True West

Nobody calls the West wild anymore, but it’s still a place where you can die of exposure while walking your dog. Last spring a Santa Fe woman did just that, taking a wrong turn on a mountain path outside the city limits. Her dogs guarded her body for two weeks before she was found. In 1995, an RV salesman took a scenic route through the mountains of Southern Oregon, lost his way in the snow and starved to death. In 1994, a woman jogging near Sacramento was killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion. Step outside the sanctuary of the cities--the increasingly Easternized coastal corridor of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles--and the West is still a large and indifferent place. By virtue of the impersonal power of its vast spaces and violent weather, the American West--however fragmented, developed, subdivided and grazed over--is still a place of terrifying extremities. The West, as Larry McMurtry has written, “has always been and remains in many ways just Too Much.”

The Too Muchness of it all--the promise and the peril of the West--has been working in the minds of Americans for generations. “For more than a century,” writes Richard White in his “new history” of the American West, “ ‘It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,’ ” the West “has been the most strongly imagined section of the United States.” Revisionist histories, such as White’s and those of Patricia Nelson Limerick, are the latest imaginings. The West has stood for both the escape from civilization and the imposition of it; the contradictions are entrenched in our language: How the West Was Won, How the West Was Lost, Manifest Destiny, the “opening” of the “frontier,” the “settling,” the “closing,” the “conquest” of the West, Custer’s Last Stand, “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Westerners themselves generated their own individual mythologies, appropriating the fictitious lore of Billy the Kid and other Indian fighters into their own heroic personal histories, but the larger myths were built up by newspapers and dime novels, filmmakers, artists and writers who stocked the public imagination with Western characters and images. The period of the great imaginative writers of 19th century Eastern America (Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson) was succeeded by a 20th century so dominated by Western writers and Western subjects--Mark Twain, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Barbara Kingsolver, Norman Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song”--that such writing seems no longer regional but simply American. In Sam Shepard’s “True West,” one of the play’s two crazed brothers yells, “There’s no such thing as the West anymore! It’s a dead issue!” The West he mourns is the imagined West of freedom, land and opportunity, a West that has always existed only in the mind, set against a harsh reality of land with little water and less opportunity. But if there is no True West, there are many true Wests.

The strongest images of the West have derived from the manic salesmanship of their creators and the needs of their audiences: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show created an exotic, static vision of the American Indian for a fearful public; newspapers and biographies shaped Custer into a national hero; Hollywood westerns elaborated, through the cowboy and the lawman, the image of the American male. Purveyors of modern visions of the West, as represented by several new books discussed here, are more muted, less melodramatic, prone to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the subject. As always in the West, as many fail as succeed.

Robert D. Kaplan’s “An Empire Wilderness” is a new fantasy for a public afflicted with millennial jitters of an aggressive and technocratically futuristic West. He imagines the West transformed into a 21st century polyglot economic powerhouse whose dynamism will all but erase the artificial borders between Canada, the United States and Mexico and render the federal government largely irrelevant, except as a global police force. As a fantasy, it seems designed to flatter Americans with a version of Manifest Destiny that subsumes countries to the north and south. As a cautionary moral tale, it is disapproving; Kaplan is offended by the American appetites for drugs and food, noting that the poor, particularly, are overweight, “some grossly.” As a prediction of the end of American civilization as we know it, it is science fiction unsupported by fact. Gazing into his crystal ball, Kaplan concludes that “the next passage will be our most difficult as a nation, and it will be our last.”

Kaplan, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, born and raised in the East, drove, flew and traveled on buses throughout the western half of North America, interviewing locals on the ground: ranchers, public relations flacks, professors, social workers, military men, mayors, poets, tour guides and business people. It is an epic journey but geographically confusing; he jumps from Omaha, Neb., to California, to Mexico, then wanders north through the Southwest, Oklahoma and Montana to the Pacific Northwest, with only the most abrupt and awkward transitions to link his consequential trips.

It would hardly matter that Kaplan’s conclusions are both highly speculative and obvious--yes, jets and computers have changed the world, people have moved to the suburbs (the business districts of which he refers to as “post-urban pods”)--were he a trustworthy guide and insightful observer. But his tone is that of an East Coast policy wonk; while being given a distressing tour of the slums of north St. Louis by a local black cop, Kaplan tells us that he was moved to shout out the phrase “policy vacuum.” He is oddly titillated by the apocalyptic scenarios of “large, bloody cataclysms” destroying the federal government conjured up by a reclusive radical who lives in the desert outside of Tucson.

Despite frequent comparisons of 21st century America to the city-states of ancient Greece, he is historically careless, asserting in one factually garbled sentence that, a few blocks from the Palacio Real in Santa Fe, N.M., “is the dead drop where associates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg passed nuclear secrets from the nearby Los Alamos laboratory to the Russians.” In fact, there was no “dead drop,” and the bridge where Klaus Fuchs personally handed information on the atomic bomb to Harry Gold is long gone. While hiking along the Rogue River in Oregon, Kaplan finds himself “amid the cut-glass purity of the Three Sisters,” a tricky geographical maneuver considering that the Rogue originates far to the south of those mountains.

Kaplan’s ruminations finally seem to have little to do with historical, actual or imagined Wests but rather with a desire to calculate or triangulate, using various coordinates and statistics, an unknowable political future. His title, drawn from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” is as abstract and mystifyingly symbolic as its source, and his West is a scattered, pointillist portrait of isolated individuals and scenes.

Several other new books struggle to contain the enormousness of the West through the principle of collection. “Eyewitness to the American West” is a popular anthology of “eyewitness” accounts edited by David Colbert. As its title indicates, “Eyewitness” seems determined to trade on the immediacy of television journalism. But the notion of the “eyewitness,” with its overtones of the passive observer or bystander, is inadequate as the organizing principle of an anthology of historical texts. “Eyewitness” does not begin to elucidate the roles played by such participants in history as Hernando Cortes, Sam Houston or Lewis Keseberg (a cannibal-survivor of the Donner party who was accused of murdering Tamsen Donner before eating her flesh), whose accounts are included here. They did not simply see it happen, they made it happen, and their accounts are biased, nuanced and complex, requiring far more context than is given here.

Weighted toward the latter half of the 20th century, the anthology also suffers from what has been termed “presentism,” a preoccupation with recent history, much of it trivial. Why, for example, is Lucille Ball included? Is “Looking for Work at Disneyland”--Richard Stayton’s essay on applying for a job as a dwarf--really representative of some crucial element of 20th century experience? Overall, “Eyewitness” is poorly developed; its headnotes and their accompanying dates (which identify when the events described occurred and not when the extract was written or published) are insufficient.

“Lasso the Wind” by Timothy Egan, the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times, is a collection of pieces that somehow, although it never truly defines the “New West” of its subtitle, adds up to a larger whole, a wistful, qualified appreciation of the West as it is now. Egan has truly inhabited the rural, recreational, wild and historical places of the West that he writes about--Acoma, N.M.; Escalante, Utah; Butte, Mont.; even Las Vegas--and his pieces are detailed reporting at its best, built with information, history and statistics and enlivened by characters who are shifty and taciturn in ways peculiarly Western. “Top of the Food Chain,” in which Egan describes a fishing trip he took with his brothers in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, is a particularly subtle and effective essay, comparing the luxuries of modern camping with descriptions from the journals of Lewis and Clark of their near-fatal traverse of the same region. Without preaching, Egan simply lays out the accoutrements, material and moral, of lives separated by nearly 200 years of human history and presence upon the land, inviting us to look at what we have gained and lost in becoming the dominant animal of our ecosystem.

“The New Encyclopedia of the American West,” edited by the Yale historian Howard R. Lamar, is a collection of a different order, a richly illustrated and readable compendium of the history, mythology and personalities of the West that spans both the traditional and revisionist schools of Western history. Though “Eyewitness” was frustratingly off the mark about the Donner party, a seminal event in the history of American emigration, “The New Encyclopedia” is precise and dryly understated, describing it as an “ill-fated emigrant expedition” and relegating the nefarious Lansford Hastings, who sent the Party to their doom by way of his disastrous new route through the Wasatch Range, to his proper place in historical hell. All encyclopedias inevitably exclude someone’s pet subjects (I wished for a full reference to the nuclear reservation at Hanford, Wash., which is mentioned briefly in the entry on Los Alamos, and for more on religious sects that have sprung up in the West) but for both browsers and researchers, “The New Encyclopedia” will amply repay time spent with introductions to new and surprising characters and overviews on everything from western films to U.S. Indian policy.

The true masterpiece of these collections--these attempts to corral the contradictory and contentious true Wests of American experience between covers--is Wallace Stegner’s “Marking the Sparrow’s Fall,” a posthumous compilation of magazine articles, essays and one piece of short fiction edited by the writer’s son, Page Stegner. Wallace Stegner, who was born in 1909 in Iowa and died in 1993 in New Mexico, spent his life living in and chronicling the West. At Stanford University, as director of the creative writing program, he taught dozens of writers, including (according to “The New Encyclopedia”) McMurtry, Kesey, Thomas McGuane, Tillie Olsen, Edward Abbey, Ernest Gaines and Wendell Berry. He wrote two books about the Latter-Day Saints (“Mormon Country” and “The Gathering of Zion”), biographies of John Wesley Powell (“Beyond the Hundredth Meridian”) and Bernard DeVoto (“The Uneasy Chair”) and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Angle of Repose,” based on the life of Mary Hallock Foote, a Western artist and writer.

The pieces collected in “Marking the Sparrow’s Fall” are not merely interesting leftovers of a wide-ranging career. Some of these essays are among the finest work about the West and its meanings. “Xanadu by the Salt Flats,” about Saltair, “the stately pleasure dome that used to rise out of the waters of Great Salt Lake,” the Coney Island of the West, where Stegner worked selling hot dogs as a teenager, is eight pages that powerfully evoke the tragic nostalgia of the West, where nature and humanity vie as creators and destroyers of intense beauty:

“All through its history Saltair suffered from the forces that wanted it down. Every winter the salt-laden wind ate its paint off. Waves heavy with salt washed away bathhouses and tore out stretches of causeway. There was a succession of fires. Then in April 1925, just about the time I was beginning to dream of another summer out there, I stood on the lawn of my high school, on the eastern edge of the city, and watched smoke and flames erupt at the edge of the lake. Smoke on the water, fire on the flood.”

Ruminating on a photograph of the Saltair he once knew, Stegner mused on this beautiful, transient bubble of human artistry: “This pleasure dome was never built. It was decreed, it rose like an exhalation.”

This is also the theme of the essay on Lake Powell, the watery grave of Glen Canyon, where the works of man--the Glen Canyon Dam--destroyed one natural wonder to create another. Stegner writes of the unnatural lake without the hysteria or bitterness of environmental rhetoric or the jingoism of political cant; he takes a longer view. He argues, calmly, rationally, for the preservation of one arm of the former canyon, but underlying the argument is the observation that, like Saltair, Lake Powell is a passing phase. Stegner’s understanding of the land of the West--the aridity and essential uninhabitability of much of it--is essentially the same as that of his onetime student, Larry McMurtry, who has written about “the quality of impermanence” suggested by even the most densely populated parts of the West, where “the Big Quake, patient as a grizzly, still stalks San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

“Meantime,” Stegner writes, in “Why I Like the West,” “I want to go on living in some one or another of the Wests, perhaps because they are new, perhaps because they are still in the stage of development, not of repair, possibly because of the excitement that accompanies the coming of age of an active and promising adolescent. The Wests are waxing rather than waning countries.” Everyone who lives in the West, or loves it, should pay attention to Stegner, one of the few writers to convey a lyrical understanding of the fact that the human presence in the West is perennially ephemeral.

And who would have it any other way? The savor of the West has always been drawn from its meaningful peril; the human pursuit of its gold-laced mountains and warm fertile valleys has been a Pilgrim’s Progress salted with scalding hot springs, rattlesnakes, mudslides. After a journey that would eventually kill countless emigrants, William Clark wrote, in view of the Pacific in 1805: “[M]en appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence Ocian.”