A trailblazer in frontier myth-busting

One measure of Bernard DeVoto’s unique standing in American letters is that a writer of Wallace Stegner’s stature and power was moved to write his biography. Its title, “The Uneasy Chair,” is a sly homage to DeVoto’s long-running Harper’s Magazine column, “The Easy Chair,” in which he enlightened readers on both the grandeur of the American West and the dire threats to its existence.

DeVoto is best remembered nowadays as a historian of the West -- “Across the Wide Missouri” won a Bancroft and a Pulitzer, and “The Course of Empire” won a National Book Award -- but he also was a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, editor and teacher.

Born in 1897 and reared in Utah by a Catholic father and a Mormon mother, he was educated at Harvard University and lived most of his adult life in the vicinity of Cambridge, Mass. Early on, however, he set himself the task of explaining the West to the rest of the country. “DeVoto’s West” is an indispensable and illuminating collection of his essays on the subject.

DeVoto grew up in what he described as “the frontier’s afterglow,” and he saw for himself how little the frontier myth resembled the reality of scratching out a livelihood in a desert wilderness. He disdained the romantic but misleading notion that the West was pioneered by rugged individualists, a view that surely endeared him to Stegner. “How indeed did the frontier community exist at all,” wrote DeVoto, “except by means of a close-knit cooperation?”

“Footnote on the West,” the first essay in the collection, written in 1927, is livelier and more playful than many of the other pieces, if also just a bit arch. DeVoto, for example, argues that “the West” is a term that properly describes only Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah -- and, if pressed, the eastern fringe of Washington state and Oregon. He allows that Nevada is “West by attraction,” but he wholly excludes the Golden State: “California is not West,” he writes, “oh, decidedly and emphatically and with all the insistence of our nature, California is not West.”

Here DeVoto also anticipates the ruling passion of his later years: the conservation of natural resources in the West. “[I]n the West we are, far more than any other part of the country, in touch with the earth and subject to it,” he writes. “Its winds and drouths [sic] and plagues are not rumors or spectacles to us, but realities that we must deal with. We sometimes are resentful of the earth, and sometimes we actively hate and fear it, but we are never forgetful or disdainful of it.”

“Fossil Remnants of the Frontier: Notes on a Utah Boyhood,” published in 1935, is both a Twain-like reverie and a sharp-eyed memoir. When a gaggle of boys picked on a little girl, DeVoto recalls, she could plausibly threaten to summon Bat Masterson to her defense. His grandmother was expert with “the weapon known to her generation as a horse pistol.” And DeVoto is proud of his own wilderness skills, including the use of firearms, but he acknowledges that it had nothing to do with survival. “We were practicing a frontier craft,” he explains, “but practicing it as an art.”

DeVoto refuses to sink into sentimentality or to engage in mythmaking. He seeks to “understand the Indian side of extermination,” for example, and he insists on defining the frontier experience in terms of irreducible facts and figures. “It was a strange land, and all its strangeness came from the simple arithmetic of its rainfall,” he writes with characteristic flourish. Indeed, even when he descends into the micro-politics of conservation in the 1940s and ‘50s, he turns a memorable phrase that makes a policy issue come alive. “Mining is liquidation,” he writes. “Hundreds of ghost towns in the West ... signalize this inexorable fact.”

“DeVoto’s West” reveals Bernard DeVoto as a trailblazer who, no less than John Muir, opened a way through the wilderness for a whole generation of environmental writers and ecological activists, including Edward Abbey and Marc Reisner. He was, as Stegner wrote, “hardheaded and softhearted,” as well as “the nation’s environmental conscience and liberty’s watchdog.” Eco-politics aside, half a dozen of DeVoto’s essays are such gems of good writing -- so graceful, vivid and affecting -- that no reader of Western letters should overlook them. *