“PRAY FOR ME. I AM ALONE.”

When Reverend Cyrus Byington penned these words in all capital letters from Indian Territory in 1841, he captured something often overlooked in the grand narrative of American westward expansion: terror. Surrounded by strangers, listening to prairie wolves howl outside his mission station, Byington feared not just for his physical safety, but for his sanity and his soul.

In June 2025, Abby Gibson spent a month at the American Heritage Center as the 2024 George A. Rentschler Fellow, searching for more voices like Byington’s—voices that spoke of dread rather than destiny when they looked West. Her dissertation, “Fearful Land: Managing Terror in the American West, 1820–1920,” challenges the conventional story of westward expansion by asking: what if fear, not hope, was central to how Americans experienced the West?

Beyond Manifest Destiny

We’ve all heard the triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny—the idea that Americans were destined to spread across the continent. But this story, Gibson argues, obscures a darker emotional reality. Many Americans viewed the West as a landscape that inspired terror, brought on madness, and provided refuge for sinners and deviants. By bringing insights from the history of emotions to Western history for the first time, Gibson is working to recover the felt dimensions of this historic process.

Her dissertation explores how the United States didn’t just materially conquer the West’s peoples, land, and resources—it also had to emotionally conquer a settler nation’s fears about both itself and this place. When did the West finally “feel” like it belonged within the territorial and emotional boundaries of the United States? How did terrifying western landscapes eventually feel like home to American colonizers?

Finding Fear in the Archives

At the AHC, Gibson focused on materials related to the Indian Wars in the northern plains and the deserts of the Southwest during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly the Black Hills War of 1876–1877 and the Apache Wars of 1872–1873. These regions—Dakota Territory and Arizona Territory—were what she calls “fearful hotspots” in the post-Civil War West because of the severity of Indigenous resistance to American expansion in these sites.

Two collections particularly stood out. Oliver Perry Hanna’s 1926 reminiscence provides extensive documentation of emotional context from the Indian Wars. Hanna, who volunteered for civilian expeditions in Wyoming and Montana territories hoping to gain experience “fighting Indians” like his favorite dime novel characters, offers brutal descriptions of fear used as a weapon of war. He recalls how expedition leaders deliberately sought “to create a fear and awe among the Indians” by desecrating Lakota burial scaffolds—dismembering and scattering their dead to disrupt their journey to the next life. In turn, Hanna describes how the Lakotas responded with a steady sonic barrage of drums and singing that unnerved and destabilized the emotional equilibrium of the expedition’s men.

Equally revealing were U.S. Army physician Henry R. Porter’s morose letters home from Arizona Territory during General George Crook’s 1872 campaigns against Yavapais and Chiricahua Apaches in the Tonto Basin. Porter hated Arizona, expressing anxiety that the longer he stayed, the more likely he was to, in his words, “become some sort of maniac.” He even worried—perhaps metaphorically—that as his skin darkened under the Arizona sun, he was somehow becoming less white. Porter’s letters confirmed white anxieties about existing in the West in more visceral language than Gibson had encountered in other archives.

The Emotional Apparatus of Empire

These materials are helping Gibson flesh out her dissertation’s fifth and final chapter, which examines what she calls the “emotional apparatus of American empire.” Fear functioned not only as something settlers experienced, but as a deliberate weapon of conquest. At the same time, she is interested in how Indigenous peoples and others targeted by the settler colonial project managed and survived the terrors at the heart of westward expansion.

One function of fear that emerges clearly from these materials is how settler and state interpretations of Indigenous people’s fear racialized them as “childlike” and in turn justified their extermination and removal in the eyes of expansionists. Hanna, for instance, chalks up Native resistance to expansion as “vengeance brewing in the hearts of these Indians”—a deliberate attempt to obscure the political and territorial logic of that resistance by interpreting it as merely emotional.

Moving Forward

The Rentschler Fellowship was her last residential research fellowship of her doctorate, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Before arriving in Laramie, she was anxious about having enough material for her final chapter. Now she has both rich sources and a clearer sense of direction. She notes that she is deeply grateful for this opportunity and for the kindness and generous assistance from the AHC Reference staff—particularly Jess LaBozetta, Mary Beth Brown, Vicki Glantz, and Ginny Kilander.

As for what comes next: this work will appear first in Gibson’s dissertation, but she hopes to publish a journal article from it and eventually turn the dissertation into a book. Because the history of the American West isn’t just about where Americans went and the continent they claimed—it’s also about what they felt, what they feared, and how they learned to call a once-terrifying landscape home.

Post contributed AHC Archivist Leslie Waggener in cooperation with Abby Gibson, 2024 George A. Rentschler Fellow and PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Southern California.