Western Technological Landscapes (review)

This intriguing collection of essays, memoirs, poems, and photographs takes for its theme an issue as big as the West itself: the many ways in which technology has changed and responded to the varied and sometimes unique qualities of the western landscape. Equally ambitious is the collection’s effort to examine this theme by bringing together contributions from a variety of disciplines in the sciences and humanities. As is inevitable with any such collection, the quality of these pieces is somewhat uneven, and the multidisciplinary approach may displease the specialist searching for a more tightly focused package. Nonetheless, there is much to recommend this volume.

Historians of technology will find two articles in the section titled “The Effects of Technology” especially worthwhile. The most interesting and original is James C. Williams’s essay, “Energy, Conservation, and Modernity: The Failure to Electrify Railroads in the American West.” Williams, who is the author of an excellent recent monograph, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1997), here focuses on the early-twentieth-century competition between oil and hydropower to become the dominant western energy source. The West—and in particular California—had potentially abundant supplies of both power sources. The ready supply of oil from southern California led many railroad operators to convert their locomotives from coal to oil and to enter into the oil production business during the early 1900s. Yet given the proximity of many western rivers, which could be dammed for hydropower, managers also considered electrification of their rail lines to be an attractive alternative to oil. A surprisingly important factor in the debate, though, was the advocacy by men like Gifford Pinchot for using electrification as a conservation measure: by increasing the use of hydropower in the rail industry, increasingly scarce oil resources would be conserved. As it turns out, while Californians rapidly developed hydropower for other uses, new oil discoveries prevented the railroads from widely electrifying. Nonetheless, Williams proposes the early western view of hydropower as the epitome of modern conservation practices that later significantly contributed to “harnessing the nation’s water power, from the Colorado and Columbia Rivers to the Tennessee Valley” (p. 62).

Of all the essays collected here, Williams’s offers the most new information, and it is a valuable contribution to the growing body of work at the intersection of the history of technology and environmental history. Unfortunately, Williams does not examine the consequences of the battle between oil and hydropower for the western environment, and the collection as a whole generally fails adequately to demonstrate the connections between technological change and changes in the western landscape. To some degree this oversight may stem from the volume’s lack of a shared definition of the western “environment” or “landscape,” as is evident in a second useful essay, Jen A. Huntley-Smith’s “The Genius of Civilization: The Material Culture of Print Technology in the Nineteenth-Century American West.” Huntley-Smith provides a fascinating technical history of the development of printing in the West during the latter half of the nineteenth century that challenges simplistic theories of an East-to-West pattern of cultural and technological transmission and domination. She makes a good case for western technological innovation in printing, which she suggests may have been partly rooted in a desire to escape eastern hegemony. But while this is an intriguing observation, clearly it has little or nothing to do with the “landscape” of the West in any sense beyond regional geography.

Still others of the essays focus more closely on the land itself, and several (written by engineers and scientific experts) are valuable primers on the fundamental environmental dynamics of irrigation, waterpower, and cattle grazing. Thus the challenge and opportunity suggested by this collection is to further incorporate historical and other humanistic disciplines with the insights offered by environmental science and technology. Perhaps then we may begin truly to understand the ways in which, as the essayist David Fenimore rightly concludes, westerners have developed...