Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range

SIX. Mastering Nature: Reality and Illusion

Long bloomed the wilderness, filling the air with fragrance breathed only by wild beasts themselves, which came and departed with no higher end or aim than to devour one another, and to roam through the forests, as yet untrod by men or gods. It was reserved for man alone, for the elevation of mind and the immortality of intelligence, thus to transmute the cinders and waste material of this world into the fine gold which ministers to human culture. William Gilpin, 1890 Their residents perceived Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo as cities of nature. The resources of their hinterlands combined with the skills of their entrepreneurs and the timing of their settlement to determine their hierarchical positions within the urban system. These communities imposed new human geographies, uniting the ecosystems of the mountains and plains in overlapping processes of economic and environmental change. Indeed, the existence and growth of these frontrange communities depended on their ability to extract, process, and ship the region’s natural capital to distant markets, or in the case of Colorado Springs, to lure health and wilderness consumers to its threshold. Traditional histories boasted that such conversions represented the American mastery of nature, a fulfillment of manifest destiny , or as Gilpin crowed, the transmutation of the “waste material of this world into the fine gold which ministers to human culture.” 143 y S I X M A S T E R I N G N AT U R E Reality and Illusion Environmental historians pose alternative narratives. Among the most influential, Donald Worster writes, “the drive for the economic development of the West was often a ruthless assault on nature, and it has left behind it much death, depletion, and ruin.” Acknowledging this profound impact, William Cronon cautions that we carefully consider the complexity of historical change: “One of the longstanding impulses that environmentalism shares with its great ancestor, romanticism , has been to see human societies, especially those affected by capitalist urban-industrialism and the cultural forces of modernity, in opposition to nature.” Modern humanity is assumed to be environmentally unstable, corrupting, and malign. In his study of the Columbia River, Richard White alternatively avoids a simple story wherein “nature” disappears with the arrival of whites and industrialization . He examines how changing notions of work, and the underlying values they implied, defined human relations with the waterway. 1 Complicated motives influenced resource usage and the related struggles for control within the Denver region. Anglo-Americans supplanted Indians and Hispanos. Cities competed for hinterlands. Self-regulatory systems and tenets of traditionalism persisted even as local entrepreneurs attempted to hold the reins of an emergent market economy. Humans seemingly shaped the natural world in the service of their communities and personal economies. Whether these efforts reflected conventional chronicles of success, more recent recountings of depletion, or some new story can only be determined by understanding what historical actors hoped to achieve when they initiated environmental change. What values underlay their choices? Did the intended economic and social benefits justify the frequent environmental depredations? Did the actors anticipate all the consequences they set in motion? If not, was their control of nature illusory? At some level, all human beings alter the physical world to serve their material needs. Historians have begun to deconstruct, for example , popular stereotypes of “ecologically noble savages” that fail to convey historically contingent, culturally constructed natural contexts. The Plains Indians affected and were affected by environmental change. Their religious culture fostered a belief in nature’s unlimited bounty, while economic and defensive pressures pushed them into the bison CHAPTER 6 144 market. They avidly participated, killing as many as necessary to enhance their competitive trading position. Their activities, however, unexpectedly contributed to the animal’s decline, one factor in the decimation of their own communities. 2 Gold-rush emigrants believed that the region’s resources should provide necessities and luxuries, which they defined differently than their predecessors. With denser, more intensely commercial populations, their demands on the mountains and plains surpassed those of the Indian cultures. Advanced technology and the increased mobility of capital permitted more rapid, farther -reaching environmental changes than anything the region previously experienced. One of the most profound alterations involved the very removal of Native Americans and their value systems. The new arrivals deemed as wasted any underdeveloped resources. Within their own cultural constructs, they assumed that nature offered infinite rewards and possessed restorative powers. Confident of their progressive...