The Mountain West: Interpreting the Folk Landscape by Terry G. Jordan, Jon T. Kilpinen, Charles F. Gritzner (review)

The Mountain West: Interpreting the Folk Landscape Terry G. Jordan, Jon T. Kilpinen, and Charles F. Gritzner Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 Reviewed by Jam es W. S cott Professor Emeritus, Western Washington University D edicated to the memory of Fred Kniffen— in the authors’ words the “founding father of research in American folk geography”— The Mountain West is a major addition to the sparse collection of litera­ ture on the cultural geography of the American West. In this slim volume of seven chapters, the authors waste little space on prelimi­ naries and quickly move to the purpose in undertaking their present research. In an opening chapter titled “The American West: Continuity or Innovation?” Jordan and his co-authors reject unequivocally histo­ rian Earl Pomeroy’s claim that “the sources on the West are in large part literary” (p. 8). At the same time, they call into question the two most widely known— if now far from widely accepted— interpreta­ tions of the West: the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, which in part stresses the continuity of American settlement, and Walter Prescott W ebb’s Great Plains thesis, which stresses innova­ tion as the genesis of successful settlement west of the 100th meridian. 186 SCOTT: Review of The Mountain West 187 Both theses, as well as others advanced more recently by the “new” historians of the West, have tended to view the West as a monolithic section, if not a homogeneous geographical region. By contrast, ge­ ographers have tended to view the West as “an aggregate of distinctive subregions.” In this new work, the three authors provide an alternate and specifically geographical interpretation of the West, choosing the methodology of cultural landscape analysis. Their purpose is “to assess the degree of Western cultural distinctiveness and, more im­ portant, to determine the mainspring cause of this fabled sectionalism” (p. 3). To reach their goal, the authors first decided to limit their atten­ tion to the “mountain” West— a vast region that stretches 3,000 miles from the Mexican border northward to Alaska and embraces not only the American states included therein but also the province of British Columbia and the Yukon. Twenty-five “research districts” were identified, and within these some 1,500 individual log structures were located and examined as to design, structure, and component parts, as well as assessed as to their probable origin and evolution. A fur­ ther 500 structures located in intervening areas also were identified and examined. Needless to say, this involved field work on the grand scale, field study that extended over three decades and took the re­ searchers across tens of thousands of miles of roads and trails. In the authors’ words, “dirty boots and wet socks go with cultural geogra­ phy,” and, in reference to their comment on Earl Pomeroy, “we know more about sunburn and wet feet than we do of hemorrhoids” (p. 8). The next five chapters deal in turn with log dwellings, log out­ buildings, log carpentry traditions, wooden fences, and the material culture of haymaking. In each of these chapters, meticulous exami­ nation and assessment of existing structures enable the authors to reach their ultimate conclusion that there is no monolithic Western section or region, but rather a mosaic of subregions in which conti­ nuity and innovations each may be present to a greater or lesser degree. 188 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 58 • 1996 In the chapter on log dwellings, with which the majority of the potential readers of the book likely will be familiar, the authors dis­ cover that many traditional folk houses present in the American East or the Canadian East are uncommon or even totally absent in the mountain West, while others once widely distributed in the East un­ derwent changes of various sorts in their relocation to the West. Absent for the most part are the double-pen dwellings of Eastern America, such as the dog trot, the saddlebag, and the Cumberland house, whereas the single-pen English plan house is widely dispersed across the West. A total of 139 dwellings— about 16 percent of the total— were located, but only in a few of the 25 districts, notably the Mormon regions of...