A landscape that’s all over the map

Geography focuses on features of the landscape that can be observed and measured, including climate, vegetation, population and land use. But the geographers whose essays are collected by editor Gary J. Hausladen in “Western Places, American Myths” affirm that the American West transcends such tools of measurement. To truly understand the West, they acknowledge, a scientist must consider not only what we know but also what we think we know.

“To many historians and historical geographers, that which cannot be documented and proven to be true is of little or no interest,” writes Dydia DeLyser in “ ‘Good, by God, We’re Going to Bodie!’: Ghost Towns and the American West,” one of 13 writers, all but two of them geographers, whose works are gathered here. “But for scholars interested in social memory ... issues of truth and falsity take on new roles.”

Even something as fundamental as where to find the West has been hotly debated. In a survey, Walter Nugent found that Western historians, journalists and writers placed the boundaries of the West all over the map. The only region most agreed on was that between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, which he identifies here as “the Unambiguous West.”

Indeed, virtually every aspect of the American West is subject to scholarly dispute, prompting geographer D.W. Meinig to coin the phrase “American Wests” to summarize his view that assertions about “the West’s regional unity were sometimes more apparent than real,” as William Wyckoff puts it in his essay. The point of this collection is to explore the different, often conflicting ideas that arise when we utter the word “West.”

Most remarkable about “Western Places,” however, is how sharply the West snaps into focus and how surprising the landscape seems when viewed through the various lenses of working geographers. For every map depicting dry statistical data -- “Hispanic elected officials, per capita, 1990,” or “ ‘American Indian Reservations’ west of the Mississippi” -- we get a dozen illuminating, provocative references to the raw material of “historical geography,” from the dynamiting of sacred mountains in search of gold and silver to the role of the English-Spanish rivalry in the making of the Anglo bias against mestizos of the New World.

The essay “An Inescapable Range, or the Ranch as Everywhere” by Paul F. Starrs is a brilliant example of the alchemical blend of geography and mythology. He reminds us that ranching has always been confined to the least desirable stretches of Western wilderness -- “a sizable void where night lights illumine not.” To make the point, a satellite image of the West by night, a stretch of unbroken darkness, shows how bleak and empty most of the area has always been. “Pretty much every place where cities aren’t there are ranches.”

Starrs is fascinated by the points where myth and reality touch and spark. Ranch “landscapes are a territory of the imagination,” he allows, yet as a “functioning metaphor, livestock ranching is about quotidian life, where the real smothers the imaginary.” Even so, he finds in the hardscrabble life an undeniable grandeur. “The level of skill ... in the ability to herd animals that are ... quite cantankerous or at least willful, along twenty or thirty miles of difficult terrain, reflects more than a casual acquaintance of the land in between,” he rhapsodizes. “Western Places” reveals aspects overlooked in the popular culture. Richard H. Jackson explores the vast utopian enterprise of the Mormons, who envisioned the so-called State of Deseret as a half-billion-square-mile theocracy sprawling across nine states. The effort to create “a community of believers” ultimately was defeated by non-Mormon pioneers whose commitment to self-reliance and self-enrichment was the dominant value of America as a whole and the West in particular.

“[Joseph] Smith’s vision of a utopian society in which religion and day-to-day were a seamless whole,” Jackson concludes, “is ... replaced by the American pattern of urbanism, individualism, and social Darwinism.”

Even familiar features of Western life are seen afresh. Gambling was a fixture of frontier life more than a century before Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo in Las Vegas in 1946, as Pauliina Raento explains in “The Return of the OneArmed Bandit.” Terrence W. Haverluk’s “Mex-America: From Margin to Mainstream” shows how deeply so-called Latino culture is rooted in the folkways of people here long before the conquistadors:

“One Aztec dish, now de rigueur at many Super Bowl parties, is the Aztec blend of ahuaca (avocado) and mulli (usually a mixture of chiles and tomatoes),” writes Haverluk. “The Spanish called it guacamole.”