Western Place

Wallace Stegner has written, "Especially in the West, what we have instead of place is space....The principal invention of western American culture is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. A principal western industry is tourism, which exploits the mobile and the seasonal. Whatever it might want to be, the West is primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else; and western literature, from Roughing It to On the Road, from The Log of a Cowboy to Lonesome Dove, from The Big Rock Candy Mountain to The Big Sky, has been largely a literature not of place but of motion."

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Doesn't this seem true? In our culture--both in America and in the visions and definitions of America that we send out to the rest of the world--don't we still emphasize the wide open spaces of our continent, especially of the West? This is part of who we are, or who we claim to be. We are the country of elbow room, of room to roam. On some level, even our conceptions of ourselves and our "American Dreams" are bound up with the idea of limitless possibility, of a kind of potential that is reflected in our landscape. "We" are not locked in to places of tradition and limit, whether those be literal places or social places. Anyone can be or achieve anything in America--or so we tell ourselves--because, after all, if we can't make it here, well, then there's always a there. This has always been our American idea, the one supposedly unique to us, for unlike other ensconced and established regions of the world, where everything has seemingly always already been owned or defined or put in its "place," we've always had more. Enough for everyone. Our ideas of ourselves and our possibilites are linked to our ideas of our open spaces. And from those legends of Davey Crocket and his ilk, who headed off into the woods, to Huck who decided to "light out for the Territory," to the endlessly westering Kerouac, to every American child (or hopeful immigrant, sold on the dream of America) who has ever looked out the window to an elsewhere of promise and freedom, the sheer vastness and space of this America has stood out.

But. But there is also--and always has been--a literature of place in the West as well. For all those who "lit out," there came a time of settling down (you know, the other side of the American Dream), and the need and desire to develop a sense of home, of shelter, and of belonging in these territories. These stories are at the center of my dissertation, and this process of placing is my focus. We persist in imagining--and selling--the West as open space, as still the territory of endless horizons and wide open landscapes. And perhaps this is true, in relation to many other areas, and perhaps this is still the primary allure of the West, in our minds and our films and our books. But this focus does tend to overwrite the stories of place, the identities and lives of the people who have made a home of the West, who have become a people of this place. These are the people who are not just moving through or constantly searching. These are those who have found what they want, and who have sought to live with the landscape, and to make a place from this space. Their stories matter, and for them their territories are not empty or undefined. They have marked them with their living. There stories have happened here.

I have written elsewhere of the way that the persistent views of the Western territory as empty has led to a kind of "dumping ground" approach to the landscape. Here it is okay to test nuclear weapons, or dump nuclear waste. Here it is okay to take what we will from the land itself, and give little thought to renewal or restoration. Here it is okay to dam and flood valleys, or to strip hillsides away for the minerals that lay beneath. These approaches rely on the perception of a land that is only open space, that is "not being used" or is "virtually uninhabited." And doing so not only often puts the people who are here in jeopardy (just ask the "downwinders" who continue to die of cancer as a result of nuclear fallout), but also ignores and erases the connections these "virtual uninhabitants" have to the landscape, to the places they have made and the stories they have lived in them.

Doesn't a literary and imaginitive tradition that emphasizes only the space of the West, and the limitless mobility that it promises, ultimately do the same thing?

I wonder.

Beginning by Erasure

Well, despite my many, many efforts to the contrary, it's finally happened. I've started on a chapter. I'm skipping the introduction for now, and my first chapter sets out to show how the West was perceived and represented as "empty space," and how those who sought to settle it -- the Great Plains, specifically -- had to struggle with both the real and imagined "desertness." I roughly imagine the chapter in three parts. First, I will venture to show how the West (again, specifically the Great Plains, but with applicability to the West as a whole) was perceived by many in the 19th century as a "Great American Desert," and how this perception (in tandem, of course, with many practical obstacles) served to hold back the settlement of the American intererior for several generations. Subsequent to that--and the heart of the chapter--will be a discussion of how this myth shifted to one in which the agrarian settlement of the Plains became a heroic, and national venture. The desert turned to garden. Here, I will look to the literature--Cather, Rölvaag, etc.--to show how individuals struggled practically and (more imporantly) psychologically with the "space," and how they sought to carve a place for themselves within the landscape. Finally, in a closing discussion, I plan to explore how--despite this shift in mythology from desert emptiness to garden promise--perceptions of the West have always retained a trace of "emptiness" to many both within and without. This is evident in treatments of Western landscapes as "dumping grounds"--that is, as sites for both nuclear tests and nuclear waste; as territories to be exploited by extractive economics; etc. For many, the West is still virtually uninhabited, and the tendency to erase the senses of place that have been created in those landscapes persists, "filled in" (again) with empty space.

And, if all that doesn't confuse y'all enough, here's a quickwrite I did a few days ago, to get me a back in the practice of expressing these ideas in writing. I'm not quite there yet...

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The historical impression of the Great Plains as the “Great American Desert” was one that held sway with many American settlers. This myth of the desert resulted from Stephen Long’s explorations (1820), and joined a long line of American perceptions of the unsettled West as howling wilderness. Whether the actual aridity of the plains was accurate is beside the point—so much depends on cyclical climate shifts and environmental hazards (droughts, locusts, etc)—but the story stuck. Perhaps the new settlers who ventured into this environment saw around them that these grasslands were no true desert, but many of them persisted holding on to the desert mythology because of their psychological and practical struggles with the overwhelming difference of the territory. It’s openness and seeming lack of shelter; it’s harsh weather; it’s sheer distance from the Eastern centers of familiarity and “civilization” – all of this overwhelmed many new to the region (or traveling through), and many conveniently used the mode of thinking and talking about the place that was already in practice to describe this feeling of alienness – that is, of a “desert” or “wasteland.” The desert perception may not have been a permanent, persistent, actual boundary, but the myth and the mental and physical struggles in a new landscape made it a psychological one.

Fight a story with a story. The mythology of barrier and impossibility was overcome only by convincing people that it was worth the challenge, by re-mythologizing the wilderness as a place of potential and national importance, and by making heroes of those who would take up the struggle – the yeoman heroes. The myth of the desert gave way to the myth of the garden, and this too struggled with reality. The plains were a difficult, unfamiliar, and challenging environment, and they did have “desert”-like qualities. Though not the howling wastes, the plains were still unsuited for traditional agricultural ventures. Those who settled it had to still overcome—in practice and in psychology—the sheer “spaceness” of it all. This is well represented in the literature of the time, in Cather and Rölvaag and others. The push and pull of the stories, and the struggles between the overwhelming landscape and the mythologized glory of triumph (of riches, of a “new start,” of founding a kingdom, etc.) all came together and clashed in the daily lives of these people, attempting to create a place for themselves. Some succeeded and some failed, but all struggled—both with reality and with mythology.

Even with the shift from the desert myth to the garden myth, and despite the success of settlers in eventually “placing” the plains, in creating lives and communities and histories in these apparently empty spaces (in finally creating “places to hide”), the perception of emptiness in the West persists. Perhaps it is promoted some by those within, to highlight their triumphs in overcoming, but it is also imposed by those without, who still seek to exploit the “wastes” – by extractive economics, or by nuclear testing, or by various other “dumping ground” philosophies (Vegas, prisons, etc). For many, the West is virtually uninhabited still, and those who are—in Terry Tempest Williams’ terms—the “virtual uninhabitants” must live with this perception, whether they fight it or accept it.