The Many Lives of the New WestAuthor(s) Joseph E. Taylor.docx

The Many Lives of the New West
Author(s): Joseph E. Taylor, III
Source: Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer,
2004), pp. 141-165
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25442968
Accessed: 20-11-2016 20:56 UTC
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The Many Lives of the New West
Joseph E. Taylor III
References to a "New West" have grown in recent years, but it
is unclear what
is new or western about the changes attributed to the region.
Moreover, the
"New West" has a long and troubling history, and scholars
should carefully
consider the terms masking and isolating tendencies before
invoking it.
"There is no institutional memory in the West, only dawn."1
L/ately a lot of people have been treating
the American West, a region that has been conquered and
colonized repeatedly over
half a millennium, like a bright, shiny dime. The West, so the
story goes, became a
brave new world some twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Writer
Raye Ringholz, jour

nalists Timothy Egan and David Olinger, geographers William
Riebsame and Peter
Walker, historians Patricia Limerick and William Wyckoff,
economists Ed Whitelaw
and Thomas Power, and law professor Charles Wilkinson cite
changes in the region's
economic, social, and cultural face as the dawning of a New
West, and all attribute
these transformations to capital and technology.2 The declining
importance of
Joseph Taylor, associate professor and Canada Research Chair
at Simon Frasier
University, thanks Peter Boag, Lara Braithwaite, Paul Farber,
Lynne Heasley, Matthew Klingle,
Nancy Langston, Bill Robbins, and the National Humanities
Center.
1 Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (New
York, 1998), 130.
2 Raye Ringholz, Paradise Paved: The Challenges of Growth in
the New West (Salt Lake
City, 1996); Egan, Lasso the Wind; David Olinger, "Old West
Being Replaced by Luxury Homes,"
Denver Post, 12 April 1998,
http://63.147.65.175/snapshot/partld.htm (accessed 3 December
2003; restricted access); Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The
Shadows of Heaven Itself," in Atlas of
the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, ed. William E.
Riebsame (New York, 1997), 151-78;
Peter Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional' Political Ecologies:
Toward a Political Ecology of the
Rural American West," Progress in Human Geography 27
(March 2003): 18; William Wyckoff,

"Inside the New West: A View from Suburban Montana,"
Pacific Historical Review 67 (August
1998): 406; Ed Whitelaw, "Oregon's Real Economy," Old
Oregon 72 (Winter 1992): 30-3;
Thomas Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The
Search for a Value of Place
(Washington, DC, 1996); Charles Wilkinson, "Paradise
Revised," in Atlas of the New West,
15-44; The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West (New York,
1992). For definitions of the term "New
West," see also Susan Kollin, "Wister and the 'New West,'" in
Reading The Virginian in the New
West, ed. Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum (Lincoln, 2003),
235; Carl Abbott, "That Long
Western Border: Canada, the United States, and a Century of
Economic Change," in Parallel
Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies,
ed. John M. Findlay and Ken S.
Coates (Seattle, 2002), 205-6; John Walker, "Excerpts of the
New West Dictionary," High
Country News, 29 September 1997.
Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004): 141-165.
Copyright ? 2004, Western
History Association.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly

resource extraction and rise of the Internet, light industry, and
tourism has indeed
altered the West. Shifts in economic and cultural power have
been dramatic, yet ar
guments about an intrinsically new or different West stumble
on many counts. Most
developments are national in scope, many of the propelling
forces are far from new
or revolutionary, and few effects are universal. This New West
is ultimately both less
and more than it seems: at once a marketing tool for a classist,
urban fantasy about the
pastoral countryside and a romantic elision of the dark side of
gentrification.
The shortcomings of New West declarations carry us only so
far. In this strange
era of the post-industrial, post-modern, post-dot.com, and post-
9/11, it is easy to pick
the bones of last year's prophesies. Rents in chic San Francisco
fell by a third in 2001,
and Oregon suffered the distinction of having the nation's
highest unemployment rate
through 2002, all because the digital bubble burst. This was the
same economy that
prophets said would permanently relieve western hinterlands of
their dependence on
extractive industry. If western history teaches that booms have
busts, and newspapers
show that New West themes engulf the nation, then rather than
dwell on the histori
cal and geographical myopia of boosters, let us instead focus
on the long, rich history
of the New West trope and place its latest incarnation in social

and environmental
context. I may be wrong; I might have to live this down the rest
of my career, but I
want to explain why scholars should eschew New West in favor
of other categories
of analysis.3
Beyond the analytical failings of newness and westerness lay
more disturbing issues.
Although smart people hail the New West as a place where
people and nature will
thrive like never before, most changes reveal persisting
weaknesses in environmental
and social justice. Gentrification and recreational tourism,
forces that are as fractured
and diffuse as they are powerfully transformative, tear the
social and cultural fabric of
rural communities, and the pain is felt primarily by minority
and blue-collar residents.4
The emphasis on New West environmental amenities also
fueled a rush of exurban
settlement that accelerated consumption of natural resources
and fragmentation of
ecosystems. In so many ways the New West, with its ongoing
marginalization of labor,
degradation of nature, and implementation of homogeneity,
seems a helluva lot like
the Old West. From missionaries to Mormons and '49ers to
equity refugees, western
ers have been trying to simplify the West into monochromatic
societies; and from
Chinatown to the Barrio and Albina to the Res, the West has
been America's most
3 See also Carl Abbott, ed., "Forum: Atlas of the New West,"

Pacific Historical Review
67 (August 1998): 379-420.
4 For gentrification and tourism see A. Warde, "Gentrification
as Consumption:
Issues of Class and Gender," Environment and Planning D 9
(September 1991): 223-32; William
B. Beyers and Peter B. Nelson, "Contemporary Development
Forces in the Nonmetropolitan
West: New Insights from Rapidly Growing Communities,"
Journal of Rural Studies 16 (October
2000): 461; Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional' Political
Ecologies," 15; Alice Wondrak, "Seen
Any Wildlife? Community Conflict and a Struggle for the Soul
of Estes Park, Colorado,"
Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 72-5.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
effectively segregated region for a very long time.5 Drive
through Park City, Sunriver,
or Mendocino, and it is hard to see this latest New West as a
break with that past.
Arguments for a New West ultimately turn circular. The real
and perceived
separations that accompany New West imagery?of nature from
people and people

from people?have become powerful rationales for further
segregations to save fragile
nature and playground refuges. Yet the more the West seems
New and discrete, the
more it relies on its figurative and literal ties to the Old. Take
for example fly fish
ing. Elite angling has long been a badge of environmental
sensitivity, but in recent
decades it has erupted as a prototype of New West play because
of strong marketing
and a lyrical movie by Robert Redford, yet cowboy aesthetics
are central to its modern
appeal.6 Similarly, desires to protect nature have fueled intense
battles over access to
public lands, but resource extraction still thrives because
Americans, in general, and
exurban residents, in particular, are energetic consumers. Big-
Box stores and metas
tasizing subdivisions testify to a lively demand for western
lumber and water.7 Fewer
people work state and federal lands, but many simply moved to
private holdings. The
result has been more-apparent-than-real environmental reform.
Efficiencies, rather
than less consumption, drove most workers from the ranges and
woods, and wherever
jobs vanished, gentrification seemed to accelerate.8 This has
been a complex process,
5 Elliott West, "Reconstructing Race," Western Historical
Quarterly 34 (Spring
2003): 7-26.

6 Kollin, "Wister and the 'New West,'" 235; Ken Owens,
"Fishing the Hatch: New
West Romanticism and Fly-Fishing in the High Country," in
Imagining the Big Open: Nature,
Identity, and Play in the New West, ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine
Bapis, and Thomas Harvey (Salt
Lake City, 2003), 117-9.
7 Wyckoff, "Inside the New West," 403; Virginia Scharff,
"Honey, I Shrunk the
West," Pacific Historical Review 61 (August 1998): 411-3;
Limerick, "The Shadows of Heaven
Itself," 161.
8 For shifts in production see, for example, Stuart Allan,
Aileen R. Buckley, and
James E. Meacham, Atlas of Oregon, ed. William Loy, 2d ed.
(Eugene, OR, 2001), 74-5, 85, 90-7;
Doug MacCleery, "Is the Shift to 'Ecological Sustainability' or
Ecosystem Management on U.S.
Public Lands Merely a Sophisticated 'NIMBYism'
Masquerading as a 'Paradigm Shift?'" USDA
Forest Service Eco-Watch Dialogues,
http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/consumption_ethic2.
html (accessed 3 December 2003). For job losses see William
Prudham, "Timber and Town:
Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and
Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois
Valley," Antipode 30 (January 1998): 177-98; Michael
Milstein, "Loggers Displaced in 1990s Left
Behind, Study Finds," Portland Oregonian, 7 January 2003; Ted
Helvoigt, Darius Adams, and Art
Ayre, "Employment Transitions in Oregon's Wood Products
Sector During the 1990s," Journal of
Forestry 101 (June 2003): 42-6; Matthew S. Carroll, Keith A.
Blatner, Frederick J. Alt, Ervin G.

Schuster, and Angela J. Findley, "Adaptation Strategies of
Displaced Idaho Woods Workers:
Results of a Longitudinal Panel Study," Society & Natural
Resources 13 (March 2000): 95-113;
Jonathan Kusel, Susan Kocher, Jonathan London, Lita
Buttolph, and Ervin Schuster, "Effects of
Displacement and Outsourcing on Woods Workers and Their
Families," Society & Natural
Resources 13 (March 2000): 115-34; Steven E. Daniels,
Corrine L. Gobeli, and Angela J.
Findley, "Reemployment Programs for Dislocated Timber
Workers: Lessons from Oregon,"
2016 20:56:34 UTC
144 SUMMER 2004 Western Historical Quarterly
however, because it was not just the very rich who propelled
change.9 Rural patterns
have been displaced by the demands of a broad, transnational
class of amenity-seeking,
franchise-patronizing consumers. Aspenization and
McDonaldization have merged,
and the result is a mess.10
Despite these wrenching developments, the Old West, often
now caricatured as
a cowboy state, did not go gentle into that good night, and its
resilience has exposed
a huge irony surrounding the latest New West. Although some
rural residents did
cash in, many others resisted gentrification. The media fixates

on the violence of Nye
County and Klamath Lakes, but more representative, if less
conspicuous, are those
seeking accommodation. Some are landowners negotiating
compacts with government
agencies and non-governmental organizations to solve
environmental and economic
concerns, others are neighbors discussing contentious issues
outside courtrooms and
councils addressing complex water and wildlife issues.11 The
goal everywhere has been
to ameliorate environmental problems without shredding the
material and cultural
fabric of communities. Put bluntly, these community focused
efforts are an attempt
to stem gentrification. The emergence of accommodation seems
the most interesting,
significant, and hopeful development in recent years, yet it is
also at considerable odds
with the core values of this latest New West.
Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 135-50;
Matthew S. Carroll, Steven E. Daniels,
and Jonathon Kusel, "Employment and Displacement among
Northwestern Forest Products
Workers," Society & Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 151-
6; Matthew S. Carroll, Charles W.
McKetta, Keith A. Blatner, and Con Schallau, "A Response to
'Forty Years of Spotted Owls?
A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses,'"
Sociological Perspectives 42 (Summer
1999): 325-33; William R. Freudenburg, Lisa J. Wilson, and
Daniel J. O'Leary, "Forty Years
of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry
Job Losses," Sociological

Perspectives 41 (Spring 1998): 1-26.
9 For consequences of gentrification see Beyers and Nelson,
"Contemporary
Development Forces in the Nonmetropolitan West," 459-72;
Connie Young Chiang, "Shaping
the Shoreline: Environments, Society, and Culture in Monterey,
California" (PhD diss.,
University of Washington, 2002); Bonnie Christensen, Red
Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal
Miners to Cowboys (Lawrence, 2002); Hal K. Rothman, Devil's
Bargains: Tourism in the
Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, 1998); John
Walton, Storied Land: Community
and Memory in Monterey (Berkeley, 2001); Meredith Wiltsie
and William Wyckoff,
"Reinventing Red Lodge: The Making of a New Western
Landscape, 1884-2000," in
Imagining the Big Open, 124-50.
10 For Aspenization and McDonaldization see Rothman,
Devil's Bargains, 338-70;
Dave Gowdey, "Urban Immigration is Another Name for
Cultural Genocide," Colorado Central
Magazine 56 (October 1998): 2; Bruce Selcraig, "Fore! in Santa
Fe," High Country News, 17 May
1993; George Ritzer, The McDonaldization Thesis:
Explorations and Extensions (Thousand Oaks,
CA, 1998), 1-2, 91-4, 117-49, 177-8; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food
Nation: The Dark Side of the All
American Meal (Boston, 2001).
11 Sally K. Fairfax and Darla Guenzler, Conservation Trusts
(Lawrence, 2001); Eve

Endicott, ed., Land Conservation through Public/Private
Partnerships (Washington, DC, 1993);
Seth Zucker man, "Toward a New Salmon Economy," in
Salmon Nation: People and Fish at the
Edge, ed. Edward C. Wolf and Seth Zuckerman (Portland, OR,
1999), 63-73; "National Land
Trust Census: Charts and Graphs," Land Trust Alliance,
http://www.lta.org/newsroom/census_
charts.htm (accessed 3 December 2003).
2016 20:56:34 UTC
Charles Wilkinson has been as perceptive as any New West
writer, so we should
heed his caution that the New West is "hard terrain to read" and
"use the term gingerly."
Before going further, then, we should specify which New West
we are discussing.12 A
review of Library of Congress titles that use the phrase "New
West" reveals at least
four distinct epochs in the last 135 years: the first was a
transcontinental revision of
western possibilities, the second a nostalgic longing for the
frontier period, the third
an ambivalent assessment of mid-twentieth-century modernity,
and the latest a fest
of social and ecological diversity. Although the content of each
New West has varied,
all have stressed how technology, markets, and nature have

radically changed this
region we call the West.
Appropriately enough, the first New West began as the Union
Pacific and Central
Pacific met at Promontory Point. At the very moment that the
state and capital were
creating a new, continental and transnational space, Samuel
Bowles's Our New West
and Charles Brace's The New West, followed in 1879 by Robert
Strahorn's To the
Rockies and Beyond, unleashed a literary clich? with all the
qualities of a horror
movie villain. From the beginning, New West authors stressed
how technology was
transforming western opportunities and experiences.13 In the
post-Civil War era the
technology was railroads, the opportunities seemed unlimited,
and the experiences
were settlement and tourism. Although Strahorn's subtitle
(Saunterings in the Popular
Health, Pleasure, and Hunting Resorts) flagged a class bias in
New West literature,
Bowles seemed to offer a more democratic spin by assuring
readers that the railroad
would open "a new world of wealth, and a new world of natural
beauty, to the working
and the wonder of the old."14
Every author of the era emphasized the economic opportunities
of the
Transcontinental New West. Rails and telegraph lines had
created what Richard White
calls the "first information age," and all echoed Bowles's
conclusion that railroads
were "the key to all our New West."15 Promoters integrated

innovation into their tales
of western progress. Boosters in Denver, Los Angeles,
Portland, Tacoma, and other
12 Charles Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 18.
13 Samuel Bowles, Our New West: Records of Travel between
the Mississippi River and
the Pacific Ocean (Hartford, CT, 1869); Charles Brace, The
New West (New York, 1869); Robert
Strahorn, To the Rockies and Beyond, or A Summer on the
Union Pacific Railroad . . . (Omaha,
1879). For state, capital, and transnational, see Richard White,
"It's Your Misfortune and None of
My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman,
1990), 57-9, 145-7, 236, 246-8;
Donald Meinig, Transcontinental America, 1850-1915, vol. 3 in
The Shaping of America: A
Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven,
1998), 3-8; Augustus J.
Veenendaal, Jr., Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment
Helped Build American Railroads
(Stanford, CA, 1996).
14 Bowles, Our New West, v.
15 Quote from telephone conversation with Richard White;
Richard White,
"Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental
Railroads in the Gilded Age,"
Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 21-2; Bowles, Our
New West, 46; Brace, The New
West, 182-7.

2016 20:56:34 UTC
towns? communities of which many foundered?argued that new
technologies made
their places logical sites of investment, and railroads fueled
such hopes with promises of
trunk or spur lines. The Kansas City Board of Trade's
promotional broadside The New
West boasted of its links to the Pacific Ocean, while Charles
Bliss's The New West:
New Mexico and Edward Tenney's Colorado: And Homes in the
New West served as
primers on settlement opportunities near railroads. Of course,
the railroads subsidized
many of these tracts. Strahorn at one time or another worked
with the Denver & Rio
Grande, the Colorado Central, and the Union Pacific, the latter
of which published
To the Rockies and Beyond through New West Publishing in
Omaha.16
Seen one way, the Kansas City Board of Trade simply emulated
what John Smith,
William Cooper, and Chicago's founders had done in the ages
of sails, wagons, and
steam, but the 1870s were not like any previous era.17 As Karl
Marx noted, new technol

ogy had annihilated old geography when locomotion reworked
spatial logic. A Board of
Trade could argue that the Pacific Ocean reached all the way to
Kansas; Henry Villard
could extend Russian Germans' westward exodus to Nebraska
and Dakota; Portland
businessmen could scheme to corner the world salmon
market.18 The first New West
was far more globalized than any previous West, yet despite
the changes of industrial
capitalism, or maybe because of them, the period's market
rhetoric was mostly a con
servative adaptation of old speculative interests to evolving
technologies.
Far more novel was how the Transcontinental New West had
reconceptualized
nature for both profit and play. As a number of scholars argue,
an eastern literati was
16 Kansas City Board of Trade, The New West: Its Outlets to
the Ocean (Kansas City,
MO, 1873); Charles Bliss, The New West: New Mexico
(Boston, 1879); Edward Tenney, Colorado:
And Homes in the New West (Boston, 1880). For an image of
Strahom see http://freepages.gene
alogy.rootsweb.com/~jtenlen/restrahom.jpg (accessed 3
December 2003); For Strahorn's back
ground and activities see Frieda Knobloch, "Creating the
Cowboy State: Culture and
Underdevelopment in Wyoming since 1867," Western
Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 2001):
202-5. For New West Publishing see J. M. Wolfe, Wolfe's
Omaha City Directory, 1879-1880
(Omaha, 1879), 316.1 thank Eliza Robertson at the National

Humanities Center, Dan Kubrick
at the Omaha Public Library, and the anonymous reviewer for
help with this citation.
17 For early boosters see John Smith, "A True Relation of Such
Occurrences and
Accidents of Note ...," in The Complete Works of John Smith,
ed. Philip Barbour, vol.l (1608;
reprint, Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 27-117; Alan Taylor, William
Coopers Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
(New York, 1995); William Cronon,
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York,
1991). For failed boosters see
Norman Clark, Mill Town . . . (Seattle, 1970), 14-42. For
boosters and regional identity see
John Findlay, "A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the
Pacific Northwest," in Many
wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David Wrobel
and Michael Steiner (Lawrence,
1997), 37-70.
18 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, "Manifesto to the
Communist Party," in The
Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York, 1978),
476; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the 19th Century (Berkeley, 1986);
David Emmons, Garden in the Grasslands: Boomer Literature
of the Central Great Plains (Lincoln,
1971); Thomas Fuchs, "Henry Villard: A Citizen of Two
Worlds" (PhD diss., University of
Oregon, 1991); "Board of Trade," Portland Morning Oregonian,
16 August 1877, 3.

2016 20:56:34 UTC
Joseph E. Taylor 111
reimagining western nature through distinctly classist, racial,
and gendered lenses. The
result was a romanticized western landscape, emptied of
humans and crowned sub
lime.19 Here was an early articulation of the modern
wilderness aesthetic, and Bowles,
Brace, and Strahorn were among the first to sell environmental
amenities. For those
who could afford the ticket, railroads helped create and serve
an emerging demand for
wildness. Bowles called the New West an "originally, freshly,
uniquely, majestically"
natural geography: "Nowhere are broader and higher
mountains; nowhere, climates
more propitious; nowhere broods an atmosphere so pure and
exhilarating."20 Brace
prophesied: "When our pleasure-seekers on the Eastern coast
can reach in a week
such objects of wonderful grandeur and beauty as the
Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and the
high Sierras, there will be crowds taking their summer trip
hither. This region will
become our American Switzerland."21 By 1887, William
Thayer's Marvels of the New
West could only reinforce a well-established link between
industrial transportation,

mass media, and western nature. Its first chapter, a 133-page
dissertation of the West's
"Marvels of Nature," took readers on a rail journey from
Colorado's Arkansas Canon
to Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge, the Petrified Forest
in Arizona, and the
Old Woman of the Mountain in Montana.22
Ironically, historians are most familiar with the next New
West, yet we least associ
ate it with this phenomenon. During the 1890s, mass media
continued to disseminate
the market rhetoric of the New West. In 1890, Portland's
Immigration Board published
The New Empire to boost their city as the dominant Northwest
entrep?t; Spokane
merchants responded in 1897 with the New West Trade.23 Like
their predecessors,
both cities heralded the opportunities presented by new
railroads, but the continuity
of entrepreneurial rhetoric did not extend to other uses of New
West. Sociocultural
forces in the East were inspiring a basic reworking of the
West's historic and mythic
19 Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western
Landscape and National
Culture, 1820-1920 (New York, 1990), 10; David Robertson,
West of Eden: A History of the Art
and Literature of Yosemite (San Francisco, 1984); William
Cronon, "Telling Tales on Canvas," in
Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, by Jules David Prown et al.
(New Haven, 1992), 37-86; Kevin
DeLuca and Anne Demo, "Imagining Nature and Erasing Class
and Race: Carleton Watkins,

John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness," Environmental
History 6 (October 2001): 541
50; Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian
Removal and the Making of the National
Parks (New York, 1999); Patricia Nelson Limerick,
"Disorientation and Reorientation: The
American Landscape Discovered from the West," in Something
in the Soil: Legacies and
Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2000), 194-5.
20 Bowles, Our New West, v; also quoted in Limerick, "The
Shadows of Heaven
Itself," 151.
21 Brace, The New West, 185.
22 William Thayer, Marvels of the New West: A Vivid
Portrayal of the Stupendous
Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River
(Norwich, CT, 1887), xxix.
23 Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the
Inland Empire (Ithaca, NY,
1997), 139; and The New West (Spokane, WA) Trade (begun in
1897).
2016 20:56:34 UTC
significance, and Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance

of the Frontier in
American History" highlighted these anxieties by warning that
the United States
was entering an ominous age because its frontier had closed.24
In an age when many
influential Americans worried that they were being overrun by
Europe, and that a
plague of neurasthenia was crippling middle-class men, Turner
offered a nativist theory
of American culture that was rooted in the masculine frontier.
Although his argu
ments about American democratic development fared poorly,
his essay is still useful
for illuminating the cultural concerns that were driving both
eastern anti-modernism
and the next New West.25
Thus, although many westerners were desperate to modernize,
eastern writers
desired a very different West. From 1890 to 1930, their New
West was essentially
nostalgic. Threatened by polyglot eastern cities, Owen Wister,
Zane Grey, and other
writers crafted antimodern fantasies of a pastoral past ruled by
guns, horses, and chiv
alrous men. The result was the apotheosis of the cowboy as an
American knight.26
The plot of William Raine's Gunsight Pass; How Oil Came to
the Cattle Country
and Brought the New West was typical in depicting white
heroes struggling against
a dark-skinned villain (in this case Mexican), but the subtitle
revealed an atypical
consideration for how technology had changed the West after
1890.27 A potboiler about
cowhands turned derrick workers and then capitalists was a

departure from the genre's
clich?s, yet other New West writers broke with convention
even further. The Nostalgic
New West often featured women and youths civilizing wild
places in less violent, yet
equally mythic, stories. Among these were Amy Blanchard's
Gentle Pioneer, Being
the Story of the Early Days in the New West, Alfred Rice's An
Oregon Girl: A Tale
of American Life in the New West, Edwin Sabin's Boy Settler;
or, Terry in the New
West, and Frederick Niven's Lady of the Crossing; A Novel of
the New West. Seattle
24 Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier
in American History,"
in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for
the Year 1893 (1893), 199-227.
25 For critiques of Turner's essay see William Cronon,
"Revisiting the Vanishing
Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner," Western
Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987):
157-76; Martin Ridge, "The Life of an Idea: The Significance
of Frederick Jackson Turner's
Frontier Thesis," Montana The Magazine of Western History 41
(Winter 1991): 2-13; Richard
White, "Frederick Jackson Turner," in Historians of the
American Frontier: A Bio-Biographical
Sourcebook, ed. John R. Wunder (New York, 1988), 660-81.
For fin de si?cle culture see Jackson
Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

(New York, 1981); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization:
A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995); Kim
Townsend, Manhood at Harvard:
William James and Others (New York, 1996).
26 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of
Westerns (New York, 1992);
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier
in Twentieth-Century America (New
York, 1992); Stephen May, Zane Grey: Romancing the West
(Athens, OH, 1997).
27 William Raine, Gunsight Pass: How Oil Came to the Cattle
Country and Brought the
New West (New York, 1921).
2016 20:56:34 UTC
publisher L. B. Mock captured the sentiment of these works in
its dedication to Lucy
Byrd Mack's Maid of Pend d'Oreille, an Indian Idyl: "to those
daring souls who made
the new west positive."28
To the extent that they considered the subject, Progressive
historians paralleled
novelists' treatment of the New West. Both groups linked the
trope with the past. Like

the domesticated New West novels, John Eaton's Sheldon
Jackson, A Pioneer in the
New West highlighted the role of the eastern-based Woman's
Board of Home Missions
of the Presbyterian Church in taming the West as a Christian
society. Frederick
Jackson Turner's Rise of the New West echoed Raine in
emphasizing technology's
civilizing impact. Like most other novelists, though, Turner
focused on the romantic
past of canals and steam rather than a bustling present. Linking
New West with the
trans-Appalachian era also seems to have created retroactively
a fifth New West be
fore 1840.29 All the Nostalgic New West works also shared
three familiar traits: they
expressed a fascination?sometimes horrid?with modernity and a
yearning for a
romanticized moral order; they combined supposedly
dispassionate description with
boosterish prescription; and the imagined and real Wests
continued to harmonize
fact with fiction.
In contrast, the third New West bared growing contradictions
between popular
culture and the social and cultural conditions of the times. By
the late 1930s, urban
ization and the New Deal had laid the foundation for rapid
industrialization.30 A few
writers again argued that such changes signaled another New
West. Ronald Russell's
1938 A New West to Explore portrayed the Portland Junior
Symphony as "pioneers

of a great artistic and cultural future for America "31 The
appropriation of frontier
imagery for an urban, highbrow future foreshadowed the
rhetoric of John E Kennedy,
but this was neither the only nor the dominant reworking of
frontier at the time. Like
28 Amy Blanchard, Gentle Pioneer, Being the Story of the
Early Days in the New West
(Boston, 1903); Lucy Byrd Mack, Maid of Pend d'Oreille, an
Indian Idyl (Seattle, 1910); Alfred
Rice, An Oregon Girl: A Tale of American Life in the New
West (Portland, 1914); Edwin L. Sabin,
Boy Settler; or, Terry in the New West (New York, 1916);
Frederick Niven, Lady of the Crossing; A
Novel of the New West (New York, 1919).
29 John Eaton, Sheldon Jackson, A Pioneer in the New West
(New York, 1898);
Frederick Jackson Turner, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829
(New York, 1906). One can argue
that I make too much of the New West, that I should instead
place it the context of Walter E.
Weyl's The New Democracy; An Essay on Certain Political and
Economic Tendencies in the United
States (New York, 1914), Herbert Croly's New Nationalism,
and the New Republic (and later
FDR's New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower's New Look, and JFK's
New Frontier). Unlike those neolo
gisms, the New West already had a history.
30 Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain, The American
West: A Twentieth

Century History (Lincoln, 1989), 220; Richard White, The
Organic Machine (New York,
1995), 72.
31 Ronald Russell, A New West to Explore; The Story of the
Portland (Oregon) Junior
Symphony Orchestra and Jacques Gershkovitch, Pioneers of a
Great Artistic and Cultural Future for
America (Boston, 1938). See also Victor Chittick, ed.,
Northwest Harvest, A Regional Stocktaking
(New York, 1948).
2016 20:56:34 UTC
the earliest works on the New West, Bruce Grant's The Cowboy
Encyclopedia: The
Old and the New West from the Open Range to the Dude Ranch
traced how urban
ization and transportation (in this case the automobile) had
gentrified the rural West
for play. Grant and others also noted that, despite dramatic
change in the West, most
Americans were still obsessed with the frontier of cowboys,
trappers, and missions,
and that popular culture had essentially frozen the West in
1880.32 Eastern climbers
gloried in conquering untrammeled peaks in Colorado's Needles
Mountains, while
Jack Kerouac noticed how "the energetic Chamber of

Commerce types of the new
West decided to revive the ghost town of Central City,
Colorado" as a tourist trap,
complete with a Victorian opera and Old Western saloons.33
Here was an Ambivalent
New West, both peering ahead and wistfully gazing over its
shoulder.
The way professional historians employed the New West
reveals the roots of the
New Western History backlash. At a time when the West was
the country's most rapidly
growing, culturally potent region, every historian who invoked
New West from 1937
to 1970 focused on the distant past, never allowing it even to
cross the hundredth
meridian. Bernard Mayo's Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New
West (1937), William
Chambers's Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West
(1956), Roscoe Buley's
The Romantic Appeal of the New West, 1815-1840 (1961), and
Randolph Randall's
James Hall: Spokesman of the New West (1964) all equated
New West with Trans
Appalachia. As if to underscore this trend, Ray Allen
Billington republished Turner's
Rise of the New West in 1962.34 Here was an example of
consensus history, of the past
pared down to stories of stalwart men upholding principles of
democracy and industry.
The historians were reinforced by the romantic literature of
Irene Grissom's Verse of
the New West and Emmie Mygatt's Rim-Rocked, A Story of the
New West.35 This

mythic perspective was the backdrop for Henry Nash Smith's
Virgin Land and Leo
Marx's The Machine in the Garden. Both highlighted the bond
between urbanization
32 Bruce Grant, The Cowboy Encyclopedia: The Old and the
New West from the Open
Range to the Dude Ranch (Chicago, 1951). See also Earl
Pomeroy's trenchant analysis of western
tourism in in Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in
Western America (New York, 1957), 139?
217; and his The Pacific Slope: A History of California,
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and
Nevada (New York, 1965), 293-371.
33 Duncan Maclnnes, "The Old and New West in the Needle
Mountains," Appalachia
34 (June 1941): 374-9 and Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1955;
reprint, New York, 1976), 51.
34 Bernard Mayo, Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West
(1937; reprint, Hamden,
CT, 1966); William Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, Senator
from the New West: Thomas Hart
Benton, 1782-1858 (1956; reprint, New York, 1970); Roscoe
Buley, The Romantic Appeal of the
New West, 1815-1840 (Detroit, 1961); Randolph Randall,
James Hall, Spokesman of the New
West (Columbus, OH, 1964); Frederick Jackson Turner, Rise of
the New West, 1819-1829 (New
York, 1962).
35 Irene Grissom, Verse of the New West (Caldwell, ID, 1931);
Emmie Mygatt, Rim
Rocked, A Story of the New West (New York, 1952). For

consensus history see Peter Novick, That
Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American
Historical Profession (New York,
1988), 333-5.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
Joseph E. Tartar ???
and pastoral aesthetics, and revealed that American
ambivalence about modernity
has long been central to the New West interest in nature (often
expressed as frontier)
as psychic refuge.36
These tendencies have produced ever greater paradoxes in the
latest New West.
At first glance, the surfeit of works makes this era seem
substantively different. The
Library of Congress catalog contains over one hundred New
West titles?greater
by a magnitude of ten than any previous era?but on close
examination, half have
nothing to do with the American West. Others include
publishing houses such as
New West Library, New West Publishing, New West Press,
New West House, New
West Writers, and New West Communications, or
entertainment companies such as
New West Music, New West Recordings, New West Records,
New West Films, and

New West Entertainment, the latter of which issued a string of
slasher movies.37 A few
more are sound recordings such as Charles Tyler's Saga of the
Outlaws: A Polyphonic
Sonic Tale of the Old & New West, the Beat Farmers' Tales of
the New West, and
Walking Wounded's The New West.38 New West cuisine
inspired two books, New West
architecture another, and Canadians have adopted New West to
describe changing
economic, social, and cultural conditions from Winnipeg to
Vancouver.39
The thirty-two remaining titles blend old and new trends. Eight
address older
36 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West in
Symbol and Myth (New
York, 1957); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(New York, 1964). See also Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the
Fight Against Automobiles
Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, 2002).
37 Publishing houses using the phrase include New West
Library (San Francisco),
New West Publishing (San Rafael), New West Press (Hamilton,
WA), New West
Communications Corporation (Beverly Hills), New West House
(Bruneau, ID); and New West
Writers (Abbotsford, BC). For entertainment companies see
New West Music (Van Nuys), New
West Recordings (Abilene, TX), New West Records (Austin).
For film studios see New West

Films Production, and New West Entertainment.
38 Charles Tyler, Saga of the Outlaws: A Polyphonic Sonic
Tale of the Old & New West
[sound recording], Nessa Records N-16, one analog album,
1978; Walking Wounded, The New
West [sound recording], Chameleon Records CHLP 8613, one
analog album, 1987; The Beat
Farmers, Tales of the New West [sound recording], Rhino
Records RNLP 853, one analog album,
1985.
39 For cuisine see Linda Eckhardt, The New West Coast
Cuisine (Los Angeles, 1985);
Dennis Rohde, Pizza: A Slice of the New West (Flagstaff, AZ,
1997). For architecture, see Cottle
Graybeal Yaw Architects, Architecture of the New West:
Recent Works by Cottle Graybeal Yaw
(Des Plaines, IL, 2002). For Canada, see Anne Nothof, ed.,
Ethnicities: Plays from the New West
(Edmonton, AB, 1999); Elma Schemenauer, Calgary: Heart of
the New West (Calgary, AB,
2000); Darrel Janz, Calgary: Heart of the New West (Memphis,
2001); Frederick H. Candelaria,
ed., New West Coast: 72 Contemporary British Columbia
Poets: New Poems with Personal
Commentaries and Autobiographical Sketches (Vancouver, BC,
1977); John Richards and Larry
Pratt, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in the New West
(Toronto, ON, 1979); Eric Wells,
Winnipeg: Where the New West Begins: An Illustrated History
(Burlington, ON, 1982); Paul
Grescoe and David Cruise, The Money Rustlers: Self Made

Millionaires of the New West (New
York, 1985).
2016 20:56:34 UTC
New Wests. Stephen Brown's Voice of the New West: John G.
Jackson concerns the
Trans-Appalachian frontier. William Speer's The Encyclopedia
of the New West, Scott
Solliday's Chandler, Pioneer City of the New West, Stanley
Noyes's and Daniel Gelo's
Comanches in the New West, and Donald Pisani's Water and
American Government
(with a chapter on "Wiring the New West: The Strange Career
of Public Power") focus
on the Nostalgic New West. Gary Elliott's Senator Alan Bible
and the Politics of the
New West discusses the Ambivalent New West.40 Gene
Gressley's Old West/New West
and Barbara Meldrum's Old West-New West were less
concerned with New West
than historiographical directions.41 The remaining twenty-four
titles offer takes on the
post-1970 New West. Their main themes are environmental and
social diversity, but
diversity is riddled with contradictions. If urbanization had
inspired pastoral dreams

before 1945, the post-war, post-industrial West has fueled
obsessions with wilderness.
By 1970, those who could afford what Roderick Nash called
"full stomach" environ
mentalism were fleeing urban social and cultural diversity for
rural ecological diversity
and unpeopled spaces.42
One set of New West titles addresses the changing landscape.
Robert Adams
christened this New West in 1974 with a photographic essay,
titled The New West,
that explored the impact of rapid growth along Colorado's
Front Range. As John
Szarkowski explains in his foreword, Adams was distressed by
how "sprawling non
towns . . . suddenly cover so much of what was recently our
beautiful countryside."43
Jeanie Kasindorf's The Nye County Brothel Wars, which
portrayed a local struggle over
legalized prostitution as a Wisterian showdown between good
and evil, implied that
the West was still essentially wild and violent.44 More recent
works have focused on
the urban invasion of the rural West. In different places and
with unique perspectives,
writers have charted these cultural clashes. Dave Carty's Born
Again at the Laundromat
roams Montana's unsexy side to describe a world that will
never find its way into a
40 Stephen W. Brown, Voice of the New West: John G.
Jackson, His Life and Times

(Mac?n, GA, 1985); Donald Pisani, Water and the American
Government: The Reclamation
Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935
(Berkeley, 2002); William S. Speer, ed.,
The Encyclopedia of the New West, Containing Fully
Authenticated Information of the Agricultural,
Mercantile, Commercial . . ., rev. ed. (Easley, SC, 1979); Scott
Solliday, Chandler, Pioneer City of
the New West (Chandler, AZ, 1996); Stanley Noyes and Daniel
Gelo, Comanches in the New
West, 1895-1908: Historic Photographs (Austin, TX, 1999);
Gary E. Elliott, Senator Alan Bible
and the Politics of the New West (Reno, 1994).
41 Gene M. Gressley, ed., Old West/New West: Quo Vadis?
(Worland, WY, 1994) and
Barbara Howard Meldrum, ed., Old West-New West:
Centennial Essays (Moscow, ID, 1993).
42 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed.
(New Haven, 1982), 343;
William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature," in
Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William
Cronon (New York, 1995), 69-90.
43 Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the
Colorado Front Range, fore
word by John Szarkowski (Boulder, CO, 1974), x.
44 Jeanie Kasindorf, The Nye County Brothel Wars: A Tale of
the New West (New
York, 1985).

2016 20:56:34 UTC
tourist brochure. Peter Decker's Old Fences, New Neighbors
muses over gentrification
of western Colorado's working ranches. Raye Ringholz's
Paradise Paved traces growth
pressures in the inland West, while Liza Nicholas's, Elaine
Bapis's, and Thomas Harvey's
Imagining the Big Open uses Robert Redford's romantic
depictions of Old and New
as a fulcrum to analyze the remaking of the West as a nature
playground.45 In all these
works a collision of urban consumers and rural producers has
created, in the words
of Aspen architects Cottle Graybeal Yaw, "a dynamically
evolving rural-recreational
lifestyle, blending work with play and creating new definitions
of community." Nothing
underscores this better than Elizabeth Flood's Cowboy High
Style and Bud Lilly's and
Paul Schullery's Bud Lilly's Guide to Flyfishing the New West,
both of which explicitly
link gentrified lifestyles to the rural West.46 At times, New
West diversity can seem
like little more than wealthy folk playing in the country.
New West studies of literature and art also stress diversity, and
many expand the

conceptual and geographical boundaries of the Diverse New
West. Brian Bouldrey's
Writing Home and Robert Gish's First Horses feature short
stories, memoirs, and po
ems on a range of western experiences. Gregory Morris's
Talking Up a Storm honors
western writers of national acclaim, while Krista Comer
explores the spatial gendering
of their works in Landscapes of the New West.47 Blending
stories of trailer parks, gay
neighborhoods, and wheat-bread suburbs, this New West is
indeed demographically and
culturally complex. This is the point of Charles Guerin's The
New West, which argues
that recent western art is a "celebration of non-conformity of
the artistic spirit."48 The
urban vista of these studies is unusual, however. More typical
in equating New West
with rural, Ann Ronald's The New West of Edward Abbey is
nevertheless a quixotic
entry. If Abbey's love of wilderness is as New West as it gets,
his glorification of sexist
loners is Old West according to Melody Graulich 's and
Stephen Tatum's Reading The
45 Dave Carty, Born Again at the Laundromat: And Other
Visions of the New West
(New York, 1992); Peter R. Decker, Old Fences, New
Neighbors (Tucson, AZ, 1998); Ringholz,
Paradise Paved; Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey, Imagining the
Big Open. While lacking the New
West tag, Raye Ringholz's Little Town Blues: Voices from the

Changing West (Salt Lake City,
1992) also traces these stories in the New West hangouts of
Aspen, Jackson, Moab, Moose, Park
City, Santa Fe, and Sedona.
46 Cottle Graybeal Yaw Architects, Architecture of the New
West, 10; Elizabeth Clair
Flood, Cowboy High Style: Thomas Molesworth to the New
West (Salt Lake City, 1992); Bud Lilly
and Paul Schullery, Bud Lilly's Guide to Fly Fishing the New
West (Portland, OR, 2000). See also
"Points West," Sunday Morning, Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS), 18 August 2002.
47 Brian Bouldrey, ed., Writing Home: Award-Winning
Literature from the New West
(Berkeley, 1999); Robert Gish, First Horses: Stories of the New
West (Reno, 1993); Gregory L.
Morris, Talking up a Storm: Voices of the New West (Lincoln,
1994); Krista Comer, Landscapes of
the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary
Women's Writing (Chapel Hill, 1999).
48 Charles A. Guerin, curator, The New West: January ll-
March 16, 1986, Colorado
Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, CO, 1986), 4.
2016 20:56:34 UTC

Virginian in the New West.49 Most of Reading's authors follow
paths blazed by Jane
Tompkins in analyzing the racist, classist, and gendered
structure of Owen Wister's
classic, but these essays seem more akin to New Western
history than New West. The
exception is Susan Kollin's "Wister and the 'New West,'" which
shows how relevant
The Virginian can be to modern range wars over public
lands.50 The varied perspectives
of these works reinforces the argument that the Diverse New
West is being rocked by
social and cultural change, but is this new?
A third set of books foreground contests over nature in the New
West, but here
diversity seems to contradict itself. Thomas McGuire's,
William Lord's, and Mary
Wallace's Indian Water in the New West and Carl Abbott's, Sy
Adler's, and Margery
Post Abbott's Planning a New West both explore urban impacts
on western nature.
The essays in Indian Water trace the history of Indian water
treaties, the growing
pressure to shift water from rural to urban consumers, and the
prospect of privatized
water markets and declining federal support for tribes. Cities
are engines driving
rural resource extraction, but in Planning a New West they
become nature's friend
as Portlanders lobby to save the Columbia River Gorge for
scenic recreation, albeit
at the expense of the economic and political power of gorge
residents.51 Three more

works focus mainly on New West struggles over public lands.
Sharman Russell's
Kill the Cowboy and Charles Wilkinson's The Eagle Bird chart
the legacy of rural
resource industries, yet both ultimately call for moderation and
balance rather than
unilateral closure of public lands to Old West interests.52 Less
restrained is Timothy
Egan's Lasso the Wind. Egan, who in an earlier book advocated
eliminating logging
so the Pacific Northwest would have nicer scenery, adopts the
same perspective for
environmental conflicts around the West.53 One of the
paradoxes of the Diverse New
West is that some of its advocates posit a Hobson's choice
between diverse nature and
diverse communities.
Standing apart are three attempts to comprehensively analyze
this New West.
Michael Johnson's New Westers is a breathtaking examination
of market, scholarly,
49 Ann Ronald, The New West of Edward Abbey
(Albuquerque, 1982); Graulich and
Tatum, Reading The Virginian in the New West.
50 Kollin, "Wister and the 'New West,'" 233-54.
51 Thomas R. McGuire, William B. Lord, Mary G. Wallace,
eds., Indian Water in the
New West (Tucson, AZ, 1993); Carl Abbott, Sy Adler, and
Margery Post Abbott, Planning a New
West: The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area
(Corvallis, OR, 1997). For New West ten

sions with Indians, see Robert Sullivan, A Whale Hunt (New
York, 2000). For urban consump
tion, see Tom Knudsen, "State of Denial" in the Sacramento
(California) Bee, 27 April 2003,
http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/
(accessed 3 December 2003).
52 Sharman Apt Russell, Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of
Mythology in the New West
(Reading, MA, 1993); Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird.
53 Egan, Lasso the Wind; Timothy Egan, The Good Rain:
Across Time and Terrain in the
Pacific Northwest (New York, 1990), 253. See also John Baden
and Donald Snow, eds., The Next
West: Public Lands, Community, and Economy in the American
West (Washington, DC, 1997);
Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies; Walker,
"Reconsidering 'Regional' Political
Ecologies," 18.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
literary, visual, and musical representations of the West, but its
vast sweep results in
reified clich?s such as the West is "willy-nilly... self-
fashioning and self-imitative" and
that "the whole scene is changing."54 By contrast, Neil
Campbell's jargon-laden Cultures

of the American New West deftly exposes the New West's
shimmering condition:
Efforts to define the West inevitably reduce its complexities
and smooth
out its contradictions by transforming cultural processes into
natural
ones, history into myth. To view the West otherwise is to see it
as sev
eral spaces simultaneously, overlapping, in contact and
exchange, as
'thirdspace'. In this sense, the New West is always relational,
dialogic,
engaged in or capable of reinvention?and, therefore,
contradictory,
irreducible, and hybrid.55
Both Johnson and Campbell capture facets of the region's
complex dynamics, but
neither delivers a coherent sense of where the New West is
located. It seems spatially
disconnected, flitting about from hip town to cool resort with
lots of empty space
in between.
At first glance William Riebsame's Atlas of the New West
seems to address this
problem. The maps of a peopled, cultured, playful, ugly West
ground discussion as they
reveal important shifts in perception. The New West appears
more obviously diverse
and explicitly interested (in all meanings of that word) in
recreation than at any
previous moment.56 Yet Riebsame's central argument is

overdetermined: the essence
of the New West is a shift from the traditional economy of
resource extraction to an
amenities-seeking service economy; the Internet and light
industry revolutionized
rural economies by drawing a highly educated class from cities
to exurbia. "The New
West," he argues, "is truly built by New Westerners, not by the
commodities industry
nor even the corporate logic of economies of scale."57 Few
authors more completely
efface the West's past, but essays by Wilkinson and Limerick
reveal the Atlas's underly
ing tensions. Where Wilkinson sees in the restoration of a
Missoula carousel and the
Quincy Library Group hopes of a kinder, gentler West,
Limerick turns unusually (for
her) pessimistic, doubting the New West's newness and ability
to "reverse history" to
solve problems with social equity. The New West's romantic
dreams, she remarks at
the end of her essay, "both shelters and darkens our lives."58
54 Michael L. Johnson, New Westers: The West in
Contemporary American Culture
(Lawrence, 1996), 28, 149.
55 Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West
(Chicago, 2000), 164.
56 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 95, 113, 124, 137; see
also Michael Janofsky, "U.S.
Utah Land Accord Incites Unlikely Critics," New York Times,

A18, 23 May 2003.
"Riebsame, Adas of the New West, 12, 109; Egan, Lasso the
Wind, 133; Timothy P.
Duane, Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the
Changing West (Berkeley, 1999),
73-194; Joel Kotkin, The New Geography: How the Digital
Revolution is Reshaping the American
Landscape (New York, 2000), 3-51.
58 For "reverse" and "darken" see Limerick, "The Shadows of
Heaven Itself," 165, 178;
Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 38-44.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
The Atlas is a tremendous effort to document systematically
what others assert
anecdotally, but even its strengths undermine the notion of a
New West. For one
thing, Riebsame's maps also reveal the disconnected nature of
this New West. Logging,
mining, and farming still thrive, even if loggers, miners, and
farmers do not.59 For
another, essentializing rural history as extractive has immense
rhetorical power, but
this simplified relationship of past to present obscures crucial
biases. Where the rural

West was purely extractive?a claim at odds with earlier New
Wests?it now seems
purely for play?which is equally problematic. As Wilkinson
notes, "Most of the [New
West's] ascendant values ... cannot rightly be called new; all
had long preceded" it.60
Anne Hyde adds that much of the "Interior West has always
functioned as a sort of
destination resort for wealthy grown-up children, with the poor
providing the raw
materials and the services to make such a fantasy possible."61
Workers who must live
in dorms reminiscent of nineteenth-century logging camps or
commute long distances
to service wealthy tourists underscore High Country News
publisher Ed Marston's
observation that "El Nuevo West is also the old West."62
Work, play, and class are but opening wedges; the New West
markers falter repeat
edly. Although the region might seem more diverse to New
West writers, Asians, blacks,
gays, Indians, Jews, Latinos, and women are hardly recent
arrivals.63 Nor is popular
59 Beyers and Nelson, "Contemporary Development Forces in
the Nonmetropolitan
West," 472; David M. Wrobel, "The View from Philadelphia,"
Pacific Historical Review 67
(August 1998): 388.
60 Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 17.
61 Anne Hyde, "Nothing New Under the Sun: Continuities in
the West," Pacific

Historical Review 67 (August 1998): 395. See also William
Robbins, "In Pursuit of a Historical
Explanation: Capitalism as a Conceptual Tool for Knowing the
American West," Western
Historical Quarterly 30 (Autumn 1999): 285.
62 Marston quoted in Limerick, "The Shadows of Heaven
Itself," 177.1 thank JoAnn
Kalenak at High Country News for help with this citation. See
also, William G. Robbins,
"Creating a 'New' West: Big Money Returns to the Hinterland,"
Montana The Magazine of
Western History 46 (Summer 1996): 66-72; Rothman, Devil's
Bargains, 338-70; Ray Ring, "The
New West's Servant Economy," High Country News, 17 April
1995; William G. Robbins, Hard
Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850-1986 (Seattle,
1988), 54-67.1 thank the anonymous
reviewer for help with this point.
63 For New West diversity see Riebsame, Atlas of the New
West, 101-2. For criticism of
the Atlas' concept of diversity see Wrobel, "The View from
Philadelphia," 385; Hyde, "Nothing
New Under the Sun," 397; Scharff, "Honey, I Shrunk the
West," 415. For the West's diverse past
see Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken
Past of The American West (New
York, 1987); White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My
Own." For groups other than Indians,
for whom the bibliography is too rich and the point too obvious
to summarize, see Blake
Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an
American Work Culture (New York,

1992); Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and
Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific
Northwest (Berkeley, 2003); John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise:
Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American
City (New York, 1966); Susan Armitage and Elizabeth
Jameson, eds., The Women's West
(Norman, 1987); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds.,
Writing the Range: Race, Class,
2016 20:56:34 UTC
awareness novel. By the early 1970s, TV-Westerns such as
Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Kung
Fu, and Little House on the Prairie featured most of these
groups in plots.64 If even
Hollywood saw this decades ago, what is so new about the New
West? This goes for
gentrification, too. Some seem star-struck by the arrival of Bill
Murray, Glenn Close,
and Bruce Willis. Bookstores, baseball teams, and bison
burgers are paradigmatic
shifts; brew masters and espresso stands signify cultural
advance.65 But this also only
makes sense if we ignore the history of national parks,
Raymond tours, health spas,
Harvey Girls, mountaineering clubs, the Columbia River
Highway, and Sun Valley,
all of which preceded World War II.66 Neither is the New West

particularly western.
Claiming Ralph Lauren or Ted Turner as western icons has
obvious flaws, and tech
nology and the market affect far more than just the rural West.
Gentrification is a
force in many cities, not just South of Market and Belltown,
and tourists and equity
refugees have reshaped the upper Midwest and New England as
much as Grass Valley
and Culture in the Women's West (Norman, 1997); Ronald T.
Takaki, Strangers from a Different
Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, 1989); Quintard
Taylor, in Search of the Racial
Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990
(New York, 1998); Oscar Martinez,
Mexican-Origin People in the United States: A Topical History
(Tucson, 2001); Frederick C.
Luebke, ed., European Immigrants in the American West:
Community Histories (Albuquerque,
1998); Ava Kahn, ed., Jewish Life in the American West:
Perspectives on Migration, Settlement, and
Community (Los Angeles, 2002); Ferenc Morton Szasz, Scots
in the North American West, 1790
1917 (Norman, 2000). For critiques of the West as
exceptionally diverse see Elliott West, "A
Longer, Grimmer, But More Interesting Story," Montana The
Magazine of Western History 40
(Autumn 1990): 72-6; Michael P. Malone, "The 'New Western
History': An Assessment,"
Montana The Magazine of Western History 40 (Summer 1990):
65-7; Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A
New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American

West (New York, 1996).
64 Gunsmoke, CBS, 1955-1975; Bonanza, National
Broadcasting Company (NBC),
1959-1973; Kung Fu, Warner Brothers and American
Broadcasting Company (ABC), 1972
1975; Little House on the Prairie, NBC, 1974-1983.
65 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 97, 112-31, 139;
Limerick, "The Shadows of
Heaven Itself," 165-6; Egan, Lasso the Wind, 30, 137, 144,
147-50.
66 Anne F. Hyde, "Cultural Filters: The Significance of
Perception," in A New
Significance, 175-201; Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness;
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature:
Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of
American Conservation (Berkeley, 2001),
81-146; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and
Conservationists in Twentieth-Century
America (New Haven, 1997), 71-171; Pomeroy, In Search of
the Golden West, 3-111; Rothman,
Devil's Bargains, 50-112, 168-201; Anne M. Butler, "Selling
the Popular Myth," in The Oxford
History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A.
O'Connor, and Martha A.
Sandweiss (New York, 1994), 787-90; Mary Spence,
"Waitresses in the Trans-Mississippi West:
'Pretty Waiter Girls', Harvey Girls, and Union Maids," in The
Women's West, 219-34; Michael P.
Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San
Francisco, 1988); Erik Weiselberg,
"Ascendancy of the Mazamas: Environment, Identity and
Mountain Climbing in Oregon, 1870

to 1930" (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1999); Jim
Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History
(Seattle, 1998); Abbott, Adler, and Abbott, Planning a New
West, 28-32.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
and Missoula.67 Stripped of its sensationalism, New West
boosterism sounds like any
other ad for a "new, improved" product.
What is left is a vision of the rural West similar to Joel
Garreau's Empty Quarter.
Wilkinson's wilderness is "a peculiarly western institution";
Timothy Duane's "real
West" is where "the sounds of Nature dominate the sounds of
Culture"; Egan's is
"a little space for discovery."68 These neo-frontier fantasies
can sound modest, but
they often imply a casual social and cultural deracination, or
what Virginia Scharff
calls "a lamentable resettlement project."69 Wilkinson first
coined the term "Lords of
Yesterday" to describe ancient laws that still regulate public
resources, but Duane and
Jim Lichatowich have redefined it as a synonym for the people
who work in those
industries.70 Desiring to end these jobs, Duane and Egan move
beyond describing
rural decline to argue that hard times justify euthanizing

extractive industries.71 This
rationalization reduces value to income and dismisses those
activities which make less
money. The archetypal argument is that timber has declined in
importance, so Pacific
Northwesterners should stop logging public lands.72 The
creation of the Columbia
River Gorge National Scenic Area exposes the power of this
logic, but Egan offers its
most expansive venting. Although he justly worries about
environmental abuses, he
also seems to view the western past through a prism of
contempt. When not insult
ing loggers, miners, and the state of Montana, or wishing to
end New Mexico's cattle
67 For claims about the West see Wilkinson, "Paradise
Revised," 38-41; Egan, Lasso
the Wind, 166-80, 194-211; Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 74-80.
For national trends see Kotkin,
The New Geography, 26-35, 44?79, 162. For gentrification see
Lynne Heasley, "Shifting
Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help
Historians Tell a Complicated Story?"
Human Ecology 31 (June 2003): 194-5; Madeleine Hall-Arber,
Christopher Dyer, John Poggie,
James McNally, and Ren?e Gagne, New England's Fishing
Communities (Cambridge, MA, 2001),
42-6; Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England:
Explorations of Regional Identity from the
Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 2001),
239, 265-6, 304. See also S. Watson,
"Gilding the Smokestacks: The New Symbolic Representations
of Deindustrialised Regions,"

Environment and Planning D 9 (March 1991): 59-70.
68 Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 73; Duane, Shaping the Sierra,
156; Egan, Lasso the
Wind, 82; Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America
(Boston, 1981), 302-5, 310-1.
69 Scharff, "Honey, I Shrunk the West," 410.
70 For "Lords" see Charles Wilkinson, Crossing the Next
Meridian: Land, Water, and
the Future of the West (Washington, DC, 1992), xiii, 3-27. For
uses of Lords see Duane, Shaping
the Sierra, 172; Jim Lichatowich, Salmon Without Rivers: A
History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis
(Washington, DC, 1999), 54.
71 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 143, 122-58; Egan, Lasso the
Wind, 194-211, 229-47;
Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, 4-5.
72 Whitelaw, "Oregon's Real Economy"; Ed Whitelaw, "Rich
Oregonian, Poor
Oregonian," Oregon Quarterly 74 (Summer 1995): 28-30;
Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional'
Political Ecologies," 14; James McCarthy, "First World
Political Ecology: Lessons from the
Wise Use Movement," Environment and Planning A (July
2002): 1285-6; Richard White, '"Are
You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?':
Work and Nature," in Uncommon
Ground, 171-85.

2016 20:56:34 UTC
industry so he can catch trout, he spins fantasies of giving the
Rogue River Valley a
makeover so it looks like Napa or Sonoma.73
Egan may be an extreme example, but he is far from alone in
desiring a rural New
West mirroring his urban and urbane tastes.74 Concluding that
"cities are basically
anti-nature," Duane and many many others with means have
moved to exurban com
munities with hopes of building a different future.75 The
ability of digital technology
to free these people from the old geography of workplaces is a
principal engine of the
exodus, yet once again the New West seems familiar. Migrants
have helped displace
small-town enterprises with national franchises that cater to
their tastes, and they
import many of the economic and social problems they wish to
escape, including
soaring real estate values, tax and education conflicts, and
gated communities.76 The
quest for environmental amenities has also produced massive
contradictions. Cashing
in on inflated urban and suburban home prices allowed equity
refugees to buy larger
properties in rural places, thereby gaining greater access to
nature, but the resulting,
largely unregulated growth has exacerbated groundwater

pollution, habitat fragmen
tation, and forest fires.77 In other words, the Diverse New
West led to a self-defeating
repetition of supposedly Old West problems.78
Rural westerners have not accepted passively this New West.
Rationalized mar
ginalization goaded an equal and opposite reaction from Wise
Use and Local Control
movements.79 Ranchers in Nye County, Nevada, and Catron
County, New Mexico,
73 Abbott, Adler, and Abbott, Planning a New West, 42-69;
Egan, Lasso the Wind, 11
32, 147-53, 185; Egan, The Good Rain, 178.
74 For urban colonization of the rural West in the past, see
William G. Robbins,
Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the
American West (Lawrence, 1994), 162-83.
75 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 73-121, 433; Kotkin, The New
Geography, 27-51.
76 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 256-66, 360; Hyde, "Nothing
New Under the Sun," 395;
Scharff, "Honey, I Shrunk the West," 411-13; Robbins,
"Creating a 'New' West," 68-70;
Wyckoff, "Inside the New West," 401; Rothman, Devil's
Bargains, 344.
77 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 195-250; Walker,
"Reconsidering 'Regional' Political
Ecologies," 14, 17.

78 Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 27; Wilkinson, The Eagle
Bird, 25, 140, 155;
Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 29, 31; Duane, Shaping the
Sierra, 117, 263-4, 386-410, 431, 438;
Kotkin, The New Geography, 39, 170, 175, 185.
79 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 142-6; Wilkinson, The
Eagle Bird, 130-1. Urban
rural tensions are at least continental in scope. For the United
States see "Reconciling Alaska's
Urban-Rural Split, Wilda Marston Theater, Loussac Library,
Anchorage," http://www.common
wealthnorth.org/transcripts/4urbanruralsplit.html (accessed 3
December 2003); and Public
Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research,
Election 2002: Rural Voters and
Rural Issues, December 2, 2002, (Report for the W K. Kellogg
Foundation, 2002), http://www.
wkkf.org/pubs/FoodRur/Pub3791.pdf (accessed 3 December
2003). For Canada see "The Rift,"
News in Review: Online Resource Guide, Canadian
Broadcasting Company (CBC), September
1998,
http://www.tv.cbc.ca/insidecbc/newsinreview/sept97/election97/
rift.html (accessed 3
December 2003; site now discontinued). For a global
perspective see Jacob Burke and Julian
Beltran, "Competing for Water," UN Habitat, United Nations
Human Settlements Program,
http://www.unhabitat.org/HD/hdv6n3/competingforwater.htm
(accessed 3 December 2003).
2016 20:56:34 UTC

became the poster children of this rural backlash, menacing
BLM agents and wolves
and garnering national attention. Many neighbors seemed to
share their resent
ments, if not extremism, but in the big picture this latest
version of nullification was
less a viable response than a badge of marginalization.80
Change came, and denial
was impotent. More interesting and significant were the efforts
of a broad group of
rural westerners seeking a different course. For example, Ed
Marston met Wise Use
members to discuss mutual concerns about gentrification, and
Egan visited a similarly
contentious roundtable in Jackson. Tellingly, Marston started
to host monthly meetings
of environmentalists and ranchers, but Egan bolted in disgust
"to find a true West,"
apparently thinking that cultural difference is not part of the
real West.81 Whether
Egan's perspective is urban, exurban, or weird, he clearly does
not understand the rural
West. It is as contentious as any city, and while Wilkinson's
view of Quincy seems
romantic, he is correct that what goes on in those meetings is
also important.82
Accommodation through local coalition building is the most

significant new
development in the rural West.83 Major shifts in environmental
management over the
last fifteen years have forced wrenching changes to the region.
Closed mills and plants
made under-employment a way of life. Income levels fell and
government revenues
plummeted. "Reskilling" programs embittered residents, but
there was little new in this.
As Scharff notes, westerners "have been complaining that
outsiders and speculators
have been ruining the place for roughly five centuries at last
count."84 More notable
was the creation of coalitions, sometimes called watershed
councils, to air concerns and
find solutions. Local efforts such as the Mattole Restoration
Council, Quincy Library
Group, Trout Creek Mountain Working Group, and Nestucca
Watershed Council have
forged considerable, if subtle, changes around the West.
Although most attention is
focused on how the groups repair habitat, their greater
achievement has been in forcing
80 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 142-5; Richard White,
"The Current Weirdness
in the West," Western Historical Quarterly 28 (Spring 1997): 5-
16; James McCarthy, "States of
Nature and Environmental Enclosures in the American West,"
in Violent Environments, ed.
Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 117-
45; McCarthy, "First World

Political Ecology," 1290.
81 James Sherow, "Environmentalism and Agriculture in the
American West," in The
Rural West Since World War 11, ed. R. Douglas Hurt
(Lawrence, 1998), 70-1; Egan, Lasso the
Wind, 10. Both corporations and environmental organizations
have condemned these coalitions
because they could not control events, but as Charles
Wilkinson notes, "The single greatest ally
of those who would wreck the West is the idea that the West is
homogeneous," The Eagle Bird,
155; Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 27.
82 Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional' Political Ecologies," 20;
McCarthy, "First World
Political Ecology," 1281-2; Wilkinson, "Paradise Revised," 41-
4
83 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 24, 463; Riebsame, Atlas of the
New West, 145; Seth
Zuckerman, "Toward a New Salmon Economy," 63-73;
Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 61.
84 For "complaining" see Scharff, "Honey, I Shrunk the West,"
410. For economic im
pacts, see Helvoigt, Adams, and Ayre, "Employment
Transitions in Oregon's Wood Products
Sector During the 1990s."
2016 20:56:34 UTC

residents to confront the West's resilient heterogeneity. Early
meetings are often studies
in pathos due to mutual distrust and despair, but familiarity
breeds sympathy as well
as contempt. Caricatures slowly, painfully, grudgingly become
neighbors. This is not
Ren and Stimpy singing "Happy Happy Joy Joy," but more like
crew cuts and longhairs,
speculators and back-to-the-landers, and resource workers and
environmentalists sit
ting down and talking and talking and, occasionally, finding
common ground. Land
users sometimes agree to alter practices, and exurbanites
sometimes admit that the
Old West has not and will not fade away in any simple
manner.85
Newcomers also discovered that they have changed in
unexpected ways. One
result of these coalitions has been the modification of
opposition to public subsidies
for natural resource industries. A few critics now dispute the
classist dismissal of rural
economics. Charles Wilkinson, for example, wants to
recalibrate subsidies to favor
small-scale operations and local communities rather than
corporations. Duane is
more selective, wanting to aid farmers but end logging except
for "craft" carpentry, a
relic economy that is a hallmark of gentrification.86 Wilkinson
and Duane are em

blematic of the frustrations that accompany local
accommodation. In struggling with
the complexities of the rural West, solutions are often halting
and incomplete, but the
effort itself is significant. In turning away from zero-sum
games, in rejecting the no
tion that compromise is weakness, rural westerners may have
found a way to redefine
debates that too often rage in ignorance and defiance of local
wishes.87 To the extent
that they question the wisdom of gentrification, they might also
create something at
considerable odds with this latest New West.
While the American West is changing, change is a truism for us
historians. Thus,
the New West is better understood as boosterism than analysis,
as a rhetorical flour
ish sharing more with "Rain Follows the Plow" or "Come West
and Live" than "The
Significance of the Frontier" or The Legacy of Conquest. New
West works best at
justifying gentrification and selling books. Journalists and
writers use it because pub
lishers care about sales, circulation, and viewer shares, and
historians are implicated,
too. There have been three New West papers given at Western
History Association
85 Duane, Shaping the Sierra, 488-9, n.25; Freeman House,
Totem Salmon: Life Lessons
from Another Species (Boston, 1999); Mike Connelly, "Home
Is Where They'll Lay Me Down,"
Orion: People and Nature 23 (Summer 2001): 19, 21; Mark
Sternen, personal and various commu

nications; Scott Staats, "Hatfields Recognized for Sustainable
Ranch Management," Capital
Press Agriculture Weekly, 7 December 2001; Joseph E. Taylor
III, "History, Memory, and Salmon:
Reconciling the Past in Natural Resource Management," (paper
presented, Seventh
International Symposium on Society and Resource
Management, University of Missouri,
Columbia, MO, May 1998.)
86 Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird, 122-3; Duane, Shaping the
Sierra, 307-9; Christensen,
Red Lodge and the Mythic West, 212-38.
87 Joseph E. Taylor III, '"Well-Thinking Men and Women': The
Battle for the
White Act and the Meaning of Conservation in the 1920s,"
Pacific Historical Review 71
(August 2002): 356-87.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
meetings, but one historian added the phrase for Imagining the
Big Open and three
others adopted it for the volume's subtitle.88 If the only reason
to use New West is
sales, however, why perpetuate an idea that is neither new nor
western, let alone one
which masks so many of the West's least admirable traits?
Scholars are different, or

at least we should be. For better and worse we can keep cheap
tricks at arm's length,
and now seems high time.
My problem with New West is not simply political discomfort
but the phrase's
scholarly isolation. Have we already forgotten the
breakthroughs of the 1980s, that
the West is American history and America is world history?
Similar forces affect
many places, yet nobody else talks of a New New England,
New Amazon, or New
Nepal. So why marginalize oneself with ghettoized
terminology?89 New West inhibits
comparisons; "consumption," "colonialism," and "post-
colonialism" make these stories
relevant to broad groups of scholars and activists. As
geographer James McCarthy
notes, the rural American West is not the Third World, but the
environmental and
social tensions arising from its gentrification reveal '"more
ambiguity, porosity, and
commonality' within and between the categories of 'first' and
'third' worlds" than
historians usually acknowledge.90 Western environmental
issues and violence is one
example. Peter Walker argues that these conflicts often "reflect
underlying tensions
between competing capitalisms that commodify nature in
incompatible ways."91 The
resulting battles have been waged on at least two very different
fronts: one occurs in
state structures (courtrooms, legislatures, administrations)

among those with capital;
the other unfolds through extralegal violence by marginalized
groups. From this per
spective, Wise Use and Earth First! activists have more in
common with each other
and other rural resistors around the world than New West can
ever convey.92
Only by eschewing the insularity of New West do we perceive
the global relevance
of what seems like regional gentrification. Take for example
that archetypal New
West pastime, fly fishing. William Kittredge overstated things
when he described the
Rockies as a "bumper-to-bumper raceway," and he cast too
much blame on "fly-fishing
nuts who saw A River Runs Through It," sold their homes, and
moved to Montana.93
88 For New West papers see WHA conference books for 2003
(p.34), 2001 (p.43), and
1995 (p.32). For changed titles see 2001 (p. 41), 1999 (p. 38)
and Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey,
Imagining the Big Open, v-vi.
89 Patricia Limerick made the same argument about "frontier"
in "The Adventures of
the Frontier in the Twentieth Century," in The Frontier in
American Culture, ed. James
Grossman (Berkeley, 1994), 72-80; a review of paper and
session titles for the American Society
for Environmental History conferences from 1995 to 2003
revealed no use of the term "New
West" by environmental historians.

90 McCarthy is quoted in Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional*
Political Ecologies," 10.
See also McCarthy, "First World Political Ecology," 1296 and
Robbins, Colony and Empire.
91 Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional' Political Ecologies," 17.
92 McCarthy, "States of Nature and Environmental Enclosures
in the American West."
Kittredge, quoted in Johnson, New westers, 343.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
Still, those "nuts" reveal trends that run like the Lake Missoula
floods through history
and across continents. Fly fishing has been a core form of
gentrified play for centuries,
and for just as long anglers have constrained local access to
streams while planting
all sorts of exotic fish. Owning a fly rod was a sign of wealth
and taste, but things are
different since Norman Maclean's book and Robert Redford's
movie. Changes can be
mapped by the growth of stores that serve fly fishers, but like
so much about the New
West, the story is contradictory and complex.94 The spread of
Orvis shops marks fly
fishing's passage from rare avocation to popular sport, and like

climbing and kayaking,
marketing successes fueled overcrowded experiences and
degraded environments.95 As
the West fills with Izaak Walton wannabees, fly-fishing's
frontier is migrating again,
this time to Kamchatka, where the Portland-based Wild Salmon
Center is battling "red
caviar poachers [who] are permanently destroying these
spawning grounds." The UN
pledged its support to this war effort, but as usual nuances are
blurring. It is hard to
know exactly what is going on, but my guess is this is as much
about gentrified capital
ism as irresponsible locals. The Itelmans and Koryaks, after
all, have been eating vast
amounts of salmon eggs since at least 1740, when Georg Stellar
noted that "Ikra, or
dried fish eggs ... is one of the most popular and nutritious
foods on Kamchatka."96
94 Riebsame, Atlas of the New West, 116; Michael McGovern,
"The Reel Story," http://
www.outdoor-
retailer.com/or_publications/archives/07_99_archive/07_99g.ht
m (accessed 3
December 2003, site now discontinued); Norman Maclean, A
River Runs Through It (Chicago,
1976); Robert Redford, A River Runs Through It
(Columbia/Tristar, 1992). For western angling
Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (Boston, 1899), 57-79;
Captain Cleveland Rockwell, "The
First Columbia River Salmon Ever Caught with a Fly," Pacific
Monthly 10 (1903): 202-3; Zane
Grey, Zane Grey's Adventures in Fishing, ed. Ed Zern (New
York, 1952); Lisa Mighetto, "Sport

Fishing on the Columbia River," Pacific Northwest Quarterly
87 (Winter 1995-1996): 5-15. For
angling politics see Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An
Environmental History of the
Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, 1999), 166-202.
95 Daryl Gadbow, "Missoula-Area Fisheries in Good Shape,"
Billings (Montana)
Gazette, 20 February 2003; "Mixed Reviews for Plan to Cut
River Crowding," Great Falls
(Montana) Tribune, 17 June 2002; Tom Dickson, "Cross
Currents," Montana Outdoors 34 (July
August 2003): 6-10. Little of this is new. Philadelphia's
Schuylkill Fishing Club had to move
twice before 1900 to escape overcrowding and habitat decline,
and Portland anglers were pro
moting new areas to disperse crowds from the Clackamas River
in the 1910s. Colleen J. Sheehy,
"American Angling: The Rise of Urbanism and the Romance of
the Rod and Reel," in Hard at
Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, ed. Kathryn Grover
(Amherst, MA, 1992), 79; "Nearby
Streams Lure To Anglers," Portland Morning Oregonian, 10
May 1914, sec. 2, p. 4; "1200 Fishers
On River," Portland Morning Oregonian, 19 April 1915, 11.
96 For "?kra," see Georg Steller, Steller's History of
Kamchatka: Collected Information
Concerning the History of Kamchatka, Its Peoples, Their
Manners, Names, Lifestyle, and Various
Customary Practices, ed. Marvin W Falk, trans. Margritt Engel
and Karen Willmore, Rasmuson
Library Historical Translation Series, vol. 12 (Fairbanks, AK,

2003), 119. For "poachers" see Paul
Webster, "U.N. Joins Russia's Fight to Save Western Pacifie
Salmon," Science 301 (29 August
2003): 1167. The title unintentionally signals the impetus of
this battle, since Russians would
hardly refer to Pacific salmon as "western." See also Elizabeth
Arnold, "Scientific Program in
Russia Combines Tourism, Fishing and Science in an Effort to
Preserve Russia's Pristine Waters
and Variety of Fish," Morning Edition (NPR), 20 January 2003;
Elizabeth Arnold, "American and
Russian Scientific Study of Salmon in a Remote Region of
Russia," Morning Edition (NPR), 21
January 2003.
2016 20:56:34 UTC
Western gentrification also encompasses South America, where
clothing mag
nate Doug Tompkins has become the Latin American version of
Ted Turner. Like
his buddy Yvon Chouinard, Tompkins made his millions in the
outdoor recreation
industry and the West's sporty fashion trends of the 1980s.
Proceeds from the sale of
his two companies, North Face and Esprit, have enabled him to
buy huge swaths of
"wilderness" in Chile's Region X and western Argentina.
Tompkins's goal is to stem the

ecological impact of globalization by converting the lush
forests of alerce trees into a
permanent preservationist park. In the process, though, he has
evicted poor residents
and created ill will with neighbors and the government.
Although Tompkins is trying
to build bridges with Chileans, he also promotes elite fun
hogging at his ecotourism
resort called Caleta. There, enlightened tourists from places
like Aspen, Jackson, and
Ventura enjoy his imagined Pumalin Park, dine on gourmet
organic meals, and sleep
in plush lodges.97 Tompkins and transnational fly fishers
underscore Peter Walker's
observation that "aesthetic environmental ideologies are not
'obstacles' to capitalist
accumulation, rather, they are at the core of a new kind of
capitalism."98
This should make even the most credulous New West booster
nervous. When
hip becomes pass?, when the "barbarians" invade the
sanctuaries of Veblen's "leisure
class," then cool will morph.99 It is already happening in
vaunted New West enclaves.
Gentrified play is moving on, and as it does, local boosters are
seeking new ways to
attract capital. New West rationales for saving nature can
implode under these circum
stances, and, as Bill Cronon warns, the habits of thought that
inspired recreational
environmentalism have been poor safeguards at home.100
Donald Worster, Patricia
Limerick, and Paul Sabin have already illustrated the tendency
of the American

West to slip its geographic moorings under the sails of
"frontier" and "West." In a
similar manner, the New West has had so many lives because
its mythic qualities are
so serviceable. Its emblematic power, substantive pliancy, and
spatial coyness make
it eminently adaptable, and because Egan is correct about
western amnesia, it seems
more than silly speculation to wonder whether the next New
West will be the Far
East or the Antipodes.101
97 John Ryle, "Lord of All He Surveys," Outside 23 (June
1998): 57-68, 167-9;
William Langewiesche, "Eden: A Gated Community" Atlantic
Monthly 283 (June 1999): 84
105; "Now He Is Buying In Argentina," Santiago Times
(Chile), 27 August 2001, http://test.chi
rongroup.com/splash/stimes/index.php
?nav=story&story_id=451 (accessed 3 December 2003;
site now discontinued).
98 Walker, "Reconsidering 'Regional' Political Ecologies," 17.
99 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New
York, 1994).
100 Beyers and Nelson, "Contemporary Development Forces in
the Nonmetropolitan
West," 472; Hal Clifford, "The Gear Biz," High Country News,
27 October 2003; Peter Walker
and Louis Fortmann, "Whose Landscape? A Political Ecology
of the 'Exurban' Sierra," Cultural
Geographies 10 (October 2003): 469-91; Cronon, "The Trouble

with Wilderness."
101 Donald Worster, "New West, True West," Western
Historical Quarterly 18 (April
1987): 141-3; Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the
Twentieth Century"; Paul Sabin,
2016 20:56:34 UTC
For all these reasons New West tells us less about the West
than the writers who
use the term. Depending on how one counts these things, this is
now the fourth
or fifth New West, and each has been a window into the era's
hopes and anxieties.
Technology, markets, and the state converge repeatedly in
these tales, and while no
two periods have been alike, a few themes emerge over and
over. Entrepreneurial and
gentrified spins are ubiquitous in New West literature, as is the
paradox of diversity.
The link between urban development and pastoral yearnings
suggests that as the city
grew more heterogeneous, the educated and wealthy viewed
western nature increas
ingly as a white refuge from darker realities.102 Rural Indians,
women, and workers
rarely speak in this literature because most of it has been

written by an urban literati,
primarily eastern before 1960 and mainly western since 1970.
The shifting residency of
New West authors does matter, but so does their gentrified
perspective and colonizing
discourse because they are the strongest continuities in New
West historiography. The
New West is a simplistic and loaded trope. Its reasoning is
flawed, its history troubling,
and we, of all people, should be trucking in more sophisticated
terms.
"Home and Abroad: The Two 'Wests' of Twentieth-Century
United States History," Pacific
Historical Review 66 (August 1997): 305-35; Roland Barthes,
"Myth Today," in Mythologies,
trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 109-59.
102 Louis Warren, "Wilderness and Civilization: Race and
Nature in American
History," (paper presented, American Society for
Environmental History, Durham, NC,
March 2001.)
2016 20:56:34 UTC
Contents[141]14214314414514614714814915015115215315415
5156157158159160161162163164165Issue Table of
ContentsThe Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2
(Summer, 2004), pp. 141-266Front MatterThe Many Lives of
the New West [pp. 141-165]Texas Rangers, Canadian Mounties,
and the Policing of the Transnational Industrial Frontier, 1885-

1910 [pp. 167-191]The Ups and Downs of Mountain Life:
Historical Patterns of Adaptation in the Cascade Mountains [pp.
193-213]Field NotesUndiscovered History: The Thoughts of
Thom Ross [pp. 214-224]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [p.
225-225]Review: untitled [p. 226-226]Review: untitled [p. 227-
227]Review: untitled [pp. 227-228]Review: untitled [pp. 228-
233]Review: untitled [pp. 233-234]Review: untitled [p. 234-
234]Review: untitled [p. 235-235]Review: untitled [pp. 235-
248]Review: untitled [pp. 248-249]Review: untitled [p. 249-
253]Book Notices [pp. 255-257]Recent Articles [pp. 259-
266]Back Matter

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