Essay

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4 The Realization of the American West

PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK

The parts of the United States differ in space, and also in time. When it is 8:30 a.m. in New York, it is 5:30 a.m. in California, and 6:30 a.m. in Colorado. This fact

provides the occasion for the Westerner's peak moments of regional consciousness. The phone rings at 6:30 a.m. This must be an emergency; it is just a typical

Easterner who thinks that if everyone is up and functioning in New York and Washington, then Coloradans, too, ought to be dressed and ready to talk business. I

have received these regional wakeup calls from people in all lines of work, but I suppose the most telling fact is that I have received them from people who work in

the news media. A manager at National Public Radio placed one of those calls. It did not seem altogether dignified, and it certainly did not seem professional, to talk

to the producer of "All Things Considered" while I was in my bathrobe, but those were the circumstances under which he chose to chat.

These are the peak moments of prickly regional consciousness, prickly moments of the "don't tread on me" variety. "You people to the east," one cannot avoid

thinking, "are not taking us seriously. Since you are so certain that you live at the center of the universe, the idea that there may be other people living at other centers,

on other schedules, cannot enter your mind."

Sometimes this issue becomes public and consequential. In 1980, the poor souls in California were still going to the polls, deluded into thinking that they were

American citizens participating in a presidential election. While the Californians "voted," the eastern TV stations declared Ronald Reagan the winner and Jimmy Carter

the loser. When the results were in from the Eastern United States, the real election was over.Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/8/2019 11:33 AM via UNIV OF ALABAMA AN: 4688 ; Dorman, Robert L., Wilson, Charles Reagan.; The New Regionalism : Essays and Commentaries Account: s4594951.main.ehost

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Regional differences, on the occasion like the 1980 election, are not easy to miss. And yet scholars in the field of Western American history have invested a

remarkable percentage of their time and energy in the question, is there really a West, or is what we call the West simply a floating zone of the Anglo American

imagination? 1 Confronted with a presentation from a Western American historian, specialists in other fields of history, who cannot think of anything else to ask in the

questionandanswer period, trot out the same old refrain of critical inquiry: "you call yourself a 'Western' American historian, but where is the West? Wasn't it once

west of Jamestown? Wasn't it once west of Plymouth Colony?"

"Where is [the West's] location?" the painter George Catlin asked in the midnineteenth century. "Phantomlike it flies before us as we travel."2 Quite a number of late

twentieth century historians show a remarkable loyalty to this Catlinism, detaching the West from the surface of the earth, making the West a place of the imagination

and not a place on the planet, segregating the West from reality. This essay is called "The Realization of the West," and that is the bedrock meaning of my enterprise

here: to cast the West as real, threedimensional, actual—literally, and literarily, grounded. In other words, realized. Made real.

But now, return to the electionnight coverage, and think what the anchorman says as the evening progresses. "We are starting to get results from the West," the man

in the nice suit with the perfectly combed hair will say. At that point, he will talk about what is going on in Utah, or Arizona, or Wyoming, or even California.

What I want you to notice is what does not happen at this moment. The switchboard does not light up with hundreds of puzzled and disoriented callers. The news

show does not say:

I have an important clarification to make. After I told you that we were getting reports from the West, many hundreds of you called in to ask, "where is 'the West'? Wasn't the

West onceC op yr ig ht @ 1 99 8. U ni ve rs it y Pr es s of M is si ss ip pi .

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west of Jamestown, Virginia, and Plymouth, Massachusetts? How can you say that you are getting election results from a place that existed only in the minds of James Fenimore

Cooper, Albert Bierstadt, Owen Wister, Frederick Remington, Zane Gray, John Ford, and Louis L'Amour? We knew what you meant when you said you had results from the

Northeast, the South, and the Midwest, but we are bewildered each time you refer to the West."

On the contrary, the anchorman simply announces the results from the West, and the public does not fly into a definitional tizzy. This is a great comfort to me. It

suggests that the realization of the West has actually proceeded much farther than you would ever guess from the discussions of scholars.

But this consensus—that the West exists, and exists as a real place—only works, some may think, if you are careful to avoid the question, "Where exactly is this

region, and what are its boundaries?" The outward boundaries are, indeed, tough to draw, but, then again, drawing outward boundaries is probably the least useful

way to define a region. What is more useful is to keep in mind a set of common characteristics. These characteristics appear and overlap in many places between the

Hundredth Meridian and the Pacific Ocean; they appear and overlap often enough to tie those places into a unit we can call the West.

Here are my nominations for those characteristics of Westernness: 3

1. The West is more prone to aridity, and aridity is the most significant factor in producing what we now

refer to as "the wide open spaces." Aridity, moreover, puts a particular strain on conventional Anglo

American notions of proper landscapes and landuse.

2. The West contains more Indian reservations, and more visible, unvanished Indian people.

3. The West has the bulk of the land still in federal control—the bulk of the country's National Parks,

National Forests, and Bureau of Land Management lands; with the center of gravity of its activities in

the West, the Department of the Interior embodies this peculiar, tense, and prolonged federal/regional

relationship.Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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4. The West contains the territory—and the descendants of the people—conquered in the Mexican

American War; it shares a border with Mexico, and that border forms a distinctive, and troubled, line

between a very developed and prosperous nation and a very underdeveloped and poor nation.

5. The West is closer to the Pacific Ocean while the rest of the nation has been far more oriented

toward the Atlantic, and this fact of geography has all sorts of historical consequences. Thanks to the

proximity to the Pacific, Asian American populations, Asian immigration, and Asian trade have their

centers of gravity in the West. While we have been very much preoccupied with the overland trail,

many white Americans, as well, reached the West by maritime travel.

6. The West underwent AngloAmerican conquest at a time when the United States was a fully formed

nation, providing, thereby, a more focused and revealing case study of how the United States as a

nation conducted conquest and especially how the federal government adopted a central role for itself

in that process. 4

7. As a result of all these factors, the West is a region particularly prone to demonstrate the unsettled

aspects of conquest, to show in the late twentieth century more than its share of the evidence that the

conquest of North America came to no clear, smooth end. One particularly consequential part of that

heritage of conquest is the West's state of entrapment in the myths generated to justify and prettify

conquest.

There may be other, and better, ways of testing the validity of these regional characteristics. But the test that matters the most to me is the roadtest I conducted in the

late 1980s and early 1990s. I gave speeches derived from these propositions all over the West, to a wide variety of audiences. Clearly some themesCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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make more sense in some Western places than in others. Aridity does not get to the core of things in Seattle (though Seattle has had boughts with drought). In

Montana, the Canadian border matters much more than the Mexican border. AngloTexans, in the midnineteenth century, cleverly maneuvered their way out of

ceding land to the federal government as public domain and thus avoided many of the controversies that beset the public land states. But, for all these variations of

particular places, audiences from Missoula to Albuquerque, Fort Worth to Portland, have given every indication that this definition of regional issues matches up to the

concerns of their locale.

Few of these are factors unique to the West, even though the overlapping of these factors in the West is distinctive. Clearly, to take the most conspicuous example, the

whole continent underwent a Europeanoriginating conquest. And yet the West is the part of the United States most associated with the myths, justifications, and

rationales of American expansion and conquest. Indeed, that was how the whole problem of Western unreality first set in—with the nationalistic fantasy of a better,

purer, more innocent, more justified exercise in national expansion. All of the present United States was conquered, but the West is, in fact, still engaged in a

distinctive, more intense struggle with the legacy of conquest.

Of course, what I offer is very much a definition by hindsight. Even though Massachusetts Bay and South Carolina initially showed few signs of becoming part of the

same unit, hindsight allows us to include colonial history as a part of American history, even though the colonists had no foreknowledge of the nation that would come

to be. In the same way, what I refer to as the West is a historical product. As Richard White says, the West is a historically produced network of relations, a web of

relations between and among people who had very different origins, but who, for the last century or two, have woven themselves into a shared story. 5

When it is 9 a.m. in New York it is 6 a.m. in Oregon, and 7Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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a.m. in New Mexico. But this difference in timing is not, finally, just a matter of hours. In race relations, for instance, the regional pattern of Western lateness and

Eastern earliness reversed: with very diverse, and permanent, Indian tribes, with longterm Hispanic settlers and with recent Mexican immigrants, with white Americans

and immigrants of all ethnicities, and with Mormons representing the formation of a new kind of ethnicity, the West was ahead of the rest of the country in the

complexity of its race relations. Traditionally, American historians have put black/white relations at the center of American race relations. While no one can question

the crucial importance of that relationship, the West had a more complicated and confusing racial hierarchy. In the West, Anglo American racists had to figure out

where to place Mexicans—descendants of both Europeans and Indians, sometimes judged to be better and sometimes judged to be worse, by virtue of that mixed

heritage. Look at current American history textbooks, though, and you see a picture of American race relations organized almost entirely around black/white relations. 6 This is probably the most compelling reason to pay attention to the American West: when we study the diversity, and the multidirectional encounters of ethnic groups

in the Western past, we are better prepared to understand the diversity and multidirectional encounters of ethnic groups in the whole nation today.7

If some trends appeared earlier in the West and later in the East, in other matters, particularly matters of intellectual behavior, the West has tagged along behind. The

phenomenon of belatedness that was most vexing to me appeared in the perceived differences between the West and the South. Southern historians were reckoning

seriously with race, inequality, and power, while Western historians were still applauding a triumphal frontier movement of white Americans, with every other group

pushed to the margins of historical significance. The result was predictable: Southern history got respect, and Western history got dismissals and brushoffs.

Soon after I moved to the University of Colorado, a successfulCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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and influential American Studies scholar who taught there got a job at what he felt was a much more distinguished university in the South. His remarks, before

departure, encapsulated the contrast that I am describing here. "Since I am moving to the South" he said in a memorable exchange at a cocktail party, "I'll have to do a

lot of reading in Southern history and Southern literature."

"When you moved to Colorado," I asked, "did you have to do a lot of reading in Western history and Western literature?"

He did not answer the question; instead, he and everyone else in the conversation laughed heartily. One would only suggest that a sophisticated scholar would read

Western history and literature, it was clear to my companions, if one were making a joke. Choosing to get me even more riled up, on another occasion, this same

fellow undertook to tell me that while he found that reading African American history was rewarding and interesting, he felt that the history of Mexican Americans was

flat and dull.

Anger is its own wonderful, endlessly replenished intellectual fuel. I ran for quite a time on fury over this man's dismissal of the West and its people. But the most

maddening aspect of his patronizing remarks was that, five or ten years ago, he was partly right. In 1985, a stack of the important, thoughtful, wellwritten books in

Southern history and Southern literature would greatly have outweighed a stack of equally valuable books in Western history and Western literature. For the Southern

stack, you would have needed a UHaul trailer. For the Western stack, a wheelbarrow might have been too large.

The fact that this man seemed to be right about the state of Western writing did not make his remarks any less infuriating or any less motivating. Memories of him and

his snobbery kept me going through the writing of The Legacy of Conquest; it was probably a major omission to leave him out of the acknowledgements of the book. 8 (This would, of course, have opened the door to a fascinating, eagerly read kind of acknowledgment: "And I would like to thank the people who made me so furious

that I had toCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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write this book. Let me begin with soandso, whose deeply insulting remarks about my region left me determined to prove him wrong.'' And so on.)

Now, less than a decade since the departing scholar and I had that conversation, the situation is considerably changed. One wishes, in fact, that one could have a

rematch. just let that fellow try to tell me, again, that Hispanic settlement and Mexican American history add up to a dull business. Now I could hand him Ramon

Gutierrez's controversial, and very thoughtprovoking, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. For twentieth century issues, I could direct him to George

Sanchez's book, Becoming Mexican American, or David Gutierrez's forthcoming Walls and Mirrors, or Richard Rodriguez's unsettling Hunger of Memory and

Days of Obligation. I could hand him River of Traps, William deBuys and Alex Harris's collaboration in words and photographs, a biography of their northern New

Mexican neighbor, Jacobo Romero. I could ask him to read the stories and novels of Rudolfo Anaya, or Luis Albero Urrea, or Benjamin Saenz, or Sandra Cisneros,

or Denise Chavez. 9 I could explain to him that my list here is nowhere as complete as it should be, because I have one whole shelf of Chicano novelists and short

story writers, and I am struggling to find the time to read these new books. The flood of books in every category of Western American writing has knocked me off my

feet, and I look at my bookshelves in a spirit that matches that of a freshman who has signed up for too many courses, and likes each of the courses, but simply cannot

figure out how all those books are going to get read.

At this stage, we are ready for the UHaul. The wheelbarrow that once could have contained most of the Western American books, books that one really wanted to

recommend to general readers, would now be buried and invisible, under its load.

But now we get to my core question: how on earth did this happen? if, seven or eight years ago, one fumed because a snobbish professor had insulted the intellectual

importance of the West, and fumed because the West was not providing one withCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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the materials one needed to respond to that insult, then what changed that situation so rapidly and so dramatically? How did we go from scarcity to abundance virtually

overnight?

Newsweek magazine recently confirmed this change, referring to the present as the West's greatest literary era. "Without a doubt", Newsweek said, "the West is in the

midst of a don'tfenceusin literary explosion comparable to the Southern literary renaissance in the '30s." 10 The Newsweek spread had photographs of Leslie Silko,

Tony Hillerman, Bill Kittredge, Cyra McFadden, Terry Tempest Williams, and my humble self

Why me? I came up with one quotation that the writers wanted to use. More important, my photograph had to be included because I live in Boulder, Colorado, where

a threeminute drive will get you and a photographer to a stunning mountain backdrop. Western writers, it is widely understood by the Eastern media, characteristically

spend a great deal of time sitting on rocks, contemplating the view. If you want to take a photograph of a Western writer in her natural habit, you must take her

outdoors and place her on a rock, ideally with many huge, handsome rocks arrayed in the background. I have now gone outdoors and sat on rocks for Newsweek,

Life, and People. When Time took my photograph, I happened to be in Laramie, Wyoming. It was a longer drive to the photogenic rocks, so we did the next best

thing: I sat outdoors in the remarkable Wyoming wind, and with my hair attempting to leave my head, I kept up the proper theme that Western writers are in touch

with nature, and nature with them. Because the Flatirons, the mountains that rise immediately to the west of Boulder, are so beautiful and photogenic, I feel a certain

confidence that no one will ever be able to leave me out of this Western literary renaissance. Tony Hillerman will always have his mesas; Terry Tempest Williams will

have her Great Salt Lake; and I will have my Flatirons; and thus the three of us are certain to remain important Western writers, even if we all were to come down

with killer writer's block and never publish again.

As these confessions will surely indicate, I occupy a peculiarCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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position in this collection of essays. The other writers are observers, analyzers, and historians of the phenomenon of regionalism, and clearerheaded because of that

disengagement. I am trying to be an observer and analyzer of the phenomenon, but I am also a participant and an advocate. I have been a part of a recent movement

in Western regionalism, and yet that experience leaves me puzzled when I try to figure out the question: how do such movements arise, and how do they succeed? To

have a certified movement, must the participants convene, and debate their goals, and arrive at a common agenda? Did the Southern Agrarians set the model for

regional movements? If you need a meeting and a manifesto to have a movement, then someone should have told us so ten or twelve years ago. As far as I know, we

skipped that stage.

This is what I remember of my own decision to write a book that would later look like it was part of a movement. In 1981, I went to a conference called "The

American West: Colonies in Revolt", in Sun Valley, Idaho. 11 When I arrived at the conference, I had at least a foggy vision of a book I wanted to write. This vision

had been inspired, in part, by what was not said at the conference. This was, remember, 1981, when the energy boom was still on in the West. When I listened to

federal bureaucrats and energy company officials discuss the problems of extractive economies and boomtown stress and strain, I was astonished at their lack of

historical perspective. They seemed to think that Westerners, as well as Easterners trying to become Westerners, had pretty much gotten what they wanted from the

West in the distant past. Then, in the 1970s, with the energy crisis and the boom in oil and coal, events abruptly got messy and complicated, and a whole new set of

frustrations entered the picture.

At first, as I listened to them, I thought, "Most of what these people are perceiving as new problems are really just the ongoing patterns of the Western boom/bust

economy. It is a shame these people do not read Western History." And then I realized that it would not do them a bit of good if they did read Western historians.Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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In 1981, if they went to the most influential books in Western history, they would have been fed a line about how the frontier ended in 1890, and the West settled

down, became mature, and lost its distinctiveness. If they went to the trouble to read Western history, these bureaucrats and policymakers would have been just as

disoriented and just as disconnected from the region's past as they were when they did not do their reading.

While this lesson on the irrelevance of doing one's reading would very much please most of my students, I drew a different moral from the story, and left Sun Valley

determined to write a book that would connect the Western past and present, a book that would call into question this supposed watershed at the end of the frontier. I

wanted to write a book that would look at the twentiethcentury consequences of the nineteenthcentury campaign to master and dominate nature. I wanted to break

with the tradition of focusing attention on the westward movement of white people, and instead place that movement in the larger context of the northward movement

of Hispanic people, the eastward movement of Asian people, and the prior presence of Indian people.

This was, I understood from the start, much more a work of synthesis than of originality. I would be drawing on the work of many, many historians who had done

specialized studies of Western American subjects. But this was a complicated business; many, perhaps most, of the scholars who had written these works would

never have called themselves Western historians. They called themselves Indian historians, Chicano historians, Asian American historians, women's historians,

environmental historians, community historians, social historians, or business historians. To quite a number of those people, the term "Western history" meant "frontier

history" or "history of the western movement." That, in turn, suggested a kind of antiquated, outofdate, lowprestige branch of the historical profession, in which

analysis and reflection meant quoting a line or two from FrederickCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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Jackson Turner and saying whether this particular study confirmed or contradicted his 1893 frontier thesis.

This, then, was the peculiarity of the undertaking: I knew I had quite a number of possible allies and comrades in the cause of reorienting and reenergizing Western

American history, but I also knew that most of my potential allies and comrades would prefer not to be called Western American historians.

Under those circumstances, I would have been mad as a hatter if I had thought that I was a part of a movement. On the contrary, I felt pretty much on my own. I was,

for instance, very relieved when I got a contract for the book with a New York trade publisher who was not going to put me through the perils of anonymous peer

review. I was relieved, because I felt certain that this book, if submitted to a university press, would not have survived the opposition of older Western American

historians who had invested a great deal in the old frontier model of the field. The evidence in support of that fear was substantial. Before I got a trade publisher, I had

sent the proposal to the University of Oklahoma Press, where the book had been rejected because it was, one of the evaluators said, an exercise in "white guilt." At

first, I had thought that everyone would be happy with the revitalization of Western American history. Gradually I started to catch on to the fact that a few Western

history specialists would fight any reenergizing of their field, and fight it tooth and nail.

I turn now to the part that is equally hard for me to explain, in either of my roles as participant or observer. While I was writing The Legacy of Conquest, other

Western historians, Western novelists, Western short story writers, Western essayists, Western poets, Western photographers, Western painters, Western legal

scholars, were launching projects very much in the same spirit. If you look at what resulted from our separate labors in the 1980s, these labors can look more

collective than separate. You could easily come to the conclusion that we were talking to each other, influencing each other, guiding each other, and offering critiques

of each other's work.Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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But we were not. By and large, we had no knowledge of each other's existence. When we finally met in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, we met as strangers

meeting for the first time, but strangers with an odd feeling of kinship. A few weeks ago, a publisher sent me a proposal for a book someone wants to write on this

recent Western regional movement. Indeed, I do not doubt that an intelligent journalist or scholar could look at all this activity of the last decade and see a coherent,

collectively intended, coordinated movement. And yet I do not recall coherence, collective intention, nor coordination. I am left with no settled answer to the question:

Where did all these books come from? Why did these books happen when they did? Why did so many of their authors share a common intention and a common

vision? If this was indeed a movement, what were its sources and what explains its timing?

Let me offer some guesses.

We did, for one thing, have predecessors, and I do some injustice to those predecessors when I accent the newness and recentness of this regionalism. The journalist

and activist Carey McWilliams, born and raised in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and resettled in California, wrote a crucial set of books—books on Western

agricultural labor, on Mexican Americans, on Japanese American concentration camps, on California society, books that were years ahead of those written by

conventional Western historians in their reckoning with race, power, and justice. The journalist Bernard DeVoto, born and raised in Ogden, Utah, wrote vividly and

memorably on the West's federal dependence, and its ironic relationship to the fantasy of Western independence, an idea that often gets portrayed as if it were the

discovery of the New Western Historians.

The most important precedentsetter was the writer Wallace Stegner. At a conference in Missoula in his honor in the fall of 1993, the participants spent two days

noting how dramatically Stegner had gotten the jump on both Western historians and Western creative writers. 12 In a book published in 1945, One Nation,Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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Stegner denounced Western segregation and discrimination, offering sympathetic portraits of Indians, Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans,

and Mexican Americans. In The Big Rock Candy Mountain and in Angle of Repose, Stegner faced up to the tragedy and injury in the story of the westward

movement, tragedy and injury too easily brushed off by more conventional writers. In his biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,

Stegner explored the implications of the West's limited water, and showed the longrange relevance of Powell's latenineteenth century thoughts about the region's

future. 13

In Wolf Willow, his memoir of his family's experience, homesteading in southern Saskatchewan, just north of the Montana border, Stegner touched every one of the

bases of the current reckoning with the West: he examined the actions of the people—Indian, meti, trader, trapper, Mountie—who had been in the place, and changed

the place, before the arrival of Anglo Americans and Anglo Canadians; he examined the unhappy ecological effects of the effort to turn dry plains into wheat farms; he

examined the reality of tragedy and failure and broken dreams in the whole enterprise. As a child in Whitemud, Saskatchewan, he had been kept in complete

ignorance of the rich history of the place; he lived, he said, "without the faintest notion of who had lived there before me." Even though the chimneys of an abandoned

metis village stood at the edge of town, "we never," Stegner said, "so much as heard the word metis." Stegner wanted,and finally found, "a past to which I could be

tribally and emotionally committed," and that is a fine summation, in an economical eleven words, of what recent Western writers have been trying to find.14

In a 1967 essay called "History, Myth, and the Western Writer," Stegner reached his peak as a diagnostician—saying exactly what had gone wrong with writing about

Western life, and prescribing a cure. "Western writers … ," he said, "have shown a disinclination, perhaps an emotional inability to write about theCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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contemporary." With the West of the present relegated to the unspeakable, "the living past, having little apparent relevance to the present, became a dead past,

sometimes a pool of nostalgia." And then, in a passage that reads exactly like the prescription for a revitalized Western history and literature, Stegner wrote this:

"through all the newly swarming regions of the West,… millions of westerners, old and new, have no sense of a personal and possessed past, no sense of any

continuity between the real western past which has been mythicized almost out of recognizability and a real western present that seems as cutoff and pointless as a

ride on a merrygoround." 15 Stegner had the foundation laid for a reenergized Western intellectual movement by 1967, really by 1955 and the publication of Wolf

Willow. And yet for another decade or so, he had the foundation pretty much to himself. Why did Western historians refuse to hear Stegner's call to stop amputating

the present from the past? Or, if they heard the call, why did they dismiss it?

A galvanizing moment, for many Western writers of both fiction and nonfiction, was the encounter with Norman Maclean's A River Runs through It.16 A number of

people had told me I should read this book, but I did not act on that advice until November of 1980. My timing was unfortunate: it was my first year lecturing; it was 8

p.m. at night; I had a lecture the next morning at 9 a.m.; I had nothing written or outlined. "I'll just take a quick look at this opening story," I said to myself, and within

another couple of pages, it was clear that I would read the whole thing, take another hour to write Mr. Maclean a fan letter, and then spend from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m.

writing the lecture. After this memorable conversion experience, I became the selfappointed Cambridge, Massachusetts distribution center for A River Runs through

It; I believe I gave away thirty or forty copies before I left Massachusetts. Each time I handed someone a copy, I was saying, "The American West is tragic and

important and could support fine writing, and this book will show you what I mean."

If Mr. Maclean gave his papers to an archive, that might wellCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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be the place to look for the origins of a regional movement. I am pretty sure that mine was one of a flood of fan letters from Western writers who had never met each

other, but who picked up A River Runs through It and put it down very much encouraged. If this book existed, we all thought, then we were going to be alright. But

Mr. Maclean was a very distinctive individual, far too independent to undertake to organize a movement; the inclination of so many to rally around his example still

needs explanation.

In other words, why the 1980s?

Here are some possibilities.

In the 1970s, following the OPEC boycott, the energy resource industries of the West underwent a great boom. Domestic production of oil and coal became a variety

of patriotism, freeing the nation from dependence on foreign suppliers. In a flurry of investment, speculation, boom towns pulling in jobseekers, and improvident

construction of office buildings in Western cities, the boom carried Westerners off on another wave of unthinking optimism.

In the early 1980s, the boom crashed, and crashed without ambiguity. Oil prices collapsed. Federal support for oil sale development disappeared. Boom towns had

borrowed heavily to expand roads, services, schools, and housing. As the boom ended, the towns found themselves with many debts, and with many departing

residents.

The West landed hard when this boom collapsed. The mental climate, of necessity, became one of reckoning. It was impossible to ignore the fact that the West had

ridden this roller coaster of boom and bust for a century and a half, and that it was dangerous to ignore the risk and repetitiveness of this ride. The collapse of the

energy boom was a reminder to every Western resident that it was time to get serious about this region, to watch out for these dangerous fantasies of easy and endless

prosperity, and to try to figure out what permanent residence and occupation in the region might entail.Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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In the same spirit, the 1970s had seen a boom in the agricultural economy, in both ranching and farming. Farmers went into debt to expand their operations. Then, in

the 1980s, tough times hit ranching and farming. With another farm crisis, the residents of the rural West were imperiled again; here, too, it was time for a reckoning.

The fate of cattleraising was a particular puzzle: if ranchers and cowboys had acquired the mythic status of the archetypal Westerners, should Americans simply watch

passively while real ranchers disappeared and ranches evolved into resorts and playthings for movie stars and other rich investors? And if one chose cultural

preservation, what federally sponsored set of subsidies and special protections would be necessary to keep this relic economy thriving?

Equally consequential was the growing, and permanent, power of environmentalists and preservationists. Cattleranchers, for instance, were in trouble in part because

environmentalists saw cows as agents of degradation on the public lands. The recreational users of public lands had mounted a stiff challenge to the more

conventionally utilitarian sorts, the ranchers, loggers, and miners. In the 1980s, it was hard to miss the fact that many of these conflicts looked irreconcilable; the

available land and the available natural resources simply could not satisfy the demands of the contesting users. Frederick Jackson Turner had announced, in 1893, that

the West had reached a turning point; the frontier was closed and Americans would have to face up to limits. In fact, far more people moved to the West after 1890

than before 1890. If one went by numbers, the nineteenthcentury westward movement was a small, frail prelude to the much greater twentiethcentury westward

movement. But the 1980s consciousness of too many demands on too few resources suggested that Turner's picture of a West transformed by a recognition of its

limits might, over the long haul, have proven to be accurate. It was just that Turner got his timing wrong, and dated the change one hundred years too early.

Demographic change may well provide the bedrock for allCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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these other reasons for a reappraisal of the West. In the mid1960s, California became the most populous American state. In the 1980s, the population of the South

and West came to outnumber the population of the Northeast and the Midwest. Here was a loud and clear statement that Westerners had to be reckoned with—as a

voting population, as a reading audience, as a people who has some right to know about the place where they had landed.

In the 1960s, the principal sources of immigration into the United States shifted from Europe to Asia and Latin America. The Atlantic Coast had been the point of

entry for European immigration, but Asian immigration had concentrated on the Pacific Coast, just as Mexican immigration had its greatest impact on the West. The

increasingly significant presence of Mexican and Asian immigrants was a fact of life that I took for granted, growing up in California. In the same spirit, the sizable

migrations of African Americans into the West, during and after World War Two, made the presence of significant populations of black Westerners something that a

person born in 1951 would take as given. Similarly, the resurgence of Indian societies—in selfgovernment, litigation over treaty rights, and cultural persistence—was

hard to miss in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Because I took all this for granted, I was thoroughly, wildly puzzled by the assumptions made by conventional Western

historians. Historical tellings of the story of the American West, focused on Anglo Americans, simply made no sense to me. While I am willing to believe that the social

justice movements of the 1960s had a great influence on the current Western regional movement, I also think that some of us had, at the bedrock, a lived awareness of

a diverse Western population whose presence the old frontier models could not begin to explain.

On the broadest, planetary scale, the winding down of the Cold War had its effect on visions of the American West. While the Soviet Union was still holding together,

the American empire of nuclear weaponry, with much of that empire centered in theCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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American West, was beginning to totter. Downwind from the Nevada Test Site, or at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, and the Rocky Flats

Weapons Assembly Plant in Golden, Colorado, and around a variety of Western places where uranium had been mined or processed, it was clear that we faced a big

reckoning with the domestic costs of the Cold War. When Congress undertook to choose a location for a permanent nuclear waste disposal site, it was no surprise to

anyone when the Eastern states were eliminated, and Western locations were the finalists. The aridity, the wide open spaces, and the sparse settlement of various

Western areas had given this region the leading edge in national nuclear enterprise, and those same qualities gave the region the edge when it came to selecting a site

for permanent radioactive waste storage. The radioactive legacy of the Cold War embodied the way in which the various American enterprises in mastering nature had

produced a disturbing tangle of consequences and dilemmas. The West lay at the exact center of that tangle.

The winding down of the Cold War had another, considerably happier effect: without an evil empire to contend against, the Cold War pressures to present a cheery,

faithaffirming, patriotic version of the American past lost some of their force. The moral complexity of Western American history had long been held hostage to the

need for a belief in American exceptionalism, to a faith that white Americans are simply kinder, gentler, and generally better behaved when they constructed their own

version of empire. More and more, with the end of the Cold War, it seemed possible that a simpleminded patriotism would no longer stand in the way of regional and

national selfunderstanding.

Finally, there is the matter of generations. By the late twentieth century, there were a lot—literally, millions—of people of nonIndian descent who had been born and

raised in the West, sometimes to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generation. To these people, the West could not be the exotic place ''out there." It had become,

instead, a familiar place of permanent residence;Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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it had become home. To members of these Westernborn generations, it was becoming tiresome to see their home trivialized, thought of as a theme park when it was

thought of at all.

Indeed, one can see this generational transition in much of the recent fiction and nonfiction. A pattern of these books is their reckoning with legacies and inheritances,

mothers and fathers. This is not to say that only Westerners are preoccupied with their inheritances. But it is to say that this attention to parents is a fundamental

reversal of the conventional image of the West as a place of fresh starts and new beginnings, the place where one went to escape the past and its burdens and

complications. A preoccupation with parents is also a reversal of conventional Western writing, the kind of writing that, as Wallace Stegner said in 1967, left us with

an "amputated present," disconnected from the Western past. One of the best ways of reattaching this disconnected present to its origins was to turn to an examination

of family and descent, to rediscover one's parents, and to rediscover them as they existed as young people, preparents, before one's own birth. Contrasting the ways

of mothers with the ways of fathers, this exploration invariably led to a reckoning with gender—to a realization that much of what we traditionally called "Western

experience" was acted out in response to very structured definitions of manhood and femininity.

Ivan Doig, William Kittredge, Mary Clearman Blew, Richard Rodriguez, Janet Campbell Hale, Teresa Jordan, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng: across borders of ethnicity

and gender, these writers have sought themselves in their parents. 17 In that quest, they reversed the misguided image of the West as the place where the past drops

away, loses power over the present, vanishes. Without a clue as to what these other writers were up to, I happened onto this central preoccupation with descent and

inheritance when I used the word "legacy" in my own book title.

Connecting the present to the past is, I suspect, no big deal for other places and regions. But, after decades with Western history ripped into two by the supposed end

of the frontier, connectingCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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the present to the past became the biggest show in town for Western writers. One of the best examples of this concern for continuity appears in Susan Lowell's under

recognized novella Ganado Red. 18 The novella begins with a Navajo woman weaving a blanket, a Ganado Red rug. The novella then follows the rug, from the

trading post, to its first Anglo owner, a rich spinster in Santa Fe, to a hippie home in Santa Fe, to the store of a merchant in Southwest artifacts, to its final owners.

These characters are people who seem disconnected, but who are in fact tied together, and bridged in time, by their intense encounter with a remarkable art object.

What Susan Lowell was doing with her Ganado Red rug was, in fact, very similar to what Western historians were doing with their emphasis on the continuity of

regional issues.

Contemporary Western writers share, as well, a preoccupation with death and grief. This, too, may seem like neither a big deal nor a very distinctive concern. But

take another look at a Louis L'Amour novel or at the autobiography of Buffalo Bill Cody. Conventional Western writing of that sort cast death as a casual event, and

not entirely real—a necessary component of adventure, but no occasion for serious grief or guilt. Violence and death in the popular Western added up to fun,

amusement, escapist entertainment. In those terms, taking death seriously was a major shift for Western writing. Norman Maclean's grieving for his brother, Terry

Tempest Williams' grieving for her mother, Fae Myenne Ng's main character's grieving for her sister, Ivan Doig's grieving for his mother, Linda Hasselstrom's grieving

for her husband: all these acts of reckoning with death add up to an important part of the project of putting past and present back together, and reversing the

conventional notion that the West was the region that had escaped tragedy.19

In contemporary Western writing, no one is taking for granted the absolutely astonishing and bewildering fact that people, who were once overpowering in their

vitality, have ceased to be alive. What we have here is a return to basics—to a forceful encounter with the fact that the passage of time is bewildering and disorienting,Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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that historical change and consequence are improbable, unpredictable, and inexplicable, and that death is, in truth, a mystery. You can see this rediscovery of the

mysterious workings of time in many forms. From memoirs to short stories to projects in rephotography to monographs in environmental history, Westerners have

been looking at mountains, plains and deserts that were long portrayed as pristine, natural, unchanged places, and seeing them instead as what they are—places

layered with history, with memory, with stories, in truth, haunted places. 20

This accent on reading and understanding the past of particular places leads us to one of the possible fault lines in current Western regionalism. Most of the places so

explored have been rural. We have, in recent times, come perilously close to ratifying the old notion that the "real West" means the "rural West." By this notion, the

spaces that are characteristically Western are by definition not urban: they are wide open spaces with the sky stretching in all directions.

And yet cities and towns have long played an important part in the region's life. Most important, the West has been for a couple of decades the most urban part of the

nation, with the greatest percentage of its people living in cities. Thus, we face a problem here. We have a regional literature in which many of the most powerful texts

are set in the countryside, and a regional demographic fact by which the majority of Westerners live in the cities. We run, as well, the risk of taking part in another

movement in which regionalism means a pastoral, antimodernist escape from real life.

Reckoning with Western urbanness—making sure that the word "Westerner" can mean dweller in the city as well as dweller in the countryside—could save us from

this risk. And, on the other hand, failure to reckon with Western urbanness, and with the tight and tangled relationship between the urban West and the rural West,

could prove to be the undoing of this movement.

In the same way, the complexity of Western ethnicity could be the making or breaking of this enterprise. For me and for manyCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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of my coworkers in Western history, the major reason for going regional was to find a unit of historical study that would be racially and ethnically inclusive. The point

of Western regionalism, in large part, was to call the attention of American historians to the fact that as long as they ignored the Western half of this country, they could

tell only a fragment of the story of American race relations.

So here is the dilemma: how multiethnic has this movement really proven to be? In historical circles, I think the answer is clear: the works of Indian, Chicano, Asian

American, and African American historians have been absolutely essential and central to the revitalization of Western American history. Is this equally true for the

creative writers? I think so: if you removed the Indian writers—Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Michael Dorris, Leslie Marmon Silko, Janet Campbell

Hale, and James Welch—from the list of significant Western writers, you would leave an awful gap. But do the works of these novelists really fit in the category of

regionalism? Are they companions to books by white writers like William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, Judith Freeman, or Barbara Kingsolver?

I am not only willing to say that these seemingly disparate books fit together, I am willing to believe that they fit together. Consider two books that at first seem very

unrelated. If you took two days, and on one day you read Teresa Jordan's Wyoming ranch memoir, Riding the White Horse Home, and on the next day, you read

Fae Myenne Ng's San Francisco Chinatown novel Bone, you would have some reason to think that Jordan and Ng were friends who spoke frequently to each other,

commented on each other's manuscripts, and found considerable common ground in their themes and feelings.

I cannot tell how eccentric I may be proving to be in seeing a Westernness that crosses these ethnic boundaries. Was I the only member of the audience who thought

that the movie Stand and Deliver was a Western movie, with the Latino students' triumphant performance on the AP calculus exam a greater WesternCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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victory than any occasion in cinema when the good guys shot down the bad guys on Main Street? Am I the only member of the audience thinking that The Joy Luck

Club is an important Western movie? Or, perhaps more important, would an African American novelist like Walter Moseley, writing stories set in Los Angeles,

choose in any way to associate himself with a literature of place and region? 21

The whole campaign in Western American history was to give the word "Westerner" a more expansive definition, stretched far beyond the usual image of a tough

white male on a handsome horse in a wide open landscape. The term "Westerner" was supposed to be remodeled and expanded to include American Indian lawyers,

Japanese American farmers, northern New Mexican Hispanos, World War Two African American defense workers in Los Angeles. But if it turns out that the term

Westerner will not make that stretch, or, more particularly, if it turns out that the term "Western writer'' will not stretch to include the full range of human beings living

and writing in the American West, then who wants a regional movement?

Not me.

I do not think we are anywhere near that point of breakdown. We may, in fact, never get there. In the meantime, that is one of the principal elements to celebrate in

Western American writing: once, not that long ago, you could have made the case that this was the field of study most dominated by white writers who paid almost

exclusive attention to the actions of white Westerners, and now writers of color and Anglo writers are reading each other and sharing turf with reciprocal curiosity,

interest, and, often enough, good nature.

By becoming ethnically inclusive, Western writers did a far better job at reckoning with Western reality than the subscribers to the old whitecentered narrative ever

could. But here, with the word "reality," we come to what I think may be the principal appeal of current Western writers: their conviction that there is something called

reality, and that words can move closer or further,Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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toward or away, from reality. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the nation and the globe, intellectuals have embraced the ideas of relativism, the construction of meaning, the

shiftiness of representation, the changeability of interpreted experience. With these ideas so influential, it is hard for people, intellectuals or not, to find a place to stand,

to ground themselves in convictions that will not prove to be quicksand.

Meanwhile, in the West, it is still two or three hours earlier. The terms truth and reality and accuracy still seem usable, central, and reliable. Writers, novelists as well as

historians, declare—and believe—that their goal is to dig out the real West, the West that has been buried under images, myths, rationales, and justifications.

No wonder people want to read these writers. They produce books that are filled with an otherwise hardtofind faith in bedrocks, groundedness, knowable reality. In

their preoccupation with place, in their determination to understand and reckon with the physical reality of the Western land and people, Western writers confess their

faith that there is a real world out there, a real world that can support and sustain human life and thought.

And yet, for all these claims of reality and truthfulness and honesty, contemporary Western writers are still in a dance with the imagemakers. The New Western

History, for instance, has been written up in every major newspaper and newsmagazine, and certain Western historians of doubtful character have even agreed to go

out and sit on rocks in the company of Eastern photographers. There is presently a mad, uncontrolled, wild rush of documentary makers toward Western history; in

the course of a week, one's office answering tape can fill up with calls from filmmakers. In the summer of 1992, when Newsweek magazine declared the Western

literary renaissance to be genuine and official, we got a reminder that Western writers still take their certification from the Eastern media; it is still the validation of the

Eastern media that makes us real.

Recently, in my undergraduate readings seminar, we read BuffaloCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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Bill Cody's autobiography. 22 On that occasion, this whole paradox caught up with me. Just a few years ago, I could read Buffalo Bill with a clear head and clear

judgment. I occupied a solid piece of high ground, from which I could view and judge Buffalo Bill's unrestrained marketing of the "authentic" Wild West, tailored and

staged to match Eastern expectations. Cody never called it the Wild West Show, remember; this was, he told his audiences, the real Wild West in itself, not a show.

Audiences were to take Cody's performances as an encounter with a West where life was more interesting, more intense, more full of stories, than life could ever be in

the pallid places where dull Easterners had to live.

This time, after having taken many wild rides at the Eastern Media Rodeo myself, my encounter with Buffalo Bill was quite different from our earlier meetings. This

time, I did not feel anywhere near as pure. Now Buffalo Bill and I met more as fellow practitioners of the art of being professional Westerners, playing on the

opportunities presented by two historical moments when Westerners became particularly cool.

Buffalo Bill had me beat; he was many stages beyond me in the selling of the West. My version of the West, I believe, is much more grounded, realistic, and inclusive

than his. But some kinship with Cody would be hard for me to deny, and hard for the other, visible Western writers to deny either.

We return, in other words, to the word realization, and its many meanings. My preference in definitions is obvious: "to make real; bring into being; achieve; to

understand fully; to apprehend." I have, for obvious reasons, shied away from the dictionary: "to convert into money; to gain, obtain, as in 'the company realized a

profit'; to be sold for, bring a profit: said of property."23 Look anywhere in American popular culture—look at TV shows, movies, mailorder catalogues, clothing

stores—and you can find the evidence that the West is indeed being "realized" today, or sold for profit. The perception that the West isCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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more vital, more hearty, more authentic, more grounded, and more real has added up to a fine commercial opportunity.

This is an opportunity that publishers, like any other participants in a commercial enterprise, have clearly realized. The change, here, is dramatic. In the 1970s' Norman

Maclean's manuscript of A River Runs through It made the rounds of publishers and got rejected, until the University of Chicago Press took it. To "add further to

their literary handicaps," Maclean explained, "these stories turned out to be Western stories—as one publisher said in returning them, 'These stories have trees in

them.'" 24

Ivan Doig's This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind went on a similar round of rejection in the mid1970s, acquiring a total of twelve "nothankyou's"

before HarcourtBraceJovanovich took it. The rejecting editors liked the writing, but they could see no commercial hope for the book. I quote some samples: "I don't

think it would be a successful trade book in its present shape." "Unfortunately, much as I do like your work, I find that what you have here is not at all commercial."

"Although Ivan Doig writes intelligently and well, I don't think his memoirs are going to add up to a publishable trade book."25 That unmarketable, uncommercial

book, of course, eventually sold so many copies that the publisher recently issued a new hardcover, fifteenth anniversary edition.

In the 1970s, two of the West's finest writers were getting bounced from rejection letter to rejection letter. In the 1990s, we have a New York publishers' frenzy, a

thundering herd of Eastern editors pursuing Western writers as fervently as Eastern excursionists used to pursue Western buffalo (though, one hopes for the targets,

less painfully and more profitable). And so one wonders: Does all this literary activity of the last decade just add up to the West's twentythird love affair with the

Eastern massmarket media? Will this wave of enthusiasm be followed, as the others have been, with a decline in affection, a drifting apart, and then a rediscovery and

reigniting of passion a decade or two later? Have we just undergone another episode of the massmarketingCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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of the Western dream, even if what is now for sale is a slightly modified, more realistic dream? Is the literary renaissance just a pleasant, optional accompaniment to

the new television Westerns, the new movie Westerns, the surge of Western vests, boots, and all the various modifications of denim in catalogues and clothing stores?

I believe—of course, I have to believe—that this has been more than another wave in the mass marketing of the Western myth. As a participant and advocate, I have

to believe that we have taken genuine strides in regional and national selfunderstanding, that these recent tellings of the Western story are more truthful and more

realistic than previous tellings, that the realization of the West leans more to the definition of "realize" as "to understand fully, apprehend," and less to the definition of "to

convert into money."

Whatever it adds up to, intellectual movement or marketing madness, the last decade's worth of mental activity in the West has certainly been entertaining. It has,

moreover, been gratifying, especially for writers who once feared captivity in the university. Regular, nonacademic people read our books; federal land management

agencies place Western writers as principal speakers at their summits and conventions; people living these regional issues eagerly tell their stories to scholars. Back in

college, I can remember the yearning that came into our voices when we used the word "relevance," imagining that what we thought about in school might have some

bearing on lives and actions outside the university. Few of the ideals I held in the late 1960s have survived in such good shape as this one. Taken seriously by public

audience, the realized and relevant West literally holds its ground.

Commentary / Katherine G. Morrissey

When I mentioned to my Western history colleagues that I would be commenting on the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick, theyCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r

ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

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exclaimed, "How wonderful!" and in the same breath they would add, "But, oh, she's such a hard act to follow." And, indeed, she is; her eloquence, wit, and

intelligence leave one in admiration. And it is in this spirit of delight and admiration that I offer comments.

First, let me place myself in time and space. I am from the same Western mountain states time zone as Patricia Nelson Limerick. But rather than the Flatirons of

Colorado, I come from the Sonoran desert of the Southwest—the country from which and of which Susan Lowell writes so eloquently in Ganado Red.

As a historian of the American West, my research has focused on the interior Pacific Northwest—the forests and plateau country where Janet Campbell Hale places

her autobiographical writings, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, and where Roseann Lum McCunn situates A Thousand Pieces of Gold. I was presenting

a paper based on my research concerning this area of eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and southeastern British Columbia at a regional academic history

conference a few years ago. In my discussion of the creation of the Western region at the turn of the century and its celebrations as the Inland Empire, I mentioned that

a regional consciousness persisted in the interior Pacific Northwest, and I argued that these lingering ideas about this place constituted a ghost region—a region with

layers of memory, history, and meaning which continue to haunt the present. After my talk, a member of the audience got to her feet to add her own comments. "I am

from Spokane, Washington," the woman asserted. "I'm from the Inland Empire and I want to tell you that regardless of what you say, we are not invisible, we are not

dead, we are real." Referring to the area and its inhabitants, she declared "we are an important region." She spoke with considerable emotion as she talked about her

attachment to the place.

I am reminded of this incident as I read Patricia Nelson Limerick's provocative paper. As Limerick so eloquently described, and as the woman from Spokane

forcefully reminded me, connectingCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

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the present to the past and the past to the present is a central concern of Western regionalism. Both speakers, too, distinguish a "real West" and reveal the power and

persistence of regional identity.

Regional identity and regionalism are vexed issues. The attachments which individuals and groups create to a particular place, the ways in which people identify with

one location over another, are contested. The woman from Spokane objected to the ways in which I categorized her place, her region, and she drew on her authority

as a resident of the Inland Empire to confront my interpretation of that region. Our rhetorical differences, over a ghost region and a real region, reflected different

positioning. We both drew our own conclusions about the region, but in our participation in that disagreement we agreed on the existence and significance of the

region. It is worth noting her strategy of calling upon a tangible corporal existence, of a "real" person and a "real" place. It is an effective strategy—to lay claim to

experience and to the real in a discussion of ideas and representations.

I was reminded of my encounter with the woman from Spokane as I considered Limerick sketching out the "realization of the American West" in the recent Western

regional movement. In a similar way Limerick draws upon her authority as a resident of the West and an advocate of Western regionalism in her description of the

contemporary regional movement in Western history and literature. She is a participant and an advocate as well as an observer and analyzer. And as such, she

believes that terms such as truth, reality, accuracy, and authenticity still seem useable, central, reliable. Holding onto a claim to the real, she suggests, is a distinguishing

characteristic of Western writers.

Such a strategy engages in just that shifting ground of representation that Limerick seems to want to separate from the Western literary and historical enterprise.

Clearly, she is uneasy about "the constructedness of meaning, the shiftiness of representation, the changeability of interpreted experience." And she worries about the

"dance with the media and the imagemakers." SheCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n

fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e

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acknowledges that artifice involved in Western regionalism, even as she insists upon an essential reality. Yet as she engages us with her language of the "real," the

actual, and the tangible, she constructs a version of Western regionalism that dances on that unstable ground.

By pointing to the representational aspects of Limerick's presentation of the West, Western regionalism, and the Western regional movement, I do not mean to suggest

that I disagree with her assessment of the current trends within Western regionalism—the urge to connect the present and the past, for example, or the appeal to a

"real" West. I worry a bit, however, about her claims for Western regionalism. An appeal to a "real" West, an essential West, faces the danger of erasing the

multiethnic character and diversity of the West. The impulse of regionalists to consensus, to claims—in Limerick's words—of a "we" who "have taken genuine strides

in regional selfunderstanding," faces the danger of erasing the conflicts and contestations inherent in the West. The most vehement and persistent claims for Western

regionalism seem to come disproportionately from Westerners anxious to defend its validity against challenges.

What intrigues me most about the ongoing creation of regions—and regions are always in the process of formation—is the persistence of conflict and contestation.

Indeed, in most cases conflict and contestation characterize region more than consensus. Regions are comprised of different individuals and groups who are engaged in

conflicts over meanings of places, over the relations of peoples in and with places, and over their often competing visions of the future. These struggles are both

material and representational. And they take place not only in the world of writers and historians, but also in the world of the everyday.

To grapple with regionalism and regional identity, therefore, we need to pay attention to conflicts, to the issues under contestation, and to the language used in those

conflicts. Which brings me to the metaphor of amputation. Limerick quotes Wallace Stegner's use of that metaphor—it is a wonderfully evocativeCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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metaphor with multiple interpretive qualities. I would like to pick up that metaphor, but to cast it in a different way. Not to consider the act of reattaching a limb, but to

consider the act of cutting off or severing a limb.

Amputation is, at times, a survival strategy. There was a story on the news about a man in the backcountry by himself who suffered an accident which ended with one

of his legs pinned underneath a large boulder. With no one to help him, and unable to shift the boulder by himself, he took drastic action. He cut off his leg at the knee,

freeing himself, then crawled out for assistance—not an ideal solution, perhaps, but a pragmatic one. He sacrificed part of his body for survival, for life. He sacrificed a

known past for a future.

Individuals and groups in the West who are engaged in conflicts often find themselves in similar predicaments. Certainly Daniel Gillen, a striking miner from Coeur

d'Alene, Idaho, suggested as much to a visiting Congressional committee on Industrial Relations in 1899. "I would sooner cut off my right hand than give up my liberty

to them [the mine owners]," he explained. Gillen's words vividly express the vehemence of those who shared his workingclass identity, the striking miners in a conflict

over rights within the industrial mining world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Situated in the interior Pacific Northwest, the miners also drew upon

the local rhetoric of regionalism; they based their assertion of rights, in part, on a claim to a "history" in this particular site. The miners' adherence to such rhetorical

strategies suggests a broader view of regional identification, one not only attached to physical location, but also to socioeconomic location. 1

And Gillen's words echo those of a participant in another nineteenthcentury northern Idaho rights struggle. Ten years before Gillen reported his indignation, Coeur

d'Alene leader Andres Seltice negotiated with a different visiting federal government committee over the rights to land, over the boundaries of his people's reservation.

Relinquishing reservation land, Seltice explainedCo py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

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during the 1889 negotiations, "was just the same as cutting my left arm off." The disputes over the Coeur d'Alene reservation lands, part of a longer struggle over

Coeur d'Alene tribal rights to land and selfdetermination, rested on assumptions regarding the place of Native Americans in the nation and the region. 2

These two ongoing rights struggles—one defined by class, the other by race—shared more than simply the language of amputation. The questions raised by these

struggles—over the rights to land, selfdetermination, economic control, identity, and the future—engaged these and other inhabitants of the interior Pacific Northwest.

Both Gillen and Seltice were engaged in struggles over rights—one of those sets of conflicts which helped define the region in which they lived. They shared a strategy

of calling upon a tangible corporal existence, of using a physical, material metaphor as they asserted their identity in terms of class or race. In the different and

competing discourses about who belonged or who did not belong to defined communities or regions, about who had the rights to define those communities or regions,

these Westerners were participants in important representational struggles, struggles which had significant material consequences. What I am suggesting here is the

inseparability of the material and the mental worlds of region. Representations are interconnected with the real both in the past and in the present.

Let me end with Limerick's title: "the realization of the American West." She offers two definitions of the term—to make real and to convert into money. I am intrigued

with the former; "to make real" or "to make realistic" assumes that one makes or creates a reality. And with that "realization of the American West," I heartily agree.

Co py ri gh t @ 19 98 . Un iv er si ty P re ss o f Mi ss is si pp i.

Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut

pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r

ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .