Eleven Ways to Consider Air

70 Eleven Ways to Consider Air Brandon R. Schrand I. Of all the elements in the American West romanticized in the nineteenth century, air is perhaps the most curious. Gold, copper, silver, and water certainly top the list in many ways and rightfully so. The notion of water in the arid West, for instance, lived long (indeed too long) in the Victorian imagination before it was recognized, finally, by some, as a resource with a rarity on par with some hard-rock minerals. One of the greatest stories about illusory water beyond the one hundredth meridian concerns the Buena Ventura River that supposedly coursed across the alkali desert of western Utah before eventually crashing into the Pacific. Cartographers plotted the river carefully, Mormons told tales of its azure waters, and settlers wandered the desert in vain seeking the faintest sign of its meandering breadth. Trouble is, no such river ever existed despite the stories, despite the maps. It was a myth. Air, though, was the most egalitarian of elements, and it was purer in the West, people thought, than anywhere else. And it was for the taking . One did not need a sluice box, smelter, or pickax to extract it from the sky. One need not go mad in the desert with a bogus map looking for it. All one needed was a set of lungs to process its infinity. Seldom did a nineteenth-century travel writer pass through the West without gushing about the pure mountain air. Consider Horace Greeley, who had this to say in his 1860 account, An Overland Journey: “Brooks of the purest water murmur and sing in every ravine; springs abound; the air is singularly pure and bracing.” Likewise, in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, published twelve years later, the swaggering adventure-crat, Clarence King, waxed this way: “After such fatiguing exercises the mind has an almost abnormal clearness: whether this is wholly from within, or due to the intensely vitalizing mountain air, I am not sure.” My favorite, albeit lesser known period author, Captain John Codman, traveled west in 1873 and took up lodg- 71 Brandon R. Schrand ing in my hometown of Soda Springs, Idaho, a settlement tucked in a sagebrush valley in the southeastern corner of the state. In The Mormon Country, published a year later, Codman wrote that in Soda Springs he had “nature in her wild majesty, [and] an elastic, stimulating air.” The mountain air in the West was not there merely to enjoy for its “bracing” freshness; it was literally prescribed for one’s health, as if it could be bottled and sold. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician of prominence toward the end of the nineteenth century, was well known for his “rest cure” (treating women for their so-called “hysteria”) and most notably here, for his “fresh air therapy.” If a man felt glum, soft, or, god forbid, effete, Mitchell sent him packing for the West where a stark encounter with rugged landscape and exposure to the wild air would restore his machismo faster than he could say “Buena Ventura.” Mitchell’s most well-known client was none other than Teddy Roosevelt.1 It is not known whether John Codman consulted Dr. Mitchell before boarding his Pullman Palace Car to the land of enchanted air, but it is clear that the idea of fresh-air-as-medicine was a priority for the fifty-nine year old blue-blood. His close friend and former Mormon prophet Heber J. Grant once remarked that Codman “suffered from asthma, and he discovered he was better at Soda Springs, Idaho, than at any other place” in the world. The message seemed clear: Go West, old man. Get some air. II. During the early summer weeks of 1950, the Monsanto Chemical Company broke ground at the very northern edge of Soda Springs. There, at the northern city limit in a brushy stretch of grazing land amid knuckles and ridges of basalt, the company erected a phosphorus furnace plant above the subterranean layers of ore they planned to reach, exhume, and process. Since that summer, Monsanto has dominated the landscape, economy, and cultural fabric of the southeastern Idaho town. Monsanto made the town, people say...