Olam Katan (Small World): Jewish Traders on the Santa Fe Trail‪.‬

People and ideas may follow the flow of money and commerce, but their relationships often endure long after the specific business concerns that created them have been forgotten. The multicultural dimensions of exchange resulting from international trade are central to the nineteenth-century American western experience. Yet, the historical West and the mythic West, for many Americans, have so intertwined that we are left with but a superficial ideal, a nationalistic West of cultural homogeneity rather than diversity. Being "American" during the nineteenth century required newcomers to set aside old ways in favor of a nationalistic view centered on a homogeneous and uniform ideal, one that either denied outright or drastically modified people's backgrounds and traditions. By the time historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his paper on the American frontier at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, the politics of the nation demanded a historical model by which past conquests could be explained and rationalized, and upon which future conquests might be built. The eyes of politicians and historians were not on what the nation was but, rather, on what they thought it should be. Although Turner saw the greatest contribution of the West as democracy, he also noted its contribution to nationalism, its importance to the emergent nationalistic paradigm. The story of America's move West became, through the urging of Turner and others, the new American nationalism, a homogeneous way of looking at the country that persists to this day. (1) Yet, even a superficial glance at the complex cultural roots of the Santa Fe trade between Mexico and the United States debunks such facile myth making. Regardless of nationalistic rhetoric, the homogeneous ideal of the late nineteenth century was, of course, unrealistic. The nation, to quote Walt Whitman, "contained multitudes" reflected in language, customs, economics, politics, religion, gender, and a hundred other subclassifications of human existence. The U.S. ideal of "E Pluribus Unum" had correctly identified the "many" but only imperfectly approached the "one." The American nation-state evolved amidst an unprecedented global whirlwind of social and economic expansion based on advancing technology. In the nineteenth century, the frontier conflict in the American West paralleled similar upheavals in South Africa, on Russia's far Kamchatka Peninsula, and elsewhere on the planet. (2) It was a period of colony and empire, of rapid economic expansion and accelerated human displacement.