DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good by Bernard DeVoto (review)

2 2 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 as women come to terms with their pasts, their towns, their children, their parents, their work, and each other. I especially love the sideways glances in the book as well as the dead-on stares, moments that convey the richness of experience alive throughout these pieces. While the editors talk about the “diversity” in the collection, that diversity tends to be generational and narrative rather than stylistic or attitudinal. This is not, perhaps, a collection for readers who want a robust exploration of, say, women who don’t learn and grow and share and care and come together for the greater good and come to love the West. Readers will be hard-pressed to find women who are as mean as snakes or who fly back to Newark vowing never to set foot in Pocatello again. But this faint caveat should not discourage the prodigious number of readers who will delight in this book. DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Qood. By Bernard DeVoto. Edited by Edward K. Muller. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. 275 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by Charles Waugh Utah State University, Logan Most people today know Bernard DeVoto best either from his Bancroft Award-, Pulitzer Prize-, and National Book Award-winning historical trilogy of the set­ tling of the American West or from Wallace Stegner’s biography The Uneasy Chair (1974), but his landmark conservation essays in Harper’s have largely gone unread in this generation. DeVoto’s West, edited by historian Edward K. Muller, remedies this situation by collecting the very best of DeVoto’s articles that brought the American West before the broader American public and, when no one else seemed capable of taking up the fight, broadcast the many and various threats our national lands faced. Somewhat of a historical anomaly, DeVoto was a western intellectual at a time when just putting the two words together was an oxymoron. He was bom and raised in Ogden, Utah, by a Catholic immigrant father and a Mormon mother, as a “Gentile.” This outsider mentality stayed with him for much of his life, certainly through his college education at Harvard, and well into his first years at Harper’s. Luckily, not fitting comfortably into either the East or the West, DeVoto never succumbed to establishment thinking or societal pressure. Instead, in his essays, we get simply the direct observation of a sharp, self-aware mind, capable of recognizing where he came from and what from that place was worth preserving. For example, in “Fossil Remnants of the Frontier,” DeVoto details the wild, multicultural Utah of his youth, upsetting the common contemporary percep­ tion of a place homogeneously conservative, authoritarian, and Mormon: “I played with the sons of ... men who came from everywhere, who had every conceivable tradition, education, and canon of taste and behavior” (31). In B o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 5 “The West: A Plundered Province,” he contrasts the allure of western land­ scapes and individualism with its ever-present ties to eastern finance and indus­ try, demonstrating that the resources and people of the West have always been manipulated into contributing more to the wealth of others than themselves. The publication of this collection, and especially the series beginning with “The Western Land Grab”—which details the subversive attempts of a few wealthy ranchers and industrialists to sell off our public lands— could not be more timely. Just this past fall, Rep. Richard Pombo of California attempted to legislate the same thing, the sale of millions of acres of publicly owned land to private developers. DeVoto knew that the protection of our public lands required vigilance and action. With his “Easy Chair” column, he made sure his readers understood the threats aimed at our cultural connections to our frontier heritage, but he also recognized that only by inspiring his readers and by motivating them to act would they be able to protect our public lands. This is why he...