CLOUDS OF DISPUTE COVER WORLD WARMING : POLITICAL HEAT VS. SCIENTIFIC LIGHT : The American West: Bust, Boom, Hang On

A lot of nonsense is being written these days about the American West. Recent magazine and newspaper accounts, now spreading to network television, portray a West mired in social despair, an economy gone bust with no new boom in site. The land is harsh. Small towns wither. Young people move away. The western myth has died.

There is some truth there. But this is not new. Such comments overstate the case. They leave the impression of a sudden phenomenon. They make it appear the Plains states and the intermountain West are in terminal decline, leaving little reason for anyone to want to live there anymore. And they imply that the only difference between good times and bad is a little economic exploitation of the West’s natural resources.

“When oil was good, Wyoming was good,” Newsweek observed in an article about “America’s Outback” in its Oct. 9 edition. Yet when the oil business was booming in Wyoming--and the coal business, too--there was plenty that was exceedingly bad. The state sprouted dreary colonies of trailer houses; its schools and other public facilities were overwhelmed; there was alcoholism, mental illness and domestic violence--and bitterness between those who got the money and those who did not. Most often, the best jobs went to outsiders who drifted on as soon as the boom faded.

But western life never has been easy. There is never enough rainfall, except when there is too much, as when the hay has been cut and left in the field to dry, or when rain falls as hail and batters a good grain crop to nothing, or when a blizzard hits in the middle of lambing. From the beginning, ranching was a marginal operation. Businesses and towns perpetually struggle. Young people have always been lured out of state by better job opportunities.

This new interest in the West seems to result in part from the success of books about the region in recent years, including Ian Frazier’s current bestseller, “Great Plains,” and poignant novels by Montanan Ivan Doig and Wyomingite Gretel Ehrlich. The last time the national media took such interest was during the energy boom of the 1970s when the so-called Overthrust Belt of the Rockies was the hot topic of petroleum clubs in Denver and Casper and when Wyoming was becoming the national leader in coal production. Those articles tended to focus on the burdens of success, not the benefits. The universal question was whether sudden prosperity and an influx of strangers, uncaring of western traditions, would alter the romantic life style of the rancher forever.

More than just economics is being dredged up in the latest round of articles and essays. The theme suggests a dark side to the West marked by dreariness, bitterness, brutality and exhaustion. In examining the recent literature of the West, U.S. News & World Report says, in an article entitled “Our Imaginary Plains,” that the heroes of the late-20th Century are nothing like Zane Grey’s lonesome cowboy. They turn out to be, after all, people pretty much like people anywhere.

Looking to the future, the Wall Street Journal quoted Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University describing the Plains as “an austere monument to American self-delusion” centered on the concept that emigrants to the West could start a new life on 160 barren acres granted under the Homestead Act. The Poppers then indulge in a sentimental notion of their own: that as the Plains become depopulated, they be turned into a massive grasslands park inhabited by buffalo and other beasts. Newsweek romanticized the same theme by declaring that the promise of a century ago is dead in the six Western states celebrating their centennial years in 1989 and 1990, and that the West may return to what it once was: “Vast silent spaces where wild game stare at the passing horseman.”

In fact, 1889 was not so terrific. The brief age of the open cattle range in my home state of Wyoming ended in the terrible blizzards of the late 1880s. Soon after Wyoming joined the Union in 1890, the state’s big ranchers, with tacit support from state government, hired a trainload of Texas gunmen to kill a score of small ranchers suspected of being rustlers (but the small ranchers surrounded the gunmen at the TA Ranch near Buffalo and the governor had to send the army to the rescue).

The era of the homesteader was no glory period, either. The Plains are littered with sun-bleached skeletons of homesteads gone bust and consolidated into large ranches. Abandoned windmills dot the prairie like spindly tombstones.

In the 1940s, my parents moved from Philadelphia to live the romantic life of ranchers, buying a homestead near Big Horn, Wyoming, with a two-story house, a cabin, two barns, two small ponds, lots of redwing blackbirds, cheat grass and a team of horses named Buck and Bally. My folks tried to raise sheep and went bust. They tried milk cows and went bust. We moved to Chicago and two years of a good-paying job, but by then my mother and father could not stand to be away from Wyoming. They preferred being poor in Big Horn to being comfortable anywhere else.

Rugged individualism was not necessarily the key to running a small ranch. It was being a good neighbor. That was wartime and the only way to survive was for everyone to help everyone else. When we had milk cows, Dad would take turns with other ranchers, driving around the Big Horn Loop road picking up their full milk cans every morning and taking them to the creamery in Sheridan. In the summer, we would go to the Bensons or the Dows to help put up hay and then everyone would come to the Stall place and do the same.

No vacations. When the hay is ready, it must be cut. Cows have to be milked twice a day, every day. Sheep and cattle must be fed regardless of weather. Animals get sick and must be tended. Horses kick. Tractors slip off blocks. Hands get caught in gears. People age quickly under such conditions. Medical attention may be many hours away.

The promise of the future may be no more than the ability to hang on, get through the summer without losing a crop, or the winter without having to buy expensive feed--and being able to make the next bank payment. Perhaps to buy a new pickup next year. Or see the youngest of seven children become the first to graduate from high school. Maybe go off to Laramie or even California to college.

Outside money and business is greeted with ambivalence or suspicion. Many of these people like things pretty much the way they are. They go down to the bar for a beer or two in the evening, cheer for the the high school teams, go to town to shop on Saturdays, attend dances at the community center and know everything about their neighbors there is to know. They will be there through the current bust. They will be there through the next boom, too. Harsh as the land may be, they love it. They are survivors.