Reality and Illusion in the West

REALITY AND ILLUSION INTHE WEST Richard E. Lingenfelter. Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986. viii + 664 pp. Illus. Carol Fairbanks, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 300 pp. Illus. Will Baker. Mountain Blood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. xi + 175 pp. Illus. Richard Batman. James Pattie's West: The Dream and the Reality. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. xii + 378 pp. Illus. Joseph C. Porter. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and his American West. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. xviii + 362 pp. Illus. Christine Bold In the last tale of Will Baker's Mountain Blood, the narrator crawls through a tunnel deep into a mountain, pursuing a thin vein of gold. His guide is a Mexican miner who is reworking an old site abandoned long ago by the Spanish. Within the story, the incident clearly functions as a metaphor for the writer's attempt to rework the subject of the West from a new perspective, and so expose hidden nuggets of meaning. Not all the authors under discussion use this metaphor, but it applies to all their endeavours. Often by means of prodigious research, these five works mine different regions for stories, images or characters which were previously unknown or misunderstood. In the process, they all tap a familiar vein: the amalgamation of reality and illusion in the West. Three of the books deal with collective images of the West. The most exhaustive documentation of the reality underlying a widely held set of illusions is Richard Lingenfelter's Death Valley and the Amargosa. In effect, Lingenfelter does for Death Valley what Walter Prescott Webb did for the Great Plains: he details the environmental reality of the region, thereby revealing the process by which it exercised an imaginative force on American culture. 1 Lingenfelter is a research physicist, where Webb was a historian, and perhaps for that reason, Lingenfelter draws fewer speculative syntheses than his distinguished predecessor. Nevertheless, his revelations are rich and fascinating. 78 Christine Bold For Zane Grey readers, Death Valley is "an abyss of ashes, iron walled and sun blasted, hateful and horrible as the portal of hell," a trap of "poison air" and "midnight furnace winds" (444). This image is the first illusion stripped away by Lingenfelter, who shows that the perception of endless horrors owes less to statistical evidence than to the valley's name. The area is "the lowest, hottest, driest spot in America'' (3), but it holds only one significant dangerdehydration -for the unprepared summer traveller. Archeological evidence suggests that Death Valley has been inhabited for at least ten thousand years and, since records began, the number of deaths there have averaged less than one per year. The name seems to be the legacy of the 1849 gold seekers: a most ill-prepared group. En route to the California diggings, various parties struck south through the valley, imagining it to be a shortcut. Their blunderings are detailed here, as they quarrelled among themselves, wandered off the trail of water holes and stumbled on to the salt flats. Despite the very real torments of dehydration, scurvy and starvation, only one man is known for certain to have died, and his companions named the valley when they finally straggled out in February 1850. If one ruling misconception concerns the dangers of Death Valley, another concerns its mineral wealth. The first nuggets of gold were discovered in 1849, by two Mormon missionaries in one of the hapless emigrant parties. The missionaries themselves were not very interested in the gold-being intent upon reaching the unconverted in the South Sea Islands-but the discovery triggered the first of many gold rushes to Death Valley. The mining began in late 1850, on the Salt Spring Lode at the valley's southern end, and the lesson learned by that enterprise recurred in every decade at every site throughout the area. There was precious metal in Death Valley, but there was not the water and wood essential to the refining process. From the 1850s to the 1920s, the story repeats itself: men stampeded into the valley...