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238 9 Shifting Currents Cultural Expressions in Idaho Richard W. Etulain W hen Vardis Fisher, perhaps Idaho’s best-known writer, returned to the state in 1931 after several years in the Midwest and East, he quickly became a revealing example of shifting transregional cultural trends. The embodiment of American interregional—and even larger—influences in his Idaho fiction and the twelve-volume Testament of Man series, Fisher also represented key ingredients in Idaho’s cultural identity: it too was transitioning from a frontier to a definable region. Later, as in much of the West, Idaho writers and sometimes artists moved on to postregional emphases in their works. These “frontier,” “region,” and “postregion” stages illustrate transitions in Idaho culture from the earliest travelers’ descriptions through an emerging regional consciousness and on to recent emphases on nonregional, or more than regional, subjects. Idaho has also often been an “in-between” culture. Like Arizona, which is surrounded by Mexican, Californian, New Mexican, and Mormon cultures, Idaho is bounded and influenced by regional and national cultures . Vardis Fisher’s career illustrates these chronological shifts and inner and outer contexts that have frequently shaped the cultural history of Idaho.1 This chapter deals briefly with selected cultural currents in Idaho from 1800 to the present. The first section discusses writers, beginning with the earliest explorers and travelers who passed through Idaho headed elsewhere , and then treats authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Vardis Fisher, and Marilynne Robinson, who lived and wrote during at least a decade of residence in Idaho. A second section focuses on art, specifically the work of painters, in Idaho. The stress is on frontier, regional, and postregional Cultural Expressions in Idaho 239 transitions and outside-in relationships that figure prominently in Idaho culture. For instance, consider the artistic travelers, including John Mix Stanley, George Catlin, and Thomas Moran, and the ideas and artistic techniques they brought from outside to their early paintings of the region. In addition, think of the important Local Color images that dominate the domestic artworks of Mary Hallock Foote, the best-known Idaho artist of the late nineteenth century. A brief discussion of Idaho art in the post-1900 era completes this section. The third part of the chapter touches on one example of ethnic culture in Idaho, that of the Basques, to show cultural expressions within a particular context. As this section suggests, ethnic influences can be more powerful than place in shaping cultural trends. The closing paragraphs provide a few concluding thoughts about cultural currents in Idaho. This final section raises questions about Idaho’s cultural future and notes topics that ambitious writers interested in the state’s cultural history could address.2 Literature in Idaho The first writers who visited Idaho from roughly 1800 to 1860 usually wrote about what they considered the unique—or at least unusual—qualities of the lands and humans they encountered. These emphases mean that on their routes to other places, explorers and travelers, their heads full of previous experiences, usually stressed the novel scenes and peculiar peoples they met. The visitors frequently superimposed their cultural baggage on the landscapes and Native men and women of Idaho. As a result, the first written “literature” of Idaho depicts places and peoples as varied as the travelers themselves.3 The first of these well-known nineteenth-century explorers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery, as well other travelers who followed, provide revealing glimpses of themselves and new scenes and humans. Lewis and Clark were struck with the poverty, hunger, and generally wretched state of the “Snake” (Shoshoni) Indians but considered the more “civilized” Nez Perce among the friendliest and most advanced Natives they had encountered. In the rugged Rocky Mountains, the Nez Perce were “most admireable pilots” who saved the explorers much time—and perhaps their lives. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, overall, reacted both 240Richard W. Etulain negatively and positively to the eating habits, dress, and sexual mores of Idaho’s Natives.4 Other travelers also emphasized sociocultural novelties. Washington Irving, a notable American writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, never visited Idaho. Nonetheless, in his books Astoria (1836) and TheAdventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), Irving provided romantic depictions of it as a “wild and sublime region” but also one featuring “a desolute and awful waste” in its southern parts. As missionary Narcissa Whitman crossed the Snake River Valley, she filled her diaries with biblical images of upper rooms, inns for...

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