Under Starry Skies Above : OF CHILES, CACTI, AND FIGHTING COCKS Notes on the American West <i> by Frederick Turner (Berkley/North Point Press: $19.95; 211 pp.) </i>

There were several good reasons for reading this book, one of which, to anyone with a love of the spice of life, is paramount: a first-rate recipe for “Basic Texas Red” chili. As Frederick Turner points out in his chapter, “A Lot Like It Hot,” one must be careful to distinguish between chile , which is the pepper, and chili , which is the dish you make from chiles; that, however, is the least of the informative tidbits about chiles and chili that can be found here.

Turner, whose book “Spirit of Place,” published earlier this year, touched but briefly on the American West, here turns his attention completely to the spirit and place of that expanse whose peculiarities, stark drama and absence of visible boundaries altered the consciousness of so many of its immigrants. Mustangs, saguaros, the lives of cowboys and Indians (at least as seen by white eyes), the Gargantuan proportions of the Czech beseda in Deming, the Horatio Alger rise of the Basque sheepherders, cockfighting, Billy the Kid: One cannot say: “It’s all here,” because the legends are endless, but this is as good a place as you are likely to find from which to begin a revisitation of the American West.

Of course there are changes from “the olden days.” Government management (or mismanagement, which amounts to the same thing) has wrought ecological endangerment everywhere one cares to look. Nor has the situation been markedly improved by the well-meaning intervention of environmental groups, equally devoted to management though on terms somewhat different than those of the local ranchers and farmers.

It would be too easy to devote an entire book to the disasters of a overly managed land; it would be too easy to ignore such things altogether also, and Turner does not skirt the issue in his essay on the plight of the mustangs. It is not an easy issue: The Bureau of Land Management was pretty clearly rendered absurd by the Reagan Administration, but the claims--and worse, the methods--of the environmentalist groups are equally open to criticism. The vast herds of wild horses that once roamed the West are severely diminished--but were their huge numbers such a good thing for them?

Government and special-interest groups are not the only instigators of change. Boosterism has sufficiently obscured enough of history to leave the story of Billy the Kid eternally ambiguous, and the American consciousness itself has suffered changes in the passage of time. The festival celebrating the Czech community in Deming, N.M.--that has taken place for nearly 60 years--may be seeing its last days as new generations lose interest in producing klobase , the Bohemian sausage of pork and beef that is the staple of the beseda . But the tourism that it inspires may be sufficient to keep the custom alive, though the intimacy of the earlier gatherings has long been forsaken.

Like the Czechs, the Basques have witnessed change: The way of these remarkable sheepherders, who steadily extracted pasturage from the most unlikely places (such as the Great Basin of eastern Oregon), has eroded, but without much regret. That way was too lonely, too cut off from the mainstream to long survive. Yet there are some regrets: The decline of one way of life is seldom, if ever, isolated from the culture from which it sprang. When a generation begins to think in the language of its surrounding culture, the mind set of the mother tongue is doomed.

Turner is at his best when writing about people, and his chapter, “Buying the West--and Selling It: Two Versions,” is clearly the best piece in the book. There he describes the quintessentially wild Western lives of two gifted adventurers: James Willard Schultz, who lived among the Blackfeet, marrying a Pikuni woman, and wrote “My Life as an Indian”; and the French-Canadian artist and writer Joseph-Ernest-Nephtali Dufault, who lived as a cowboy and was better known to us all as Will James, the author of “Smoky” and “Lone Cowboy.” Schultz’s and James’ stories are as Western as sagebrush, and Turner serves them well with intimacy, simplicity and affection. Will James appears little known to younger generations, but to my own and that of my parents, his books and paintings made the Old West live. It is good to see him remembered so fondly.

Turner’s American vision is alive: We see through his words. He has found his voice, but it is still a question whether he has discovered what he needs to say with it. The West is a strongly delineated place in outward form, and this can sometimes produce a deceptive impression of depth in those who write about it. “Spirit of Place” was a fine book, and this is a good one too, but they are not the best that we could receive from Turner, given his abilities. A broad vision is not enough; it needs to go deeper.

Meanwhile, try the chili.