BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : The Unsung Heroes of Frontier America : A SHOVEL OF STARS: The Making of the American West, 1800 to Present, <i> by Ted Morgan</i> , Simon & Schuster, $30, 559 pages

By JONATHAN KIRSCH

April 20, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Ted Morgan is hardly the first historian to rediscover and redefine American history by focusing on the lives of ordinary people rather than “great men.”

John Sanford has done it with special brilliance, for example, and so have Page Smith and Howard Zinn, among many others. But Morgan’s latest book, “A Shovel of Stars,” is a creditable effort at rescuing from obscurity what Morgan calls “that large American class of the overlooked.”

“I am trying to duplicate the actual experience of settlement through the people who were there,” explains Morgan. “I am . . . trying to include all those whom previous histories of ‘the American people’ left out--women, Indians, Chinese coolies, freed slaves. . . .”

Morgan, a biographer, historian, and Pulitzer-winning journalist, performed a similar service in “Wilderness at Dawn” for the less-than-celebrated men and women who lived in the original 13 Colonies, and now he turns his attention to the rest of the ever-shifting, ever-growing terrain that we call the American West.

The story begins with the exploration of the Missouri frontier--”Too thin to plow,” the settlers said of the river itself, “too thick to drink--by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Right away, the author gives us an unexpected glimpse of the famous explorers through the eyes of a backwater Army captain who sheltered Meriwether Lewis after he suffered a nervous breakdown that would ultimately end in his suicide.

“Lewis expressed a firm determination never to drink any more spirits or use snuff again, both of which I deprived him of for several days and confined him to claret and a little white wine,” wrote the captain to President Thomas Jefferson. “But after leaving this place by some means or other his resolution left him.”

Morgan’s eye wanders back and forth across the continent as he describes the lurches and pauses in the movement toward Manifest Destiny. Now and then, he edges southward--”Florida at the start of 1836 was a very jittery peninsula”--and eastward: “West Virginia,” he observes, “found itself in the peculiar position of having to secede from Confederate Virginia if it wanted to remain within the Union.”

Mostly, though, Morgan looks to the West, and he is always more interested in what was happening on the ground than in drawing lines on a map. Indeed, he has searched out the telling detail, the poignant anecdote and the vivid yarn that illustrate how life was actually lived on the frontier.

A hotel guest in New Mexico, who complained when he could not get a plate of eggs after the dining room closed, paid for his ill temper with his life: “You infernal son of a bitch,” said the offended waiter, “get down on your knees and beg my pardon, or I’ll kill you.”

A black man named Abraham who fought with Seminoles in the Everglades against the encroaching white settlers recalls the day when the guerrilla band fell to the invaders:

“I lose most everyt’ing,” says Abraham in a contemporary account, “all my powder and blankets, a hundred dollars in silver, my freedom papers. . . .”

A frontier attorney--”Anyone who’d read Blackstone’s Commentaries “--rejoices over a verdict that resulted in a judgment of 12 1/2 cents for the plaintiff and a fee of $2.50 for the lawyer: “Ah, there’s nothing like your first client, your first case, and your first fee.”

Some of the most illuminating moments in Morgan’s book are the little revelations about famous men and women who have been turned into bland icons by school texts and history books.

Kit Carson, for example, was a mercenary whose mission was to starve out native villages by killing off their sheep and burning their crops. And when Jacob Sutter picked up that famous gold nugget on his spread in California, he fancied himself a potentate of sorts, and he even printed up passports for the little kingdom that he called “New Helvetia.”

“A Shovel of Stars” runs all the way up to “the last frontier” in Alaska and Hawaii, but Morgan ends on a wistful and bittersweet note. The American frontier always attracted and rewarded those who were ornery and foolhardy enough to push its boundaries ever westward--but the frontier is, at last, closed.

“Now he was a nuisance,” says Morgan of the “frontiersman” who “dresses funny, smells funny, acts funny . . . and soon he’d be a memory.”