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1 Introduction: The Regionalist Gaze Generalizations, therefore, upon the West as a whole are apt to be misleading. frederick jackson turner, “the west—1876 and 1926” After two failed attempts, John Wesley Powell and his men at last reached the top of Longs Peak on the morning of August 23, 1868. “Glory to God!” Powell exulted as he took in the view, and the men of the expedition gave three cheers. For hours they wandered the summit, a flat six acres of rock mostly barren of snow and life. The barometer indicated 14,000 feet. To the east they could see the oceanic expanse of the Great Plains. To the south Denver lay, with the rest of the Front Range extending away into the clouds. Westward there were more ranks of mountains, the Williams Fork, the Gore, the Sawatch. Immediately below, in Middle Park, streams began flowing either toward the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico . North of their latitude, except for Mt. Rainier a thousand miles away, there were no summits higher than where Powell and his men stood until one reached the Canadian Yukon.1 Half a century ago, such a scene might have opened an admiring account of Powell’s explorations of the West, including his epic river descent through the Grand Canyon and his pioneering ethnographic work among Native Americans. The imperturbable Major Powell, who lost an arm in the Civil War, would have been lauded as a man of science who strove to overturn misconceptions about the West. He would have been singled out as one of the few among his contemporaries who valued and respected Native American cultures. But today we live in more skeptical and cynical times. Scholars have taken to calling experiences like Powell’s atop Longs Peak the “magisterial gaze,” a view from a great height overlooking a scene of future conquest, a panorama devoured with “imperial eyes.” Ethnologi- 2 • Hell of a Vision cal work such as Powell’s is said to have exhibited “imperialist nostalgia,” a perverse yearning to save and cherish the remnants of what he and others were guilty of destroying.2 I find this contemporary view of western history to be as problematic in its way as the older, rosier one. I believe that the modern tradition of western regionalism, of which Powell was the founding figure, still constitutes a usable past for the twenty-first century, that is, a past that embodies the values of democracy, pluralism, communitarianism, and environmental consciousness. At the same time, however, it is important to recognize how regionalism has been implicated in the dispossession of Native Americans, racial subordination, environmental exploitation, and other aspects of empire-building in the West, which this book also attempts to do. For this reason I have taken the book’s title from the words of Captain Call at the closing of Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove (1985), which seems to capture well the ambiguity of western regionalism as seen today. On the one hand, regionalism could be a “hell of a vision” in the sense of “visionary,” “breathtaking,” or “inspiring ,” such as Powell’s own basin commonwealth plans for the Arid Region , or more recent bioregionalist schemes for “reinhabiting” and “rewilding ” the western landscape. Yet regionalists have also depicted the darker, hellish side of westward expansion and conquest, from Angie Debo’s history of the systematic theft of Indian lands, And Still the Waters Run (1940), to Patricia Nelson Limerick’s wholesale rewrite of western history as an epic of exploitation, The Legacy of Conquest (1987). And many expressions of western regionalism, like Lonesome Dove, have intentionally and unintentionally encapsulated the ambivalence of Captain Call’s words. McMurtry’s novel draws on trail-drive conventions reaching back to Emerson Hough’s North of 36 (1923), including heroic rangers, villainous Indians, and gold-hearted prostitutes, but the tone of the story is suffused with loss and regret. Hough himself, though he wrote some of the most valorizing, cliché-ridden westerns ever published, authored a series of popular articles in the early 1900s indicting environmental destruction in the West. One also thinks of Mari Sandoz’s biography of her father, Old Jules (1935), the ferocious defender of small homesteaders in Nebraska who was shown to be a chronic abuser of women and children.3 John Wesley Powell is an appropriate starting point for a history of modern western regionalism because his ideas were similarly splayed between impulses to nurture and to conquer. His feats of...

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