The Many Lives of the New West Author Joseph E. Taylor

The Many Lives of the New West Author(s): Joseph E. Taylor, III Source: Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 141-165 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25442968 Accessed: 20-11-2016 20:56 UTC
REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25442968?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

The Many Lives of the New West Author Joseph E. Taylor
Just from $10/Page
Order Essay
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Western Historical Quarterly
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Many Lives of the New West
Joseph E. Taylor III
References to a “New West” have grown in recent years, but it is unclear what
is new or western about the changes attributed to the region. Moreover, the
“New West” has a long and troubling history, and scholars should carefully
consider the terms masking and isolating tendencies before invoking it.
“There is no institutional memory in the West, only dawn.”1
L/ately a lot of people have been treating the American West, a region that has been conquered and colonized repeatedly over half a millennium, like a bright, shiny dime. The West, so the story goes, became a brave new world some twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Writer Raye Ringholz, jour nalists Timothy Egan and David Olinger, geographers William Riebsame and Peter
Walker, historians Patricia Limerick and William Wyckoff, economists Ed Whitelaw and Thomas Power, and law professor Charles Wilkinson cite changes in the region’s economic, social, and cultural face as the dawning of a New West, and all attribute these transformations to capital and technology.2 The declining importance of
Joseph Taylor, associate professor and Canada Research Chair at Simon Frasier University, thanks Peter Boag, Lara Braithwaite, Paul Farber, Lynne Heasley, Matthew Klingle, Nancy Langston, Bill Robbins, and the National Humanities Center.
1 Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (New York, 1998), 130.
2 Raye Ringholz, Paradise Paved: The Challenges of Growth in the New West (Salt Lake City, 1996); Egan, Lasso the Wind; David Olinger, “Old West Being Replaced by Luxury Homes,” Denver Post, 12 April 1998, http://63.147.65.175/snapshot/partld.htm (accessed 3 December 2003; restricted access); Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” in Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, ed. William E. Riebsame (New York, 1997), 151-78; Peter Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies: Toward a Political Ecology of the Rural American West,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (March 2003): 18; William Wyckoff, “Inside the New West: A View from Suburban Montana,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (August 1998): 406; Ed Whitelaw, “Oregon’s Real Economy,” Old Oregon 72 (Winter 1992): 30-3;
Thomas Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place (Washington, DC, 1996); Charles Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” in Atlas of the New West, 15-44; The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West (New York, 1992). For definitions of the term “New
West,” see also Susan Kollin, “Wister and the ‘New West,’” in Reading The Virginian in the New West, ed. Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum (Lincoln, 2003), 235; Carl Abbott, “That Long Western Border: Canada, the United States, and a Century of Economic Change,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies, ed. John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates (Seattle, 2002), 205-6; John Walker, “Excerpts of the New West Dictionary,” High Country News, 29 September 1997.
Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004): 141-165. Copyright ? 2004, Western History Association.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
resource extraction and rise of the Internet, light industry, and tourism has indeed altered the West. Shifts in economic and cultural power have been dramatic, yet ar guments about an intrinsically new or different West stumble on many counts. Most developments are national in scope, many of the propelling forces are far from new or revolutionary, and few effects are universal. This New West is ultimately both less and more than it seems: at once a marketing tool for a classist, urban fantasy about the pastoral countryside and a romantic elision of the dark side of gentrification.
The shortcomings of New West declarations carry us only so far. In this strange era of the post-industrial, post-modern, post-dot.com, and post-9/11, it is easy to pick the bones of last year’s prophesies. Rents in chic San Francisco fell by a third in 2001,
and Oregon suffered the distinction of having the nation’s highest unemployment rate through 2002, all because the digital bubble burst. This was the same economy that prophets said would permanently relieve western hinterlands of their dependence on extractive industry. If western history teaches that booms have busts, and newspapers show that New West themes engulf the nation, then rather than dwell on the histori
cal and geographical myopia of boosters, let us instead focus on the long, rich history of the New West trope and place its latest incarnation in social and environmental context. I may be wrong; I might have to live this down the rest of my career, but I want to explain why scholars should eschew New West in favor of other categories of analysis.3
Beyond the analytical failings of newness and westerness lay more disturbing issues.
Although smart people hail the New West as a place where people and nature will thrive like never before, most changes reveal persisting weaknesses in environmental and social justice. Gentrification and recreational tourism, forces that are as fractured and diffuse as they are powerfully transformative, tear the social and cultural fabric of rural communities, and the pain is felt primarily by minority and blue-collar residents.4 The emphasis on New West environmental amenities also fueled a rush of exurban settlement that accelerated consumption of natural resources and fragmentation of ecosystems. In so many ways the New West, with its ongoing marginalization of labor, degradation of nature, and implementation of homogeneity, seems a helluva lot like the Old West. From missionaries to Mormons and ’49ers to equity refugees, western ers have been trying to simplify the West into monochromatic societies; and from Chinatown to the Barrio and Albina to the Res, the West has been America’s most
3 See also Carl Abbott, ed., “Forum: Atlas of the New West,” Pacific Historical Review
67 (August 1998): 379-420.
4 For gentrification and tourism see A. Warde, “Gentrification as Consumption: Issues of Class and Gender,” Environment and Planning D 9 (September 1991): 223-32; William B. Beyers and Peter B. Nelson, “Contemporary Development Forces in the Nonmetropolitan
West: New Insights from Rapidly Growing Communities,” Journal of Rural Studies 16 (October 2000): 461; Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 15; Alice Wondrak, “Seen Any Wildlife? Community Conflict and a Struggle for the Soul of Estes Park, Colorado,” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 72-5.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
effectively segregated region for a very long time.5 Drive through Park City, Sunriver, or Mendocino, and it is hard to see this latest New West as a break with that past.
Arguments for a New West ultimately turn circular. The real and perceived separations that accompany New West imagery?of nature from people and people from people?have become powerful rationales for further segregations to save fragile nature and playground refuges. Yet the more the West seems New and discrete, the more it relies on its figurative and literal ties to the Old. Take for example fly fish ing. Elite angling has long been a badge of environmental sensitivity, but in recent decades it has erupted as a prototype of New West play because of strong marketing and a lyrical movie by Robert Redford, yet cowboy aesthetics are central to its modern
appeal.6 Similarly, desires to protect nature have fueled intense battles over access to public lands, but resource extraction still thrives because Americans, in general, and exurban residents, in particular, are energetic consumers. Big-Box stores and metas tasizing subdivisions testify to a lively demand for western lumber and water.7 Fewer
people work state and federal lands, but many simply moved to private holdings. The result has been more-apparent-than-real environmental reform. Efficiencies, rather than less consumption, drove most workers from the ranges and woods, and wherever
jobs vanished, gentrification seemed to accelerate.8 This has been a complex process,
5 Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 2003): 7-26.
6 Kollin, “Wister and the ‘New West,’” 235; Ken Owens, “Fishing the Hatch: New West Romanticism and Fly-Fishing in the High Country,” in Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West, ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine Bapis, and Thomas Harvey (Salt Lake City, 2003), 117-9.
7 Wyckoff, “Inside the New West,” 403; Virginia Scharff, “Honey, I Shrunk the West,” Pacific Historical Review 61 (August 1998): 411-3; Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” 161.
8 For shifts in production see, for example, Stuart Allan, Aileen R. Buckley, and James E. Meacham, Atlas of Oregon, ed. William Loy, 2d ed. (Eugene, OR, 2001), 74-5, 85, 90-7; Doug MacCleery, “Is the Shift to ‘Ecological Sustainability’ or Ecosystem Management on U.S. Public Lands Merely a Sophisticated ‘NIMBYism’ Masquerading as a ‘Paradigm Shift?’” USDA Forest Service Eco-Watch Dialogues, http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/consumption_ethic2. html (accessed 3 December 2003). For job losses see William Prudham, “Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon’s Illinois Valley,” Antipode 30 (January 1998): 177-98; Michael Milstein, “Loggers Displaced in 1990s Left Behind, Study Finds,” Portland Oregonian, 7 January 2003; Ted Helvoigt, Darius Adams, and Art Ayre, “Employment Transitions in Oregon’s Wood Products Sector During the 1990s,” Journal of Forestry 101 (June 2003): 42-6; Matthew S. Carroll, Keith A. Blatner, Frederick J. Alt, Ervin G. Schuster, and Angela J. Findley, “Adaptation Strategies of Displaced Idaho Woods Workers: Results of a Longitudinal Panel Study,” Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 95-113; Jonathan Kusel, Susan Kocher, Jonathan London, Lita Buttolph, and Ervin Schuster, “Effects of Displacement and Outsourcing on Woods Workers and Their Families,” Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 115-34; Steven E. Daniels, Corrine L. Gobeli, and Angela J. Findley, “Reemployment Programs for Dislocated Timber Workers: Lessons from Oregon,”
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
144 SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
however, because it was not just the very rich who propelled change.9 Rural patterns have been displaced by the demands of a broad, transnational class of amenity-seeking, franchise-patronizing consumers. Aspenization and McDonaldization have merged, and the result is a mess.10
Despite these wrenching developments, the Old West, often now caricatured as a cowboy state, did not go gentle into that good night, and its resilience has exposed a huge irony surrounding the latest New West. Although some rural residents did cash in, many others resisted gentrification. The media fixates on the violence of Nye County and Klamath Lakes, but more representative, if less conspicuous, are those seeking accommodation. Some are landowners negotiating compacts with government agencies and non-governmental organizations to solve environmental and economic concerns, others are neighbors discussing contentious issues outside courtrooms and councils addressing complex water and wildlife issues.11 The goal everywhere has been to ameliorate environmental problems without shredding the material and cultural fabric of communities. Put bluntly, these community focused efforts are an attempt to stem gentrification. The emergence of accommodation seems the most interesting, significant, and hopeful development in recent years, yet it is also at considerable odds with the core values of this latest New West.
Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 135-50; Matthew S. Carroll, Steven E. Daniels, and Jonathon Kusel, “Employment and Displacement among Northwestern Forest Products
Workers,” Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 151-6; Matthew S. Carroll, Charles W. McKetta, Keith A. Blatner, and Con Schallau, “A Response to ‘Forty Years of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses,’” Sociological Perspectives 42 (Summer 1999): 325-33; William R. Freudenburg, Lisa J. Wilson, and Daniel J. O’Leary, “Forty Years of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses,” Sociological Perspectives 41 (Spring 1998): 1-26.
9 For consequences of gentrification see Beyers and Nelson, “Contemporary Development Forces in the Nonmetropolitan West,” 459-72; Connie Young Chiang, “Shaping the Shoreline: Environments, Society, and Culture in Monterey, California” (PhD diss.,
University of Washington, 2002); Bonnie Christensen, Red Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal Miners to Cowboys (Lawrence, 2002); Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, 1998); John Walton, Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (Berkeley, 2001); Meredith Wiltsie and William Wyckoff, “Reinventing Red Lodge: The Making of a New Western Landscape, 1884-2000,” in Imagining the Big Open, 124-50.
10 For Aspenization and McDonaldization see Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 338-70; Dave Gowdey, “Urban Immigration is Another Name for Cultural Genocide,” Colorado Central Magazine 56 (October 1998): 2; Bruce Selcraig, “Fore! in Santa Fe,” High Country News, 17 May 1993; George Ritzer, The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions (Thousand Oaks,
CA, 1998), 1-2, 91-4, 117-49, 177-8; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal (Boston, 2001).
11 Sally K. Fairfax and Darla Guenzler, Conservation Trusts (Lawrence, 2001); Eve Endicott, ed., Land Conservation through Public/Private Partnerships (Washington, DC, 1993); Seth Zucker man, “Toward a New Salmon Economy,” in Salmon Nation: People and Fish at the Edge, ed. Edward C. Wolf and Seth Zuckerman (Portland, OR, 1999), 63-73; “National Land Trust Census: Charts and Graphs,” Land Trust Alliance, http://www.lta.org/newsroom/census_ charts.htm (accessed 3 December 2003).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
Charles Wilkinson has been as perceptive as any New West writer, so we should heed his caution that the New West is “hard terrain to read” and “use the term gingerly.”
Before going further, then, we should specify which New West we are discussing.12 A review of Library of Congress titles that use the phrase “New West” reveals at least four distinct epochs in the last 135 years: the first was a transcontinental revision of western possibilities, the second a nostalgic longing for the frontier period, the third an ambivalent assessment of mid-twentieth-century modernity, and the latest a fest of social and ecological diversity. Although the content of each New West has varied, all have stressed how technology, markets, and nature have radically changed this region we call the West.
Appropriately enough, the first New West began as the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Point. At the very moment that the state and capital were creating a new, continental and transnational space, Samuel Bowles’s Our New West and Charles Brace’s The New West, followed in 1879 by Robert Strahorn’s To the Rockies and Beyond, unleashed a literary clich? with all the qualities of a horror movie villain. From the beginning, New West authors stressed how technology was transforming western opportunities and experiences.13 In the post-Civil War era the technology was railroads, the opportunities seemed unlimited, and the experiences were settlement and tourism. Although Strahorn’s subtitle (Saunterings in the Popular Health, Pleasure, and Hunting Resorts) flagged a class bias in New West literature, Bowles seemed to offer a more democratic spin by assuring readers that the railroad would open “a new world of wealth, and a new world of natural beauty, to the working and the wonder of the old.”14
Every author of the era emphasized the economic opportunities of the Transcontinental New West. Rails and telegraph lines had created what Richard White calls the “first information age,” and all echoed Bowles’s conclusion that railroads were “the key to all our New West.”15 Promoters integrated innovation into their tales of western progress. Boosters in Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Tacoma, and other
12 Charles Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 18.
13 Samuel Bowles, Our New West: Records of Travel between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean (Hartford, CT, 1869); Charles Brace, The New West (New York, 1869); Robert Strahorn, To the Rockies and Beyond, or A Summer on the Union Pacific Railroad . . . (Omaha, 1879). For state, capital, and transnational, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of
My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman, 1990), 57-9, 145-7, 236, 246-8; Donald Meinig, Transcontinental America, 1850-1915, vol. 3 in The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, 1998), 3-8; Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr., Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment Helped Build American Railroads (Stanford, CA, 1996).
14 Bowles, Our New West, v.
15 Quote from telephone conversation with Richard White; Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 21-2; Bowles, Our New West, 46; Brace, The New West, 182-7.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
towns? communities of which many foundered?argued that new technologies made their places logical sites of investment, and railroads fueled such hopes with promises of
trunk or spur lines. The Kansas City Board of Trade’s promotional broadside The New West boasted of its links to the Pacific Ocean, while Charles Bliss’s The New West: New Mexico and Edward Tenney’s Colorado: And Homes in the New West served as primers on settlement opportunities near railroads. Of course, the railroads subsidized many of these tracts. Strahorn at one time or another worked with the Denver & Rio
Grande, the Colorado Central, and the Union Pacific, the latter of which published To the Rockies and Beyond through New West Publishing in Omaha.16
Seen one way, the Kansas City Board of Trade simply emulated what John Smith,
William Cooper, and Chicago’s founders had done in the ages of sails, wagons, and steam, but the 1870s were not like any previous era.17 As Karl Marx noted, new technol
ogy had annihilated old geography when locomotion reworked spatial logic. A Board of Trade could argue that the Pacific Ocean reached all the way to Kansas; Henry Villard could extend Russian Germans’ westward exodus to Nebraska and Dakota; Portland businessmen could scheme to corner the world salmon market.18 The first New West
was far more globalized than any previous West, yet despite the changes of industrial capitalism, or maybe because of them, the period’s market rhetoric was mostly a con servative adaptation of old speculative interests to evolving technologies.
Far more novel was how the Transcontinental New West had reconceptualized nature for both profit and play. As a number of scholars argue, an eastern literati was
16 Kansas City Board of Trade, The New West: Its Outlets to the Ocean (Kansas City, MO, 1873); Charles Bliss, The New West: New Mexico (Boston, 1879); Edward Tenney, Colorado: And Homes in the New West (Boston, 1880). For an image of Strahom see http://freepages.gene alogy.rootsweb.com/~jtenlen/restrahom.jpg (accessed 3 December 2003); For Strahorn’s back ground and activities see Frieda Knobloch, “Creating the Cowboy State: Culture and Underdevelopment in Wyoming since 1867,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 2001): 202-5. For New West Publishing see J. M. Wolfe, Wolfe’s Omaha City Directory, 1879-1880 (Omaha, 1879), 316.1 thank Eliza Robertson at the National Humanities Center, Dan Kubrick at the Omaha Public Library, and the anonymous reviewer for help with this citation.
17 For early boosters see John Smith, “A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note …,” in The Complete Works of John Smith, ed. Philip Barbour, vol.l (1608; reprint, Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 27-117; Alan Taylor, William Coopers Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991). For failed boosters see Norman Clark, Mill Town . . . (Seattle, 1970), 14-42. For boosters and regional identity see John Findlay, “A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest,” in Many wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David Wrobel and Michael Steiner (Lawrence, 1997), 37-70.
18 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, “Manifesto to the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York, 1978), 476; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, 1986); David Emmons, Garden in the Grasslands: Boomer Literature of the Central Great Plains (Lincoln, 1971); Thomas Fuchs, “Henry Villard: A Citizen of Two Worlds” (PhD diss., University of
Oregon, 1991); “Board of Trade,” Portland Morning Oregonian, 16 August 1877, 3.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor 111
reimagining western nature through distinctly classist, racial, and gendered lenses. The result was a romanticized western landscape, emptied of humans and crowned sub lime.19 Here was an early articulation of the modern wilderness aesthetic, and Bowles, Brace, and Strahorn were among the first to sell environmental amenities. For those
who could afford the ticket, railroads helped create and serve an emerging demand for wildness. Bowles called the New West an “originally, freshly, uniquely, majestically” natural geography: “Nowhere are broader and higher mountains; nowhere, climates more propitious; nowhere broods an atmosphere so pure and exhilarating.”20 Brace prophesied: “When our pleasure-seekers on the Eastern coast can reach in a week such objects of wonderful grandeur and beauty as the Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and the high Sierras, there will be crowds taking their summer trip hither. This region will become our American Switzerland.”21 By 1887, William Thayer’s Marvels of the New
West could only reinforce a well-established link between industrial transportation, mass media, and western nature. Its first chapter, a 133-page dissertation of the West’s “Marvels of Nature,” took readers on a rail journey from Colorado’s Arkansas Canon to Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge, the Petrified Forest in Arizona, and the
Old Woman of the Mountain in Montana.22
Ironically, historians are most familiar with the next New West, yet we least associ ate it with this phenomenon. During the 1890s, mass media continued to disseminate the market rhetoric of the New West. In 1890, Portland’s Immigration Board published The New Empire to boost their city as the dominant Northwest entrep?t; Spokane merchants responded in 1897 with the New West Trade.23 Like their predecessors, both cities heralded the opportunities presented by new railroads, but the continuity of entrepreneurial rhetoric did not extend to other uses of New West. Sociocultural forces in the East were inspiring a basic reworking of the West’s historic and mythic
19 Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York, 1990), 10; David Robertson, West of Eden: A History of the Art and Literature of Yosemite (San Francisco, 1984); William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, by Jules David Prown et al. (New Haven, 1992), 37-86; Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, “Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness,” Environmental History 6 (October 2001): 541 50; Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, 1999); Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Disorientation and Reorientation: The
American Landscape Discovered from the West,” in Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2000), 194-5.
20 Bowles, Our New West, v; also quoted in Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” 151.
21 Brace, The New West, 185.
22 William Thayer, Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River (Norwich, CT, 1887), xxix.
23 Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 139; and The New West (Spokane, WA) Trade (begun in 1897).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
significance, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” highlighted these anxieties by warning that the United States was entering an ominous age because its frontier had closed.24 In an age when many influential Americans worried that they were being overrun by Europe, and that a plague of neurasthenia was crippling middle-class men, Turner offered a nativist theory of American culture that was rooted in the masculine frontier. Although his argu ments about American democratic development fared poorly, his essay is still useful for illuminating the cultural concerns that were driving both eastern anti-modernism and the next New West.25
Thus, although many westerners were desperate to modernize, eastern writers desired a very different West. From 1890 to 1930, their New West was essentially nostalgic. Threatened by polyglot eastern cities, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, and other writers crafted antimodern fantasies of a pastoral past ruled by guns, horses, and chiv alrous men. The result was the apotheosis of the cowboy as an American knight.26 The plot of William Raine’s Gunsight Pass; How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought the New West was typical in depicting white heroes struggling against a dark-skinned villain (in this case Mexican), but the subtitle revealed an atypical consideration for how technology had changed the West after 1890.27 A potboiler about cowhands turned derrick workers and then capitalists was a departure from the genre’s clich?s, yet other New West writers broke with convention even further. The Nostalgic
New West often featured women and youths civilizing wild places in less violent, yet equally mythic, stories. Among these were Amy Blanchard’s Gentle Pioneer, Being the Story of the Early Days in the New West, Alfred Rice’s An Oregon Girl: A Tale of American Life in the New West, Edwin Sabin’s Boy Settler; or, Terry in the New
West, and Frederick Niven’s Lady of the Crossing; A Novel of the New West. Seattle
24 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (1893), 199-227.
25 For critiques of Turner’s essay see William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 157-76; Martin Ridge, “The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 41 (Winter 1991): 2-13; Richard
White, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” in Historians of the American Frontier: A Bio-Biographical Sourcebook, ed. John R. Wunder (New York, 1988), 660-81. For fin de si?cle culture see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995); Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York, 1996).
26 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York, 1992); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992); Stephen May, Zane Grey: Romancing the West (Athens, OH, 1997).
27 William Raine, Gunsight Pass: How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought the New West (New York, 1921).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
publisher L. B. Mock captured the sentiment of these works in its dedication to Lucy Byrd Mack’s Maid of Pend d’Oreille, an Indian Idyl: “to those daring souls who made the new west positive.”28
To the extent that they considered the subject, Progressive historians paralleled novelists’ treatment of the New West. Both groups linked the trope with the past. Like
the domesticated New West novels, John Eaton’s Sheldon Jackson, A Pioneer in the New West highlighted the role of the eastern-based Woman’s Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in taming the West as a Christian society. Frederick Jackson Turner’s Rise of the New West echoed Raine in emphasizing technology’s civilizing impact. Like most other novelists, though, Turner focused on the romantic past of canals and steam rather than a bustling present. Linking New West with the trans-Appalachian era also seems to have created retroactively a fifth New West be fore 1840.29 All the Nostalgic New West works also shared three familiar traits: they expressed a fascination?sometimes horrid?with modernity and a yearning for a romanticized moral order; they combined supposedly dispassionate description with boosterish prescription; and the imagined and real Wests continued to harmonize fact with fiction.
In contrast, the third New West bared growing contradictions between popular culture and the social and cultural conditions of the times. By the late 1930s, urban ization and the New Deal had laid the foundation for rapid industrialization.30 A few
writers again argued that such changes signaled another New West. Ronald Russell’s 1938 A New West to Explore portrayed the Portland Junior Symphony as “pioneers of a great artistic and cultural future for America “31 The appropriation of frontier imagery for an urban, highbrow future foreshadowed the rhetoric of John E Kennedy, but this was neither the only nor the dominant reworking of frontier at the time. Like
28 Amy Blanchard, Gentle Pioneer, Being the Story of the Early Days in the New West (Boston, 1903); Lucy Byrd Mack, Maid of Pend d’Oreille, an Indian Idyl (Seattle, 1910); Alfred
Rice, An Oregon Girl: A Tale of American Life in the New West (Portland, 1914); Edwin L. Sabin, Boy Settler; or, Terry in the New West (New York, 1916); Frederick Niven, Lady of the Crossing; A Novel of the New West (New York, 1919).
29 John Eaton, Sheldon Jackson, A Pioneer in the New West (New York, 1898); Frederick Jackson Turner, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (New York, 1906). One can argue that I make too much of the New West, that I should instead place it the context of Walter E.
Weyl’s The New Democracy; An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States (New York, 1914), Herbert Croly’s New Nationalism, and the New Republic (and later FDR’s New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower’s New Look, and JFK’s New Frontier). Unlike those neolo gisms, the New West already had a history.
30 Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain, The American West: A Twentieth
Century History (Lincoln, 1989), 220; Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York, 1995), 72.
31 Ronald Russell, A New West to Explore; The Story of the Portland (Oregon) Junior Symphony Orchestra and Jacques Gershkovitch, Pioneers of a Great Artistic and Cultural Future for
America (Boston, 1938). See also Victor Chittick, ed., Northwest Harvest, A Regional Stocktaking (New York, 1948).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
150 SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
the earliest works on the New West, Bruce Grant’s The Cowboy Encyclopedia: The Old and the New West from the Open Range to the Dude Ranch traced how urban ization and transportation (in this case the automobile) had gentrified the rural West for play. Grant and others also noted that, despite dramatic change in the West, most Americans were still obsessed with the frontier of cowboys, trappers, and missions, and that popular culture had essentially frozen the West in 1880.32 Eastern climbers gloried in conquering untrammeled peaks in Colorado’s Needles Mountains, while Jack Kerouac noticed how “the energetic Chamber of Commerce types of the new
West decided to revive the ghost town of Central City, Colorado” as a tourist trap, complete with a Victorian opera and Old Western saloons.33 Here was an Ambivalent New West, both peering ahead and wistfully gazing over its shoulder.
The way professional historians employed the New West reveals the roots of the New Western History backlash. At a time when the West was the country’s most rapidly growing, culturally potent region, every historian who invoked New West from 1937 to 1970 focused on the distant past, never allowing it even to cross the hundredth meridian. Bernard Mayo’s Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West (1937), William Chambers’s Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West (1956), Roscoe Buley’s The Romantic Appeal of the New West, 1815-1840 (1961), and Randolph Randall’s James Hall: Spokesman of the New West (1964) all equated New West with Trans Appalachia. As if to underscore this trend, Ray Allen Billington republished Turner’s Rise of the New West in 1962.34 Here was an example of consensus history, of the past
pared down to stories of stalwart men upholding principles of democracy and industry. The historians were reinforced by the romantic literature of Irene Grissom’s Verse of the New West and Emmie Mygatt’s Rim-Rocked, A Story of the New West.35 This
mythic perspective was the backdrop for Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Both highlighted the bond between urbanization
32 Bruce Grant, The Cowboy Encyclopedia: The Old and the New West from the Open Range to the Dude Ranch (Chicago, 1951). See also Earl Pomeroy’s trenchant analysis of western tourism in in Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York, 1957), 139? 217; and his The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (New York, 1965), 293-371.
33 Duncan Maclnnes, “The Old and New West in the Needle Mountains,” Appalachia 34 (June 1941): 374-9 and Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1955; reprint, New York, 1976), 51.
34 Bernard Mayo, Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West (1937; reprint, Hamden, CT, 1966); William Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West: Thomas Hart Benton, 1782-1858 (1956; reprint, New York, 1970); Roscoe Buley, The Romantic Appeal of the New West, 1815-1840 (Detroit, 1961); Randolph Randall, James Hall, Spokesman of the New West (Columbus, OH, 1964); Frederick Jackson Turner, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (New York, 1962).
35 Irene Grissom, Verse of the New West (Caldwell, ID, 1931); Emmie Mygatt, Rim Rocked, A Story of the New West (New York, 1952). For consensus history see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 333-5.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Tartar ???
and pastoral aesthetics, and revealed that American ambivalence about modernity has long been central to the New West interest in nature (often expressed as frontier) as psychic refuge.36
These tendencies have produced ever greater paradoxes in the latest New West. At first glance, the surfeit of works makes this era seem substantively different. The
Library of Congress catalog contains over one hundred New West titles?greater by a magnitude of ten than any previous era?but on close examination, half have nothing to do with the American West. Others include publishing houses such as New West Library, New West Publishing, New West Press, New West House, New West Writers, and New West Communications, or entertainment companies such as New West Music, New West Recordings, New West Records, New West Films, and New West Entertainment, the latter of which issued a string of slasher movies.37 A few
more are sound recordings such as Charles Tyler’s Saga of the Outlaws: A Polyphonic Sonic Tale of the Old & New West, the Beat Farmers’ Tales of the New West, and
Walking Wounded’s The New West.38 New West cuisine inspired two books, New West architecture another, and Canadians have adopted New West to describe changing economic, social, and cultural conditions from Winnipeg to Vancouver.39
The thirty-two remaining titles blend old and new trends. Eight address older
36 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth (New York, 1957); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964). See also Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, 2002).
37 Publishing houses using the phrase include New West Library (San Francisco), New West Publishing (San Rafael), New West Press (Hamilton, WA), New West Communications Corporation (Beverly Hills), New West House (Bruneau, ID); and New West Writers (Abbotsford, BC). For entertainment companies see New West Music (Van Nuys), New West Recordings (Abilene, TX), New West Records (Austin). For film studios see New West Films Production, and New West Entertainment.
38 Charles Tyler, Saga of the Outlaws: A Polyphonic Sonic Tale of the Old & New West [sound recording], Nessa Records N-16, one analog album, 1978; Walking Wounded, The New
West [sound recording], Chameleon Records CHLP 8613, one analog album, 1987; The Beat Farmers, Tales of the New West [sound recording], Rhino Records RNLP 853, one analog album, 1985.
39 For cuisine see Linda Eckhardt, The New West Coast Cuisine (Los Angeles, 1985); Dennis Rohde, Pizza: A Slice of the New West (Flagstaff, AZ, 1997). For architecture, see Cottle Graybeal Yaw Architects, Architecture of the New West: Recent Works by Cottle Graybeal Yaw (Des Plaines, IL, 2002). For Canada, see Anne Nothof, ed., Ethnicities: Plays from the New West (Edmonton, AB, 1999); Elma Schemenauer, Calgary: Heart of the New West (Calgary, AB, 2000); Darrel Janz, Calgary: Heart of the New West (Memphis, 2001); Frederick H. Candelaria, ed., New West Coast: 72 Contemporary British Columbia Poets: New Poems with Personal
Commentaries and Autobiographical Sketches (Vancouver, BC, 1977); John Richards and Larry Pratt, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in the New West (Toronto, ON, 1979); Eric Wells,
Winnipeg: Where the New West Begins: An Illustrated History (Burlington, ON, 1982); Paul Grescoe and David Cruise, The Money Rustlers: Self Made Millionaires of the New West (New York, 1985).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
152 SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
New Wests. Stephen Brown’s Voice of the New West: John G. Jackson concerns the Trans-Appalachian frontier. William Speer’s The Encyclopedia of the New West, Scott Solliday’s Chandler, Pioneer City of the New West, Stanley Noyes’s and Daniel Gelo’s Comanches in the New West, and Donald Pisani’s Water and American Government
(with a chapter on “Wiring the New West: The Strange Career of Public Power”) focus on the Nostalgic New West. Gary Elliott’s Senator Alan Bible and the Politics of the New West discusses the Ambivalent New West.40 Gene Gressley’s Old West/New West and Barbara Meldrum’s Old West-New West were less concerned with New West
than historiographical directions.41 The remaining twenty-four titles offer takes on the
post-1970 New West. Their main themes are environmental and social diversity, but diversity is riddled with contradictions. If urbanization had inspired pastoral dreams before 1945, the post-war, post-industrial West has fueled obsessions with wilderness.
By 1970, those who could afford what Roderick Nash called “full stomach” environ mentalism were fleeing urban social and cultural diversity for rural ecological diversity
and unpeopled spaces.42 One set of New West titles addresses the changing landscape. Robert Adams
christened this New West in 1974 with a photographic essay, titled The New West, that explored the impact of rapid growth along Colorado’s Front Range. As John Szarkowski explains in his foreword, Adams was distressed by how “sprawling non towns . . . suddenly cover so much of what was recently our beautiful countryside.”43 Jeanie Kasindorf’s The Nye County Brothel Wars, which portrayed a local struggle over
legalized prostitution as a Wisterian showdown between good and evil, implied that the West was still essentially wild and violent.44 More recent works have focused on the urban invasion of the rural West. In different places and with unique perspectives, writers have charted these cultural clashes. Dave Carty’s Born Again at the Laundromat roams Montana’s unsexy side to describe a world that will never find its way into a
40 Stephen W. Brown, Voice of the New West: John G. Jackson, His Life and Times (Mac?n, GA, 1985); Donald Pisani, Water and the American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley, 2002); William S. Speer, ed., The Encyclopedia of the New West, Containing Fully Authenticated Information of the Agricultural, Mercantile, Commercial . . ., rev. ed. (Easley, SC, 1979); Scott Solliday, Chandler, Pioneer City of the New West (Chandler, AZ, 1996); Stanley Noyes and Daniel Gelo, Comanches in the New
West, 1895-1908: Historic Photographs (Austin, TX, 1999); Gary E. Elliott, Senator Alan Bible and the Politics of the New West (Reno, 1994).
41 Gene M. Gressley, ed., Old West/New West: Quo Vadis? (Worland, WY, 1994) and Barbara Howard Meldrum, ed., Old West-New West: Centennial Essays (Moscow, ID, 1993).
42 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven, 1982), 343; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), 69-90.
43 Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range, fore
word by John Szarkowski (Boulder, CO, 1974), x.
44 Jeanie Kasindorf, The Nye County Brothel Wars: A Tale of the New West (New York, 1985).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
tourist brochure. Peter Decker’s Old Fences, New Neighbors muses over gentrification of western Colorado’s working ranches. Raye Ringholz’s Paradise Paved traces growth pressures in the inland West, while Liza Nicholas’s, Elaine Bapis’s, and Thomas Harvey’s
Imagining the Big Open uses Robert Redford’s romantic depictions of Old and New as a fulcrum to analyze the remaking of the West as a nature playground.45 In all these works a collision of urban consumers and rural producers has created, in the words of Aspen architects Cottle Graybeal Yaw, “a dynamically evolving rural-recreational lifestyle, blending work with play and creating new definitions of community.” Nothing
underscores this better than Elizabeth Flood’s Cowboy High Style and Bud Lilly’s and Paul Schullery’s Bud Lilly’s Guide to Flyfishing the New West, both of which explicitly link gentrified lifestyles to the rural West.46 At times, New West diversity can seem like little more than wealthy folk playing in the country.
New West studies of literature and art also stress diversity, and many expand the
conceptual and geographical boundaries of the Diverse New West. Brian Bouldrey’s Writing Home and Robert Gish’s First Horses feature short stories, memoirs, and po ems on a range of western experiences. Gregory Morris’s Talking Up a Storm honors western writers of national acclaim, while Krista Comer explores the spatial gendering of their works in Landscapes of the New West.47 Blending stories of trailer parks, gay neighborhoods, and wheat-bread suburbs, this New West is indeed demographically and culturally complex. This is the point of Charles Guerin’s The New West, which argues that recent western art is a “celebration of non-conformity of the artistic spirit.”48 The
urban vista of these studies is unusual, however. More typical in equating New West with rural, Ann Ronald’s The New West of Edward Abbey is nevertheless a quixotic entry. If Abbey’s love of wilderness is as New West as it gets, his glorification of sexist
loners is Old West according to Melody Graulich ‘s and Stephen Tatum’s Reading The
45 Dave Carty, Born Again at the Laundromat: And Other Visions of the New West (New York, 1992); Peter R. Decker, Old Fences, New Neighbors (Tucson, AZ, 1998); Ringholz, Paradise Paved; Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey, Imagining the Big Open. While lacking the New
West tag, Raye Ringholz’s Little Town Blues: Voices from the Changing West (Salt Lake City, 1992) also traces these stories in the New West hangouts of Aspen, Jackson, Moab, Moose, Park
City, Santa Fe, and Sedona.
46 Cottle Graybeal Yaw Architects, Architecture of the New West, 10; Elizabeth Clair Flood, Cowboy High Style: Thomas Molesworth to the New West (Salt Lake City, 1992); Bud Lilly and Paul Schullery, Bud Lilly’s Guide to Fly Fishing the New West (Portland, OR, 2000). See also “Points West,” Sunday Morning, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 18 August 2002.
47 Brian Bouldrey, ed., Writing Home: Award-Winning Literature from the New West
(Berkeley, 1999); Robert Gish, First Horses: Stories of the New West (Reno, 1993); Gregory L. Morris, Talking up a Storm: Voices of the New West (Lincoln, 1994); Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill, 1999).
48 Charles A. Guerin, curator, The New West: January ll-March 16, 1986, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, CO, 1986), 4.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
Virginian in the New West.49 Most of Reading’s authors follow paths blazed by Jane Tompkins in analyzing the racist, classist, and gendered structure of Owen Wister’s classic, but these essays seem more akin to New Western history than New West. The exception is Susan Kollin’s “Wister and the ‘New West,’” which shows how relevant The Virginian can be to modern range wars over public lands.50 The varied perspectives of these works reinforces the argument that the Diverse New West is being rocked by social and cultural change, but is this new?
A third set of books foreground contests over nature in the New West, but here diversity seems to contradict itself. Thomas McGuire’s, William Lord’s, and Mary
Wallace’s Indian Water in the New West and Carl Abbott’s, Sy Adler’s, and Margery Post Abbott’s Planning a New West both explore urban impacts on western nature. The essays in Indian Water trace the history of Indian water treaties, the growing pressure to shift water from rural to urban consumers, and the prospect of privatized water markets and declining federal support for tribes. Cities are engines driving rural resource extraction, but in Planning a New West they become nature’s friend as Portlanders lobby to save the Columbia River Gorge for scenic recreation, albeit at the expense of the economic and political power of gorge residents.51 Three more works focus mainly on New West struggles over public lands. Sharman Russell’s Kill the Cowboy and Charles Wilkinson’s The Eagle Bird chart the legacy of rural resource industries, yet both ultimately call for moderation and balance rather than unilateral closure of public lands to Old West interests.52 Less restrained is Timothy Egan’s Lasso the Wind. Egan, who in an earlier book advocated eliminating logging so the Pacific Northwest would have nicer scenery, adopts the same perspective for environmental conflicts around the West.53 One of the paradoxes of the Diverse New
West is that some of its advocates posit a Hobson’s choice between diverse nature and diverse communities.
Standing apart are three attempts to comprehensively analyze this New West. Michael Johnson’s New Westers is a breathtaking examination of market, scholarly,
49 Ann Ronald, The New West of Edward Abbey (Albuquerque, 1982); Graulich and Tatum, Reading The Virginian in the New West.
50 Kollin, “Wister and the ‘New West,’” 233-54.
51 Thomas R. McGuire, William B. Lord, Mary G. Wallace, eds., Indian Water in the New West (Tucson, AZ, 1993); Carl Abbott, Sy Adler, and Margery Post Abbott, Planning a New West: The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area (Corvallis, OR, 1997). For New West ten sions with Indians, see Robert Sullivan, A Whale Hunt (New York, 2000). For urban consump tion, see Tom Knudsen, “State of Denial” in the Sacramento (California) Bee, 27 April 2003, http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/ (accessed 3 December 2003).
52 Sharman Apt Russell, Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Reading, MA, 1993); Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird.
53 Egan, Lasso the Wind; Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (New York, 1990), 253. See also John Baden and Donald Snow, eds., The Next
West: Public Lands, Community, and Economy in the American West (Washington, DC, 1997); Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies; Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 18.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
literary, visual, and musical representations of the West, but its vast sweep results in reified clich?s such as the West is “willy-nilly… self-fashioning and self-imitative” and that “the whole scene is changing.”54 By contrast, Neil Campbell’s jargon-laden Cultures
of the American New West deftly exposes the New West’s shimmering condition:
Efforts to define the West inevitably reduce its complexities and smooth out its contradictions by transforming cultural processes into natural ones, history into myth. To view the West otherwise is to see it as sev eral spaces simultaneously, overlapping, in contact and exchange, as ‘thirdspace’. In this sense, the New West is always relational, dialogic, engaged in or capable of reinvention?and, therefore, contradictory, irreducible, and hybrid.55
Both Johnson and Campbell capture facets of the region’s complex dynamics, but neither delivers a coherent sense of where the New West is located. It seems spatially disconnected, flitting about from hip town to cool resort with lots of empty space in between.
At first glance William Riebsame’s Atlas of the New West seems to address this
problem. The maps of a peopled, cultured, playful, ugly West ground discussion as they reveal important shifts in perception. The New West appears more obviously diverse and explicitly interested (in all meanings of that word) in recreation than at any previous moment.56 Yet Riebsame’s central argument is overdetermined: the essence of the New West is a shift from the traditional economy of resource extraction to an
amenities-seeking service economy; the Internet and light industry revolutionized rural economies by drawing a highly educated class from cities to exurbia. “The New
West,” he argues, “is truly built by New Westerners, not by the commodities industry nor even the corporate logic of economies of scale.”57 Few authors more completely efface the West’s past, but essays by Wilkinson and Limerick reveal the Atlas’s underly ing tensions. Where Wilkinson sees in the restoration of a Missoula carousel and the
Quincy Library Group hopes of a kinder, gentler West, Limerick turns unusually (for her) pessimistic, doubting the New West’s newness and ability to “reverse history” to solve problems with social equity. The New West’s romantic dreams, she remarks at the end of her essay, “both shelters and darkens our lives.”58
54 Michael L. Johnson, New Westers: The West in Contemporary American Culture (Lawrence, 1996), 28, 149.
55 Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West (Chicago, 2000), 164.
56 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 95, 113, 124, 137; see also Michael Janofsky, “U.S. Utah Land Accord Incites Unlikely Critics,” New York Times, A18, 23 May 2003.
“Riebsame, Adas of the New West, 12, 109; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 133; Timothy P. Duane, Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West (Berkeley, 1999), 73-194; Joel Kotkin, The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York, 2000), 3-51.
58 For “reverse” and “darken” see Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” 165, 178; Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 38-44.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
The Atlas is a tremendous effort to document systematically what others assert anecdotally, but even its strengths undermine the notion of a New West. For one thing, Riebsame’s maps also reveal the disconnected nature of this New West. Logging,
mining, and farming still thrive, even if loggers, miners, and farmers do not.59 For another, essentializing rural history as extractive has immense rhetorical power, but this simplified relationship of past to present obscures crucial biases. Where the rural
West was purely extractive?a claim at odds with earlier New Wests?it now seems purely for play?which is equally problematic. As Wilkinson notes, “Most of the [New
West’s] ascendant values … cannot rightly be called new; all had long preceded” it.60 Anne Hyde adds that much of the “Interior West has always functioned as a sort of destination resort for wealthy grown-up children, with the poor providing the raw materials and the services to make such a fantasy possible.”61 Workers who must live in dorms reminiscent of nineteenth-century logging camps or commute long distances to service wealthy tourists underscore High Country News publisher Ed Marston’s observation that “El Nuevo West is also the old West.”62
Work, play, and class are but opening wedges; the New West markers falter repeat edly. Although the region might seem more diverse to New West writers, Asians, blacks, gays, Indians, Jews, Latinos, and women are hardly recent arrivals.63 Nor is popular
59 Beyers and Nelson, “Contemporary Development Forces in the Nonmetropolitan West,” 472; David M. Wrobel, “The View from Philadelphia,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (August 1998): 388.
60 Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 17.
61 Anne Hyde, “Nothing New Under the Sun: Continuities in the West,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (August 1998): 395. See also William Robbins, “In Pursuit of a Historical Explanation: Capitalism as a Conceptual Tool for Knowing the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Autumn 1999): 285.
62 Marston quoted in Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” 177.1 thank JoAnn Kalenak at High Country News for help with this citation. See also, William G. Robbins, “Creating a ‘New’ West: Big Money Returns to the Hinterland,” Montana The Magazine of
Western History 46 (Summer 1996): 66-72; Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 338-70; Ray Ring, “The New West’s Servant Economy,” High Country News, 17 April 1995; William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850-1986 (Seattle, 1988), 54-67.1 thank the anonymous reviewer for help with this point.
63 For New West diversity see Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 101-2. For criticism of the Atlas’ concept of diversity see Wrobel, “The View from Philadelphia,” 385; Hyde, “Nothing
New Under the Sun,” 397; Scharff, “Honey, I Shrunk the West,” 415. For the West’s diverse past see Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of The American West (New York, 1987); White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own.” For groups other than Indians, for whom the bibliography is too rich and the point too obvious to summarize, see Blake Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (New York, 1992); Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific
Northwest (Berkeley, 2003); John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City (New York, 1966); Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman, 1987); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class,
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
awareness novel. By the early 1970s, TV-Westerns such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Kung Fu, and Little House on the Prairie featured most of these groups in plots.64 If even Hollywood saw this decades ago, what is so new about the New West? This goes for gentrification, too. Some seem star-struck by the arrival of Bill Murray, Glenn Close, and Bruce Willis. Bookstores, baseball teams, and bison burgers are paradigmatic shifts; brew masters and espresso stands signify cultural advance.65 But this also only
makes sense if we ignore the history of national parks, Raymond tours, health spas, Harvey Girls, mountaineering clubs, the Columbia River Highway, and Sun Valley, all of which preceded World War II.66 Neither is the New West particularly western.
Claiming Ralph Lauren or Ted Turner as western icons has obvious flaws, and tech nology and the market affect far more than just the rural West. Gentrification is a force in many cities, not just South of Market and Belltown, and tourists and equity refugees have reshaped the upper Midwest and New England as much as Grass Valley
and Culture in the Women’s West (Norman, 1997); Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, 1989); Quintard Taylor, in Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York, 1998); Oscar Martinez, Mexican-Origin People in the United States: A Topical History (Tucson, 2001); Frederick C. Luebke, ed., European Immigrants in the American West: Community Histories (Albuquerque, 1998); Ava Kahn, ed., Jewish Life in the American West: Perspectives on Migration, Settlement, and
Community (Los Angeles, 2002); Ferenc Morton Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 1790 1917 (Norman, 2000). For critiques of the West as exceptionally diverse see Elliott West, “A Longer, Grimmer, But More Interesting Story,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 40 (Autumn 1990): 72-6; Michael P. Malone, “The ‘New Western History’: An Assessment,”
Montana The Magazine of Western History 40 (Summer 1990): 65-7; Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York, 1996).
64 Gunsmoke, CBS, 1955-1975; Bonanza, National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 1959-1973; Kung Fu, Warner Brothers and American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 1972 1975; Little House on the Prairie, NBC, 1974-1983.
65 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 97, 112-31, 139; Limerick, “The Shadows of Heaven Itself,” 165-6; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 30, 137, 144, 147-50.
66 Anne F. Hyde, “Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception,” in A New Significance, 175-201; Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness; Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, 2001), 81-146; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, 1997), 71-171; Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 3-111; Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 50-112, 168-201; Anne M. Butler, “Selling the Popular Myth,” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York, 1994), 787-90; Mary Spence, “Waitresses in the Trans-Mississippi West: ‘Pretty Waiter Girls’, Harvey Girls, and Union Maids,” in The Women’s West, 219-34; Michael P.
Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco, 1988); Erik Weiselberg, “Ascendancy of the Mazamas: Environment, Identity and Mountain Climbing in Oregon, 1870 to 1930” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1999); Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle, 1998); Abbott, Adler, and Abbott, Planning a New West, 28-32.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
and Missoula.67 Stripped of its sensationalism, New West boosterism sounds like any other ad for a “new, improved” product.
What is left is a vision of the rural West similar to Joel Garreau’s Empty Quarter. Wilkinson’s wilderness is “a peculiarly western institution”; Timothy Duane’s “real West” is where “the sounds of Nature dominate the sounds of Culture”; Egan’s is “a little space for discovery.”68 These neo-frontier fantasies can sound modest, but they often imply a casual social and cultural deracination, or what Virginia Scharff calls “a lamentable resettlement project.”69 Wilkinson first coined the term “Lords of Yesterday” to describe ancient laws that still regulate public resources, but Duane and Jim Lichatowich have redefined it as a synonym for the people who work in those industries.70 Desiring to end these jobs, Duane and Egan move beyond describing rural decline to argue that hard times justify euthanizing extractive industries.71 This rationalization reduces value to income and dismisses those activities which make less
money. The archetypal argument is that timber has declined in importance, so Pacific Northwesterners should stop logging public lands.72 The creation of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area exposes the power of this logic, but Egan offers its most expansive venting. Although he justly worries about environmental abuses, he also seems to view the western past through a prism of contempt. When not insult ing loggers, miners, and the state of Montana, or wishing to end New Mexico’s cattle
67 For claims about the West see Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 38-41; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 166-80, 194-211; Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 74-80. For national trends see Kotkin,
The New Geography, 26-35, 44?79, 162. For gentrification see Lynne Heasley, “Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?” Human Ecology 31 (June 2003): 194-5; Madeleine Hall-Arber, Christopher Dyer, John Poggie, James McNally, and Ren?e Gagne, New England’s Fishing Communities (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 42-6; Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 2001), 239, 265-6, 304. See also S. Watson, “Gilding the Smokestacks: The New Symbolic Representations of Deindustrialised Regions,” Environment and Planning D 9 (March 1991): 59-70.
68 Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 73; Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 156; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 82; Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston, 1981), 302-5, 310-1.
69 Scharff, “Honey, I Shrunk the West,” 410.
70 For “Lords” see Charles Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (Washington, DC, 1992), xiii, 3-27. For uses of Lords see Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 172; Jim Lichatowich, Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis
(Washington, DC, 1999), 54.
71 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 143, 122-58; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 194-211, 229-47; Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, 4-5.
72 Whitelaw, “Oregon’s Real Economy”; Ed Whitelaw, “Rich Oregonian, Poor Oregonian,” Oregon Quarterly 74 (Summer 1995): 28-30; Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 14; James McCarthy, “First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the
Wise Use Movement,” Environment and Planning A (July 2002): 1285-6; Richard White, ‘”Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, 171-85.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
industry so he can catch trout, he spins fantasies of giving the Rogue River Valley a makeover so it looks like Napa or Sonoma.73
Egan may be an extreme example, but he is far from alone in desiring a rural New West mirroring his urban and urbane tastes.74 Concluding that “cities are basically anti-nature,” Duane and many many others with means have moved to exurban com munities with hopes of building a different future.75 The ability of digital technology to free these people from the old geography of workplaces is a principal engine of the exodus, yet once again the New West seems familiar. Migrants have helped displace small-town enterprises with national franchises that cater to their tastes, and they import many of the economic and social problems they wish to escape, including soaring real estate values, tax and education conflicts, and gated communities.76 The quest for environmental amenities has also produced massive contradictions. Cashing in on inflated urban and suburban home prices allowed equity refugees to buy larger properties in rural places, thereby gaining greater access to nature, but the resulting, largely unregulated growth has exacerbated groundwater pollution, habitat fragmen tation, and forest fires.77 In other words, the Diverse New West led to a self-defeating repetition of supposedly Old West problems.78
Rural westerners have not accepted passively this New West. Rationalized mar ginalization goaded an equal and opposite reaction from Wise Use and Local Control movements.79 Ranchers in Nye County, Nevada, and Catron County, New Mexico,
73 Abbott, Adler, and Abbott, Planning a New West, 42-69; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 11 32, 147-53, 185; Egan, The Good Rain, 178.
74 For urban colonization of the rural West in the past, see William G. Robbins,
Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, 1994), 162-83.
75 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 73-121, 433; Kotkin, The New Geography, 27-51.
76 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 256-66, 360; Hyde, “Nothing New Under the Sun,” 395; Scharff, “Honey, I Shrunk the West,” 411-13; Robbins, “Creating a ‘New’ West,” 68-70;
Wyckoff, “Inside the New West,” 401; Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 344.
77 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 195-250; Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 14, 17.
78 Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 27; Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 25, 140, 155; Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 29, 31; Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 117, 263-4, 386-410, 431, 438; Kotkin, The New Geography, 39, 170, 175, 185.
79 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 142-6; Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 130-1. Urban rural tensions are at least continental in scope. For the United States see “Reconciling Alaska’s Urban-Rural Split, Wilda Marston Theater, Loussac Library, Anchorage,” http://www.common wealthnorth.org/transcripts/4urbanruralsplit.html (accessed 3 December 2003); and Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Election 2002: Rural Voters and Rural Issues, December 2, 2002, (Report for the W K. Kellogg Foundation, 2002), http://www. wkkf.org/pubs/FoodRur/Pub3791.pdf (accessed 3 December 2003). For Canada see “The Rift,” News in Review: Online Resource Guide, Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), September 1998, http://www.tv.cbc.ca/insidecbc/newsinreview/sept97/election97/rift.html (accessed 3
December 2003; site now discontinued). For a global perspective see Jacob Burke and Julian Beltran, “Competing for Water,” UN Habitat, United Nations Human Settlements Program, http://www.unhabitat.org/HD/hdv6n3/competingforwater.htm (accessed 3 December 2003).
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
160 SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
became the poster children of this rural backlash, menacing BLM agents and wolves and garnering national attention. Many neighbors seemed to share their resent ments, if not extremism, but in the big picture this latest version of nullification was less a viable response than a badge of marginalization.80 Change came, and denial
was impotent. More interesting and significant were the efforts of a broad group of rural westerners seeking a different course. For example, Ed Marston met Wise Use
members to discuss mutual concerns about gentrification, and Egan visited a similarly contentious roundtable in Jackson. Tellingly, Marston started to host monthly meetings of environmentalists and ranchers, but Egan bolted in disgust “to find a true West,” apparently thinking that cultural difference is not part of the real West.81 Whether Egan’s perspective is urban, exurban, or weird, he clearly does not understand the rural West. It is as contentious as any city, and while Wilkinson’s view of Quincy seems romantic, he is correct that what goes on in those meetings is also important.82
Accommodation through local coalition building is the most significant new development in the rural West.83 Major shifts in environmental management over the last fifteen years have forced wrenching changes to the region. Closed mills and plants
made under-employment a way of life. Income levels fell and government revenues plummeted. “Reskilling” programs embittered residents, but there was little new in this.
As Scharff notes, westerners “have been complaining that outsiders and speculators have been ruining the place for roughly five centuries at last count.”84 More notable was the creation of coalitions, sometimes called watershed councils, to air concerns and
find solutions. Local efforts such as the Mattole Restoration Council, Quincy Library Group, Trout Creek Mountain Working Group, and Nestucca Watershed Council have forged considerable, if subtle, changes around the West. Although most attention is focused on how the groups repair habitat, their greater achievement has been in forcing
80 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 142-5; Richard White, “The Current Weirdness in the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 28 (Spring 1997): 5-16; James McCarthy, “States of
Nature and Environmental Enclosures in the American West,” in Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 117-45; McCarthy, “First World Political Ecology,” 1290.
81 James Sherow, “Environmentalism and Agriculture in the American West,” in The Rural West Since World War 11, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (Lawrence, 1998), 70-1; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 10. Both corporations and environmental organizations have condemned these coalitions because they could not control events, but as Charles Wilkinson notes, “The single greatest ally of those who would wreck the West is the idea that the West is homogeneous,” The Eagle Bird, 155; Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 27.
82 Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 20; McCarthy, “First World Political Ecology,” 1281-2; Wilkinson, “Paradise Revised,” 41-4
83 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 24, 463; Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 145; Seth Zuckerman, “Toward a New Salmon Economy,” 63-73; Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 61.
84 For “complaining” see Scharff, “Honey, I Shrunk the West,” 410. For economic im pacts, see Helvoigt, Adams, and Ayre, “Employment Transitions in Oregon’s Wood Products Sector During the 1990s.”
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
residents to confront the West’s resilient heterogeneity. Early meetings are often studies
in pathos due to mutual distrust and despair, but familiarity breeds sympathy as well as contempt. Caricatures slowly, painfully, grudgingly become neighbors. This is not Ren and Stimpy singing “Happy Happy Joy Joy,” but more like crew cuts and longhairs, speculators and back-to-the-landers, and resource workers and environmentalists sit ting down and talking and talking and, occasionally, finding common ground. Land users sometimes agree to alter practices, and exurbanites sometimes admit that the
Old West has not and will not fade away in any simple manner.85 Newcomers also discovered that they have changed in unexpected ways. One
result of these coalitions has been the modification of opposition to public subsidies for natural resource industries. A few critics now dispute the classist dismissal of rural
economics. Charles Wilkinson, for example, wants to recalibrate subsidies to favor small-scale operations and local communities rather than corporations. Duane is more selective, wanting to aid farmers but end logging except for “craft” carpentry, a relic economy that is a hallmark of gentrification.86 Wilkinson and Duane are em blematic of the frustrations that accompany local accommodation. In struggling with the complexities of the rural West, solutions are often halting and incomplete, but the effort itself is significant. In turning away from zero-sum games, in rejecting the no tion that compromise is weakness, rural westerners may have found a way to redefine debates that too often rage in ignorance and defiance of local wishes.87 To the extent
that they question the wisdom of gentrification, they might also create something at considerable odds with this latest New West.
While the American West is changing, change is a truism for us historians. Thus, the New West is better understood as boosterism than analysis, as a rhetorical flour ish sharing more with “Rain Follows the Plow” or “Come West and Live” than “The Significance of the Frontier” or The Legacy of Conquest. New West works best at justifying gentrification and selling books. Journalists and writers use it because pub lishers care about sales, circulation, and viewer shares, and historians are implicated, too. There have been three New West papers given at Western History Association
85 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 488-9, n.25; Freeman House, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species (Boston, 1999); Mike Connelly, “Home Is Where They’ll Lay Me Down,” Orion: People and Nature 23 (Summer 2001): 19, 21; Mark Sternen, personal and various commu nications; Scott Staats, “Hatfields Recognized for Sustainable Ranch Management,” Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, 7 December 2001; Joseph E. Taylor III, “History, Memory, and Salmon: Reconciling the Past in Natural Resource Management,” (paper presented, Seventh International Symposium on Society and Resource Management, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, May 1998.)
86 Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 122-3; Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 307-9; Christensen, Red Lodge and the Mythic West, 212-38.
87 Joseph E. Taylor III, ‘”Well-Thinking Men and Women’: The Battle for the White Act and the Meaning of Conservation in the 1920s,” Pacific Historical Review 71 (August 2002): 356-87.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
meetings, but one historian added the phrase for Imagining the Big Open and three others adopted it for the volume’s subtitle.88 If the only reason to use New West is sales, however, why perpetuate an idea that is neither new nor western, let alone one which masks so many of the West’s least admirable traits? Scholars are different, or
at least we should be. For better and worse we can keep cheap tricks at arm’s length, and now seems high time.
My problem with New West is not simply political discomfort but the phrase’s scholarly isolation. Have we already forgotten the breakthroughs of the 1980s, that the West is American history and America is world history? Similar forces affect
many places, yet nobody else talks of a New New England, New Amazon, or New Nepal. So why marginalize oneself with ghettoized terminology?89 New West inhibits comparisons; “consumption,” “colonialism,” and “post-colonialism” make these stories relevant to broad groups of scholars and activists. As geographer James McCarthy notes, the rural American West is not the Third World, but the environmental and
social tensions arising from its gentrification reveal ‘”more ambiguity, porosity, and commonality’ within and between the categories of ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds” than historians usually acknowledge.90 Western environmental issues and violence is one example. Peter Walker argues that these conflicts often “reflect underlying tensions between competing capitalisms that commodify nature in incompatible ways.”91 The resulting battles have been waged on at least two very different fronts: one occurs in state structures (courtrooms, legislatures, administrations) among those with capital; the other unfolds through extralegal violence by marginalized groups. From this per spective, Wise Use and Earth First! activists have more in common with each other and other rural resistors around the world than New West can ever convey.92
Only by eschewing the insularity of New West do we perceive the global relevance of what seems like regional gentrification. Take for example that archetypal New
West pastime, fly fishing. William Kittredge overstated things when he described the Rockies as a “bumper-to-bumper raceway,” and he cast too much blame on “fly-fishing nuts who saw A River Runs Through It,” sold their homes, and moved to Montana.93
88 For New West papers see WHA conference books for 2003 (p.34), 2001 (p.43), and 1995 (p.32). For changed titles see 2001 (p. 41), 1999 (p. 38) and Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey, Imagining the Big Open, v-vi.
89 Patricia Limerick made the same argument about “frontier” in “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James Grossman (Berkeley, 1994), 72-80; a review of paper and session titles for the American Society for Environmental History conferences from 1995 to 2003 revealed no use of the term “New
West” by environmental historians.
90 McCarthy is quoted in Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional* Political Ecologies,” 10. See also McCarthy, “First World Political Ecology,” 1296 and Robbins, Colony and Empire.
91 Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 17.
92 McCarthy, “States of Nature and Environmental Enclosures in the American West.”
Kittredge, quoted in Johnson, New westers, 343.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
Still, those “nuts” reveal trends that run like the Lake Missoula floods through history and across continents. Fly fishing has been a core form of gentrified play for centuries, and for just as long anglers have constrained local access to streams while planting all sorts of exotic fish. Owning a fly rod was a sign of wealth and taste, but things are different since Norman Maclean’s book and Robert Redford’s movie. Changes can be mapped by the growth of stores that serve fly fishers, but like so much about the New West, the story is contradictory and complex.94 The spread of Orvis shops marks fly fishing’s passage from rare avocation to popular sport, and like climbing and kayaking, marketing successes fueled overcrowded experiences and degraded environments.95 As the West fills with Izaak Walton wannabees, fly-fishing’s frontier is migrating again, this time to Kamchatka, where the Portland-based Wild Salmon Center is battling “red caviar poachers [who] are permanently destroying these spawning grounds.” The UN pledged its support to this war effort, but as usual nuances are blurring. It is hard to know exactly what is going on, but my guess is this is as much about gentrified capital ism as irresponsible locals. The Itelmans and Koryaks, after all, have been eating vast amounts of salmon eggs since at least 1740, when Georg Stellar noted that “Ikra, or dried fish eggs … is one of the most popular and nutritious foods on Kamchatka.”96
94 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 116; Michael McGovern, “The Reel Story,” http:// www.outdoor-retailer.com/or_publications/archives/07_99_archive/07_99g.htm (accessed 3 December 2003, site now discontinued); Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (Chicago, 1976); Robert Redford, A River Runs Through It (Columbia/Tristar, 1992). For western angling
Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (Boston, 1899), 57-79; Captain Cleveland Rockwell, “The First Columbia River Salmon Ever Caught with a Fly,” Pacific Monthly 10 (1903): 202-3; Zane Grey, Zane Grey’s Adventures in Fishing, ed. Ed Zern (New York, 1952); Lisa Mighetto, “Sport Fishing on the Columbia River,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 87 (Winter 1995-1996): 5-15. For angling politics see Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, 1999), 166-202.
95 Daryl Gadbow, “Missoula-Area Fisheries in Good Shape,” Billings (Montana) Gazette, 20 February 2003; “Mixed Reviews for Plan to Cut River Crowding,” Great Falls (Montana) Tribune, 17 June 2002; Tom Dickson, “Cross Currents,” Montana Outdoors 34 (July
August 2003): 6-10. Little of this is new. Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Fishing Club had to move twice before 1900 to escape overcrowding and habitat decline, and Portland anglers were pro
moting new areas to disperse crowds from the Clackamas River in the 1910s. Colleen J. Sheehy, “American Angling: The Rise of Urbanism and the Romance of the Rod and Reel,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst, MA, 1992), 79; “Nearby Streams Lure To Anglers,” Portland Morning Oregonian, 10 May 1914, sec. 2, p. 4; “1200 Fishers On River,” Portland Morning Oregonian, 19 April 1915, 11.
96 For “?kra,” see Georg Steller, Steller’s History of Kamchatka: Collected Information
Concerning the History of Kamchatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyle, and Various Customary Practices, ed. Marvin W Falk, trans. Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore, Rasmuson Library Historical Translation Series, vol. 12 (Fairbanks, AK, 2003), 119. For “poachers” see Paul Webster, “U.N. Joins Russia’s Fight to Save Western Pacifie Salmon,” Science 301 (29 August 2003): 1167. The title unintentionally signals the impetus of this battle, since Russians would hardly refer to Pacific salmon as “western.” See also Elizabeth Arnold, “Scientific Program in Russia Combines Tourism, Fishing and Science in an Effort to Preserve Russia’s Pristine Waters and Variety of Fish,” Morning Edition (NPR), 20 January 2003; Elizabeth Arnold, “American and Russian Scientific Study of Salmon in a Remote Region of Russia,” Morning Edition (NPR), 21 January 2003.
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
Western gentrification also encompasses South America, where clothing mag nate Doug Tompkins has become the Latin American version of Ted Turner. Like his buddy Yvon Chouinard, Tompkins made his millions in the outdoor recreation industry and the West’s sporty fashion trends of the 1980s. Proceeds from the sale of
his two companies, North Face and Esprit, have enabled him to buy huge swaths of “wilderness” in Chile’s Region X and western Argentina. Tompkins’s goal is to stem the ecological impact of globalization by converting the lush forests of alerce trees into a permanent preservationist park. In the process, though, he has evicted poor residents and created ill will with neighbors and the government. Although Tompkins is trying to build bridges with Chileans, he also promotes elite fun hogging at his ecotourism resort called Caleta. There, enlightened tourists from places like Aspen, Jackson, and Ventura enjoy his imagined Pumalin Park, dine on gourmet organic meals, and sleep in plush lodges.97 Tompkins and transnational fly fishers underscore Peter Walker’s observation that “aesthetic environmental ideologies are not ‘obstacles’ to capitalist accumulation, rather, they are at the core of a new kind of capitalism.”98
This should make even the most credulous New West booster nervous. When
hip becomes pass?, when the “barbarians” invade the sanctuaries of Veblen’s “leisure class,” then cool will morph.99 It is already happening in vaunted New West enclaves. Gentrified play is moving on, and as it does, local boosters are seeking new ways to attract capital. New West rationales for saving nature can implode under these circum stances, and, as Bill Cronon warns, the habits of thought that inspired recreational environmentalism have been poor safeguards at home.100 Donald Worster, Patricia Limerick, and Paul Sabin have already illustrated the tendency of the American
West to slip its geographic moorings under the sails of “frontier” and “West.” In a similar manner, the New West has had so many lives because its mythic qualities are so serviceable. Its emblematic power, substantive pliancy, and spatial coyness make it eminently adaptable, and because Egan is correct about western amnesia, it seems
more than silly speculation to wonder whether the next New West will be the Far East or the Antipodes.101
97 John Ryle, “Lord of All He Surveys,” Outside 23 (June 1998): 57-68, 167-9; William Langewiesche, “Eden: A Gated Community” Atlantic Monthly 283 (June 1999): 84 105; “Now He Is Buying In Argentina,” Santiago Times (Chile), 27 August 2001, http://test.chi rongroup.com/splash/stimes/index.php ?nav=story&story_id=451 (accessed 3 December 2003; site now discontinued).
98 Walker, “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies,” 17.
99 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1994).
100 Beyers and Nelson, “Contemporary Development Forces in the Nonmetropolitan West,” 472; Hal Clifford, “The Gear Biz,” High Country News, 27 October 2003; Peter Walker and Louis Fortmann, “Whose Landscape? A Political Ecology of the ‘Exurban’ Sierra,” Cultural Geographies 10 (October 2003): 469-91; Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”
101 Donald Worster, “New West, True West,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 141-3; Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century”; Paul Sabin,
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Joseph E. Taylor III
For all these reasons New West tells us less about the West than the writers who
use the term. Depending on how one counts these things, this is now the fourth or fifth New West, and each has been a window into the era’s hopes and anxieties. Technology, markets, and the state converge repeatedly in these tales, and while no two periods have been alike, a few themes emerge over and over. Entrepreneurial and gentrified spins are ubiquitous in New West literature, as is the paradox of diversity. The link between urban development and pastoral yearnings suggests that as the city grew more heterogeneous, the educated and wealthy viewed western nature increas ingly as a white refuge from darker realities.102 Rural Indians, women, and workers
rarely speak in this literature because most of it has been written by an urban literati,
primarily eastern before 1960 and mainly western since 1970. The shifting residency of
New West authors does matter, but so does their gentrified perspective and colonizing discourse because they are the strongest continuities in New West historiography. The New West is a simplistic and loaded trope. Its reasoning is flawed, its history troubling, and we, of all people, should be trucking in more sophisticated terms.
“Home and Abroad: The Two ‘Wests’ of Twentieth-Century United States History,” Pacific Historical Review 66 (August 1997): 305-35; Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 109-59.
102 Louis Warren, “Wilderness and Civilization: Race and Nature in American
History,” (paper presented, American Society for Environmental History, Durham, NC, March 2001.)
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 20:56:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Contents
[141]
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
Issue Table of Contents
The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 141-266
Front Matter
The Many Lives of the New West [pp. 141-165]
Texas Rangers, Canadian Mounties, and the Policing of the Transnational Industrial Frontier, 1885-1910 [pp. 167-191]
The Ups and Downs of Mountain Life: Historical Patterns of Adaptation in the Cascade Mountains [pp. 193-213]
Field Notes
Undiscovered History: The Thoughts of Thom Ross [pp. 214-224]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [p. 225-225]
Review: untitled [p. 226-226]
Review: untitled [p. 227-227]
Review: untitled [pp. 227-228]
Review: untitled [pp. 228-229]
Review: untitled [pp. 229-230]
Review: untitled [pp. 230-231]
Review: untitled [pp. 231-232]
Review: untitled [pp. 232-233]
Review: untitled [pp. 233-234]
Review: untitled [p. 234-234]
Review: untitled [p. 235-235]
Review: untitled [pp. 235-236]
Review: untitled [pp. 236-237]
Review: untitled [pp. 237-238]
Review: untitled [pp. 238-239]
Review: untitled [pp. 239-240]
Review: untitled [pp. 240-241]
Review: untitled [pp. 241-242]
Review: untitled [pp. 242-243]
Review: untitled [pp. 243-244]
Review: untitled [pp. 244-245]
Review: untitled [pp. 245-246]
Review: untitled [pp. 246-247]
Review: untitled [pp. 247-248]
Review: untitled [pp. 248-249]
Review: untitled [p. 249-249]
Review: untitled [pp. 249-250]
Review: untitled [pp. 250-251]
Review: untitled [pp. 251-252]
Review: untitled [pp. 252-253]
Book Notices [pp. 255-257]
Recent Articles [pp. 259-266]
Back Matter