Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West

3 | Land Tenure The Spatial Musculature of the American West

85 The morphology of landscape is part accident, part assertion, and always contested. When conflicting visions of land ownership and use collide, invigorating stress becomes enraging strain, and the outcome is typically tabulated as winners and losers. However, in the American West this robustly Darwinian process rarely results in the extinction of land claims, and places are best seen as shifting stages where the exercise of power and resistance to it vie for dominance. The matter of land tenure will always form the spatial musculature of this fractious region, but its geographic configuration is dynamic . Land The impress of the West’s initial claimers, be they Indians or Europeans, remains vital in the landscape.1 But this is rarely a monolithic, indelible stamp. Zelinsky’s “Doctrine of First Effective Settlement” argues that an initial group’s viable adaptation to a landscape will inevitably be absorbed and applied by succeeding cultures.2 This doctrine assumes that land tenure patterns , once established and profitable, are at most amended and not erased. At its core is the assumption of maintained power. Evidence from the American West suggests both persistence through marshaled force and widespread, ideologically diverse opposition to it—often with a goal of reestablishing a former real or imagined tenure structure. Complainants abound, be they radical left or right, environmentalist or extractor, Indian, Hispano, Mormon, or Anglo. Turner’s “frontier” may be over, but the matter of whose land it is and what the land should best be used for is far from decided.3 For good or ill, 3 | Land Tenure The Spatial Musculature of the American West john b. wright Limerick’s “unbroken history” prevails, and the West remains a panorama of discord and dissent.4 Before Western land tenure conflicts can be explored, some basic reminders must first be offered about geographic myths, the assembly and disposal of land, and resulting regional patterns. For some, the American West and the rest of the United States are a manifest revelation of God’s mercantile intention, for others a stark reminder of conquest, oppression, and destructive exploitation. A diversity of geographic thought stalks our world. Myth Myths are things that never were but always are. The Americas are a mythridden place where untruths and the search for meaning bind together like paralleling strands of a rope.5 In the West, the strands continue to tighten like a noose. Two dominant myths about the Americas at the time of European contact —that the land was largely unoccupied and that the land was ecologically pristine—have proven to be stunningly false. Denevan, drawing on work ranging from Woodrow Borah to George Lovell, speculates that 54 million indigenous people resided in the Americas in the marker year of 1492.6 North America contained four million with a sizeable population in the Southwest (125,000). A heavily peopled landscape was at once inconvenient and auspicious for Europeans seeking wealth and souls through the sword and cross. The immense demographic losses from disease, famine, and war between 1492 and 1650 may have created the impression of “emptiness,” but in no fashion can the land ever be dismissed as unclaimed. The persistence of this myth still plays out in land tenure disputes between Indian nations and the U.S. government.7 The Edenic myth of an environmental paradise in the Americas also collapses from the simplest of things, a declarative recital of land alteration at the time of contact: the Pleistocene extinctions of megafauna,8 widespread forest clearing, grassland creation and maintenance by fire, the construction of agricultural fields, terraces, ridges, and mounds,9 the vast irrigation systems of the Aztec, Hohokam, and Inca,10 immense cities, causeways, and thousands of miles of roads.11 The survival of this myth can largely be blamed on vivid mass-culture representations in movies such as 1492—The Conquest of Paradise and by the uninformed or disingenuous statements of environmentalists (and some Indians) falling back on selective portrayals of Indians as pacifist “ecologists.”12 Myths arise whenever needed. During the homesteading era, untested 86 | john b. wright farmers prayed that plowing the soil or planting trees would bring civilizing rain to a stubbornly arid landscape.13 During the neohomesteading residential boom of the late twentieth century, amenity migrants to the Rockies would prefer that warmth follows the Mercedes. Misperceptions, abetted by real estate agents and other growth-promoting “boomers,” continue to lure the...