Cities and Nature in the American West

Into the West

Where is the American West? It should be easy enough to locate on a map, but doing so requires identifying it in relation to other cardinal points on a compass— east defines west, and vice versa. That reciprocal relationship also demands a historical calculation: which West at what time? The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had nothing to do with the states of Oregon and Washington, referring instead to the more than 260,000 square miles that sprawled west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River; the post-Revolutionary generation’s spatial imagination tracked only so far as the Mississippi River. If there was no West Coast then, some now living on what is known affectionately or derisively as the “Left Coast” have their doubts about how best to identify their specific locale.A friend’s daughter, who grew up in Oregon, informed her parents that she was heading west for college—to Montana. For her, the idea of the West as a place was more culturally derived than cartographically determined, a point Texas-native Rick Bass also makes in the title to his memoir about moving to Montana from the Lone Star State—Why I Came West. This fluid form of literary place making is manifest as well in that thickly settled fictional terrain, The Wild West. Backdrop to innumerable movies, literary home to upwards of 1,700 dimestore novels about Buffalo Bill, it is a mutable space writes Clive Sinclair: “We all grew up putting together our own little miniature Wests.”1 Historian Frederick Jackson Turner believed too that the West was a moving target. In 1893 he declared that the western frontier had reinvigorated American democracy: the “existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Embedded in his perception of that movement was a cultural assertion that into the west c h a r m i l l e r [ 1 ] [ 2 ] c i t i e s a n d n at u r e allowed Turner to score points against the eastern-centered historians of his day. If the frontier determined the ebb and flow of the democratic impulse, he wrote, then the“true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”2 The truth of his perspective, he believed, was defined by the nature of settlement. As the frontier pressed west into the Great Plains, up and over the Rockies, across basin and range, and then into the Pacific coastal valleys, it recapitulated earlier, more primal conditions and thereby reenergized American political institutions and social life.“The peculiarity of American institutions,” Turner observed “is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to changes in an expanding people,” a westward course that set the stage for a final act of adaptation. In “the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress,” the expansionary nation evolved “out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.”3 Yet urbanization did not mark the end of the frontier, it was its catalyst; so recognized one of Turner’s contemporaries, famed journalist Richard Harding Davis. In 1892, a year before Turner delivered his “Frontier Thesis” to the American Historical Association meetings in Chicago, Davis had roamed through Texas, Oklahoma , and Colorado; in search of the frontier crucible, he discovered that it had been hammered out on an urban forge. Not that he was impressed with the cities through which he toured. Only Denver seemed anything like his New York City home, and he disdained the middling metropolises he visited, dismissing San Antonio as “ugly” and Oklahoma City as “a freak of our civilization.” Anything smaller was almost beneath contempt: “seven houses in the West make a city,” he snorted. But this well-traveled, if parochial , man understood from the transportation grid on which he journeyed and the U.S. Cavalry units with whom he rode—from the muddy mining communities he slogged through and the financiers and executives with whom he dined— that the contemporary western economy depended heavily on the urban tools of conquest and commerce. The federal government’s fiscal subsidies and military power; the massive investment of outside capital to extract precious metals, harvest timber, and run livestock operations; and the steady stream of migrants—all were key agents linking these...