Vacations with Cowboys & Indians : Taming the West With Words : Writers May Be Unintentionally Spoiling Paradise by Sending a Stampede of City Slickers Heading for the Hills.

The American West is crawling with debunkers these days. A new breed of western writer is making its mark, arguing that the West of the imagination-and in particular of Hollywood’s imagination-is on the verge of extinction, its prairies ravaged by over-grazing, its mountains torn up by mining, its forests stripped, and its park lands overrun by commercial tourism.

Meanwhile, more and more travelers are finding that the West they first glimpsed during Saturday matinees is every bit as breathtaking as the movies made it out to be. The boom in dude ranch vacations, national park attendance and second home development-for that matter, the amount of academic attention the West is getting-are all signs that the nation’s century-old love affair with the West is stronger than ever.

The high cost of foreign travel, the aggressive marketing of national parks and the successful revival of Westerns such as “Dances With Wolves” and “City Slickers” partially explain the renewed popularity of Western travel. But there is another force at work in the promotion of the late 20th Century Old West. It has something to do with the law of unintended consequences.

Many of the same writers who have been ringing the death knell for America’s most mythic landscape, have helped set in motion the century’s last stampede of western tourists. Traditionally, the West was portrayed as a land of second chances-the place where city weary Americans at last could be at their best. The literature of the West still trades on that old nostalgia. Only now, say the writers, time is running out on the dream.

Novels like Ralph Beer’s “Blind Corral” and Dan O’Brien’s “In the Center of the Nation” present heroic but doomed struggles of westerners to protect the land and a way of life from mining companies, real estate developers, poachers and artifact thieves. Tony Hillerman’s gentlemanly Navajo detectives risk their lives to protect their land and culture. Doug Peacock’s “Grizzly Years,” tells how theauthor, a Vietnam veteran, regained his sanity working to save the great bears of the northern Rockies. Ex-New Yorker Gretel Ehrlich tells a tamer but equally moving story about finding a new life as a sheep herder in Wyoming after her fiance dies of cancer. These and other works about modern day cowboys, geologists, big city dropouts, drifters, detectives, drunkards and dreamers generally have one thing in common: a belief in the redemptive powers of the land west of the 100th meridian.

It’s no wonder these books are so prominently displayed in hotels and airports from Albuquerque to Jackson Hole or that western travel consultants mail out book lists to prospective clients. The authors may deplore the growth that is steadily gnawing away at the mountain West, but their writing promotes it more eloquently than any chamber of commerce brochure. “Montana, The Last Great Place,” reads the title of one bulging anthology of serious western writing. “White Man in Paradise” is the title of a recent Esquire Magazine article about the West.

I, for one, must admit that many of my travels through desert and mountain country were the result of books and magazine articles that impelled me to get a glimpse of a wilderness that might well vanish in my lifetime. That my footprints help hasten that process, has not deterred me. I belong to a breed of traveler--and there are a lot of us--who only stay away after we encounter too many of our own kind on the trail.

Ironically, some of the most beguiling travel writing has been done by writers who have stated the most passionate cases against the pressures of tourism and development. Over the past few years, a steady stream of articles by serious western writers such as Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, William Kittredge and the late Edward Abbey have celebrated the wonders of mountain and desert as well as the pleasures of old-fashioned cow-town life.

These evangelists of open spaces have taken to promoting their favorite places in lushly photographed articles for Travel and Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler--complete with highway maps, the names of favorite guides and outfitters, lists of sleepy cafes where just the locals eat and the address of hotels where the only entertainment is a CB receiver and a snoring dog.

Sometimes, with these articles, the romanticizing of the West can get so mixed up with the merchandising of it that you have trouble telling where one stops and the other starts. One Outside Magazine article, billed as a feature about northern New Mexico’s Little Tesuque River, turned out to be something else altogether. It was a thinly veiled advertising spread on outdoor clothing companies, their models posed smartly along a stretch of the Little Tesuque as it twists its way through the Santa Fe National Forest.

Written as they so often are by the best of contemporary western writers, the new, high-toned travel journalism breathes an air of exclusivity. McGuane is hardly beating a drum for industrial tourism when he reveals the location of a favorite trout stream in western Montana in a 1990 issue of Conde Nast Traveler. McGuane is writing for people who know and love the arcana of fly fishing--not to mention the equipment--that McGuane, a consummate gear man, loves to dote on. The same is true for Harrison’s reverie in the same magazine about a road trip across the golden, quilted outback of eastern Montana. Harrison was writing for people with time on their hands, for a couple of buddies in a piebald Caddy with a gallon of Glen Livet and an ancient Mannlicher to keep the rattlers at bay.

But just because they are not writing for the tour-bus crowd, doesn’t mean these authors don’t have a large audience out there.

Already there is at least one Montana-based travel planning firm that will point you to these places, trace the navigable back roads on a map, mark the trail heads, find you a guide or tell you what rancher will put you up for the night. All that for a price high enough to guarantee you’ll be pretty much by yourself, at least this year. And if you like your destination well enough, the same travel company will put you in touch with a real estate agent.

As the character of the West steadily changes, and towns like Telluride, Santa Fe, Sedona, and Red Lodge turn into high-country suburbs, a number of factors are to blame. The booming second home market, the proliferation of personal computers and the invention of the fax machine has made it possible for thousands of well-to-do Americans to live where they once took vacations. But in various ways writers helped fuel the trend. There are old-timers in Santa Fe who date the transformation of that town to the much publicized arrival of John Ehrlichman in the late 1970s. It wasn’t long before Ehrlichman, writing in Travel and Leisure and other publications, was letting the world in on the secrets of chic rusticity.

Like Ehrlichman, who has moved out, the travel magazines lately have been forsaking the glitter capitals as they search for what is left of the unspoiled West.

Increasingly, you can find articles about American Indian food served up in Bluff, Utah or towns in Montana where movie stars are “banned.” For a while, Livingston, Mont., served as the model of the post-Santa Fe West. It was one of those places where the nostalgia was served up with few frills, where the road into town passed a weed-choked rail yard set off by tumbled down corrals and rusty fertilizer tanks. There were real people about. Hard stares greeted the tourist who wandered into the wrong barroom. Wheel chair access was not universal. Waiters were not yet called wait persons. People hadn’t tied red bandannas around all of the dogs’ necks.

Now there are a half dozen dude ranches in the vicinity. Jane Fonda and Ted Turner live down the road. A made-for-TV movie based on a McGuane book was just filmed nearby. And if you’re reading about it here first, you haven’t been paying much attention to the travel press.

Today’s writers aren’t the first to send out mixed signals about the frontier. Since Colonial times, American literature has expressed contradictory attitudes toward wilderness. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan New England believed that the forest harbored devils or, at least, gave rise to devilish instincts. James Fenimore Cooper’s noble woodsmen Uncas and Natty Bumppo, on the other hand, belonged to a natural world that bred virtue and valor.

Western writers today wrestle with their own set of conflicts, inclined toward preservation but also sympathetic to struggling neighbors who can’t survive if too much land is protected from grazing or mining or subdividing. “The old order in the West has a right to fear the environmentalists. (They) don’t care much about loggers, and farmers and miners,” wrote William Kittredge in “White People in Paradise.” Edward Abbey’s writing often mixed reverence for the land with scorn for armchair environmentalists whose ardor for the land has never been tested by trying to make a living off it.

For many western writers struggling to make ends meet, an assignment from a travel magazine helps keep the baby in diapers and the house trailer in propane. It may mean giving away a secret or two or blazing a trail to a favorite fishing hole where you would just as soon not bump into some fellow in Patagonia waders.

But a writer’s got to do what a writer’s got to do. It’s a noble tradition. The West was civilized by those who least wanted it civilized. The late A.B. Guthrie wrote about that in his famous novel “The Big Sky.” In the last chapter of the book, two aging mountain men share a bottle and talk about how their world had changed for the worse and how they helped make it that way. They had trapped the beaver, killed the varmints, subdued the Indians, made the place safe for greenhorns.

“It’s all sp’iled, I reckon. The whole caboodle,” says one.

“Everything we done it looks like we done against ourselves and couldn’t do different if we had knowed.”