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Conserving the Covered Wagon [1925]
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Conserving the Covered Wagon [1925] In this Sunset Magazine companion to "Pioneers and Gullies," Leopold once again evokes the image of the pioneer, this time to argue for preservation of remnants of "covered wagon wilderness," free of roads and motorized vehicles, as a link to the virtues of America's pioneer past. One evening I was talking to a settler in one of those irrigated valleys that stretch like a green ribbon across the colorful wastes of southern Arizona. He was showing me his farm, and he was proud of it. Broad acres of alfalfa bloom, fields of ripening grain, and a dip and a sweep of laden orchards redolent of milk and honey, all created with the labor of his own hands. Over in one corner I noticed a little patch of the original desert, an island of sandy hillocks, sprawling mesquite trees, with a giant cactus stark against the sky, and musical with the sunset whistle of quail. "Why don't you clear and level that too, and complete your farm?" I asked, secretly fearing he intended to do so. "Oh, that's for my boys-a sample of what I made the farm out of," he replied quietly. There was no further explanation. I might comprehend his idea, or think him a fool, as I chose. I chose to think him a very wise man-wise beyond his kind and his generation. That little patch of untamed desert enormously increased the significance of his achievement, and conversely, his achievement enormously increased the significance of the little patch. He was handing down to his sons not only a piece ofreal estate, but a Romance written upon the oldest of all books, the land. The Romance of The March of Empire. It set me to thinking. Our fathers set great store by this Winning of the West, but what do we know about it? Many of us have never seen what it was won from. And how much less will the next generation know? Ifwe think we are going to learn by cruising round the mountains in a Ford, we are largely deceiving ourselves. There is a vast difference between the days of the "Free 128 Conserving the Covered Wagon 129 Tourist Campground-Wood and Water Furnished," and the Covered Wagon Days. We pitched our tents where the buffalo feed, Unheard of streams were our flagons; And we sowed our sons like the apple seed In the trail of the prairie wagons. Yes-sowed them so thick that tens of thousands are killed each year trying to keep out of the way of each other's motors. Is this thickness necessarily a blessing to the sons? Perhaps. But not an unmixed blessing. For those who are so inclined, we might at least preserve a sample ofthe Covered Wagon Life. For after all, the measure of civilization is in its contrasts. A modern city is a national asset, not because the citizen has planted his iron heel on the breast of nature, but because of the different kinds of man his control over nature has enabled him to be. Saturday morning he stands like a god, directing the wheels of industry that have dominion over the earth. Saturday afternoon he is playing golf on a kindly greensward. Saturday evening he may till a homely garden or he may turn a button and direct the mysteries ofthe firmament to bring him the words and songs and deeds ofall the nations. And if, once in a while, he has the opportunity to flee the city, throw a diamond hitch upon a packmule, and disappear into the wilderness of the Covered Wagon Days, he is just that much more civilized than he would be without the opportunity. It makes him one more kind of a man-a pIOneer. We do not realize how many Americans have an instinctive craving for the wilderness life, or how valuable to the nation has been their opportunity of exercising that instinct, because up to this time the opportunity has been automatically supplied. Little patches of Covered Wagon wilderness have persisted at the very doors ofour cities. But now these little patches are being wiped out at a rate which takes one's breath away. And the thing that is wiping them out is the motor car and the motor highway. It is of these, their uses and their abuses, that I would speak. Motor cars and highways are ofcourse the very instruments which have restored to millions...