Voices from the Bottom of the Bowl: A Folk History of Teton Valley, Idaho, 1823–1952 by Thomas Edward Cheney (review)

154 Western American Literature been, and a strong virtue of Little Town Blues is that it demonstrates that small western towns have always been in motion. In many small towns, this movement may not now be perceptible to the eye, and may have traversed a predictable boom /bust course from founding as cattle, timber, mining, or railroad centers to sleepy decadence interrupted only by the arrival of an occasional shopping mall. But in the case of an increasing number of small towns, as Ringholz and Muscolino document, a new cycle of development has emerged, one based more on tourism, leisure, and ostentatious displays of wealth than on hard work and the simple life. Their portrayal of Moab (Utah), Sedona (Arizona), and Jackson (Wyoming) establishes that a major concern for the West now lies in development which, paradoxically, may not destroy the environment in the gross ways so popular with earlier entrepreneurs, but which will, nonetheless, transform small semi-rural towns into overpriced, sterile fortresses in which only the rich can afford to live. This is a kind of development which Ringholz calls “resortification,” and which one of her interviewees calls “desanctification,” even though some observers of the West might find it difficult to discover a recent time period without some form of desecration. In any case, Ringholz tries to find a middle ground between unbridled development and no development. Her response is “customized develop­ m ent”—growth which is the result of careful, systematic planning and which is calculated to preserve as much as possible of a town’s individual personality. Inevitably, as she suggests, the “Old West” is giving way to the “New West,” a process that means economic development, since the post-Columbian West was never without some kind of exploitation of the environment. Let us hope that “customized development” can at least slow down the momentum toward a small-town West dominated by specialty shops and Wal-Marts. /fHOMAS MADDEN Eastern Oregon State College \yVoicesfrom the Bottom ofthe Bowl: A Folk History ofTeton Valley, Idaho, 1823-1952. By Thomas Edward Cheney. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991. 136 pages, $16.95.) Thomas Edward Cheney grew up in the Teton Valley, a valley shaped like “an earthen bowl. . . with a crack” (the Teton River) running through it. “Like a culture in a bowl,” he states, “I am a form of life generated there.” As a prom inent folklorist, Cheney recognized the value of the “form of life gener­ ated there” and recorded it in this book of loosely connected stories, set mostly in the first quarter of the century. Although Cheney says his mother is “the binding twine holding the whole together,” more likely it’s Cheney who lends continuity to the series of vignettes, or else the Teton Valley itself, which connects all the characters. Reviews 155 The book includes tales of diverse characters, such as farm boys who learn the facts of life; a mother who subjects her children to late-night bedbug raids; a sensitive, dreamy bankrobber who pleads insanity because of schizophrenia; and a red-haired schoolteacher who (it is said) entertains men in her hotel room. The book also includes more sobering tales, like the horrors experienced during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Throughout these tales, Cheney pro­ vides us with an entertaining and informative look at the folkways of pioneer community life. ^JJETSY WARD Utah State University ^Seasons ofDeath and Life: A Wilderness Memoir. By Maggie Ross. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990. 211 pages, $19.95.) ^Jíáges ofthe Earth: A Man, A Woman, A Child in the Alaskan Wilderness. By Richard Leo. (New York: Henry Holt, 1991. 303 pages, $19.95.) Both of these books are about wilderness, although in wildly different ways. In Maggie Ross’s intensely personal yet confusingly oblique memoir, wilderness is a place of escape from a world of cruelty and pain. Wilderness provides solitude, a haven in which healing can occur. In Richard Leo’s recollections, wilderness is the presence of something more—not healing, but fulfillment. In Seasons ofLife and Death, an Anglican solitary nun, wounded in unidenti­ fied ways, arrives in the wilderness of a Northwestern coastal canyon. She forms an intimate attachment...