Delivered at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association’s 2025 Conference, 19th – 22nd February 2025, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

While critiques of Noel Bertram Gerson’s idealistic biographies of historic figures have long prevailed in academic circles, his historical fiction has so far evaded critical attention. Whether dismissed as a topic of enquiry due to assumptions about the value of popular paperback literature, or never connected to Gerson due to his use of the pseudonym Dana Fuller Ross, the same accusations of erasure, nationalism and idealisation his biographies faced can all be applied to his fictional works.

While his perpetuation of the frontier myth and explicit mentions of manifest destiny remain a problematic hallmark of its original publication date, the focus on statehood found throughout the Wagons West series offers a uniquely interesting chance to examine the stereotypes surrounding identity and ideology Fuller asserts were key to the formation of each individual state. As well as a greater “American” character formed through the juxtaposition of their Anglo-American citizens with agents from Mexico and the United Kingdom, a reading of the characteristics associated with each state throughout his work offers an illuminating insight into the perception of the American West through the outsider lens of a Midwesterner.

My paper will examine the depiction of race, nation and state in the Wagons West series, arguing a link to the current political climate. Despite its outdated and problematic views, the series was reprinted in its entirety in 2013, a recency which I will argue reflects an ongoing urge to understand a large and complex nation through a simplistic and idealised view of the sum of its parts.