic to the reconstructionists and so Reconstructing Fort Union is an ascension narrative.
Those who study the fur trade or the history of the West will also profit from Matzko’s work; the sixty pages of footnotes would be a useful resource for those interested in a deeper study of those topics or who are preparing for comprehensive exams.
Yet Reconstructing Fort Union received some negative reviews. As is wont in the profession, the book was most criticized on a topic that was almost incidental to the main thrust of the story. Historians who specialize in Native American history were not enamored of Matzko’s descriptions of the local Indian tribes. “The life of Indians along the upper Missouri was often nasty, brutish, and short” (14). Matzko went on to describe tribes ravaged by venereal disease and which were prone to cruelty. The ire of a reviewer for the Public Historian was raised by Matzko’s claim that native religions contained “few ethical or moral values” (16). The reviewer retaliated with the ultimate historian’s diss: Reconstructing Fort Union is a “whiggish narrative”! 
Matzko may have anticipated such outrage when he wrote that although “the inhabitants of Fort Union were rarely exemplars of Western civilization, neither were the Indians who traded there gentle children of nature. Recent attempts to romanticize them [the Indians] reflect more the anomie and lost spirituality of contemporary society than nineteenth-century reality” (14).
Matzko’s story reflects poorly on both politically-correct attitudes and politically-trenchant Washington bureaucrats. National Park Service bureaucrats consistently resisted development of Fort Union. Ironically, the very thing that they most detested, a reconstruction, may have been in part a result of their unwillingness to compromise with local boosters and amateur historians earlier on.
In the final analysis, Reconstructing Fort Union is well written, well researched, and a contribution to several fields.
[Blogger's Note: The Native American history people attack targets on an equal opportunity basis. Accusations of "whiggishness" pale in comparison to the treatment of Andrew Isenberg over The Destruction of the Bison. The lefty Princeton professor had dared to write that "The rise of the nomadic, equestrian, bison-hunting Indian societies of the western plains was largely a response to [the] European ecological and economic incursion” (32). Furthermore, he noted that Indians were hunting bison at an unsustainable rate prior to the decimation by European hunters. Although he won a prestigious teaching award at Princeton, he was denied tenure.]
