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Introduction
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Introduction Dictionary of the American West was conceived while listening to writers gripe. Some years ago, a group of writers at a convention of the Western Writers of America fell to talking about how our editors didn’t understand Western words. The funniest and most appalling story was about an editor who knew buckskins is a word for Davy Crockett deerskin clothes but didn’t know it’s a color of horse. So she wrote in the margin of a manuscript, “I know buckskins get old and stiff and smelly, but I’ll be damned if I’ll believe they can whinny or canter.” Like other minorities in this country, Westerners speak a language that has arisen in their particular circumstances to suit their special needs and ways of seeing things. As with black English or the lingo of, say, lobster men or truck drivers, it’s only half familiar to other Americans. So when millions of tourists appear each summer, they get confused. (If they’re told to walk along the bench to the coulee and follow the coulee to the divide, they may even get seriously lost.) Readers of the vast literature about the West need help. I well remember feeling bewildered when I first came to the West thirty-five years ago, and feeling still more bewildered when I began to explore Indian cultures and the culture of my own ancestors, the Cherokees. The purpose of this book is to mark the trail clearly. For me the dictionary became a passion. Words enabled me to grasp the mind-set of the people who used them. The many words for irrigation ditches and the men who oversee them brought me a feeling for this lifeline of people that allows them to grow their beans and melons and at the same time connects them to the river. The speech of the mountain men—Wagh, hoss, mind your hair now!—took me into their dangerous and intoxicating world. Indian people’s ways of talking took me home to their ways of thinking. The tumult of words for cowboy gear led me to understand the complexity of that under-appreciated job, as well as the cowboy’s pride in his equipment. Altogether I made intimate acquaintance with the West, and came to see more deeply and clearly this place and these peoples, those still living and those gone over, of my heart’s circle. So the least personal kind of book, a dictionary, became very personal. From the beginning I’ve known that the West has been thoroughly misrepresented . Misrepresented by the newspaper reporters who sensationalized it, by the artists who romanticized it, by the Wild West shows that turned it into caricature. It’s been elevated (or lowered) to myth by Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, and the other novelists. Reinvented by grand movie directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Sam Peckinpah. Turned now into a joke of an icon by drugstore cowboys and the likes of Marlboro and Busch Beer. Sometimes I want to grab people and say, But if you’d only look at the real West! vi Adventure and daring? The mountain men top all for that. Heroism and villainy? How about the Donner party? Tragedy? Observe the Lakotas and Cheyennes fighting the U.S. military for their very existence. Nor is all this fascinating stuff historic . Getting to know today’s deserts, less forbidding as they are—the curious plants, the odd critters, the wondrous land forms—has been a great experience for me. Everything strange, wonderful, inspiring, amazing, outlandish, romantic, extravagant , fascinating is in the real West, both yesterday and today. The myth is puny beside it. Human cultures, I’ve discovered, reveal themselves intimately in their language. To carry some of that insight to the reader, I’ve gone well beyond listing mere denotations of words to tell the lore, the stories, the human meanings behind them, even to suggest the way of seeing the world they sprang from. For me that has been an act of devotion. Along the way, naturally, I got to know previous dictionaries and glossaries of Western words. They represent love and intelligence and honorable labor, and I am grateful to the writers of each of them. I’m aware of a profound indebtedness to them. Yet I also discovered that, until recently, previous dictionaries of the West often didn’t get it right. They were Anglo-centric, Texas-centric, male-centric, and cowboy-centric. Mostly...