Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (review)

Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire. By Katherine G. Morrissey (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) 220 pp. $45.00 cloth $18.95 paper.

The American West is shaped as much by myth as by reality. As Morrissey writes in Mental Territories, "the story of the West is of the countless creations and destructions of regions, communities, settlements, and places, of lost visions and forgotten dreams. Ghost regions exist throughout the West and help define its essence today" (15). Morrissey sets out to understand the visions, myths, and dreams that shaped one such ghost region--the interior Northwest, once known as the "Inland Empire."

Even in the minds of most people who live in the Northwest, the Inland Empire is no longer a coherent region, or even much of a place at all. But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intense boosterism shaped a powerful regional identity. Morrissey's study asks, Why did the Inland Empire rise, why did it fall, and why does knowing the answers tell us something interesting?

Whereas most scholars have studied the forces that draw a region together, Morrissey is more interested in conflict and difference. At times of change, various groups struggled to define who and what did not belong to the region, in the process defining an emerging regional identity. More important, we still live with the legacies of these conflicts, as a "New West" tries to shape itself in opposition to an earlier West defined by economies based on resource extraction.

There are many ways of understanding a place; natural history, geography, and economic and institutional history all offer different perspectives. But, as Morrissey argues, regions are not just defined by geography, politics, and economy. They are also mental territories that different groups of people constantly construct through their debates and dissensions. Rather than focus directly on the links between miners, agricultural producers, railroads, and markets, Morrissey focuses on the perceptions of environment and community that define the bonds between people and place. Bringing together diaries, letters, maps, brochures--the musings of gravediggers and empire builders--along with social theory and economic history, she offers new perspectives on familiar stories.

Case studies give economic and political grounding to Morrissey's examination of perceptual processes. Her two most interesting case studies--conflicts between Indians and whites over land on the Coeur d'Alene reservation, and the mining strikes of 1899--allow her to illuminate changing dynamics of power. Her study of boosterism is also particularly valuable; boosterism played an important role in the development of many parts of the American West.

Unfortunately, for a book about place, the place itself is surprisingly invisible in Morrissey's telling. Morrissey's sources allow her to give a sense of the human complexity of the region, but little sense of the ecological or geographical complexity. In a book that is so much about how perceptions of place shape a region, it is frustrating to lose the nonhuman landscapes that lie beneath the many layers of identity, conflict, and difference that she does examine.

In the beginning of her book, Morrissey argues that people shaped landscapes and that landscapes, in turn, shaped them. Yet, she never discusses the elements of these transformations. The fertile but terribly erosive loess soils of the Palouse, the perennial bunchgrasses that gave way to nonnative annual weeds, the coulees that enclosed rivers in deep prisons of stone far below the reach of irrigators, the spectacular mountains that contained even more spectacular mineral deposits, all played critical roles in how people perceived and transformed--and were transformed by--the Inland Empire. Without some understanding of the land itself, it is difficult to understand conflicts between people about control of the land.

A clearer focus on the place would also have offered Morrissey an opportunity to tie her stories together into a more coherent narrative. For example, what mines did to the river had tragic effects on the Coeur d'Alene Indians downstream at...