After the Civil War, travel letters about western sketch emerged in major newspapers. Journalists, intellectuals and politicians participated in national reconstruction and cultural reshaping through the discourse of landscape, "letters from the West" served as a cultural vehicle of American identity in this sense. As a journalist for The Republican, Samuel Bowles joined two trips to the West hosted by federal officials in 1865 and 1868, his travel letters based on these trips were representative of the time and then collected into Our New West. Among them, the accounts of the Pacific Railroad, the Great Plains and Indian tribes provide an entry point for war-torn Americans to revisit and reimagine the Republic. First, Bowles takes the Pacific Railroad as a civilized bond to unite the states, and through the "fracture" consciousness of history triggered by "railway modernity", he urges people to forget the past and look forward to the future. And then he presupposes a "unified imperial landscape" under American Manifest Destiny, aiming to pave a way for the new national identity. Second, the author's the image of the Great Plains changes from "great desert" to "great pasture", and the myth of "wilderness turned into a garden" helps to arouse American's desire to conquer the "last frontier" and thus the entire continent. The indivisibility of the Union is reaffirmed both in geographic space and cultural symbolism. Finally, the migrations and wanderings of Indian tribes in the West are treated as a particular cultural landscape to support the white supremacy and emphasize that Anglo-Americans naturally have sovereignty over the land of America. The racial hatred stirred by the exaggerated Indo-White conflict in the text, weakens the historical memory of the North-South divide on the one hand, and defines the national self while imagining the "savage other" on the other hand.The West is portrayed as a site of reconciliation between North and South, the epitome of a"continental empire", and the God-given "Promised Land" for the Puritans. In this way, the author builds a national vision, national identity and cultural community focusing on "reunion". But such a "New West" conveys the intellectual order established by the conquerors (white settlers) and the victors (the Union or the North), the resulting nationalist discourse in the press appears to integrate conflicting localism and stimulate an identical Americanness, but in fact cannot heal the division. At the same time, the view of capitalist progress, hypothesis of land development and the hierarchy of civilizations that it promotes exacerbated social unrest during the era of reconstruction, revealing the inherent contradictions and the origins of secession crisis in America's nation-building.