Those of us who live and work in the interior West (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada) like to think of ourselves as westerners. We believe we carry with us certain regional characteristics that set us apart from southerners or New Englanders or even midwesterners. In an American society more and more homogenized by modern communications, there is something comforting about a regional consciousness. It gives us a sense of place and identity in a nation where television and the Internet want to erode regional distinctions. Quite aside from our zip codes, we wish to adhere to regional traits and values (some say codes) that we believe are uniquely western. We can’t always articulate the components of our regional consciousness, but like beauty or love, we feel it and defend it when others try to fault it or diminish it.
There is, however, considerable confusion as to what these values are, where they came from, and their usefulness in a New West.
What makes it so difficult for westerners and others to discern our regional characteristics is the number of definitions, including myths, that encumber this region. Certainly some of these legends and myths we create for ourselves. But most are externally generated. Some are innocent and benign, causing a few laughs but no injury, while other legends provide us goals and guidance, frequently unattainable in a generation, but worthy objectives to which we aspire. Then there are those myths that degrade and cause misunderstanding—the inaccurate ones, the stereotypes that are sometimes purposefully cruel and cause so much misunderstanding and even violence. Some of the myths die hard, still with their boots on; others refuse to die at all.
Many Europeans, for example, see us as a collection of gun-crazed wild men (and women) impatient to pull the trigger on anyone who disagrees with us—even, sometimes, our children. This habit of violence, some American historians tell us, is a carryover from our recent “frontier” experience. The West for these observers has always been a violent place—our most violent region—one burdened by a “legacy of conquest.”
There are those who portray the West as our most democratic and tolerant region, a place where republican principles and procedures flowered in a young region unburdened by European traditions. Because there were few social or economic divisions among the early settlers, it is argued, a pioneer generation passed on to us enduring habits of democratic thought and procedures.
And then there is the Hollywood version of the West as a place where sun-bonneted maidens scamper about the daisies beside their little house on the prairie while Pa, with a six-shooter strapped to his hip, rides his trusty steed out across the wide-open range singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” A related scenario features the “rugged individualist,” the macho John Wayne type, who conquered the wilderness with bravery and true grit while making the West safe not only for democracy but also for Darwinian economics. Tinseltown’s most enduring message about the West, one that sells books and films to this day, is revealed in John Ford’s 1966 class film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. When Jimmy Stewart’s character in the film finally reveals to a newspaper editor the ironic truth of who really shot the notorious outlaw Liberty Valence, the editor refuses to rewrite the story and proclaims, “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In addition, there are those who would have us believe we are a plundered province, aided and abetted by the West’s own residents who care nothing about the environment and everything about money. We are told we’ve overgrazed, overcut, and overmined what was once a beautiful place, leaving in our wake a raped landscape with dusty pastures, barren hillsides, and poisoned streams. In short, we’re poor stewards of the physical beauty that once surrounded us.
The problem with all these myths, of course, is that they fail to account for history. It is difficult to defend the West’s monopoly on violence, for example, when looking at the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan in the South. As for our heritage of regional tolerance, clearly Hispanics and Indians question this myth. And did not the Sioux teach Custer the deadly lesson that rugged individualists cannot survive long in either war or the West? As for ruining our environment, we are certainly not alone.
A more enduring myth, one put upon us by an eastern cultural establishment, would have us believe that the West is something of an intellectual outback, lacking for world-class museums and educational institutions, a region where “minor regional writers” struggle, like the West itself, with their own self-identity . . . and the composition of a compound sentence. We’re viewed as a collection of provincial dirtbags, too lazy to move to more sophisticated and cosmopolitan regions of the country. All the energetic and smart folks born and raised in the West departed long ago, leaving behind a region described by one eastern sociologist as “a fished out pond . . . full of bullheads and suckers.”
This view was best expressed in a recent review of a new novel (Plainsong, by Kent Haruf) about the lives of decent, hardworking, and caring people on the plains of eastern Colorado who look after each other in tough times in a tough country. The reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates—a well-respected writer and teacher of creative writing at Princeton—can barely hide her contempt for these rural residents. She finds them “boorish,” “lacking in imagination,” people who live in a “narrow, ignorant, smugly provincial domestic world,” and who are incapable of “embarking upon the adventure of independence in Chicago, and beyond.” What is worse, this critic continues, these rural Coloradans “live not in the solitude of their own thoughts, at the margins of the community, but in one another’s lives.” Damned dangerous folks, these hayseeds. Sounds like they might be acting like neighbors in a community! People just don’t act that way anymore, the professor tells us, and anyone who writes about the older, traditional values of rural life is engaged in an exercise in “fantasy.” What we need instead, we are told, are more books that portray the dark side of rural life, books like William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, which features a speechless idiot and his liaison with a cow.
When it comes to understanding the West and rural life, which is so much a part of understanding this region, Oates is quite clueless. She needs to understand that the pastoral life does exist for some people in the West (as elsewhere) and that life experiences in rural communities are not fantasies; that westerners are not a rag-tag collection of demonic characters living and working out in the Big Empty who wish to be described and understood by writers whose specialty is “metaphysical speculation.”
It is one thing to read and listen to these stereotypes as they bombard us from other regions, but some of the voices are also coming from the thousands of new residents moving to this region and the millions of tourists vacationing here. They perceive the region as a place to vacation and recreate—a sort of fantasy theme park where cowboys and Indians define the workforce and mountains and rivers define the workplace.
If these are some of the more destructive stereotypes and myths that derive from our mistaken identity, what then are the codes by which we live here in the West, and from where do they derive? Let me suggest one major source and a few historical values that, though often forgotten, flow from this source and continue to survive in today’s fractured West.
What is unusual about the West, what makes it so unique as an American region, and what to large degree defines its people (culture), is our landscape. It is one as immense in scale as it is varied in composition—a complex web of forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and grasslands. It is also a landscape that over time and throughout its space has experienced human contact—more gentle contact, certainly, prior to the late nineteenth century than recently, but contact with people nevertheless.
The term “landscape” has always carried within its definition the presence of people, living and working on the land. Cultural historian Simon Schama refers to it as a “manscape,” a place of human habitation. Even Henry David Thoreau, that misanthrope naturalist, recognized the historic connection between Walden Pond’s wild landscape and the local Indians. Only recently have we in the United States and Europe begun to think of the landscape as an aesthetic, a place of pastoral beauty where people and their work are either totally absent or at least barely visible. It is this massive and varied western landscape—our interaction with it and our life and work on it, generation after generation—that defines the contours of our western culture, our memory and our history. And more than in any other region of the country, it is the landscape that influences western behavior and helps to define our most important codes.
This is true, I think, because the West, more than any region, is not far removed in time from the soil and its agricultural heritage. Hispanic migration into the interior West occurred little more than two centuries ago, and Anglo settlement is even more recent. The descendants of these settlers and thousands of others who today continue to live on the land, work its fields, graze its meadows, and harvest its crops do not consider the landscape as an abstraction, a recreational playground, or a commodity to be traded and monetized. People who make their living from the land see it as a workplace, the source of their livelihood and the place of their home. And although the traditions that derive from the land are not uniformly present throughout the West, particularly in our cities, the landscape continues to be the primary provider of memories and self-identity for many rural westerners.
It is this agricultural experience, this intimate connection with our landscape, that provides us with many of our codes. As a region, we place a high premium on hard work, honesty, thrift, and tenacity, and to work the land involves all four qualities. To this day, the work ethic remains strong in the West. And because our relative wealth did not come easily, we are careful how we, and others on our behalf, spend it. Nor are westerners quitters in the face of overwhelming odds. The close relationship to our agricultural heritage, however, involves something else, a code more important and enduring.
As I’ve suggested, settlers did not come to this place alone nor could they survive as rugged individualists. Those who migrated into the West along the trails and rivers from the East and the South did so in highly organized immigrant companies, often resembling military units. And upon arrival on the high plains or in the mountain valleys of the Rockies, settlers understood quickly that any attempt to confront the forces of nature alone in this dry, harsh country was an invitation to failure, if not death. Survival depended on hard work and patience, but it also depended even more on cooperation. Hardship and adversity only strengthened the custom.
In a new region where there was little capital to purchase labor and no excess labor to supply the need, the exchange of labor and scarce tools became a habit of survival. In this spirit, people together built houses, barns, roads, irrigation ditches, fences, and a host of institutional structures such as churches, schools, firehouses, courthouses, and jails. In addition, a series of economic recessions, and particularly the Great Depression, which hit harder and longer in the interior West than in any other section of the country, embedded in the survivors a wide array of skills and memories that survive in their children and grandchildren to this day. Those who managed to stay on the land (and fewer than a third did) reminded themselves and their offspring of life’s harsh lessons: avoid unnecessary risks, especially debt; work hard; pray for God’s grace; hope for a dividend of luck; and, above all, cooperate with your neighbors in good times and bad, especially bad. Imbued with a new, grimmer view of life’s possibilities, no one expected to be cut any slack, now or in the future. And if these survivors felt like passive agents in a national economic system they neither understood nor profited from, they had at least survived with one another’s assistance. And that was important.
This code of cooperation carries forward to this day. Farmers and ranchers share labor and equipment, and together they work brandings, roundups, and harvests. Rural people call it “neighboring,” a verb that simply translated means helping others. It can be something as simple as repairing an irrigation ditch or as important as helping to care for a sick neighbor. A good neighbor will return the assistance, the exchange of labor, out of personal friendship and a shared sense of community responsibility. No one keeps an accounting of how much labor is given and how much is received quantitatively, because no one is willing to equate or reduce personal relationships to a definitive value—not because it can’t be done by some sophisticated mental calculus, but because it is inappropriate, even rude, to even attempt such a calculation. You are just brought up to learn that labor and assistance are mutually shared, in good times and bad.
“Neighboring” includes also a high degree of mutual trust and predictable behavior where a promise made, is a promise kept. Not to do so is to destroy the trust upon which the entire “neighboring” edifice is built. Let me cite one personal example.
Some years ago, after a very dry summer, I sold 100 tons of hay to a local rancher. My neighbor said he’d pay me half now and the other half in the spring when he picked up the hay. We shook hands on the arrangement. As agreed, my neighbor picked up his hay in March, except the check for the balance due was more than I expected. “Why the difference?” I asked. He replied, “Oh, the bales weighed a bit more than you thought . . . total came to 109 tons, so that’s the difference.” A year and a half later, in the midst of an IRS audit, the agent asked to see the contract for this hay sale. “There is no contract,” I responded. The IRS agent looked at me as if I had just fallen off the onion truck. “No contract for a $7,000 sale?” “That’s right,” I informed him. “We don’t use contracts around here, at least not with neighbors.”
I suggested that if he didn’t believe me (which he didn’t) he should call my neighbor (which he did). When I visited with my neighbor to apologize for the inconvenience of the IRS intrusion, I told him my audit occurred on the occasion of my daughter’s fourth birthday party. It was, I believe, the first time an IRS agent had ever been made to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey. My neighbor thought a moment and responded with a grin, “I sure hope you used the IRS ass as the object.”
The “rugged individualist” doesn’t get any of this, of course. He represents the individualism of the self, the self-congratulatory braggart, who doesn’t understand that a mature independence carries with it the assumption of responsibility to a larger community. The “rugged individualist” proudly protects his privacy in his urban bunker or on his ranch compound, both posted with “No Trespassing” warnings. With his large bank balance, he smugly assumes he doesn’t need—nor will he be indebted to—his neighbor’s assistance. He can, of course, buy all of his ranch labor and the legal talent needed to prosecute those who violate his “property rights.” In his arrogance he will go it alone because that’s the way he made his money. He doesn’t realize, at least at first, that the practices on Wall Street are far different from the codes on Main Street.
There is, I believe, one other important quality of the West. I hesitate to call it a personal code; it is a physical characteristic that influences our behavior and, to a degree, places a premium on the code of cooperation. I’m referring to the immense space that surrounds us. The sheer size of this space—all 100,000 square miles of it—affects our psyche. As westerners, we carry within our mental geography a different, larger sense of space, distinct from New Englanders and certainly from city residents. We are accustomed to more space surrounding us, and therefore we need more elbow room to feel comfortable, and we get damned grumpy when newcomers crowd us—on a highway or in a new subdivision across the fence. It is all this gorgeous open space that now attracts others to this region.
We find it difficult to absorb these residents into our communities. As newcomers crowd in around us with their different sense of space and place, they want to question the established norms and traditions in their new surrounding; they want to lecture us on a multitude of subjects, especially how to reorganize our landscape. It is on our landscape, we say to ourselves, they wish to relax and vacation, the same landscape on which we wish to work and harvest. We are accustomed to more space and fewer structures, more acreage and fewer roads, longer sight lines with more sky. Newcomers do not always share the same vision. I’m not suggesting our view is any better; it is just different. And it is these differences that have caused considerable internal debate and raised the noise level, if not the contentiousness, in our western cities and towns.
Maybe it is time westerners remember one of our strongest traditions, that of being a good neighbor. This western code of “neighboring” has always assumed a degree of tolerance and a willingness to listen to different opinions. And there is, of course, a mutual obligation for others to do the same. Being a good neighbor includes also taking care of our landscape and being good environmentalists. Agriculturalists and others who have lived on our landscape possess an authentic knowledge of what works on the land and have learned, sometimes the hard way, that to consume our landscape is to destroy our livelihood. If all of us, natives and newcomers, cannot cooperate, how can we possibly expect to preserve the western landscape we as a nation so cherish? To do anything less is to be a poor steward; but to do more is to be a good neighbor.
It is easy, in these cynical times, to be charged with nostalgia. But if nostalgia is looking to our past for something that worked, a code that allowed people to live a life of dignity, individually and within a community, then I plead guilty. If this is nostalgia, maybe we should have more of it . . . and let it blossom throughout the land.