Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Environment and Region in the American West) [New ed.] 1496229541, 9781496229540

Citation preview

“This is history as it should be written, focusing not only on people but also on the natural environment as it changes through time. The result of that complex interaction has been a saga of conflict, hope, failure, conservation, and sustainability. Everyone who lives in the West should know its environmental history, and the rest of the world should know it too because it offers important lessons for humanity. This book is big in scale and rich in detail, yet written with economy and grace, with a scholar’s judicious understanding, and with a lover’s passion for the place.” —­D onald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance

“In this fresh take on the history of the American West, Sara Dant tells us why ‘the West as Eden’ has always been a false illusion and how truth-­telling of our past might resolve twenty-­first-­century issues and even provide hope for our future.” —­R osalyn LaPier, author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet

“Losing Eden is no ordinary book. Dant begins with a simple question: At what environmental cost did Americans develop the largely arid West? In answer, she offers an engaging, provocative interpretation of the region’s environmental and Indigenous history, from the primordial past to the present, with an eye toward the future in an era of climate change.” —­M arsha Weisiger, author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

“Sara Dant has created something seemingly unattainable: a one-­volume book—­full of incisive analysis, wrapped in unforgettable storytelling—­that covers the deep environmental history of the American West from twenty-­five thousand years ago to today. She delivers an important cautionary tale about the relationship between people and nature, always asking a simple question: ‘At what cost?’ I learned something on every page.” —­D ayton Duncan, author of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea

“Sara Dant’s Losing Eden is an environmental masterpiece about the American region she holds near and dear to her heart. Whether Dant tackles the problems of aridity, massive wildfires, or climate change, she hits all the right notes. . . . This is a brilliant book, learned to its core, that will stand the test of time. Environmental history at its absolute finest. Highly recommended!” —­D ouglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University

“This is environmental history at its best. Losing Eden offers a masterful narrative that explores broad-­ranging themes and the historical connections, tensions, and contradictions that have defined the vibrant and diverse peoples and environments of the American West, as well as their relationship to one another.” —­E ladio B. Bobadilla, assistant professor of Latinx history at the University of Pittsburgh

Losing Eden

Environment and Region in the American West Series Editors Leisl Carr Childers Colorado State University Michael W. Childers Colorado State University

Losing Eden An Environmental History of the American West New Edition

Sara Dant Foreword by Tom S. Udall

University of Nebraska Press  Lincoln

© 2023 by Sara Dant Foreword © 2023 by Tom S. Udall First edition published 2017 by Wiley & Sons “Roll On, Columbia.” Words by Woody Guthrie. Music based on “Goodnight, Irene” by Huddie Ledbetter and John A. Lomax wgp/tro. © Copyright 1936, 1957, 1963 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., and Ludlow Music, Inc., New York ny. Administered by Ludlow Music, Inc. International copyright secured. Made in U.S.A. All rights reserved, including public performance for profit. Used by permission. All rights reserved The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-­grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-­Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-­Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Dant, Sara, 1967–­author. | Udall, Tom S., other. Title: Losing Eden : an environmental history of the American West / Sara Dant ; foreword by Tom S. Udall. Description: New edition. | Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2023. | Series: Environment and region in the American West | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022061288 isbn 9781496229540 (paperback) isbn 9781496236227 (epub) isbn 9781496236234 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: West (U.S.)—­Environmental conditions—­ History. | Human ecology—­United States—­History. | bisac: nature / Natural Resources | history / United States / State & Local / West (ak, ca, co, hi, id, mt, nv, ut, wy) Classification: lcc f591 . d258 2023 | ddc 978—­dc23/eng/20221228 lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022061288 Designed and set in Arno Pro by L. Welch.

For Dan and Claire

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Foreword, by Tom S. Udall

xi

Introduction: The Nature of the West

1



1. Losing “Eden”

9



2. The West Transformed

39



3. Claiming and Taming the Land

67



4. The Great Barbecue

99



5. The Pivotal Decade

125



6. Conservation and Preservation

153



7. Roll On

179



8. Booming the West

205



9. Building Consensus

233



10. Environmental Backlash and the New West

261



11. The Last Frontier

291

Epilogue: Our Lonely Planet Index

321 331

Illustrations



1. Map of the American West 2. Map of migration routes used by First Americans 3. The Three Sisters 4. Map of Indigenous nations in the West 5. Chaco Culture National Historical Park 6. Map of the Columbian Exchange 7. Mission San Xavier del Bac 8. Map of horse culture diffusion 9. Map of the Public Land Survey System 10. Map of territorial acquisitions, federal exploration, and overland trails 11. Malakoff Diggings, California, 1905 12. Map of transcontinental railroads to 1900 13. J. W. Powell’s Arid Region map 14. Early clear-­cutting damage 15. Waiting for a Chinook 16. The Ghost Dance by the Ogallala [sic] Sioux at Pine Ridge Agency, Dakota 17. Fish wheel on the Columbia River, Oregon

ix

2 13 22 24 29 43 53 57 70 73 90 106 111 117 119 126 134



18. “January catch of Forest Service hunter T. B. Bledsaw, Kaibab National Forest, ca. 1914” 19. Between the Desert and the Sown, 1895 20. President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir 21. “There it is—­take it.” 22. Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde 23. Boulder Dam, April 26, 1935 24. Map of Colorado River Compact region 25. Map of the Dust Bowl 26. Mushroom cloud from atomic bomb test, 1955 27. Map of nuclear fallout in the West 28. Suburbanization, with curvilinear streets 29. Church for Idaho 30. Senator Frank Church and President Lyndon Johnson, 1968 31. The “Dirty Dozen,” 1974 32. Clear-­cuts in the Lewis and Clark National Forest, 1956 33. When I’m Secretary of Interior . . . 34. Reies Tijerina leading an Alianza protest 35. Spotted owls in a Pacific Northwest old-­growth forest 36. “Road” claim made under rs 2477 37. Caribou migration, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 38. Map of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 39. Black Fire, New Mexico, 2022 40. Map of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 41. We 10, Hulahula River float trip crew, 2019 42. Earthrise 43. Bison on American Prairie lands

x Illustrations

137 147 154 166 172 180 194 199 209 210 222 234 243 250 252 262 270 272 279 292 295 301 312 316 323 326

Foreword Tom S. Udall

In Losing Eden, Sara Dant has written a comprehensive book on the American West. She covers everything from its geography through its history to its current configuration. More importantly, however, she has written about the lessons we can take from this story to deal with the existential crises we face today. This is not necessarily a pretty story, nor is it one in which the human species comes off particularly well. Basically, it is a story of how for the last five hundred years we have failed to understand the true value of the West—­ the region that allowed us to become by 1900 the most productive economy in the world by virtue of our labor, our capital, and, most significantly, our natural resources. There was a time, before what Dant calls the “Great Dying”—­the hundred years in which up to 90 percent of the Indigenous population was lost to the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans—­when Native peoples largely lived in harmony with their environment. A time when attention was paid to the interconnectedness of all living things. A time when life was based on a subsistence economy sustainable with respect to the demands of the environment of the place. A time when the interests of the community prevailed over individual interests. A time when, in places like the Southwest, watershed communities with communal irrigation systems defined the equitable distribution of water—­the essential ingredient. xi

The Europeans brought instead a market economy that bypassed the checks and balances required to maintain a sustainable economy. Western land became a commodity to be measured and sliced and partitioned and sold off without consideration for its fragile ecology. The fur trade provides a particularly vivid example of the market economy’s focus on “progress and civilization” over respect for living creatures and ecological balance. The contribution of beavers to the overall environment was literally wrecked to make the fur hats fashionable in Paris. In short, as Dant writes, “the sustainability of Native communities became increasingly impossible when demand for merchantable commodities dictated the ‘value’ of nature.” In the nineteenth century, the gold rush, railroads, and the whole of America’s “manifest destiny” overwhelmed the concern for the land itself and the scarcity of water in the West. The Civil War ramped up the Industrial Revolution in the East, making greater demands on the West’s natural resources, which added to what became an unsustainable plunder. In the twentieth century, “progress” continued to have priority over sustainability. National policy supported dams and oil production and highways. It’s not that there weren’t voices reminding us that the West was precious and must be preserved: Theodore Roosevelt believed our greatest task was to leave the land in better condition than it was left to us. John Wesley Powell believed the fragility of the West could not sustain the greed of exploitation, and John Muir believed appropriation of natural resources beyond need would unbalance the environment. By the 1960s and 1970s there was a sufficiently broad environmental movement to ensure the enactment of federal laws bringing some measure of protection to our endangered natural resources—­a national project momentarily stymied by their unbridled exploitation by Interior secretary James Watt in the 1980s. That movement continues to grow and push us toward the development of renewable rather than depletable resources—­an existential necessity in the face of the threats of climate change and the earth’s sixth mass extinction. All of which leaves us where?

xii Foreword

Dant has hopes for a New West that values conservation in place of an Old West of extraction and exploitation. Essentially, we have no choice but to recognize that the accelerated rate of climate change means we learn to live sustainably or we lose it all. And learning to live sustainably means learning the history of the West and how there was a time when humans knew how to do that.

Foreword  xiii

Losing Eden

Introduction The Nature of the West

The American West has long been a region of hope and renewal. Even now, at the vanguard of climate change and emblematic of a planet whipsawed by increasingly violent and destructive environmental crises, the West yet holds the extraordinary promise of modeling a sustainable future for the nation and the world. The writer Wallace Stegner foresaw this possibility, writing that “we are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.” Environmental history is a field of study that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s during the heyday of the environmental movement. As “history,” it is the study of change over time, but instead of focusing on traditional topics like presidents and wars, environmental history examines the evolving relationship between people and nature; it is rooted in place. From this perspective, humans exist within nature, not apart from it, and, like all animal species, humans will survive only if we can preserve the health of the habitat in which we live. We both shape and are shaped by the world around us. There are perhaps as many different definitions of the West as there are westerners, but in this text the term describes the contiguous, continental region lying west of the hundredth meridian. This longitudinal divide separates the more arid West from the more lush East, effectively delimiting 1

1. The American West. Map by Amber Bell.

an ecological as well as geographical distinction that has affected human interaction with nature over time. Beyond these cartographic boundaries, the West’s exceptionalism derives from its unique environment. It is a land of extremes. The highest and lowest temperatures ever recorded in the United States occurred in the West; in the lower forty-­eight, the West has the tallest peaks and the lowest valleys; the West also holds national snow records, hail-­size records, no-­rain records, and even fastest temperature rise and drop records. For Stegner, the West’s aridity is essential: “[It] gives the western landscape its character . . . the air its special dry clarity. . . . [Aridity] 2 Introduction

puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars . . . exposes the pigmentation of the raw earth . . . limits, almost eliminates, the color of chlorophyll . . . [and] erodes the earth in cliffs and badlands.” There is no way to comprehend the past or present West—­and by extension the nation—­without understanding the pervasive influence of these powerful forces. As the region’s greatest asset and challenge, the natural West has constantly forced its residents to rethink and reconfigure their relationship with the land. Far from the wilderness described in earlier histories, the West was never an undiscovered Eden. It is instead an ancient homeland with landscapes that humans have inhabited, modified, and managed for thousands of years. Native peoples generally lived lightly on the land but sometimes pressed it beyond its carrying capacity. When Europeans and later Americans arrived, they were not engaging with undisturbed nature, as so many argued until the 1990s, but these immigrants nevertheless portrayed the West as an Eden or Promised Land destined for their use. By definition, the term “Eden” is synonymous with unspoiled paradise, a pristine utopia of bounty and abundance. For some, the West fulfilled this biblical vision of a land of milk and honey, but for many the region constituted a harsh and unforgiving desert of aridity and struggle, while others envisioned it as a vast expanse of material wealth to exploit and plunder. This fusion of Edenic myth and environmental and economic reality shapes both the past and present, and the title of this book, Losing Eden, underscores this complicated relationship, encourages readers to lose this conceit of a virgin continent, and provides a central theme for the work. The chapters that follow synthesize the West’s complex history and illuminate several key subthemes designed to challenge readers to think critically and deeply about the past. First, as a consequence of the European introduction of a capitalist market system, tension quickly developed between economy and environment, between promoting economic success and development and preventing ecological destruction. As Stegner, who wrote about the West better than anyone, explained, “For at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment.” Introduction  3

Many historians have argued that the East’s early relationship with the West was colonial and exploitive: extractive industries funneled western raw materials to eastern factories, larger and wealthier eastern financial institutions plundered the West for their own material gain, and eastern lawmakers dictated land policy to largely powerless westerners. Even Bruce Babbitt, a former Interior secretary and a westerner, observed that “traditionally, the American West has been something of a third-­world economy based on resource extraction.” While there is certainly much truth in these generalizations, the reality is more complicated. Easterners did plunder the West, but so too did many westerners. The natural resources of the West did flow to eastern factories, but they also built western cities and fueled trade across the Pacific. Ultimately, the West has enjoyed a disproportionate flow of federal largesse in the form of railroads, water projects, roads, and public lands, and some of the earliest efforts to conserve and preserve nature in the region came from the East. The West-­as-­colony stereotype persists, however, for two essential reasons. First, it has significant foundation in fact, which this text will explore. And second, it is a story that westerners want to hear about themselves because it largely absolves them and places the blame for plundering squarely on eastern shoulders. But rather than ask “Whose fault?,” this book encourages readers to consider a far more important question: “At what cost?” Americans have long celebrated progress, material wealth, and technological advancements without considering their true environmental price. This exploit-­versus-­ protect riddle remains a challenge even into the twenty-­first century. A second common thread running through much of the West’s environmental history and this book is a cautionary concept called the “tragedy of the commons,” popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin argues that individuals acting in their own self-­interest will ignore the best interests of larger society and deplete common resources. To illustrate his point, he uses the example of a local community grazing commons, open to all, where each resident could sustainably graze one cow. An individual herder could easily rationalize that the addition of one more cow to the pasture would have no appreciably negative effect on the commons but would bring appreciably greater profit to the herder himself. So long as he is the only herder who thinks and acts this way, the commons remains unharmed and stable. But 4 Introduction

the tragedy arises when each herder in the community reaches this same conclusion and each adds another cow to the commons. The individual’s contribution does not measurably degrade the commons, but the collective additions result in overgrazing. Even though the individual’s intent is not malicious, the effect is nevertheless tragic. As Hardin writes, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Hardin’s example is oversimplified and abstract, as not all people or groups utilizing community-­managed resources (i.e., commons) have careened headlong toward tragedy. In this text, the tragedy of the commons predicament is most useful for explaining the exploitation of open-­access resources such as forests, water, air, and grazing lands, rather than the more narrow, legal definition of commons that Hardin outlines. Uniquely in the West, public lands, such as national parks, forests, and reserves, endeavor to counter Hardin’s predictions of environmental “ruin” through federally regulated natural resources. Utilizing the tragedy of the commons idea to examine the long-­term environmental consequences of the transition from local to national and international economies acts as a powerful metaphor for understanding the environmental problems that arose in the American West, returning again to the “at what cost” question. Finally, the goal of achieving sustainability, and thereby avoiding the tragedy of the commons, provides a unifying purpose to this environmental history of the American West. Sustainability’s objective is the creation of environmental stability and ecological health within the framework of economic development and political systems. It is essential to our survival. Ecologists and scientists have coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe the time period (beginning around 1800 with the Industrial Revolution) when human activities increasingly influenced the physical environments of the earth. Stegner has called us “the most efficient and ruthless environment-­busters in history.” As we move through the twenty-­first century and confront the effects of our long-­term exploitation of nature and the challenges of global climate change—­undeniable in the West—­we must learn the environmental lessons of the past or suffer the consequences. In the end, we care about what we know. This environmental history of the American West endeavors to connect readers with this place, whether Introduction  5

the West is home, a vacation destination, or merely a source of curiosity. Stegner writes, “If I had not been able periodically to renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse.” Indeed, he calls the wild places of the West the nation’s “geography of hope.” Understanding the whole of the West’s environmental history can help and perhaps motivate us to move forward and sustainably create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can coexist in productive harmony. Order may be “the dream of man,” as historian Henry Adams once suggested, but to realize its geography of hope, sustainability rather than Edenic myth must become both the dream and reality of the West. Note on Content and Structure To enhance readability and avoid repetition, this text uses the terms “Indian,” “Indigenous peoples,” “Native peoples,” and “Native” interchangeably. When new expressions or specific terms appear, a short definition or description follows immediately. The suggested readings listed at the end of each chapter expand upon the ideas presented in the chapter, allow readers to pursue more in-­depth analysis of certain topics, and connect historical interpretations with individual writers and thinkers. A book of this length makes no claim to being comprehensive but instead provides a new perspective for examining the arc of the West’s history; it aspires to inspire. The hope is that readers will come away with not only a heightened curiosity about the world around them but also a more complete understanding of the past, how that past connects to the present, and how we might move forward into the future. Suggested Reading

Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1177–­89. Mark Fiege, “The Nature of the West and the World,” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 305–­12. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–­48. Wes Jackson, “Prologue,” in Becoming Native to This Place (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 1–­5.

6 Introduction

Journal of American History Round Table Discussion on Environmental History, 76 (March 1990), including Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History”; Alfred W. Crosby, “An Enthusiastic Second”; Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning”; Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History”; William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History”; Stephen J. Pyne, “Firestick History”; and Donald Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture.” Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Region and Reason,” in All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 83–­104. Walter Nugent, “Where Is the American West? Report on a Survey,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 2–­23. Sammy Roth, “The American West Went through Climate Hell in 2021. But There’s Still Hope,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2021, available at https://w ​ ww.​ latimes​ .com​/environment​/story​/2021​-12​-01​/american​-west-​ went-​ through-​ climate-​ hell​ -in​-2021​-but​-theres​-still​-hope. Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Modern Library, 2002). Also “Wilderness Letter,” Wallace Stegner to David E. Pesonen, December 3, 1960, available at Eco-­Speak, Stanford University, http://​web​.stanford​.edu​/​~cbross​/Ecospeak​/wildernessletter​.html; and “The Marks of Human Passage,” in This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers, ed. Wallace Stegner (1955; Boulder co: Roberts Rinehart, 1985), 3–­17. Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 ( June 2013): 94–­119, available at http://​jah​ .oxfordjournals​.org​/content​/100​/1​/94​.full​.pdf​+html. Louis S. Warren, “Going West: Wildlife, Frontier, and the Commons,” in The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-­Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–­20.

Introduction  7

Losing “Eden”

1

In 1962 biologist Rachel Carson opened her seminal book, Silent Spring, with a simple yet profound declaration: “The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.” Although scientists had long embraced this understanding that humans and nature share a deep, almost symbiotic relationship—­they each shape and in turn are shaped by the other—­Carson’s book brought this concept of interconnectedness to a wider audience at a critical moment. As our species’ story demonstrates, humans harbor the greatest capacity to inflict damage on and ultimately destabilize and destroy the very environments that sustain us. Over time, evolution has singled out our highly intelligent carnivorous primate as the dominant species in the food chain, but the traits that have ultimately ensured unbounded human success have also inflicted a heavy toll on the natural world. As biologist E. O. Wilson has put it, “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for earth.” Yet Wilson also argues that there is an instinctive bond between people and other living systems, which he calls “biophilia”—­ literally “love of life.” And it is this abiding connectedness, he believes, that may yet allow the same big brains that learned myriad languages, developed increasingly effective technologies, and created vibrant cultures not only to prevent environmental catastrophe and collapse but also to facilitate a sustainable balance between the environment, economy, and society.

9

A close examination of the deep history of the environment in the American West within the larger global context provides a perfect illustration of Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis. It reveals how the unique geographies of the West have exerted such a powerful influence on the peoples of this region and how those people, in turn, have shaped and altered this largely arid land over time. The first humans to set foot on the North American continent arrived in the West and constantly innovated. New tools, the advent of agriculture, fire-­and irrigation-­managed environments, and the development of extensive trade routes were essential to early survival and success in the region and belie the myth of a pristine or Edenic America discovered by Europeans. To be clear, then, Christopher Columbus was not first. He did not discover America in 1492. In fact, Columbus was very, very late. From about 280 million to 230 million years ago, the earth’s land masses were centered on the equator and consolidated into one supercontinent that scientists have called Pangaea (“whole land”). About 175 million years ago, volcanic forces began to break up this gigantic landmass—­a process known as continental rifting—­into a series of continental plates. As plate tectonics separated the continents, the plants and animals on each began to evolve and adapt to their unique environmental circumstances. Over the ensuing millennia, this evolutionary divergence produced myriad species, including our own human ancestors, who first separated from the progenitors of modern apes in Africa between 5 million and 7 million years ago. By about 4 million years ago, these forebears had evolved the unique trait of walking upright, becoming fully bipedal about 1.9 million years ago. By 1.6 million years ago, protohumans had begun to use flaked stone and teardrop-­shaped hand-­ax technology to cut wood and meat and to scrape hides, and by approximately 800,000 years ago, they had gained control of fire. Armed with these tools and weapons, such as wooden spears tipped with stone or bone points, early hunters effectively exploited the changing environments around them to become the most widely distributed large land animals on the planet. These protohuman precursors to our own species, Homo sapiens, included Homo erectus and Denisovans (primarily in Asia) and Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals, living in Europe). The first of many subsequent waves of early hominid dispersal out of Africa began as early 10  Losing “Eden”

as 1.8 million years ago; protohumans began migrating to western Europe about 1.2 million years ago, and Neanderthals emerged there approximately 400,000 years ago. Significantly, the Homo genus evolved during the long Pleistocene epoch, which began about 2.6 million years ago and finally gave way to the current epoch (the Holocene) approximately 12,000 years ago. As noted paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall writes, “Never had circumstances been more propitious for meaningful evolutionary change than among our highly mobile, adaptable, and resourceful Pleistocene ancestors.” Specifically, throughout the Pleistocene, cycles of expanding and contracting ice caps at both poles of the earth inspired hominids’ evolutionary adaptation to unsettled environmental conditions. These ice ages, or periods of glacial formation and retreat, correspond with the long-­term effects of Milankovitch cycles, the term used to describe the collective effects of earth’s tilt on climate as our planet orbits the sun. Modern humans (Homo sapiens), distinguished by their skeletal structure and larger brain size, emerged in Africa approximately three hundred thousand years ago. Competition, cooperation, and carnivory promoted mental growth that in turn expanded brain capacity, producing an increasingly evolved and canny predator. Small groups of Homo sapiens ventured first into western Asia and then other parts of Eurasia in a staggered and complex process, arriving in southeastern Asia approximately eighty thousand years ago, in Australia by about sixty-­five thousand years ago, and in Europe by about fifty-­four thousand years ago. Their big brains enabled them to cope with colder Pleistocene climates, use fire to shape their environment, and hunt larger game animals. Larger brain capacity also facilitated what some scholars have called the Great Leap Forward, although it was actually more of a long, slow burn of evolutionary language development that led to greater social organization. By about thirty thousand to forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were capable of storing vast amounts of information, crafting more sophisticated hunting tools (e.g., javelins, flaking flint points), and transmitting this knowledge from generation to generation via elaborate oral history and story and ultimately (much later) written language. In effect, language compressed the entirety Losing “Eden”  11

of human experience and wisdom accumulated over thousands of years and deposited it in the brains of the most current generation. All of this enhanced human adaptability. While paleoanthropologists hotly contest the nature of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, wherever Homo sapiens went, other hominids yielded until H. sapiens eventually became the sole surviving species from this once-­diverse family tree. There is still significant scientific debate surrounding the details of human migration into the Americas, but new dna research and genomic sequencing combined with paleoarcheology and anthropology now suggest that early Siberians began migrating eastward approximately twenty-­five thousand years ago. During this period, the earth’s climate was characterized by an advancing ice age, with much of the surface water locked up in glaciers. As a result, sea levels dropped significantly and many previously flooded or submerged areas became dry. One of these places was the Bering Strait, which lies between present-­day Alaska and Siberia. While the Bering Strait normally cradles the Bering Sea, during the Ice Age, this relatively narrow waterway became a land bridge called Beringia. Extending at times perhaps six hundred to a thousand miles from north to south, Beringia was a landscape of shrubby tundra and scattered stands of trees across which large game animals (megafauna) slowly migrated and human hunter-­gatherers followed in pursuit. Blocked by glaciation from penetrating into the American interior, these seasonal human migrants lived in and around Beringia—­modern-­day Alaska and western parts of the Yukon—­for about ten thousand years, fishing for salmon and hunting hares. Paleoanthropologists refer to this migratory pause as the Beringian Standstill, and during this period three distinct genetic lineages developed in situ: Ancient Beringians, whose genetic signal disappeared, perhaps replaced or absorbed by more recent arrivals, and two basal branches of ancestral Indigenous Americans that geneticists call Northern Native American (nna)/Ancestral-­B and Southern Native American (sna)/ Ancestral-­A . Remarkably, as one recent human genomic study noted, “all contemporary and ancient [Native Americans] for whom genome-­wide data have been generated before this study derive from either the nna or sna branch.” The Beringian Standstill came to an end about fifteen thousand years ago, when the last of the Pleistocene ice ages began to wane, creating ice-­free 12  Losing “Eden”

2. Migration routes used by First Americans. New dna research and genomic sequencing

combined with paleoarcheology and anthropology now indicate that Indigenous Americans began occupying the continent at least fifteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago. Map by Amber Bell.

corridors and emerging ecological zones teeming with plants and animals that drew these first Americans into the continent’s interior. Evidence for this diaspora endures. One day, for example, approximately thirteen thousand years ago, three individuals, perhaps a family group that included a child, strolled along a protected beach on today’s Calvert Island in British Columbia. As they walked, their feet pressed into the soft, brown clay of the shoreline, leaving twenty-­nine footprints that archeologists discovered in 2014. On nearby Quadra Island, about one hundred miles northwest of Vancouver, Losing “Eden”  13

scientists and a delegate from the local Wei Wai Kum First Nation have conducted excavations yielding more than a thousand prehistoric artifacts, described as “rock scrapers, spear points, simple flake knives, gravers and goose egg-­size stones used as hammers.” The significance of these discoveries cannot be overstated. As Nick Ashton, curator of Paleolithic and Mesolithic collections at the British Museum, has argued, such finds support “the idea that the first peopling of the Americas was from eastern Asia at a time of lower sea levels, when the landmasses were larger, but probably with the assistance of sea-­faring vessels. The footprints provide a very tangible link to the first Americans.” Then, in 2021 scientists concluded that numerous human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico dated from at least twenty-­one thousand to twenty-­three thousand years ago and thus were more than five thousand years older than previous evidence had suggested. Likely made by children and teenagers, these tracks suggest a division of labor such that these younger, less skilled individuals were consigned to “fetching and carrying.” The authors of the 2021 study argue that “the overlap of humans and megafauna for at least two millennia during this time suggests that if people were hunting megafauna[,] the practices were sustainable, at least initially. This also raises the possibility of a human role in poorly understood megafauna extinctions previously thought to predate their arrival.” A subsequent 2022 discovery of eighty-­eight fossilized human footprints in northwestern Utah, likely dating back twelve thousand years, is further facilitating our understanding of human dispersal across the Americas as well as scientific-­Indigenous research cooperation. Indigenous expansion was rapid, if uneven, and extensive, indicating that these early migrants essentially found no barriers to their progress. Motivated by changing climate and food availability, these first Americans spread human influence to the far corners of the Western Hemisphere in just a few centuries. In addition to expanding their presence over land, other, even earlier arrivals likely followed the so-­called Kelp Highway, using small boats to propel themselves to new destinations all along the Pacific coastline. Some scientists have also documented a genetic signal—­dubbed Population Y—­in two Amazonian groups (i.e., not in North America) that shows a possible connection to Australasians. To explain such a phenomenon, one scientist said 14  Losing “Eden”

simply, “We have no idea.” Wherever these first Americans settled, though, they adapted to the diverse environments of the continents and developed hundreds of distinct cultures and languages long before Columbus and the Europeans eventually arrived, thousands of years later. It is important to understand, however, that Indigenous peoples have long rejected assertions that their ancestors came from “somewhere else,” and the reconciliation of Native ancestral knowledge and scientific discovery remains a work in progress. But as Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist, affirms, “Native Americans truly did originate in the Americas, as a genetically and culturally distinctive group. They are absolutely indigenous to this continent.” This integration of insights gleaned from science and origin stories is vital. Like many Indigenous groups, Hopi-­Pueblo peoples, for example, believe they emerged from the earth. Maasaw, Caretaker of the Earth, gave his people a sacred quest to find their home, the Center Place. Much as scientists describe a swift human pioneering process across the Americas (rather than a gradual diffusion), Hopi-­Puebloans tell of the covenant made with Maasaw to walk in an ever-­widening spiral to the farthest corners in order to know the gift of the earth and ultimately to find their Center Place in today’s American Southwest. Moreover, much of the recent genomic advancement discussed above has been a direct consequence of improving collaboration and cooperation between scientists and Indigenous peoples, such as the Quadra Island excavation and Utah footprints research mentioned previously. Unfortunately, that has not always been the case. In 1940, for example, archeologists excavated the remains of a male, approximately forty years old, shrouded in a rabbit-­ skin blanket and reed mats, from a place called Spirit Cave, near present-­day Fallon, Nevada. For nearly half a century, the Nevada State Museum’s storage facility housed the remains without the knowledge of the local Fallon Paiute-­ Shoshones. In 1996, when a journal article alerted them to the museum’s collection, the tribe began a long campaign for repatriation. Finally, in 2015 geneticist Eske Willerslev met directly with the Fallon Paiute-­Shoshones and received permission to retrieve dna from a tooth and earbone of the Spirit Cave remains. With the involvement and consent of the tribe, his analysis not only dated the remains at 10,600 years old but also established Losing “Eden”  15

the Ancestral-­A dna connection between the ancient Spirit Cave man and modern Paiute-­Shoshones. As the tribe said of the study, “[It] confirms what we have always known from our oral tradition and other evidence—­that the man taken from his final resting place in Spirit Cave is our Native American ancestor.” To further this syncretism, Willerslev subsequently attended the tribal reburial of the Spirit Cave man in the summer of 2018. “What was most amazing is that it was similar to if you and I were burying a very close relative,” he said. “It’s that emotional even though we are burying a mummy that was living 10,000 years ago.” Anthropologists and historians have identified and classified three basic phases of human history in the Americas prior to European contact. The term “Paleoindian” refers to the earliest inhabitants and their culture, which dominated from at least 15,000 years ago until approximately 9,000 years ago. As these highly nomadic first Americans diffused rapidly across the continents, they engaged in intensive hunting and gathering, utilized stone tools, and lived in bands of between twenty and sixty individuals. By about 13,000 years ago, this Paleoamerican presence included the Clovis culture, characterized by fluted stone spear points and named after the site in present-­ day New Mexico where archeologists first discovered their artifacts. Clovis (and later Folsom) peoples ranged across much of the West and incorporated a rich variety of plants and big game animals into their diet. Approximately twelve thousand years ago, global environmental changes that featured a gradual warming trend and the end of the Ice Age also brought to a close the long Pleistocene epoch. This profound ecological transformation ushered in the Archaic period. During this phase, which predominated until about four thousand to five thousand years ago, Indigenous peoples augmented big game hunting with smaller game, seasonal fruit and vegetable gathering, and fishing. Many Native groups continued to employ this subsistence strategy even after European contact, but others embraced agriculture and animal domestication beginning approximately five thousand years ago. This last phase of precontact history is known as the Neolithic Revolution. As Indigenous peoples dispersed across the Americas, they encountered a floral and faunal cornucopia. As recently as fifteen thousand years ago, the primeval American West rivaled Africa’s Serengeti Plain. A safari across 16  Losing “Eden”

that western landscape would have encountered camels, sloths, and saber-­ toothed cats, herds of elephant-­like mammoths and mastodons, and giant early bison and horses, as well as lions, dire wolves, and short-­faced bears. However, the environmental consequences of this swift human expansion, in combination with changing climatic conditions, were especially deadly for the continent’s animals, unaccustomed and unprepared as they were to confront this new and lethal predator. The result was a stunning bestiary collapse, known as the Pleistocene extinction. According to many paleoanthropologists, once the Clovis hunters arrived they quickly helped drive the vast majority of these easy-­target giants to extinction. This theory, called the “Pleistocene overkill” hypothesis, was first popularized in the 1960s by geoscientist Paul Martin, who argued that early humans had unleashed a “blitzkrieg” on North America’s megafauna. Martin argued that people proved such efficient hunters that most of the continent’s large mammals went extinct before they could develop appropriate predator responses. Some Native scholars, like Vine Deloria Jr., however, quickly dismissed Martin’s “mythical Pleistocene hit men” idea as “simply preposterous.” Other scientists have also disagreed with Martin’s theory, arguing that since some of these animals were not prime human prey, these massive extinctions likely resulted from climate change in the wake of the last Ice Age. Whatever the cause—­and it is most likely a conflation of influences—­the massive Pleistocene die-­off permanently wiped out more than 70 percent of North America’s megafauna, including dire wolves, mammoths and mastodons, gigantic beavers and condors, and even a six-­and-­a-­half-­foot saber-­toothed Pacific Northwest salmon, in addition to the other animals listed above. Indeed, with the exception of native pronghorn antelope, only those species that had migrated across Beringia, coexisted with humans, and evolved earlier survival strategies, such as elk, deer, and bighorn sheep, avoided this grim extinction fate. This great ecological simplification meant that the West lost much of the wildlife diversity that Africa still retains. To be sure, scientists have not been able to link the Pleistocene disappearance of all large animals to human predation. Among the most perplexing extinctions of the great die-­off is that of the North American horse (Equus). Historians and anthropologists have offered numerous explanations for Losing “Eden”  17

its disappearance, but none seems quite adequate. Archeological evidence supports the combination of overhunting and climate change as the major culprits for the extinction of mammoths and saber-­toothed cats, whose small numbers and long gestational periods limited their populations, yet little evidence exists regarding the disappearance of horses. Scientists believe that until about ten thousand years ago, ancestors of the modern horse dominated the natural environment of North America, constituting as much as one-­ third of the continent’s faunal population. From their American base, these wildly successful inhabitants spread around the world (a reverse Beringia migration) and became, over time, the zebras and wild Asian steppe ponies of the modern era. So, what happened here? How did this obviously successful, stable, significant population crash? Completely? Especially when their habitat, the vast grasslands of the western plains, remained intact? The usual suspects provide no answers. Paleontologists have found no evidence of, for example, horse jumps, the mass-­death kill sites used by early human inhabitants to harvest bison, nor have they found arrow points or hunting implements preserved with fossilized horse remains to indicate hunting as they have with, say, mastodons. Furthermore, if, as some have posited, horses were so susceptible to human predation, why did they live on in other parts of the world? At this point, there seems to be no definitive answer to these vexing questions, although data suggest that horse extinction is most consistent with the activities of Clovis hunters. Regardless of the cause, the consequences of the Pleistocene die-­off were definitive. In combination with the slow development of agriculture in the Americas, the absence of big game animals with domestication potential further disadvantaged Archaic Indians in the coming Neolithic/Agricultural Revolution. When pastoral Europeans finally did arrive, they encountered Native peoples who had domesticated only one large mammal (the South American llama, along with the closely related alpaca), a few fowl, and dogs. American Indians utilized no other beasts of burden and as a consequence harbored no real animus against predators like wolves and cougars, but their agricultural development lagged behind that of Europe as a result. Interestingly, of all the habitable continents colonized by migrant human populations, the Americas were the last to experience the Neolithic Revolu18  Losing “Eden”

tion (Australia never experienced it). The Neolithic Revolution (literally, the new stone age) was the grand human experiment in living with domesticated plants and animals, as well as smelting metallic ores and using stone tools for grinding. So why were the Americas late to the revolution and with what consequences? The Fertile Crescent (comprising present-­day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt) represented the vanguard of the Neolithic Revolution, the most critical period of human development. Historians argue that this sweeping geographic arc encompassing the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys of ancient Mesopotamia and the Nile River delta of ancient Egypt formed the cradle of human civilization. It was here, at least eight thousand to twelve thousand years ago, that humans first learned to farm and raise livestock and later to irrigate agricultural fields. Archeological evidence indicates that this agricultural revolution would evolve independently at later dates in several other locations around the world. Everywhere the Neolithic Revolution occurred, it profoundly transformed the relationship between people and the natural world: human populations became less nomadic and more sedentary, produced food more efficiently and in greater quantities, and used the escape from daily hunting and gathering responsibilities to further develop art, culture, math, science, religion, and government. In essence, agriculture allowed humans to appropriate the energy of the sun for their own gain, which spurred cultural advancement. In the Americas, however, the Neolithic Revolution began slowly and “accelerated tardily,” according to environmental historian Alfred Crosby, leaving Native Americans at a distinct disadvantage when iron-­and steel-­ wielding Europeans finally did arrive. In other words, while Indigenous adaptation and innovation had ensured not only survival but also success and sophistication, European technology would prove ascendant and irresistible in the coming invasion and conquest. Corn offers one explanation, Crosby believes. Because this eventual staple evolved from a grass to a food source so slowly, the populations of the Americas, as well as their innovations, were vulnerable when confronted by wheat-­growing Europeans. Europeans aggressively embraced sedentary agriculture, domesticated animals, and cultivated their farmlands far more rapidly than their Native American counterparts. Why? Population pressure. As human numbers Losing “Eden”  19

increase and their demand for food rises correspondingly, people face a choice: control population or produce more food. They must “become either celibate or clever,” Crosby humorously concludes. Celibacy has never been popular and population control was usually brutal, including instances in prehistory where Native peoples killed up to 40 percent of their female infants. Faced with such horrible prospects, humans usually chose Plan B, a more reliable food supply, which farming readily addressed. But the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, which fundamentally altered people’s relationship with the natural world, usually did not occur until population densities outstripped the carrying capacity of the surrounding environment. In other words, only when people could no longer sustain their communities through subsistence hunting and gathering did they turn to the innovation of domestication. The limits of nature, in essence, forced steadily expanding human societies to make the leap. And because people settled in Europe far earlier than they did in the Americas, the population densities there reached critical mass earlier. The interconnectedness of the so-­called Old World—­Eurasia and Africa—­further facilitated the transmission of innovation through migration and trade, thereby giving Europeans a head start in the Neolithic race. The Americas, by contrast, were disconnected from the rest of the world. As global temperatures gradually began warming approximately fifteen thousand years ago, signaling the end of the Ice Age, glaciers retreated and Beringia flooded again. Paleoindians and later Archaic peoples, geographically isolated in the so-­called New World, would pay a heavy price in the long run for their Neolithic naïveté. In the Americas, the shift from Archaic hunting and gathering to Neolithic agriculture occurred relatively recently, just five thousand to seven thousand years ago in present-­day Mexico and about forty-­five hundred years ago in what is now the United States. Despite its relatively recent appearance, agriculture was nevertheless transformative, and while the earliest domesticated plant in the Americas was squash, corn became the staple that allowed some New World Indians to flourish and expand geographically. Humans and corn formed a powerful symbiotic relationship, and the plant’s evolution profoundly shaped the lives of Indians. Indeed, some Mexico Natives still refer to themselves as the “corn people” and many western Indian creation stories 20  Losing “Eden”

revere the Corn Mother as the genesis of the people—­such as the Mandans and Hidatsas—­in homage to the grain that sustained and sustains them. Corn’s caloric value derives from its ability to efficiently capture and store energy, but its modern cob-­and-­husk design renders it utterly dependent upon human beings for seed dispersal and reproduction. Simply put: without people to remove the husk and plant the kernels, corn would become extinct; husked cobs can’t grow. Historically, there were no wild maize plants, no corn forebears so to speak, but Neolithic Indians quickly embraced hybridization to improve both the size and quantity of weedy grasses (known as teosintes) that eventually became corn. Corn, however, is terribly inefficient compared to wheat and other grains (grown by Europeans). It not only requires intensive human attention during all parts of its life cycle—­manual planting rather than simple scattering, individual hand-­harvesting rather than sickle-­swath mowing, and physical seed removal—­but it is also lower in vitamin and protein content than wheat and more rapidly depletes the soil. Thus, corn farmers in the Americas had to expend far more energy to produce their staple than did their European wheat-­growing counterparts. Furthermore, while this “new” food sustained larger and larger populations, particularly in the arid American Southwest, where it flourished, it also rendered Indians fundamentally less healthy. Paleopathologists, who study disease in early human populations, have discovered that corn consumption caused a dramatic increase in cavities and tooth decay, osteoporosis, increased the frequency of disease, and led to a rise in mortality at every age. The reasons are fairly simple: hunters and gatherers enjoyed a much more varied and rich diet of proteins, vegetation, and vitamins and minerals, while malnourished (especially in protein, iron, and calcium) agriculturalists relied heavily on their starchy corn crop. Such a single or “monocrop” reliance also increased the potential for starvation among agriculturalists. If the one crop failed, so too did the Indians who cultivated it. Hunters and gatherers’ dietary variety at least ensured the availability of something to eat. Finally, the sedentary life of agriculturalists proved a fertile breeding ground for diseases and parasites, a fate nomadic hunters and gatherers nimbly avoided. Corn, along with squash and beans, formed the “three sisters” trinity of Neolithic Indigenous domesticated agriculture. Cultivation of squash, in Losing “Eden”  21

3. The Three Sisters. Corn, beans, and squash constituted the primary agricultural crops of

various Indian groups and were grown as a sustainable trio: beans vined up sturdy corn stalks and restored nitrogen (depleted by corn) to the soil, while ground-­trailing squash acted as a weed barrier and conserved soil moisture. Illustration by Joyce Dant. Used with permission of the artist.

the form of pumpkins and various gourds, predated that of maize, while the origins of bean cultivation are less clear. The combination of the three, however, creates a sustainable planting symmetry: cornstalks support vining bean plants; beans restore vital soil nitrogen depleted by corn; and squash plants provide a water-­saving ground cover that shades the roots of all three. And compared to corn alone, the three sisters provided a more balanced suite of essential vitamins and complete proteins to Neolithic farmers as far north as the Dakotas. The environmental shift to domesticated farming not only altered the diets and settlement patterns of Native communities that adopted it but also led to profound social changes. As Indians embraced agriculture, they also introduced class divisions into their societies. Unlike relatively egalitarian hunters and gatherers, agriculturalists developed social hierarchies to distribute food surpluses and manage lands. Not surprisingly, the elites thrived. Their control over and ability to afford to store food enabled them to survive during lean times while the working masses paid the ultimate price. Women’s work also expanded as they added corn planting, weeding, harvesting, and grinding to their continuing roles of gathering, cooking, hide work, fuel collection, and child care. These responsibilities could convey influence, too; control over food carried power. The myriad challenges of corn evolution and cultivation have led many historians, like Crosby, and anthropologists to conclude that corn lies at the heart of the dramatic disparity between Old World and New World development and achievement. It certainly destroys the “pristine” myth. As the evidence above demonstrates, the West was no Eden. Indigenous peoples brought about their own substantial and significant environmental changes. In combination with their origin stories, environmental relationships reinforced the first Americans’ connection to the land. These diversified cultures across the American West employed technologies and lifestyles ranging from Archaic hunting and gathering to Neolithic agriculture specifically adapted to their particular location. Native peoples in this area occupied four geographic/topographic regions: the Pacific Coast, the Great Basin, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains. And they did so in surprising numbers. Although a precise census count is impossible to achieve, as mentioned earlier, historians and anthropologists estimate Losing “Eden”  23

4. Indigenous nations in the West. Map by Amber Bell. For further details on territories,

languages, and treaties, consult Native Land Digital at https://​native​-land​.ca/.

that prior to the arrival of Europeans, Native populations north of Mexico probably numbered around 3.8 million. Of these, approximately 800,000 lived along the coast, 231,000 lived in the arid intermountain West, 908,000 lived in the southwestern farming regions, and another 378,000 lived on the Great Plains into the northern Rockies. Again, these numbers hardly constitute a pristine, virgin wilderness or an uninhabited Eden like later European arrivals would mythologize. The Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges form the eastern boundary of the Pacific Coast region and enclose a diversified set of ecosystems ranging from the golden Mediterranean grass and scrublands of western California 24  Losing “Eden”

to the lush and bountiful seashores that stretch from Baja to the Gulf of Alaska. In the Pacific Northwest and Columbia Plateau, Archaic Indians diverged from their southwestern corn-­growing cousins and derived both their culture and their calories from salmon. Plateau peoples adhered to a more traditional hunting and gathering strategy that also utilized fire to manage their local environment, all of which centered on the great salmon runs. Salmon are anadromous fish, which means that they hatch in freshwater rivers and streams and then make their way to the ocean, where they live in open waters before returning to the exact beds of their origin to spawn and die. Estimates of these annual prehistoric runs vary between eight million and twenty-­five million fish. Native peoples gathered at sites along rivers such as the Columbia in places like The Dalles (about sixty-­five miles east of present-­day Portland) and harvested this rich bounty in staggering numbers. As a result, The Dalles became a major trading center, with links extending south to California and ultimately across the continent. Not surprisingly, for people so dependent upon a fish, salmon became not only a source of calories but also of cosmology. The Chinookan-­speaking people of the Pacific Northwest viewed their lives and fate as intimately intertwined with their primary food source. In addition to salmon, Pacific Coast Indians also fished for cod and halibut, harpooned whales, collected shellfish, hunted deer and elk, and gathered huckleberries, wild strawberries, and roots. Some groups built elaborate cedar plank longhouses and organized their social hierarchy matrilineally. Culturally, the Indigenous peoples of what is today coastal Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia included Siuslaws, Quinaults, Tlingits, and numerous Coast Salish groups. They spoke dozens of different languages. According to Squamish oral history, the world began with water everywhere. Gradually, the mountains lifted out of the sea to create land for the first man, named X i7lánexw (the numeral 7 denotes a glottal stop in pronunciation), which means “The First One.” Three “Transformers” sent by the Creator gave The First One a wife, an adze (a tool similar to an ax), and a salmon trap, and all Squamish people descend from these ancestors. For the Salish, the Creator sent Coyote and his brother Fox to shape the geography of the world and establish the skills people would need to survive and thrive. Losing “Eden”  25

Farther south, along the present-­day California coastline, cultural sophistication proliferated in the absence of corn-­based agriculture but in proximity to the sea. Shellfish, sea mammals, and a now-­extinct flightless duck helped sustain nearly 10 percent of the total pre-­Columbian population north of Mexico. Climate and soils supported blue and live oaks as well as manzanita, and competition for access to and control over valuable resources such as acorn-­rich oak groves delineated clear political divisions and created power structures to manage distribution, trade, diplomacy, and warfare. These skilled, trade-­based, class-­organized settlements defy the traditional logic that only agricultural communities possessed social sophistication and sedentary villages. As historian Colin Calloway has shown, “coastal peoples were hunters and gatherers, fishers and foragers, not farmers, yet they lived in sedentary villages, owned property, practiced economic and craft specialization, developed an elaborate material culture, built monumental architecture, held slaves, and measured rank by wealth and heredity.” Archeologists estimate that the mild climate and rich resource base in California likely made it the most densely settled area north of Mexico in pre-­Columbian America. Culturally, Indigenous coastal Californians included the Diegueños, Chumash, Salinans, Muwekma, and Costanoans and, farther north, the Pomos, Wiyats, and Karuks. Their languages included more than a hundred distinctive dialects. Much like the Squamish and Salish in the Pacific Northwest, Costanoan tradition describes a watery world out of which the mountains and land arose. Coyote and Eagle helped bring people into the world, and Coyote gave the Ohlones bows and arrows to kill rabbits, plus nets for fishing, and told them to gather seaweed to eat with acorns so that they would never die of hunger. Eastward from the Pacific Coast, the Great Basin region between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains—­so named by explorer John C. Frémont in recognition that the area drains internally and lacks any connection to the oceans—­displays a striking geographical diversity and demanded unique adaptations from its inhabitants. The glacial retreat that came about at the end of the Ice Age left some four hundred thousand square miles of the formerly lush basin arid and austere. Lying in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin region is bounded by the Wasatch Mountains to 26  Losing “Eden”

the east, the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range to the west, and the Snake River basin to the north, while its southern boundary is more ephemeral. Geographers further subdivide the area into a northern “cold winter desert” and a southern “hot summer desert,” which includes the Mojave and Colorado/Sonoran Deserts, with the Colorado Plateau canyonlands as a regional desert bridge. In this, the only cold desert in the country, most precipitation (the annual total is less than ten inches a year) falls in the form of snow, while summer temperatures in the hot southern deserts can top 120°F. Altitude and latitude strongly affect both flora and fauna: sagebrush-­speckled steppes in the north transition through broad piñon-­ juniper landscapes into cholla and saguaro cactus deserts in the south. These harsh, parched environs usually meant that population densities here were very low, following the ecological principle known as Liebig’s law, which argues that the minimum amount of food available during the scarcest period limits population. Species, including humans, that fail to keep their numbers in check find that nature will do the dirty deed for them. Without food, “surplus” populations—­of people or animals—­die off, reducing their numbers to more sustainable levels, which in turn contributes to the overall stability of the ecosystem. The archeological record of the Great Basin indicates that Indians have occupied the region for at least fourteen thousand years. Culturally, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin included northern (Numa) and southern (Nuwuvi) bands of Paiutes, a large and diverse Shoshone population (including Goshutes), and Northern and Southern Utes. The Ute origin story tells of the ancient time in which the Creator, Sinawav, and Coyote lived. Sinawav gave Coyote a bag of sticks, instructing him to take them “over the far hills to the valleys beyond.” Under no circumstances could Coyote open the bag until he had reached his destination. Naturally, Coyote’s curiosity got the better of him, and as soon as he was out of sight, he peeked into the bag. Out rushed people, yelling in strange languages, who quickly dispersed in all directions. Coyote took the few remaining sticks to the sacred valley and released the Ute people, but Sinawav knew that Coyote had failed in his task, dooming the Utes to war with these neighbors, so Sinawav sentenced Coyote to forever roam the earth on all fours. Losing “Eden”  27

The earliest Paleoindians of the Great Basin were highly mobile big game hunters who utilized Clovis-­and Folsom-­style projectile points to bring down mammoths, bison, ground sloths, camels, and perhaps horses. In the northern cold winter desert region, fall rabbit and pronghorn drives and seasonal root and tuber harvests, along with piñon nuts, provided valuable nutrition to Archaic hunting and gathering bands like the Shoshones. And everywhere, as Calloway notes, “Great Basin peoples pursued subsistence strategies that required intimate knowledge of the land and its animals, regular movement to take advantage of seasonal diversity and changing conditions, and careful exploitation of the environment.” As the climate continued to dry out and heat up, Indian peoples adapted by vigorously embracing agriculture, which allowed them to be more efficient consumers of calories by eating lower on the food chain. Successful Neolithic Indian populations switched from hunting big game to farming small plants. For Fremont culture groups living in Utah and parts of Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada, corn was critical. These part-­time farming cultures lived in smaller family groups and supplemented their diets by hunting and foraging. In the hot summer desert of the Southwest, knowledge of corn cultivation flowed north out of what is now Mexico and arrived in the Four Corners region of present-­day Utah/Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado approximately three thousand years ago. Across a relatively short span of time—­perhaps twenty-­five generations—­corn, along with beans and squash, fueled population growth by providing efficient and storable calories that could sustain growing numbers through the unpredictable weather and precipitation cycles that marked this period. It also led to the development of pottery and basketry for storage and more permanent villages in the form of multistory pueblos. Near present-­day Phoenix, Arizona, for example, the Hohokam people, forebears of modern Pimas, engineered their survival through the construction of the largest and most sophisticated irrigation network in the Americas, channeling scarce water from the Salt and Gila Rivers through more than a thousand miles of canals to support populations in excess of fifty thousand. This primary reliance upon agriculture, supplemented by more efficient foraging, proved remarkably successful and also led to the coalescence of large pueblo settlements like those of the Chaco Canyon Ancestral Puebloans 28  Losing “Eden”

5. Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Between 850 and 1150 ce, Ancestral Puebloan

peoples built Pueblo Bonito (meaning “beautiful town” in Spanish). This four-­story structure containing more than 350 rooms served as the center of the far-­flung southwestern Chacoan culture that flourished for more than three hundred years. Photo by author.

(a.k.a. the Anasazis) in modern-­day New Mexico. Characterized now by its spectacular ruins, Chaco served as the center of Ancestral Pueblo Indian culture. Massive, multistory ceremonial great houses utilized sophisticated architectural and construction techniques precisely aligned with solar, lunar, and cardinal directions. At its cultural peak in 1050 ce, Chaco’s large sphere of influence sustained perhaps as many as fifteen thousand people in this harsh and arid environment of short growing seasons and long winters. Like the Hohokams, Chacoans built irrigation works to make their agricultural fields bloom. Life here was not easy, however. Historian David Stuart’s analysis of human remains at Chaco reveals that “broken bones, overwork, bad teeth, and seasonal hunger were common.” Like so many successful cultures, the Ancestral Puebloans eventually overreached the carrying capacity of their lands. By 1000 ce, foraging resources, especially meat, had already begun to disappear, thus intensifying reliance on agricultural production, which Losing “Eden”  29

itself relied on relatively predictable rainfall patterns. Despite the claims and promises of Ancestral Puebloan elites, however, the weather did not fall under their purview. They could not make the sky rain. In the 1090s, severe drought devastated Chacoan corn and food reserves, and before long the greatest society in ancient North America unraveled, much as Liebig’s law predicts. Ancestral Puebloan farmers buried their dead, abandoned their homes, and dispersed to wetter climates, such as Mesa Verde in Colorado and the pueblos along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The vast regional trade networks this ambitious society had established, which included Pacific Coast seashells, Plains bison hides, Idaho obsidian, Mexican macaws, and local turquoise, also disintegrated. Nature had taught a powerful lesson about the costs of environmental overreach—­that human populations ignore natural parameters at their own peril. As Stuart writes, “The larger and more complex a society, the less capable it is of carrying on after losing even a moderate percentage of its critical resources.” Native descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans would not make the same mistakes again. Later European immigrants would. To the east of the extensive Great Basin region lies the Rocky Mountain range, which bisects the North American continent and, at two thousand miles in length, extending from present-­day New Mexico through Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana into Canada, is one of the world’s longest. Sculpted by water in its many forms, this craggy, undulating spine claims more than fifty peaks above fourteen thousand feet and supports a mosaic of vegetative zones ranging from mixed and short-­grass prairie through broad-­leaved deciduous forests; piñon, juniper, and ponderosa woodlands; fir, spruce, and lodgepole pines; to alpine tundra. As a continental divide, this iconic range dictates where precipitation runoff will flow—­either westward to the Pacific or eastward to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean—­and provides the headwaters for many of the West’s mighty rivers: the Rio Grande, Platte, Arkansas, Colorado, Green, Columbia, Salmon, Snake, and Missouri. The Rockies’ towering heights also act as the last major continental cloud obstacle for eastbound storms, scraping moisture from the sky and leaving a thirsty Great Plains grassland in their wake. The difficulties of life in these steep terrains dissuaded Paleo-­and Archaic Indians from establishing large-­scale settlements here. Yet, prior to European 30  Losing “Eden”

arrival, various groups did find ways to live on these slopes. Ancestors of modern Arapahos, Apaches, and Blackfoot peoples combined nomadic foothill hunting of mountain sheep, deer, and elk with seasonal plains forays for mammoths and ancient bison, together with the gathering of roots and berries, to forge long-­term survival strategies. The Tukudikas, for example, also known as Sheep Eater Indians and the Mountain People, were a band of Shoshones who lived on the Yellowstone Plateau and extracted their subsistence from the land by combining berry, plant, and root gathering with bighorn sheep and other game hunting. They fashioned bows from sheep horns, arrowheads and tools from quarried obsidian, clothing from sheepskin, and containers from soapstone, all of which were valuable trade commodities. Seasonal burning sustained grasslands that attracted game animals, and the Tukudikas also kept domesticated dogs, which they used in hunting, to haul two-­pole sleds (travois), and for companionship. Archeological evidence indicates that these early inhabitants made rock walls to herd and drive game animals and used fire deliberately to alter floral and faunal conditions to their advantage. Blackfoot origin stories describe how Naapi/Napioa, also known as Old Man, created land on the flooded earth using mud from a turtle’s mouth. He also made the people and tamed bison for them to hunt. Sprawling eastward from the Rockies lie the Great Plains, a seemingly endless expanse of grass lapping against the ephemeral line of aridity along the hundredth meridian, where less than twenty inches of rain falls annually (the magic number needed to sustain nonirrigated agriculture). This vast savanna experiences periodic droughts as the aridity line fluctuates, which in turn has dramatic impacts on the flora and fauna. In this environment, agriculture and buffalo hunting formed the foundation of early Plains Indian subsistence. According to the Kiowas, as the waters of the flooded earth receded and were replaced first by lands and then forests, the hero Saynday brought the people into the world by striking a hollow log until a pregnant woman got stuck, blocking all others. As the climate warmed and the forests receded, Saynday taught the forest people to hunt bison on the plains, which complements the geological records of glacial retreat. By 1000 ce, groups such as the Mandans, Pawnees, Wichitas, and Osages were cultivating the three sisters crops in farming villages established along river corridors. Losing “Eden”  31

Postglacial climate conditions also favored the smaller modern American bison (Bison bison)—­a dwarfed evolutionary survivor that emerged approximately five thousand to ten thousand years ago, and early Blackfeet and prehorse Apache hunters effectively adapted their technology to hunt this thick-­hided animal. Plano-­pointed weapons lacked the fluting found in Clovis and Folsom projectiles, but Plains hunters utilized the atlatl, a wickedly effective spear-­or dart-­throwing device that used lever action to increase the velocity of the projectile at a range of more than one hundred yards. By about 100 ce, these hunters had augmented their weaponry with even more efficient bows and arrows. Despite this hunting pressure, the great shaggy bison herds quickly multiplied in the vast expanses of the Great Plains, especially in the absence of horses, thus sustaining larger human populations and becoming central to the grasslands ecosystem that lured Native hunters and gathers for centuries. Historians have argued that the expansiveness of the plains encouraged herd evolution among the bison and that the Pleistocene disappearance of predators allowed their numbers to multiply. But the presence of proficient human hunters also contributed to the efflorescence of this plains icon. As Archaic Indians shaped both the animal’s population size and distribution, the plains became a vast bison belt. Hunters who understood the seasonal patterns and habits of bison found an almost limitless bounty and thus a predictable and reliable food source that supported population expansion. These highly mobile Plains Indians lived in tipis made of bison hides stretched across wooden poles that could be set up and taken down with relative ease. Tipi poles served a dual purpose as the framework for lodging and, when collapsed, could be reconfigured to form the triangular frame called a travois, pulled by dogs (prior to horse reintroduction) to haul possessions. Archaic Indians used fire to improve and expand bison-­favored grasslands, direct herd movement, and drive the animals toward selected kill sites. Communal hunters also utilized dead-­end canyons and corrals to herd large groups of bison into a mass slaughter. But the most sensational form of buffalo hunting was surely the buffalo jump, where well-­coordinated and timed maneuvers drove entire herds off a cliff to plummet to their death. Folsom-­era jumps in Alberta and Texas date this practice as far back as ten 32  Losing “Eden”

thousand years. Carnage at this scale led to huge food surpluses, such that food drying and preservation became essential, and also to some waste. Not surprisingly, bison were central to the religious lives of Plains Indians. Strict spiritual guidelines and rituals governed all aspects of the hunting, preparation, and consumption of bison, sometimes blurring the distinctions between humans and animals. On the northern plains, for example, the buffalo-­calling ceremony transmitted the animal’s power and maintained the close bond between the species through highly ritualized sexual intercourse between tribal women and men dressed as bison. Despite this extensive scientific record of human habitation and alteration of the West’s natural environments, the myth of a virginal American wilderness prior to the arrival of Europeans persists. Historians have challenged this Edenic vision, arguing that nineteenth-­century writers and painters such as Henry David Thoreau and George Catlin created the “pristine” myth by overlooking the extensive habitat modification that Indians had undertaken and depicting them instead as rare and benign occupants simply waiting for “real” history (i.e., European history) to begin. Nothing could be further from the truth. This mythology of a hemisphere “untrammeled by man” (to use the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964) is problematic for several reasons. First, it drastically underestimates the size and sophistication of Indigenous populations. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, New World Indians probably numbered between fifty-­five million and sixty million, with nearly four million living north of present-­day Mexico. Thus the Americas were far from empty and had not been for more than fifteen thousand years. Second, the myth of the Americas as a “pristine” Eden ignores the influence these millions of people exerted over the lands on which they lived. Studies have shown that Indigenous per capita land use in the Americas was comparable to other regions of the world at that time. Environmental historians and anthropologists also know that Indians’ use of fire throughout the West dramatically altered forest composition, expanded grasslands essential for game animal grazing, and dispatched pesky parasites such as lice. Burning favored fire-­tolerant tree, shrub, and grass species and created more open, park-­like forest patterns in places like present-­day California. Regular seasonal burning also preserved open grasslands by halting tree and shrub growth Losing “Eden”  33

and expansion. Ecologists believe, for example, that the modern sagebrush landscape of the interior West did not assume that aspect until the 1800s, when non-­Indian fire suppression replaced historic burning regimens. These ecological changes, in turn, created ideal habitats for large game animals, which limited Native need for domesticated livestock, and opened up suitable swaths for agricultural cultivation. In the Southwest, extensive canal systems irrigated fire-­cleared gardens and fields and enabled sizable populations to live in otherwise arid environments. Deforestation, burning, and cultivation all also exposed soils to erosion. On the whole, scientists estimate that prior to European contact, people living north of modern Mexico utilized approximately 1.2 acres per capita—­the most efficient land use in all of the Americas. The final problem with the “pristine” myth is that it reduces all early Indigenous peoples to “primitive” terms and disregards their social and cultural sophistication, further obscuring the environmental impact of their urban settlements. Large populations took a heavy toll on local ecosystems, necessitating long-­range trade for goods and resources. These trade routes connected Native settlements throughout the continent and led to the establishment of extensive road systems, some of which remain in use to the present. A ball court at Wupatki National Monument, near present-­day Flagstaff, Arizona, for example, one of more than two hundred in the state, bears strong similarities to sites in Mexico noted by early Spanish explorers. In 1492, then, Columbus and arriving Europeans “discovered” not a “pristine” wilderness devoid of human influence but a thoroughly Indianized natural environment and populations that had significantly altered, transformed, and managed the American landscape for thousands of years. Far from being benign, Archaic and Neolithic Indians exerted a disproportionate influence over the natural world and its major components. As this deep history demonstrates, it is time to lose the myth of Eden. By the time Europeans finally set foot in the Americas, Native peoples had flourished in the so-­called New World for tens of thousands of years, evolving societies ranging from subsistence hunting and gathering bands to sophisticated, agricultural, urban metropolises. Through careful management of scarce natural resources, they had wrested a living from sometimes harsh and formidable environments in the American West that arriving Europeans 34  Losing “Eden”

shunned as inhospitable. Indigenous peoples also paid attention to changes in climate and rainfall and reacted accordingly. Approximately fifty-­five hundred years ago, following the relatively wet and abundant Pleistocene epoch, the West experienced a profoundly dry and hot interval geologists call the Altithermal. Native peoples responded by moving away from the areas that could no longer sustain them. As global warming transforms the American West of the twenty-­first century in much the same way, the adaptive patterns established by these first westerners offer a useful cautionary tale and provide important insights into the central role of the environment in human history. E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis reminds us that “we are literally kin to other organisms.” The real goal, then, must be sustainability and not some fantastical return to a mythic Eden utopia. Rachel Carson elegantly framed this endgame, writing that “the balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored.” In 1492, unfortunately, equilibrium remained elusive as newly arriving Old World Europeans were primarily interested in conquest and not cooperation. Suggested Reading

Matthew R. Bennett et al., “Evidence of Humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” Science 373, no. 6562 (September 24, 2021): 1528–­31. Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford, “The North Atlantic Ice-­Edge Corridor: A Possible Palaeolithic Route to the New World,” World Archaeology 36, no. 4 (2004): 459–­78, available at http://​planet​.uwc​.ac​.za​/nisl​/Conservation​%20biology​/Karen​%20pdf​ /Clovis/​ Bradley​%20​&% ​ 20stanford​%202004​.pdf. See also Jennifer Raff, “Rejecting the Solutrean Hypothesis: The First Peoples in the Americas Were Not from Europe,” The Guardian, February 21, 2018, available at https://​www​.theguardian​ .com​/science​/2018/​ feb/​ 21/​ rejecting-​ the-​ solutrean-​ hypothesis-​ the-​ first-​ peoples​ -in​-the​-americas​-were​-not​-from​-europe. Nicola Davis, “Prehistoric Human Footprints Unearthed on Canada Shoreline,” The Guardian, March 28, 2018, available at https://​www​.theguardian​.com​/science​ /2018​/mar​/28​/footprints​-sand​-scientists​-prehistoric​-canada​-british​-columbia. Vine Deloria Jr., “Mythical Pleistocene Hit Men,” in Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995), 93–­112. Losing “Eden”  35

William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (September 1992): 369–­ 85. Also “The ‘Pristine Myth’ Revisited,” Geographical Review 101, no. 4 (October 2011): 576–­91. Tim Flannery, “Visit to a New World,” in The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 155–­69. Dan Flores, “Introduction” and “Empires of the Sun: Big History and the Great Plains,” in American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 1–­28. Michael Greshko, “Ancient dna Reveals Complex Migrations of the First Americans,” National Geographic, November 18, 2018, available at https://​www​.national geographic.​ com/​ science/​ 2018/​ 11/​ ancient-​ dna-​ reveals-​ complex-​ migrations-​ first​ -americans​/​#close. Glenn Hodges, “First Americans,” National Geographic 227, no. 1 ( January 2015): 124–­37. “Hopi Origin Story,” from Native America, episode 1, “Sacred Stories,” aired August 15, 2018, on pbs, available at https://​www​.pbs​.org​/native​-america​/extras​/sacred​ -stories/. Native America is a four-­part series pbs series that is an unprecedented combination of cutting-­edge science and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Peter Iverson, “Taking Care of Earth and Sky,” in America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus, ed. Alvin M. Josephy Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1993), 85–­118. Shepard Krech III, “Paleoindians and the Great Pleistocene Die-­Off,” Nature Transformed, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center, June 2008, available at http://​ nationalhumanitiescenter​.org​/tserve​/nattrans​/ntecoindian​/essays​/pleistocene​ .htm. Charles C. Mann, “1491,” The Atlantic, March 1, 2002, 41–­53. Curtis W. Marean, “The Most Invasive Species of All,” Scientific American, August 2015, 32–­39. Paul Martin, “Overview of Overkill,” in Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 48–­57. Fen Montaigne, “The Fertile Shore,” Smithsonian Magazine, January–­February 2020, available at https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/science​-nature​/how​-humans​-came​ -to​-americas​-180973739/. Native Land Digital, available at https://​native​-land​.ca/. Michael Pollan, “The Plant: Corn’s Conquest,” in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 15–­31.

36  Losing “Eden”

Clive Ponting, “The Spread of European Settlement,” in A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2007), 117–­41. Ludovic Slimak et al., “Modern Human Incursion into Neanderthal Territories 54,000 Years Ago at Mandrin, France,” Science Advances 8, no. 6 (February 9, 2022), available at https://​www​.science​.org​/doi​/10​.1126​/sciadv​.abj9496​?adobe​ _mc​=​mcmid​%3d49599120527800776941408448764938984883​%7cmcorgid​ %3d242b6472541199f70a4c98a6​%2540adobeOrg​%7cts​%3d1644421877​&​_ga​ =​2​.232383519​.1687030882​.1644251297​-1546950294​.1623435729. H. H. St. Clair and R. H. Lowie, “Shoshone and Comanche Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 22, no. 5 ( July–­September 1909), available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​ /stable​/pdf​/534742​.pdf. David E. Stuart, “The Fall of Chacoan Society,” in Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 125–­53. Erika Tamm et al., “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders,” plos one 2, no. 9 (September 5, 2007), available at https://​journals​.plos​.org​/plosone​ /article​?id​=​10​.1371​/journal​.pone​.0000829. Ian Tattersall, “Ice Ages and Early Europeans,” in Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), 145–­58. Harlan Unrau, Basin and Range: A History of Great Basin National Park ([Denver co?]: U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1990), available at https://​ www​.nps​.gov​/parkhistory​/online​_books​/grba​/hrs​.pdf. Thomas R. Vale, “The Pre-­European Landscape of the United States: Pristine or Humanized,” in Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape, ed. Thomas R. Vale (Washington dc: Island Press, 2002), 1–­40. Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington dc: Island Press, 1993), 31–­41. Ryan M. Yonk, Jeffrey C. Mosley, and Peter O. Husby, “Human Influences on the Northern Yellowstone Range,” Rangelands 40, no. 6 (December 2018): 177–­88, available at https://w ​ ww.​ sciencedirect.​ com/​ science/​ article/​ pii/​ s0190052818300749. Carl Zimmer, “dna of 11,500-­Year-­Old Children in Alaska Yields Clues about the First Americans,” New York Times, October 27, 2015, available at https://​www​.nytimes​ .com​/2015​/10​/27​/science​/dna​-of​-ancient​-children-​ offers-​ clues-​ on-​ how-​ people​ -settled​-the​-americas​.html.

Losing “Eden”  37

The West Transformed

2

Saynday, the Kiowa trickster figure, was coming along, and before him stretched the wide plains. Off in the distant east, he saw a dark, mounted figure riding slowly and deliberately. As the stranger drew closer, Saynday observed that the mysterious rider was clad all in black and that his face, although obscured by shadow and dust, was deeply scarred. “Who are you?” asked the stranger. “I am Saynday,” he replied. “The Kiowas are my people. And who are you?” “I am Smallpox,” the man in black answered. “I am one with the white man—­they are my people as the Kiowas are yours. Sometimes I travel ahead of them, and sometimes I lurk behind. But I am always their companion, and you will find me in their camps and in their houses.” “What do you do?” Saynday inquired. “I bring death,” Smallpox replied. “My breath causes children to wither like young plants in spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful a woman is, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death. And to men I bring not death alone but the destruction of their children and the blighting of their wives. The strongest warriors go down before me. No people who have looked on me will ever be the same.” Saynday shuddered at the prophecy and the death stench that encircled Smallpox. Thinking quickly, Saynday told Smallpox, “My Kiowa people are few and poor already. We’re not like the Pawnees [bitter enemies of the Kiowas]. They have great houses, half underground, in big villages by the river, and every house is full of people.” Smallpox grew interested. “I like that,” he said. “I can do my best work when people are crowded together.” “Then you’ll like 39

the Pawnees,” Saynday promised. “I think I’ll go and visit the Pawnees first,” Smallpox decided. “Later on, perhaps, I can get back to the Kiowas.” As he reined his weary black death horse to the north, Smallpox warned Saynday, “Tell your people when I come to be ready for me. Tell them to put out all their fires. Fire is the only thing in the whole world that I’m afraid of.” But as Saynday watched Smallpox ride away from the Kiowas, he set fire to the prairie grasses at his feet. Carried by the winds, the flames soon encircled Kiowa camps and kept them safe from Smallpox. Saynday congratulated himself, and that’s the way it was. —­Adapted from Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin, American Indian Mythology

Unfortunately for the Kiowas and other Native peoples of the American West, no amount of trickster cleverness could save them from the impending disasters and transformation that exploring Europeans inadvertently unleashed. Disease may have been the most obvious and devastating consequence, even holocaust, of contact, but European introduction of exotic plants and animals, new social and cultural mores, and a global market economy irrevocably transformed the environment. That, in turn, altered human responses and meant that by the early 1800s Indigenous Americans could no longer live in the West as they had traditionally. European market-­based economies and Indian subsistence were simply incompatible, and the environmental changes wrought by the newcomers only reinforced their ultimate success. Almost every schoolchild learns the discovery ditty: “in fourteen hundred and ninety-­two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” The story usually continues that in this year Christopher Columbus and his crew “discovered” America, with the implication that this allowed “real” history to begin. But Columbus was almost assuredly not the first Old World explorer to visit the Americas. The so-­called New World was really only new to continental Europeans. Instead, perhaps as many as five hundred years earlier, Norse sailors had begun prowling the shores along Newfoundland and Labrador in search of bountiful fishing grounds. They almost certainly made landfall and had some contact with Indigenous peoples, but they neither arrived in significant numbers nor stayed for any duration, so their effect on the American environment 40  The West Transformed

was fleeting and ephemeral. Thus, Columbus’s voyage retains its significant place in American history not because he was the first European to arrive but because the Old World–­Americas connection he forged would last. Sizable European colonization efforts had emerged by the late fifteenth century for several key reasons. First, ambitious kings and queens consolidated their powers into nation-­states, and their desire for greater wealth and territory led them to support and promote exploration and colonization beyond Europe. Second, expanding domestic populations, which began to recover from earlier disease epidemics, fueled a demand for broader trade both by generating a larger labor force capable of producing more trade goods to sell abroad and by stimulating a growing demand for consumer items at home. Third, the Reformation movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inspired European Christians, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, to save “heathen” souls across the globe. Portuguese mariners first led the way out onto the Atlantic, also known as the “sea of darkness,” and by 1500 Portugal had captured control of the lucrative West African gold trade (which would later turn into an even more profitable slave trade) and translated this newfound wealth into real power. It was a seductive model. Spain entered the exploration game with the hope of tapping into the other major known source of wealth at the time, the “Indies” (as Europeans called China, Japan, and India), and their alluring and valuable spices, silks, drugs, and perfumes. These precious commodities fetched stunning prices in Europe because the primary routes for acquiring them—­by land through Constantinople and across bandit-­riddled overland trade routes or by sea via the pirate-­infested Indian Ocean—­made them rare in Europe. Therefore, an efficient trade route would bring untold riches and power to whichever country could get there first. This was Columbus’s basic proposal to Spain: utilize the roundness of the earth and sail westward to get to the East. His miscalculation regarding the size of the earth (he significantly underestimated it), however, left just enough room for the Americas. Columbus never acknowledged that he had discovered a new world (he maintained until his death that what he had encountered were the outer islands of the Indies). Nonetheless, his four voyages, which began in 1492, established Spanish precedence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The West Transformed  41

Historians label the period between Columbus’s 1492 voyage and approximately 1520 the Age of Exploration, and in these early years most of Spain’s efforts in the Americas focused on assembling reliable maps of new lands, sticking flags in beaches to proclaim Spanish sovereignty, and identifying resources for export and exploitation. By 1520, however, the Age of Exploration had given way to the Age of Conquest, as Spain sought to claim and tame its new possessions. The next three decades witnessed some of the bloodiest chapters in all of recorded human history, as the Spanish exerted their dominance over a vast region extending from present-­day California across the continent to Florida and south through the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America (with the exception of Brazil, which the Portuguese controlled). On that fateful October 12 day when Columbus and his men stepped ashore in the Bahamas, probably on present-­day San Salvador Island, they set this process in motion, transforming the Atlantic Ocean from an Old World–­Americas barrier into a two-­way sea bridge that would in time revolutionize the entire planet. Columbus’s voyages commenced a global redistribution of people, plants, animals, and diseases known as the Columbian Exchange. When Beringia disappeared under the sea approximately ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, the Americas became isolated from the rest of the world, resulting in the evolution of unique flora and fauna across the continent. Europeans had never seen fish with whiskers, snakes that rattled, or shaggy bison; they had never tasted blueberries or vanilla or tomatoes or chocolate. The three main staples that would soon form the foundation of the modern European diet—­beans, corn, and potatoes (both white and sweet)—­also came from the Americas via the Columbian Exchange. Manioc (an edible root that became an African staple) and peppers, peanuts, and pineapples all traveled eastward across the Atlantic and westward across the Pacific to feed growing European, Asian, and African populations. So, too, did tobacco, to which Europeans quickly became addicted, and cotton, which transformed European clothing. Indeed, Columbus’s journal entry on November 6, 1492, notes the explorer’s fascination with “the herbs [the Taíno Indians] are accustomed to smoke,” explaining that, “lighted at one end, the roll is chewed, and the smoke is inhaled at the other. It has the effect of making them sleepy and 42  The West Transformed

6. The Columbian Exchange. Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the Americas set in motion a

transformative global movement of peoples, plants, animals, and diseases that historians call the Columbian Exchange. Map by Amber Bell.

almost intoxicated, and in using it they do not feel tired. These rolls of dried leaves are called by them tabacos.” Europeans also provided their own unique contributions to this environmental revolution in the Americas. Prior to Columbus, Native peoples throughout the Americas had only limited experiences with domesticated animals—­llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs in South America and turkeys and some dogs in North America. But European immigrants brought their prolific livestock across the Atlantic with them: cows, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, and horses, which would transform the lives of Native peoples in the coming century. By 1650, for example, Navajos were actively shepherding growing flocks of sheep and goats, and they had incorporated these animals into their The West Transformed  43

diet and their material culture through trade goods such as rugs and clothing. Honeybees crossed the Atlantic, too, and were so profuse that Indians referred to them as “English flies.” Over time, the introduction of these domesticated animals caused cascading changes to the land, such as introduced exotic feed crops, fenced-­in ranges, and extermination campaigns against predators like mountain lions, wolves, and bears. The Columbian Exchange also introduced Native peoples of the Americas to large-­scale plantation crops such as wheat and sugarcane, rice, barley, and oats and to entirely new foods such as onions and peaches, olives and peas, and apples and okra, as well as coffee and tea. Accidental exchanges occurred as well. Old World dandelions, for example, readily re-­seeded themselves in the Americas after sailing across the Atlantic in the guts and feed of livestock, and European rats successfully stowed away on ships until they could escape onto a new continent, displacing the smaller, less aggressive rats of the Americas and spreading unintentional exchanges like disease and famine. Even the lowly earthworm was a Columbian hitchhiker. Having gone extinct in most of North America during the Ice Age, earthworms successfully returned to colonize continental soils following European immigration and began composting fallen foliage, aerating the land, and facilitating the establishment of exotic European plants in the Americas. Many historians have argued that one of the main reasons that Europeans successfully colonized the Americas was because many of their plants and animals thrived there, too. In essence, these Old World immigrants could easily and readily replicate parts of their former lives and landscapes in this new place without having to learn new lifeways. However, the other major factor in European settlement success in the Americas was the deadly array of diseases the immigrants carried with them across the Atlantic. Scientists classify diseases as either contact diseases (e.g., smallpox, influenza, common cold, measles, diphtheria, cholera, coronavirus), which spread via contact with bodily fluids (including aerosolized breath), or vector diseases (plague, malaria, typhus, West Nile fever, Zika), which require a living organism such as a mosquito, tick, or flea to spread the pathogen. For several centuries prior to Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, almost every major contact and vector epidemic that could wipe out human populations, most of which originated from domesticated animals, had ravaged Europe: 44  The West Transformed

smallpox, plague, measles, typhus, and influenza, for example. Trade with Africa and the Indies had brought these killers home to the continent, and between roughly 1200 and 1500 ce, Europe’s population stagnated. Predictably, huge numbers of people died, but some did not. For a variety of reasons, their bodies successfully fought off the diseases and gave them immunity, which they then passed along to their children. Europe’s population had begun to recover by the late fifteenth century as more people were born with immunity to these deadly maladies. But possessing disease immunity also means a person can potentially carry a disease without contracting it (i.e., remain asymptomatic while infected). Thus, when European explorers and settlers arrived in the Americas and encountered Native populations who kept few domesticated animals and had no outside contact with the rest world, the results were catastrophic . . . for the Indians. Furthermore, where Europeans historically had only had to fight off one disease at a time, Indigenous Americans encountered a panoply of pathogens in just a short period of time. The result was a significantly higher mortality rate. In Europe, for example, the fourteenth-­century nightmare known as the Black Death (bubonic plague) had a devastating 30 to 50 percent mortality rate. The Italian scholar Giovanni Boccaccio gives a prescient and almost eerie lamentation of its horror: “Either because of the influence of heavenly bodies or because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds, the pestilence, originating some years earlier in the East, killed an infinite number of people as it spread relentlessly from one place to another until finally it had stretched its miserable length all over the West. And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail.” Yet in the Americas, mortality from the tsunami of European diseases reached up to an astonishing 90 percent. Or higher. Often the first disease did not kill people but just weakened their immune systems until the second or third infection finished them off. The collapse of the Native populations in the Americas was horrific and helped pave the way for European conquest. Indians constituted a “virgin soil” genetic population, one that had never encountered these diseases because of their extreme geographic isolation from the rest of the infected world in the millennia after their migration from Beringia. It meant that they The West Transformed  45

had no immunity to them. The novel coronavirus (sars-­CoV-­2) pandemic that emerged in late 2019 and early 2020 is a modern example of a virgin soil epidemic and the rapid ease with which it can spread through human populations. Catastrophically, within just a few years of Columbus’s arrival, disease had rendered the Native peoples of the Caribbean nearly extinct. The once-­mighty and far-­flung Aztec Empire of Mexico, whose population numbers reached as high as 25 million on the eve of contact, crumpled to 2 million within fifty years after smallpox raged through their cities and towns, while Incan depopulation approached 93 percent by 1600, also largely due to smallpox. And in North America, some East Coast settlements disappeared altogether, while other Indigenous groups, like the southwestern Jemez province, suffered losses of at least 87 percent. The vast scope of the human toll is impossible to calculate since there was no precise census, but historians have estimated that out of 55 million to 60 million Indigenous people in the Americas in 1492, no fewer than 3 out of every 4 and perhaps as many as 90 to 95 percent died of European diseases and their aftermath within a few generations of Columbus’s arrival. In the American West alone, that translated to approximately 1.6 million deaths. Disease struck hardest in areas of concentrated contact between Europeans and Native peoples, but as the opening story in this chapter illustrates, after devastating the coastal regions, smallpox and other killers made their way relentlessly into the interior of the continent. Thousands of Indians died without ever making contact with Europeans, as terrified Natives, unaware that they were already contaminated, unwittingly became disease vectors (agents) for these successive waves of pathogens, either by fleeing their infected villages or by engaging in warfare with other Indigenous groups. Imported European rats also helped spread European diseases via flea bites, creating a perfect symbiosis from which biologically defenseless Indians had no escape. To add insult to injury, history suggests that there was no reciprocal population poisoning. Perhaps with the exception of syphilis (rarely fatal), Indians gave no deadly diseases to Europeans. Why not? Surely over several thousand years of human habitation in North America, viruses had mutated into something malignant? Two critical differences existed between Euro46  The West Transformed

pean and Indigenous American societies at the time of contact. The first was population density. At the time of Columbus’s arrival, Europe’s population roughly equaled that of the Americas . . . all of the Americas. Because of their much more limited geographic distribution, Europeans and other Old World peoples lived in much closer proximity to one another, which enhanced the likelihood of transmitting infectious disease. By contrast, Native peoples of the Americas lived in widely scattered settlements across two vast continents, so that even if a virus did mutate and become deadly, it lacked the vectors necessary to spread and so died out and disappeared. Second, Europeans lived in close proximity not only to one another but also to their livestock, which provided a constant source of viral attack. Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, poultry, rats, mice, dogs, cats, and other animals are all capable of infecting and/or transmitting a wide variety of viral and bacterial horrors to human hosts—­the 2009 swine flu and 2020 covid-­19 “bat virus” pandemic are modern examples. Except for the few examples mentioned earlier, Indians kept no domesticated animals. The deadly result of Indians’ splendid isolation was that while Native peoples of the Americas had (temporarily) escaped the plagues and poxes that had ravaged European populations for centuries, they ultimately lacked the protective immunities that disease-­exposed populations had built up over generations. In the end, the germs of the European invaders proved far mightier than their guns. There were also significant environmental consequences that accompanied the human tragedy of this “Great Dying.” The loss of 90 percent (or more) of the human population of the Americas in the relatively short span of approximately one hundred years following European arrival substantially decreased Indian land stewardship and influence. Estimates suggest that about 1 percent of the total landmass of the Americas—­nearly the size of present-­day Texas—­was abandoned due to disease epidemics compounded by war, slavery, and famine. As forests and secondary regrowth repossessed agricultural areas and grasslands no longer maintained by Indigenous settlements and seasonal burning, the effect was a substantial carbon uptake in the land during the 1500s and a corresponding decrease in atmospheric co 2. This genocide-­generated land-­use change directly coincides with lower temperatures (approximately .27°F/.15°C) experienced globally during the The West Transformed  47

coldest part of the so-­called Little Ice Age in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In other words, as one study concluded, “the Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land in the Americas that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric co 2 and global surface air temperatures in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.” Clearly, indelible human impact on global climate change is not a just recent phenomenon but one with deep historical roots. Old World–­Americas contact proved contentious for many other reasons, too. The differences between Europeans and Indigenous Americans derived not so much from the way they acquired food or sheltered themselves but in their relationship to their natural environment and their social and economic organization. In these areas, the gaps generally proved profound and problematic, primarily for Indians, and in the long run destroyed the natural and social ecologies that shaped Native ways of life. European explorers and colonizers believed that God had commanded humanity to subdue the earth and granted human dominion over all living things. As a result, Europeans viewed themselves as existing outside of nature, above and removed, and believed the natural world was theirs for the taking, a gift from God to his chosen species. By contrast, Indigenous Americans saw themselves as an extension of the natural world, intimately bound by the great cycles of life and death that affected the flora and fauna around them. This worldview does not mean that Indians did not exploit their natural environment; they did. It does not mean that Indians did not alter their natural environment through the use of fire and agriculture; they did. Generally, though, the Indian relationship to the natural world emphasized the interconnectedness of all living things, including people, and human abuse of the environment, instead of reverence and respect, came at the risk of spiritual retaliation. In one Kalapuyan story, for example, the Frog People had captured all of the water behind a dam, so Coyote tricked them into letting him have a big drink while he secretly dug under the dam until it collapsed, making the rivers and streams and waterfalls. The Frog People were furious, but Coyote chastised them, saying, “It is not right that one people have all the water. Now it is where everyone can have it.” 48  The West Transformed

Religious differences aggravated European-­Native conflict in other ways as well. European colonizers, whether Catholic or Protestant, brought with them a devout belief in one god (monotheism), whose visage was that of a white man. They worshiped their god in a highly ritualized manner in formal churches according to written scripture. Native spiritual practices and beliefs varied widely, although most practiced a nature-­based polytheism (belief in many gods) that invested the natural world with spiritual power and envisioned gods as animals, trees, celestial objects, or forces of nature. The Zunis, for example, revere Mother Earth, Father Sky, and supernatural Pueblo nature spirits called kachinas. Because there was no alphabet-­based writing present in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indians primarily transmitted their rituals, stories, songs, and beliefs orally, making them situational, dynamic, and constantly evolving. From the European perspective, Indian spiritual life amounted to heathenish blasphemy, and the colonizers would spend the next several hundred years attempting to eradicate Native religious practices. The twin “gifts” of Christianity and civilization (order, government, culture, clothing), Europeans believed, were more than adequate compensation for what they would take from the land that God had provided for his chosen people, meaning the Europeans, of course. Cultural ideas about property reinforced these religious differences. While both Indians and Europeans engaged in landownership, their practices differed greatly. Europeans brought with them an understanding of the landscape itself as a commodity to be held as private property, a concept essentially unknown in the Americas prior to contact. Private property as a commodity, defined as exclusive access to and use of land such that an individual owner can exclude all others, arose naturally from European ideals of taming the land. But this legal definition clashed fundamentally with Indian practices of collective use and access, known as usufruct rights in European law. In a usufruct system, individuals or groups can obtain the right to use the land or resource of another provided they do not destroy or degrade the original resource—­a system of legal sharing. To Native peoples, the belief that an individual could actually own a piece of ground as a private, exclusive commodity seemed absurd; the land had been there long before and would exist long after any individual life. The West Transformed  49

Generally, Indians did believe in and vigorously defend tribal territories, hunting grounds, personal possessions, and homes, and most Indian cultures did recognize private (which usually meant family) ownership of berry patches, fishing locations, and the sometimes extensive garden plots managed by women in agricultural tribes. But here, too, they protected only collective use of and access to resources on the land, not private possession of the land itself; theirs was a “use” view as opposed to a “commodity” view. At Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, for example, various Chinookan-­and Sahaptin-­speaking peoples would gather by the thousands during seasonal salmon runs to dip-­net migrating fish from wooden scaffolding platforms erected out over the roaring waters. But this valuable resource was carefully regulated, as kinship networks determined fishing rights and prize scaffold locations were inherited patrimony. These fundamentally incompatible ways of “owning” land led to serious initial conflicts. When early Europeans entered into land negotiations, for example, they believed they were buying exclusive private property (both the land and its resources as commodities), and they began erecting fences and accosting trespassers. Indians, however, believed they had sold only use and access, which the original seller could convey to numerous parties and still retain for themselves. In the long run, Native user rights proved no match for European private property laws and irate colonists with firearms. As environmental historian William Cronon has written, “A people who loved property little had been overwhelmed by a people who loved it much.” Interestingly, this conflict between individual possession and communal access presaged later land struggles between conservation and preservation advocates. In addition to their discordant attitudes about the natural world, Europeans and Indians also disagreed on social and cultural issues. As evidenced by their love of private property (land as a means to an end—­wealth), Europeans generally valued the success of individuals over that of the community. Wealth determined one’s status and social class, and individual upward mobility was the universal ambition. The global expansion of European trade in the 1500s and 1600s, as well as the evolution of commerce-­oriented capitalism, only amplified this goal. By contrast, Native societies generally elevated the good of the group above that of the individual. While Indians did strive to perform 50  The West Transformed

well in battle or ceremonies, their motivation was not usually for individual glory but for the well-­being of the larger community, and status derived not from wealth but from service. The potlatch ceremony, practiced by the Coast Salish and other Pacific Northwest peoples, provides an excellent example. The ritual served (and still serves) as a means of redistributing tribal wealth and encouraging reciprocity among and between families. At the potlatch, families or individuals gave away valuable possessions—­food, household items, and even dances and songs—­often during lean winter months. As they enriched their neighbors while impoverishing themselves, they helped thwart Liebig’s law, and thus the family’s or individual’s status rose within the clan, tribe, or village. Europeans also flinched at the matrilineal and matrilocal organization of many Indian nations, such as the Crows and Hopis, where individuals trace their identity and heritage through the mother’s line and married couples reside with the female head of the household. At the time of contact, Europe was not only strongly patrilineal (heritage traced through the father’s line) but also thoroughly male dominated. Women held almost no legal rights; they could not own property (except under Spanish law), vote, or hold political office, and with the exception of a few queens, they were at the legal mercy of their fathers, husbands, or brothers. By contrast, many Native societies, especially those practicing agriculture, accorded women significant power, both political and economic. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Agricultural Revolution had resulted in a gendered division of labor: women farmed while men hunted. In agricultural societies, then, since women contributed the bulk of the calories that sustained the community, they retained significant authority. To Europeans, allowing women to cultivate agriculture, divorce their husbands (by kicking the man out of their house), determine whether or not to go to war (they will feed the warriors . . . or not), and actively participate in the political process (including chief selection) seemed the height of barbarism. The Spanish, who arrived first and had moved northward out of present-­ day Mexico by the late sixteenth century, dominated European settlement and colonization of the American West. One raison d’être for New Spain—­the Spanish term for its American colonies—­was wealth generation. The SpanThe West Transformed  51

ish Crown’s search for merchantable commodities—­natural resources with recognized monetary value—­led it to establish a hierarchy in its territorial possessions. For Spain, the most lucrative resources, and thus its primary focus, consisted of the gold and silver flowing out of the former Aztec and Incan Empires in Mexico and Peru, respectively. The Crown’s agricultural holdings in the Caribbean constituted a secondary but still valuable resource. Distinctly third in the pecking order, primarily because they lacked anything of commercial value, were the lands north of Mexico. Northern New Spain—­from present-­day California to Florida—­seemed to hold no known merchantable commodities, only Indian labor and souls, and thus its value lay primarily in Spain’s ability to claim the land and use it as a buffer to keep other European rivals at bay. To secure its more valuable territories, like Peru and Mexico, Spain had dispatched troops, but to the future American West, the Crown dispatched padres. Under their direction, the Catholic mission system became the primary institution responsible for fortifying Spain’s not-­so-­valuable northern territories. Other European nations soon challenged the primacy of the Spanish. By the late eighteenth century, the Russians had begun edging southward from Alaska along the Pacific coastline, and the French had colonized along the Mississippi and fortified New Orleans, which pressed hard on New Spain. The Spanish occupation of both Texas and California was part of the Crown’s attempt to block the expansion of its French and Russian rivals, and soon missions stretched across the West, from Texas, headquartered around San Antonio, to the California coast, from San Diego to Sonoma. The Spanish sent mostly men to settle and minister these outposts, and their liaisons with Native women soon manifested as a growing mestizo or mixed-­race population. The arrival of the padres proved deadly to the West’s Native inhabitants, however, as Spain’s missionizing efforts brought European diseases into the region. This intimate contact predictably facilitated disease transmission, and death followed the colonizers as they migrated northward. In 1690, for example, the first winter of contact with the Spanish devastated the Caddo population in what is now eastern Texas, and as the missions spread westward and northward, diseases like smallpox ravaged Native societies. By 52  The West Transformed

7. Mission San Xavier del Bac. This Catholic mission, founded in 1692 by Father Eusebio

Kino, underwent a reconstruction completed in 1797. It is located approximately ten miles south of present-­day Tucson, Arizona. Photo by Marysimlaz, Wikimedia Commons.

the end of the next century, this deadly killer had visited the Shoshones of present-­day Idaho, causing the extinction of entire bands, and decimated the Native populations of California, killing more than two-­thirds (from a peak of nearly 325,000 in the 1760s to fewer than 100,000 by 1850). The pathogens were relentless, and even the most clever Indian trickster figures such as Saynday proved no match. As the story at the beginning of the chapter so clearly illustrates, Indians recognized that smallpox and other diseases accompanied white settlement, and not just the Spanish. In 1836, for example, the arrival of American Presbyterian missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in Oregon Country brought measles and death to the local Cayuse tribe, whose survivors finally responded by massacring the missionary couple and ten others in 1847. The Spanish Crown and mission system also profoundly shaped the lives of sixteenth-­century Pueblo Indians, the diverse and culturally advanced peoples of the Rio Grande basin in present-­day New Mexico, by altering the region’s established Native power structure, introducing horse culture to the Indians of the West, and ushering in a market economy. Earlier contact with the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who was fruitlessly The West Transformed  53

searching for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola and their gold, and other conquistadors had alerted the Pueblos to the value of Spanish horses and metal implements, as well as the power of Spanish weaponry. The Indians also initially saw the potential benefit of adding Franciscan friars and their powerful god to the Pueblo religious pantheon. Thus, in the summer of 1598, when Juan de Oñate arrived with a caravan of five hundred settlers and nine Franciscans to begin the process of claiming and taming New Mexico by establishing missions in the name of Spain, the potential for friendly relations existed. The Spanish king had even ordered that this process be “apostolic and Christian, and not a butchery,” but Oñate was an entrepreneur, not an ecclesiastic, and his purpose was profit, not pacification. In 1598 Oñate founded the mission and surrounding province of Santa Fe in Nuevo México, but his brutal leadership fell hard on the Indigenous people. For example, the following year, in 1599, after the people of nearby Acoma Pueblo refused to pay excessive food tributes (taxes), Oñate and his men launched a punitive attack that killed eight hundred men, women, and children, enslaved several hundred survivors, and chopped off the right foot of every surviving warrior. Oñate’s desperate search for wealth not only devastated the entire Pueblo region by exacting exorbitant tributes in food and animal hides but also wrecked the New Mexico mission and settlement he founded. By 1601 most of the conscientious colonists had fled to their Spanish homeland with tales of Oñate’s savagery. Over the next few years, this grasping, so-­called last conquistador extended his influence onto the Great Plains and westward to California, but he failed to strike it rich and eventually returned to Spain after the courts convicted him of cruelty to both colonists and Natives and banished him from Nuevo México. The Acomas never forgot Oñate, however. On a moonless night in December 1997, as the state embarked on a yearlong celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of his entrada, several Acomas crept up to the imposing twelve-­foot-­high equestrian statue at the Oñate Monument near Española and carefully sawed off its right foot. Despite Oñate’s barbarism, Spain managed to retain control of the region, primarily due to emerging intertribal warfare between Pueblos and Apaches, triggered by the arrival of the Spanish. The arid high deserts of New Mexico 54  The West Transformed

lacked the natural resources to sustain large human populations. For nearly a century, however, the largely nomadic Apaches had traded with, and occasionally raided, the sedentary Pueblos in a mostly mutually fulfilling relationship that exchanged Pueblo food for Apache protection and ensured the subsistence of both groups. The Spanish, however, tipped the fragile ecological balance by not only extorting resources such as corn and blankets from the Pueblos, leaving them bereft of trade goods when the Apaches arrived, but also by bringing alluring new resources, such as metal and horses into the region. In order to pursue their own subsistence, both Pueblos and Apaches soon needed European trade—to participate in this emerging market economy—more than they needed each other. That need in turn strained the already fragile environment’s capacity to provide more food and shattered the tenuous reciprocal trade relationships between these Native societies. As historian Elizabeth John has written, “Spain had unwittingly sparked among Apaches an equestrian revolution that would spread among Indian peoples far into the interior, transforming Native economies and upsetting balances of power for centuries to come.” Interestingly, the Pueblo-­Apache conflict also spawned mass Pueblo conversions to Catholicism in the hope that the Franciscans’ faith and Spanish military might would provide salvation from devastating Apache raids. Thus, despite Oñate’s blundering, this “soul” responsibility caused Spain to reconfigure its presence in New Mexico and establish a royal colony headquartered around the city of Santa Fe, founded in 1610 (the first permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi), with the purpose of teaching and ministering to the Pueblos. Although the mission system may have dictated settlement patterns in northern New Spain, the desire for wealth still motivated Spanish colonists to move to the territory and exploit the land and labor of Nuevo México for profit. In the end, however, this greed would have dire consequences. Under the encomienda system, which rewarded loyal Spaniards with land grants and limited rights to Native labor, the Crown extended its control over the region, provided for the protection of the Pueblos against their Apache enemies, and promised greater food security with the introduction of Spanish livestock, wheat, and barley. But as prosperity returned, so too did Apache raiders. Encomendero dispossession and exploitation of the Pueblos also The West Transformed  55

increased, since the watchful eye of Spain was on the far side of the Atlantic. As historian Devon Peña has written, “This meant that indigenous farmers could not maintain the xinampas [a kind of floating garden], terraces, check dams, irrigation ditches, and other erosion and runoff control structures they had perfected over generations,” which in turn led to the demise of Native agricultural landscapes. Starting in 1650, successive drought years combined with Apache attacks to make Spanish corn and labor tributes impossible burdens for the Pueblos. By the 1670s, the specter of starvation hovered over the region, leading to the abandonment of some Indian pueblos, among them Humanas Pueblo (Gran Quivira), the first settlement Oñate had encountered. Drought withered not only corn, wheat, and peppers but also the wild grasses essential for horses and cattle. Spanish atrocities, including Franciscan attempts to eradicate Pueblo religious practices by hanging, whipping, and jailing Pueblo medicine men, finally provoked an Indian uprising. In 1680 desperate Pueblos, pushed to the brink of social collapse by a decade of aridity and Spanish economic and spiritual abuse, rose up in rebellion. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Crown and its minions out of the region for more than a decade. In 1692, when the Pueblos finally allowed the Spanish to return to Santa Fe, it was on Pueblo terms, which included an end to the encomienda system, the legal right to practice their Native religion, and the assimilation of Spanish crops, trade goods, and livestock into the emerging market economy. One important environmental consequence of the 1680 revolt was the spread of horses and horse culture (the herding and breeding of horses) throughout the American West. As discussed in the previous chapter, horses had disappeared from the Americas as a consequence of the great Pleistocene die-­off that also wiped out mammoths and saber-­toothed cats. Unlike the latter two, however, horses were fated to return, and when they did, they flourished, reoccupying their ancestral environmental niche with remarkable vigor. The Spanish first reintroduced the horse to its ancient homeland in the sixteenth century. While the aforementioned Apaches had learned horse culture from the Pueblos by the 1650s and some southern tribes such as the Caddos of eastern Texas and the Rio Grande–­area Jumanos had horses as early as the 1660s, it was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that effectively diffused 56  The West Transformed

8. Horse culture diffusion across North America following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Map by Amber Bell.

Equus caballus throughout the American West. As the padres and other Spanish survivors fled the Pueblos’ fury, they left behind their horses in numbers far greater than the local Indians could effectively utilize or control. Turned loose on the plains or escaped from corrals, these adapted equines flourished in their ancient “native wild,” and horse populations soared. Estimates suggest that by 1800 present-­day Texas and New Mexico alone were home to more than two million of these animals, while the missions of California, which did not even receive horses until the 1770s, were slaughtering them as nuisances by the early 1800s. The West Transformed  57

Following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, horse culture rapidly spread from tribe to tribe across the West through trade and theft, thereby transforming Native relations with the natural world. Utes in what is now Colorado and Utah acquired horses directly from the northern Pueblos. Historical evidence suggests that from there, Native traders dispersed horses and horse culture northward to Shoshonean-­speaking bands, linguistic kin of the Utes, some of which by the early 1700s were heading south toward the New Mexico horse herds to become southern plains Comanches. The Comanches then traded horses up the plains to the Pawnees, Kiowas, and Cheyennes. Bands of the latter two groups soon moved south to join the Comanches on the southern plains. Meanwhile, the Shoshones and affiliated Bannocks quickly became middleman horse traders in the Northwest, where they were supplying tribes such as the Nez Perces and Cayuses with mounts by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Horse culture continued at a full gallop up the Rockies to the Blackfeet and eventually reached farming groups like the Hidatsas on the Missouri River, some groups of which mounted up and rode onto the northern plains to become the Crows of present-­day Montana and Wyoming. Horses and horse culture spread throughout the Missouri and Yellowstone River valleys to the Mandans and Assiniboines. Horses even reached various bands of Lakotas in the Great Lakes country, and by the 1720s and 1730s these groups were also mounting up and moving west onto the plains. The arrival of the horse was transformative. Horses not only conveyed riders farther and faster, which in turn allowed tribes to claim larger territories and participate in raids for material goods and ever more horses, but they also allowed Indian groups to expand northward and eastward onto the Great Plains. As historian Pekka Hämäläinen humorously observes, “Horses also made nomadism infinitely more agreeable.” Mounted riders could more effectively and efficiently hunt and exploit the great shaggy bison wealth (with numbers as high as thirty million) that had bloomed across the Great Plains during the earlier equine absence. The result was the emergence of a complex Indian-­horse-­bison economy. By the early 1700s, horse-­mounted Indians such the Comanches and the Lakotas were streaming out across the Great Plains, taking advantage of the 58  The West Transformed

great expanses of grass that nourished the horses and bison that, in turn, became the twin foundations of their subsistence for the next 150 years. According to Hämäläinen, “The Plains Indian horse culture represents the ultimate anomaly—­[European] ecological imperialism working to Indians’ advantage.” At least for a while. In these flush times, estimates indicate that the plains could have sustained nearly two hundred thousand subsistence (but not market) hunters, and horses conveyed authority, prestige, and might to the tribes that possessed them. Throughout the American West, Native groups quickly, voluntarily, and eagerly embraced horse trading. In an emerging economy, analogous in many ways to the American fur trade, Indians conveyed captured animals north and east via trade fairs and bartering in what environmental historian Dan Flores has called the “great horse funnel.” The Comanches further refined this system by augmenting their captive herds with careful breeding and selective raiding. As a result, their influence eventually extended along a broad north-­south band from the Dakotas south into New Mexico and Texas. As Flores concludes, “To a significant degree, [Indians] created the western horse trade, built their own internal status systems around it, and for a century used it to manipulate the geopolitical designs of competing Euroamericans anxious for profits and alliances with them.” Full-­blown equestrianism may have catapulted the Comanches to the pinnacle of plains power, but it also proved to be their and other tribes’ ultimate undoing. Their ever-­expanding horse herds competed directly with bison for grass and water, the two foundational resources of plains ecology. Not surprisingly, the stunning success of Comanche Empire hunters and warriors attracted other tribes onto the plains. This surging Indigenous population’s intense horse grazing, combined with their overuse of the relatively rare riparian zones along rivers and streams so essential to the survival of the Indian-­horse-­bison triad, soon strained the carrying capacity of the natural environment. Too little grass for all of the hungry mouths and year-­round exploitation of waterways that never had a chance to recover, rejuvenate, and regrow their plant and animal biotic wealth meant that bison populations had begun declining by the late eighteenth century. The land simply could not supply this insatiable floral and faunal demand. Indians’ hunting also The West Transformed  59

pressed hard on the bison herds because tanned robes were serving as the medium of plains exchange by the 1820s, and eventually Indians killed the great shaggies in numbers far in excess of subsistence. The rapid adoption of horse culture by Native peoples bound them into the emerging market economy of Euro-­Americans. It was an unsustainable shift. Horses were the means to effectively capitalize on the wealth of the plains, and so they became, in effect, merchantable commodities. But at what cost? Horses and bison hunting meant that some Plains Indians abandoned more predictable subsistence agriculture and returned to a hunting-­gathering lifestyle. It also meant embracing trade relations with whites in order to acquire the guns and metals necessary for warfare, efficient game pursuit, and robe processing, as well as trade goods and the food staples that these former agriculturalists no longer produced. Bison robes were the “cash” of the plains market. This subsistence shift, combined with the Spanish introduction of livestock, horses, and agricultural grains, along with the devastation of Native populations due to disease, resulted in new Indian alliances and commercial relationships with the Spanish and other European powers that ultimately transformed traditional Native ways of life. Over time Plains Indians became less of an “ecosystem people” and more of a “market people.” For example, the Crows’ shift from agriculture back to hunting not only greatly diminished their knowledge of medicinal and subsistence plants but also resulted in a redistribution of power within the tribes as the status of men, now the primary calorie providers, rose, while agriculturalist women’s influence declined. In many cases, the shift to horse culture and bison hunting ultimately led Plains Indians into polygyny (multiple wives), since women processed the buffalo their husbands killed into tanned robes and one wife often could not keep pace with her husband’s harvest. In the face of these remarkable ecological and cultural changes, it became impossible for Indians to continue to live as they had lived in the American West prior to contact. The short-­term effect of the horse-­bison economy produced a cultural flourishing of Plains Indians such as the Comanches and Lakotas, as well as power enough to shake the Spanish Empire and later Mexico. But the long-­term consequence was a gradual descent from subsistence into what historian Richard White has labeled “dependency,” 60  The West Transformed

a situation where a competing dominant economy eliminates the ability of an existent economy to sustain itself and ultimately, in this case, rendered Native society and Native peoples superfluous. It was not simply the military might of the Europeans that ensured their eventual dominance in the West but rather the perfect storm of consequences that arose from their arrival in the Americas. “Guns, germs, and steel,” as geographer Jared Diamond has suggested, were certainly critical elements, but so too was the evolution of a market economy, which inexorably drew in Indians, willingly and sometimes eagerly. Neither disease nor the introduction of the market alone was enough to deliver a knockout blow to sustainable Indigenous cultures and societies, but in combination the long-­term social, cultural, and political effects were devastating to Indian ways of life. Unlike a subsistence economy, a capitalist or market economy dictates not only the value of and means by which goods are traded but also the very goods themselves—­the merchantable commodities. The range of these commodities is notably far narrower than in a subsistence economy, in which any item that sustains life has value, because merchantable commodities must possess a value mutually agreed upon by both seller and consumer. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues, “Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little.” Commercial economies emphasize the “producing much” gambit and by definition involve interdependence, which undermines independence, particularly when one market participant significantly outnumbers and outproduces all others. A commercial economy and the desires it creates also has significant environmental implications. The fundamental goal of subsistence societies is survival and security, not the maximizing of production or profit. The ecological limits of their immediate surroundings and the demands they place on their local natural environment are limited and usually sustainable. In order to succeed, many subsistence societies practice mobility, through seasonal migrations, and periodicity, harvesting certain plants and animals only during certain times of year and leaving them to regenerate during others. Liebig’s law argues that the minimum number of resources available during the season of greatest scarcity further limits population sizes. Thus, subsistence economies, such as the precontact Pueblos, usually live The West Transformed  61

sustainably within their natural environment because population does not exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. A market economy bypasses these environmental checks and balances. The laws of supply and demand not of a local population but of a world market govern a capitalist system, and world markets generate potentially infinite demand for a narrow range of products. In addition, the profit incentive present in capitalism but absent in subsistence economies drives production increases in an attempt to sate what are ultimately insatiable demands. “Markets,” writes Sahlins, erect “a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.” Sometimes consumers desire certain commodities purely for the status that they convey. In the long run, this is unsustainable. In the American West, Indians willingly entered into the European-­ introduced market system initially because it brought them horses and superior materials such as knives, farming tools, guns, food, and clothing to replace their own goods. But their participation drew them steadily away from traditional, more subsistence-­oriented and ultimately more sustainable lifeways. Capitalism and the market also undermined tribal cohesion by shifting Native focus away from the collective group and toward the individual, as “monetary wealth” in the form of shell and glass beads, horse herds, bison robes, and other forms of “cash,” rather than community service, became the measure of social status. The histories of the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos also reveal that within a relatively short time Europeans introduced alcohol and credit into the market. It was a shrewd move indeed, since this intoxicating and addictive addition could generate potentially infinite demand while credit created debt that in turn necessitated overhunting, further eroding tribal autonomy. In order to acquire the European trade items upon which they had become increasingly reliant and to pay off ever-­rising debts, Indians spent more and more of their time acquiring furs and robes for the market, which accelerated the depletion and even disappearance of many fur-­bearing animals, such as bison and beavers, and also resulted in an increased reliance on Euro-­ Americans for basic food and shelter requirements. This cycle of dependency born of Indian agency (choice) meant that over time Indians were no longer able to ignore the market; they had to participate in order to survive. 62  The West Transformed

In the long run, the market system replaced traditional tribal authority as the determining agent for much Indian land use, introducing the infinite and insatiable demands of a consumer economy to environments that had long provided sustenance and security to local economies. When, for example, the Pawnees of present-­day Nebraska returned to sedentary agriculture as bison numbers dwindled and Navajos in the Southwest eliminated native game to herd more sheep, they each shifted their modes of production away from subsistence and further integrated themselves into the market. These changes in tribal society were inextricably intertwined with changes in the environment, a biocultural process. Both groups abandoned diverse sources of subsistence to cater to the narrow demands of the market. In doing so, they overtaxed their soils, which soon became depleted and eroded, leaving the people ever more dependent on European trade. It was a vicious cycle. Indian participation in the market accelerated European dominance over and control of the American West. It also fundamentally altered human perception of the land itself, from one that offered nearly infinite resources capable of ensuring security and survival to one that provided very limited commodities capable of producing profit in an exterior-­defined market. In a way, then, the natural environment proved to be the Europeans’ most powerful colonizing ally and weapon. As Cronon put it, “Economic and ecological imperialisms reinforced each other.” In the short to medium term, Indians eagerly embraced economic and technological innovations and proved remarkably resilient and adaptive to all the European-­wrought changes in the land. But in the long term, the immigrants’ diseases, trade goods, domestic livestock, and commodification of natural resources fundamentally undermined Native subsistence, altered the natural environment, and ensured Indian trade dependence. Suggested Reading

Katrine Barber and Andrew H. Fisher, “From Coyote to the Corps of Engineers: Recalling the History of the [sic] Dalles—­Celilo Reach,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108, no. 4 (2007): 520–­31, available at http://​www.​ jstor.​ org/​ stable/​ 20615790. Christopher Columbus, “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus,” in Journal of Christopher Columbus (during His First Voyage, 1492–­93), and Documents Relating The West Transformed  63

to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real, ed. and trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 15–­193, available at http://​web​.as​.uky​ .edu​/history​/faculty​/myrup​/his206​/Columbus​%20​-​%20journal​%20of​%20the​ %20first​%20voyage​.pdf. William Cronon, “Bounding the Land,” in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 54–­81. Brian R. Dott, “Names and Places: How the Chile Found Its Way ‘Home’ to China,” in The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Dan Flores, “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses: The Horse Trade and the Early American West, 1775–­1825,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 58, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 3–­21. Megan Gambino, “Alfred W. Crosby on the Columbian Exchange: The Historian Discusses the Ecological Impact of Columbus’ Landing in 1492 on Both the Old World and the New World,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2011, available at https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/alfred​-w​-crosby​-on​-the​-columbian​ -exchange​-98116477. Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 173–­208. Also “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (December 2003): 833–­62. Adam R. Hodge, “‘In Want of Nourishment for to Keep Them Alive’: Climate Fluctuations, Bison Scarcity, and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1780–­82 on the Northern Great Plains,” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (April 2012): 365–­403. Elizabeth A. H. John, “New Mexico, 1705–­1733,” in Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–­1795, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 226–­57. Also “Indians in the Spanish Southwest,” in Major Problems in the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II (Lexington ma: D. C. Heath, 1989), 49–­63. Jennifer Klunk et al., “Evolution of Immune Genes Is Associated with the Black Death,” Nature, October 19, 2022, available at https://​www​.nature​.com​/articles​/s41586​ -022​-05349​-x. Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (March 1, 2019): 13–­36, available at https://​www​ .sciencedirect​.com​/science​/article​/pii​/s0277379118307261.

64  The West Transformed

Claudia Leal, Shawn Van Ausdal, Marina Miraglia, and Sandro Dutra e Silva, “Africa and the Americas in the Columbian Exchange: An Interview with Judith Carney,” halac—­Historia Ambiental, Latinoamericana y Caribeña 10, no. 3 (2020): 380–­401, available at https://​halacsolcha​.org​/index​.php​/halac/​ article/​ download/​ 514/​ 431. Margot Liberty, “Hell Came with Horses: Plains Indian Women in the Equestrian Era,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 32, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 10–­19. Barry Lopez, “Coyote Takes Water from the Frog People,” in Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 162–­63. Robert MacCameron, “Environmental Change in Colonial New Mexico,” Environmental History Review 18, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 17–­39. Charles C. Mann, “The Tobacco Coast,” in 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 51–­98. Also “The Syphilis Exception,” in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 405–­8. Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin, “Saynday and Smallpox,” in American Indian Mythology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 173–­77. Edmund S. Morgan, “Columbus’ Confusion about the New World: The European Discovery of America Opened Possibilities for Those with Eyes to See. But Columbus Was Not One of Them,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2009, available at https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/people​-places​/columbus​-confusion​-about​ -the​-newworld​-140132422. Devon Peña, “The Spanish Colonial Ecological Revolution,” in Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 57–­64. Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in Stone Age Economics (New York: Routledge, 1972). Richard White, “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” in The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), xiii–­xix, 315–­23. Sam White, “Cold, Drought, and Disaster: The Little Ice Age and the Spanish Conquest of New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 89, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 425–­58.

The West Transformed  65

Claiming and Taming the Land

3

On July 24, 1847, a sick and weary Brigham Young peered down out of his covered wagon at the sprawling valley of the Great Salt Lake receding away into the west and reportedly proclaimed, “This is the right place.” Seeking refuge from persecution, the Lion of the Lord had led the Latter-­day Saints on a long and arduous journey from their adopted home in Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Basin, hoping that the splendid isolation of this desert locale would allow them to practice their religion in peace. But soon, tens of thousands would come to and through the Mormon state of Deseret. Just six months after Young descended to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, another cry of western discovery echoed across the continent and the globe. In January 1848, James Marshall gleefully confided to a friend, “I have found it!” That “it” was gold. Marshall and his friend were lousy secret-­keepers, however, and news of Marshall’s shiny discovery in the American River of California (northeast of today’s Sacramento) touched off a gold rush frenzy in 1849 as hordes of prospectors poured into the region hoping to strike it rich. In the period between the 1780s and the 1850s, the West enticed all manner of settlers from the United States, from religious refugees to fur traders, farmers, and gold seekers—­it was the land of milk and honey, the Promised Land, Eden, Zion. The region’s natural resource wealth made it an obvious prize and seemed to offer tantalizing opportunities to anyone adventurous enough to take the risk. It also almost inevitably led to warfare for con67

trol over the most desirable places, as both Indigenous Native peoples and Mexicans had drawn the same conclusions. In all cases, the environment fundamentally shaped western settlement and history during this period, but Euro-­American settlers soon pushed back against these natural limits. The realities of place dictated the course of westward migration for Euro-­ Americans. Lack of trees and water on the Great Plains, for example, propelled overland pioneers onward to lusher California and Oregon, while the aridity of the interior West confined colonizers to settlements along reliable water sources such as rivers and streams. Yet even at this early juncture, white Americans, unlike their Native, Spanish, and Mexican predecessors, were determined to bend nature to their farming, mining, or other extractive will, rather than live sustainably within nature’s boundaries, confined by its carrying capacity. At what cost, then, did this conquest of the American West come? Perhaps fur trapper and trader Richens Wootton summed it up best: “The whole country has thrown off its wildness. . . . Outside of its rugged mountain peaks, its thickly wooded cañons and its natural scenery, the Wild West is no longer wild.” In 1783 the new American nation possessed the one key ingredient that nearly guaranteed its future economic, social, and political success: location. At the Revolutionary War’s end, England had conceded generous boundaries to its former colonies: the Atlantic on the east, the Mississippi River on the west, British Canada to the north, and Spanish Florida to the south. And while the geopolitical challenges of being sandwiched in between two powerful European rivals would prove daunting, the country also sat astride some of the most lucrative real estate on the planet, with the potential to expand. The United States, both in its original outline and its current configuration (with the exception of the northern portion of Alaska), lies completely within the temperate zone, a term geographers use to describe the regions of the globe lying between the tropics and the polar circles. Although this zone has striking variation, it generally encompasses milder climates that contain the ideal balance of seasons, water supply, vegetation, and soil conditions that have enabled human civilizations to flourish for thousands of years. It is no accident that the majority of the world’s population resides within these temperate borders. In the American West, this zone’s natural bounty included 68  Claiming and Taming the Land

bison and beavers, redwoods and white pines, gold and silver, mighty rivers and fertile soils—­the natural resources that could fuel an empire. After the American Revolution, white settlers eagerly pushed westward into, for them, new and unknown territories, west of the original thirteen states but east of the Mississippi River, and the country needed a way to make sense of the land it now owned. The result was the Land Ordinance of 1785, a little known but very powerful law that stands as one of the significant, and rare, accomplishments of the nation’s first government, the Articles of Confederation Congress. The ordinance not only shaped the physical structure of the West but also Americans’ perception of the land itself. The ordinance confronted the vexing problem of property boundaries, which had been a fundamental source of conflict between colonizers and Native peoples since contact. Congress’s solution to organizing the public domain, however, would have profound implications. On its surface, the ordinance seemed simple and straightforward, providing for the survey and sale of then-­western lands (like Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee) through the creation of the Public Land Survey System. Still in use today, this system describes land (property) using the terms “range,” “township,” and “section.” Starting in eastern Ohio and extending at first to the nation’s western boundary at the Mississippi River and eventually across the whole of the continent, government surveyors platted out public lands on a master grid. Each 6-­mile-­square township was and is subdivided into 1-­mile-­square sections (36 in each township), and each section contains 640 acres. The range was the number assigned to each township, in order, measured from a north-­south principal meridian. While it sounds complicated, this squares-­ within-­squares system simplified property identification. Prior to the law, property descriptions used natural features, and so it was not uncommon for deeds to include boundary descriptions such as “from the junction of Rock Creek and Dry Gulch east one mile to the top of Pea Ridge, then north to the big pine in the rock outcrop, then west to Rock Creek, then south down the center of the creek to the point of origin.” But as streams changed their course and trees died, property boundaries became murky. The new system changed all of that. In the whole of the world, there was only one section 16, township 46, north range 10 east of the third principal meridian. Claiming and Taming the Land  69

9. The Public Land Survey System, created by the Land Ordinance of 1785, imposes this

township and range grid system, originating in eastern Ohio, on the real property added to the United States by the Treaty of Paris (1783) and most subsequent land acquisitions. Designed primarily to subdivide and describe public lands, the system facilitated the transformation of nature into a commercial commodity. Map courtesy of the author.

The Public Land Survey System created real estate order out of wilderness chaos, but it did so at a cost. These new boundary descriptions were completely devoid of environmental considerations. Their arbitrary lines bisected rivers, ignored mountain ranges, and paid no heed to soil conditions, swamps, or suitable browse (edible vegetation for livestock). Stripped of its natural identity, land itself became yet another commodity in the market 70  Claiming and Taming the Land

economy, subject to the same exploitation and abuse as all other products forced to conform to the ironclad laws of supply and demand. In many ways, this imposition of a “rational” grid that ignored all environmental features typified the modern American approach to nature: it brought order out of chaos and altered the land to suit human needs instead of encouraging settlers to adapt their livelihoods to the environments in which they lived. Nature may abhor the square, but government surveyors and land speculators loved it. Not surprisingly, the nation’s appetite for this newest commodity was insatiable, and in a relatively brief and remarkable spurt of acquisition—­1783 to 1853—­the United States came to possess all lands from the forty-­ninth parallel (the U.S.-­Canadian border in the West) south to Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The first major addition came in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase, which the United States acquired for a mere $15 million from France, instantly more than doubled the size of the country, adding more than a half billion acres to the nation with the stroke of President Thomas Jefferson’s pen. Expanding the land base of the republic made perfect sense to Jefferson, whose ideal citizen was the yeoman farmer. Secure in his possessions, independent, civic, resourceful, democratic, and enterprising, the yeoman farmer embodied all the characteristics that would preserve and protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to be sure. But for Jefferson, a nation of farmers would also avoid the crushing poverty and class stratification that had emerged along with the factory system in England. When Jefferson took office in 1801, the United States was economically undeveloped, rural, agrarian, and boasted a total population of just over five million people. Industrialization might be inevitable, but it would not be at the expense of family farms if Jefferson could help it. For the third president, the Louisiana Purchase operated like a gigantic safety valve, ensuring that virtuous, independent farmers could always escape from the throes of eastern poverty to free lands in the West. And as the farmer’s plow furrowed westward, Jefferson believed, the agrarian republic would flourish as it brought new lands under cultivation, added new resources to the market, and perfected nature by bringing progress through development—­order out of chaos, along with liberty and prosperity for free Americans. Claiming and Taming the Land  71

The key question behind the great Louisiana land grab, however, was quite simply, What had the nation acquired? The trans-­Mississippi West was in many ways a great mystery to most Americans, including Jefferson, but it had been sustaining a remarkable diversity of human existence for hundreds of generations. Government-­sponsored exploration was the natural starting point, and the goals of various federal expeditions reflected the extractive resource focus of the nation. While earlier French, Spanish, and even Russian explorers had preceded the Americans into the region to look for extractable wealth, such as beaver pelts, it was the systematic forays organized in the nation’s capital that began to illuminate the real treasure the country had acquired. Jefferson, steeped in the intellectual rationalism of the Enlightenment, sought to bring order (and the township and range grid) to the chaotic West by dispatching veritable armies of mapmakers, biologists, geographers, ethnographers, botanists, and zoologists. Jefferson’s own Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) had detailed his home state’s natural history and now provided the framework for inventorying the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803 Jefferson organized the Corps of Discovery, under the capable leadership of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, as one of the earliest official U.S. probes into the West. The primacy of the natural environment was evident. In addition to instructing the explorers to map the region, Jefferson tasked the expedition with locating the elusive (and in fact nonexistent) Northwest Passage, educating the Indians about their new Great White Father, and collecting scientific information regarding the flora and fauna, climate and terrain, all with an eye for potential development. Imploring Lewis to take “great pains” in the accuracy of his observations, Jefferson further instructed the corps to become acquainted with “the soil and face of the country, its growth and vegetable production . . . the animals of the country generally . . . the mineral productions of every kind . . . climate . . . [and] the dates at which particular plants put forth, or lose their flower or leaf.” Unlike the previous explorations of competing nations, Lewis and Clark’s broad reconnaissance mission was the result of Jefferson’s plan to produce a thorough understanding of the market potential of the Louisiana Territory. Lewis in particular received extensive instruction in botanical collection techniques, Indian diplomacy, anthropological and ethnographic observa72  Claiming and Taming the Land

10. Territorial acquisitions, federal exploration, and overland trails. The contiguous United

States expanded geographically in an early nineteenth-­century burst of territorial acquisition: the Louisiana Purchase (1803), Oregon Treaty (1846), Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), and Gadsden Purchase (1853). To encourage and promote American settlement and sovereignty, the federal government sponsored numerous exploratory expeditions. Map by Amber Bell.

tion, mapmaking and instrument use, and the natural sciences during the summer prior to the expedition’s departure. From 1804 to 1806, the roughly thirty-­member corps, armed with this environmental vision for exploration (as opposed to, say, a military purpose), navigated up the Missouri River, spent the winter with the Mandans in Dakota Territory, crossed the Rocky Mountains, descended the mighty Columbia River, and returned to St. Louis after having traveled nearly eight thousand miles. On the Great Plains alone, they collected specimens that represented at least twenty new animal species and twenty-­two new plant species, and they provided the first descriptions of pronghorn antelope, grizzly bears, trumpeter swans, Lewis’s woodpeckers (named after the explorer), western rattlesnakes, cutthroat trout, and channel catfish, as well as far more thorough observations of bison, gray wolves, coyotes (which they called the “prairie wolf ”), and bullsnakes. The development potential of this extensive field survey was immediately manifest. The information the Corps of Discovery brought back to Washington fueled an American vision of harvestable riches and set a tone for subsequent expeditions to explore and document the West’s vast commercial potential. In April 1806, before the corps’s return, Jefferson had also dispatched a second Louisiana probe, led by Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis, to explore the origins of the Red River. But this ill-­fated southern counterpart to the Corps of Discovery, the so-­called Grand Expedition, only made it 650 miles before the Spanish firmly rebuffed it near the present-­day southeastern border of Oklahoma. Despite this geopolitical checkmate, Custis nevertheless cataloged more than 260 species, including new discoveries such as the Mississippi kite (a bird species) and the bois d’arc tree, in his brief three-­month journey. Zebulon Pike’s expedition in 1806–­7 and Stephen Long’s in 1820 continued to advance American trade into the West, although their descriptions of the arid region west of the hundredth meridian as the “Great American Desert” ensured that generations of westward migrants would leap-­frog over it for greener lands in Oregon and California (and that Native peoples would get relocated there). Explorers had yet to see the plains’ potential for ranching and wheat farming, though later in the century millions would arrive to try their luck. John C. Frémont’s three western forays in the 1840s also mapped out much of the westward route 74  Claiming and Taming the Land

to Oregon. Collectively, these expeditions all followed Jefferson’s charge to bring order out of chaos and firmly established the primacy of the federal government in the region. What these early federal explorers all shared was a way of looking at the natural environment for its market potential, and some of the first white Americans to venture into these newest territories in search of profits were fur traders and mountain men, whose epic treks often swung them out ahead of the nation’s advancing borders. In 1811 John Jacob Astor established the first American settlement on the Pacific Coast, Fort Astoria, located near the mouth of the Columbia River. As the far western headquarters for his Pacific Fur Company, Astor’s trading post set precedent for American presence in the region, and his “Overland Astorians” were the first whites to navigate Wyoming’s South Pass, which later became the main trade route over the Continental Divide to Oregon. Befitting their democratic heritage, many enterprising American mountain men sought to avoid costly allegiances with fur trading companies and became “free trappers,” signing short-­term contracts instead and hiring themselves out basically as fur free agents. To fully realize pelt profits, these American free traders needed access to the market, and the annual rendezvous along the Green River (about one hundred miles south of today’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming) provided it. Begun in 1825, the rendezvous was a yearly frontier trade fair that attracted mountain men, Indians, international traders, and women who exchanged goods and many services (other rendezvous occurred less frequently in Utah’s Cache Valley and in Taos, New Mexico). John Colter, for example, who had first ventured west as part of the Corps of Discovery, trapped from the Rockies to the Pacific and was the first to describe the weird and wonderful sights of Yellowstone, which also became known derisively as “Colter’s Hell.” Some of these mountain men—­Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and Jim Beckwourth, for example—­became part of the western mythology as they blazed new trails and gained romantic renown as America’s first western wilderness heroes. If the mantra was “Go West, young man,” Smith, Carson, and others led the way, for both migration and profitability. The “merchantable commodities” that initially drew entrepreneurs like Astor to the West Coast may have been in the maritime fur trade, especially Claiming and Taming the Land  75

in sea otters, with China and Russia, but the dictates of fashion in the millinery (hat) business soon elevated the North American land-­based trade in beaver pelts to the commercial pinnacle. In this iteration, beaver pelts were not so much valued for their thick outer fur as for the fine underhairs that (usually) Indian women pounded into felt that was then rendered into hats. The beaver’s underfur has an astonishing density, particularly in winter—­ anywhere from 75,000 to as many as 150,000 hairs per square inch—­and these gray, roughly inch-­long hairs also have a natural “barb” or “scaling” that interlocks when agitated and rubbed together in the felting process, creating a superior, waterproof material that holds its shape even under duress. By the seventeenth century, this densely matted “wool” had become the preferred material for French milliners, which rather quickly pushed European beavers to the brink of extinction. But in a society where one conveyed class standing and social identity through conspicuous beaver-­felt hat consumption, size and material mattered. And that meant that the seemingly limitless numbers of these furry rodents in America offered a tantalizing, untapped market. In the first half of the nineteenth century, “the fur trade was a reciprocal system which had to be bicultural and symbiotic in order to succeed,” historian William Swagerty has argued. Native laborers provided the foundation upon which the American Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its older, larger British-­Canadian competitor, the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), built the fur trade. As white-­introduced diseases ravaged newly exposed Native populations, Indians actively turned toward the market as a more efficient means of securing subsistence. White free traders were usually single men who married or cohabited with Native women for companionship, to facilitate positive cultural relations, and to increase their trapping and processing efficiency. Their mixed-­race descendants, called the Métis in the case of French-­Indian offspring and mestizo for Spanish-­Indian progeny, created a cultural middle ground of interaction and intermarriage between trappers and Native people and also anticipated the truly multicultural nature of the modern American West. In the southern Rockies as well, where the fur trade emanated out of Taos, New Mexico, white trappers like Kit Carson married or allied with New Mexican women of Indian, Mexican, or mestizo descent for the same reasons. 76  Claiming and Taming the Land

These usually mutually satisfying and reciprocal relationships allowed white mountain men to trap and hunt while Indian or Hispanic women, whose language skills and knowledge of the local natural environment were essential to their husbands’ success, tended to domestic duties, gathered and prepared food, and dressed pelts for travel and trade. The fur companies also utilized and exploited Indian transportation and communication networks and employed Native men as hunting guides. The transforming influence of the fur trade thus rippled out in all directions, affecting even the human landscape by modifying and shifting gender roles and facilitating cultural blending. Indian peoples made their own choices in participating in the fur trade and often profited from it early on; at the same time, the fur trade served as a powerful accelerant to the demographic shift from Native to white dominance in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies. Not all Indians found this new trade compelling, however. Many Native peoples derive their environmental understanding from their deep history of interacting with the natural world, and for the Blackfeet in Montana, the most powerful being in the sacred Water world is Kitaiksísskstaki, the Not Real Beaver. While there are many variations of the Beaver medicine story—­ “medicine,” or saam, and “bundle” being the terms to describe iconic religious objects—­most Blackfeet believe that it is their foundational religious ritual. According to historian Rosalyn LaPier, “In the basic story line a beaver and his family invite a human to live an entire winter in their lodge. . . . During that winter the beaver taught the human a great deal of new knowledge and introduced him or her to new natural elements such as the tobacco plant. And when the human returned to the Below world the following spring the beaver ‘transferred’ this supernatural knowledge and material objects to the human, who in turn shared them with other humans.” The Not Real Beaver also gave the Blackfeet powers over bison, to ensure that the people would never go hungry. As LaPier notes, the Blackfeet believe that the Beaver bundles create a direct connection “to the powerful supernatural beavers and related beings who could and would change nature to improve the human condition (if asked correctly).” Not surprisingly, given their intrinsic understanding of the essential role beavers played in the arid West, the Blackfeet did not participate in the beaver fur trade. Claiming and Taming the Land  77

In a sense, the fur companies were agents of a developing American empire that ushered the region into the global economic network. The British had pioneered the beaver fur trade in the Pacific Northwest to feed Europe’s insatiable hat fetish, but by the 1820s, thanks in part to Lewis and Clark’s expedition and Fort Astoria, the United States had entered the fray. Although the two countries had agreed to “joint occupation” of Oregon Country in 1818, Britain’s hbc knew that competition was bad for business, and so it sent trappers like Peter Skene Ogden to “trap out” areas ahead of the Americans. Hoping to effect a geopolitical checkmate, one hbc governor explained, “We have convincing proof that the country is a rich preserve of Beaver and which for political reasons we should endeavor to destroy as fast as possible.” This strategy brought short-­term profits, to be sure, but it also produced serious long-­term environmental consequences. Ogden’s tactics were stunningly effective, and his men quickly wiped out the entire Snake River basin beaver population. The “war” on these dam-­building animals continued throughout the northern Rockies: for example, in just six years, between 1824 and 1830, Ogden’s trappers harvested about eighteen thousand beavers south of the Columbia River, and, as early as 1824, Ogden proclaimed of the Bitterroot River in today’s Montana that “this part of the Country tho’ once abounding in Beaver is entirely ruined.” By 1840, for all intents and purposes, the hbc had fully realized its goal of creating a “fur desert.” Calculating the environmental at-­what-­cost loss of beavers to the West’s natural landscape is almost impossible. Beavers evolved as an endemic American animal with ancestral lines reaching back twenty-­four million years, including at least one family member—­the giant beaver (Castoroides), which grew to nearly seven feet in length and weighed in at nearly three hundred pounds—­that succumbed during the Pleistocene extinctions. The (much) smaller modern North American beaver (Castor canadensis) is typically about four feet long and weighs about forty to fifty pounds. On the eve of European arrival, between sixty million and two hundred million of them lived in all but the most extreme reaches of the continent. Over the millennia, these waddling ecosystem engineers had constructed such extensive and elaborate water mosaics throughout North America that one writer has humorously dubbed the pre-­Columbian period the “Castorocene” in their 78  Claiming and Taming the Land

honor. Wherever they built their homes, beavers functioned as a “keystone species”—­one that exerts a disproportionate effect on the ecosystem and without which many other species would falter. Fishes, deer, ducks, frogs, flies, and butterflies all rely on the wetlands created by beaver dam networks. Moreover, the wet, spongy beaver meadows also helped suppress fire, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Beaver dams slow streams into more gradual, meandering flows, which in turn allows the surrounding land to effectively absorb spring snowmelt and runoff and then mete out the reserved water for the remainder of the dry summer months. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, for example, the Kalapuyas utilized seasonal burning to proactively manipulate their natural surroundings and maintain open travel corridors. Beavered riparian zones kept these fires safely in check and also served as a refuge for local wildlife. But the fur desert campaigns of trappers and traders removed this valuable ecosystem service from the land, and the de-­beavered landscapes unraveled. The consequences were significant: declining water tables, increased erosion and deeply incised stream corridors, more frequent and severe flooding, shifting animal and plant populations, and more frequent and hotter wildfires. As the first big extractive corporations to work in the West, the fur companies set in motion a powerful precedent. In many ways the resource depletion wrought by the fur trade was analogous to the environmental costs of the bison/horse trade on the plains. Both the fur trade and the bison hide trade systematically commodified nature, treating it solely as something to sell, which in turn bound participants into the larger emerging system of global capitalism. Ironically, the success of the fur traders had led to their own demise, much as the success of bison hunters would do the same. Similarly, the sustainability of Native communities became increasingly impossible when demand for merchantable commodities dictated the “value” of nature. Indian reliance on white trade goods ultimately led to dependency, even though it created new opportunities in the short to medium run. By 1840, the year of the last rendezvous, the fickle whims of fashion had turned to silk hats, Indian reliance on the market had intensified, and the beaver population was hovering near extinction in the West. This was certainly no “pristine” Eden. Claiming and Taming the Land  79

In 1846, though, the consequences of American involvement in the fur trade seemed entirely positive for white traders, as well as for many of their Indian counterparts, as the United States and Great Britain peacefully negotiated their long-­standing dispute over control of the Pacific Northwest. Because of its presence in the area now, the United States claimed the 183-­million-­acre Oregon Territory south of the forty-­ninth parallel, while the British retained control over Canada to the north. For an ambitious nation like the United States, the acquisition of this region’s giant old-­growth timber, rivers teeming with salmon, rich agricultural lands, and soon-­to-­be-­discovered ore deposits was like hitting a natural resource jackpot. White farmers, missionaries, and settlers streamed into Oregon Country along the Oregon Trail, and by 1859 the territory had a large enough population to enter the Union as the nation’s thirty-­third state. During this explosive growth period, the western border of the United States surged toward the Pacific, from the forty-­ninth parallel all the way south to Mexico, and by midcentury this new West had become solidly American. But not all territorial acquisition was peaceful. The Southwest first belonged to Spain and then Mexico before the United States finally seized control of it. Spanish sovereignty dated back to the conquistadors’ original arrival in the New World at the turn of the sixteenth century, but by the early nineteenth century Spain’s glory days as a world power were waning. In 1821 a powerful Mexican nationalism successfully asserted its independence. For the United States, this changing of the guard proved significant, as a flourishing trade with Santa Fe strengthened American interest in acquiring the region. Mexico knew it. Although it had mineral, cattle, timber, and agricultural wealth, the arid Southwest held few waterways, which made the ones it did have extremely valuable. Tensions between these two uncomfortable neighbors grew as land lust and trade routes piqued U.S. desire to acquire more western land, particularly Texas, and legal American settlers and illegal squatters slid across international borders. Mexico, however, had no intention of relinquishing its new territories. The Mexican government understood that the key to sovereignty—­power and authority—­was control of the land itself: essentially, settlement equals sovereignty. So, in order to strengthen its hold on the far north, Mexico encouraged loyal colonists to claim cheap land in Texas. The requirements 80  Claiming and Taming the Land

were simple: recognition of Mexican sovereignty and, ideally, conversion to Roman Catholicism. Mexico’s goal was to develop stable, patriotic settlements that would bind these distant holdings more tightly to Mexico City, much like the Spanish missions had bound these lands to New Spain in the 1600s. But the scheme backfired. Most of the settlers who claimed Texas farms and ranches were not Mexicans but slave-­holding Americans from the Deep South seeking affordable and fertile land for growing cotton. Loyalty to Mexico and religious conversion were annoying but relatively simple obstacles to overcome, and soon Mexico’s Texas filled with Americans—­“Texians” in the parlance of the time. Despite numerous attempts to oust the horde of illegal squatters, who quickly outnumbered legal settlers, the Mexican government failed to halt the white southern tide, and in 1835 skirmishes between the two jostling neighbors finally erupted into war. Although the Texians won their independence from Mexico the following year, slavery thwarted their hopes of immediately joining the United States. In 1836 Texas was populous enough to become a new state, but 1836 was an election year, and the “Texas question” would most certainly thrust the polarizing north-­south slavery debate back into the center of American politics. So President Andrew Jackson declined to annex Texas territory, and the Lone Star Republic forged ahead as an independent country (although Mexico did not recognize it as such) until 1845, when calmer domestic politics made its admission into the United States less controversial. At least at home. Mexico, however, had never formally recognized Texas as independent, so U.S. annexation amounted to an act of war. And by 1846, the same year as the peaceful settlement of the Oregon Territory dispute with Great Britain, the United States was prepared to go to war to gain the invaluable natural resources of the Mexican Southwest. This near feverish desire to expand the nation westward became known as manifest destiny, a term coined by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan in 1845. It perfectly encapsulated the unique sense of mission and predestination that Euro-­Americans had cherished since the Puritans had proclaimed, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.” O’Sullivan’s argument that expansionism was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” was in essence a politicized nineteenth-­ Claiming and Taming the Land  81

century restatement of the seventeenth-­century utopian vision of Puritan leader John Winthrop. It quickly became a national mantra and served as the perfect justification for imperialism. By 1846 the United States had set its sights on a far bigger prize than just Texas. Farther west lay California, whose riches included livestock, verdant farmland, vineyards, and a seemingly enslavable Indian workforce. That year, President James Polk upped the ante by arraying American troops provocatively along the Rio Grande, facing Mexico. The Mexican government countered. The predictable result was the Mexican-­American War, which began in May of that year and lasted until early 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided for American acquisition of the Mexican Cession—­the entire 338-­million-­acre Southwest, from California to Texas—­in a $15 million steal. Five years later, in 1853, the United States paid Mexico an additional $10 million for the Gadsden Purchase, nearly 19 million acres in what is today southern Arizona and New Mexico, to complete the continental outline of the nation. White settlers followed federal explorers, traders, and the U.S. military into the West, and their epic treks soon transformed the natural landscape and the lives of those already living there. The possibilities inherent in the wide-­open West tantalized easterners, who saw endless opportunities for renewal and revenue. The first whites to head west in significant numbers were pioneer farmers, who followed on the heels of the fur trappers and mountain men along the California and Oregon Trails in their covered wagons and sought to claim and tame the West as their own manifest destiny. Although Indian and Hispanic agriculturalists had preceded them, Euro-­American farmers had townspeople trailing behind them—­the merchants, missionaries, and medical personnel who in turn created markets for finished goods, food, and real estate. They also brought with them familiar plants and animals that would impose their own version of the earlier Columbian Exchange on the flora and fauna of the coastal West. In 1847, for example, one intrepid Overland Trail migrant hauled hundreds of apple, pear, cherry, and peach tree saplings, along with grapevines and currant and gooseberry bushes, from Iowa to Oregon. He immediately planted them into the orchards, berry patches, and vineyards

82  Claiming and Taming the Land

near present-­day Portland that would in time evolve into the multimillion-­ dollar fruit industry all along the temperate zones of Oregon and California. This was white settlers’ version of progress and civilization, but from the perspective of the region’s endemic flora and fauna it was devastating. During the 1840s and 1850s alone, nearly a quarter of a million settlers made their way west along the overland trails, and they took their toll on valuable timber stands, using the trees for wagon repairs, firewood, home construction, and fencing. White displacement of Native peoples also caused thick fir forests to replace the park-­like oak savannahs that the Indians’ seasonal burning had maintained. Native prairie grasses retreated against the onslaught of exotic wheat and Kentucky bluegrass lawns, and salmon runs began their precipitous decline toward endangered species protection in the twentieth century. In the at-­what-­cost calculus of western expansion, these changes represented the environmental price of “progress.” One of the most remarkable of these overland pioneer migrations belonged to the Mormons. In 1847 this uniquely American faith group sought protection and salvation in the Great American Desert—­testimony, indeed, to the powerful forces pushing them westward. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints—­historically known as Mormons or lds—­arose in 1830 as the divine vision of a charismatic prophet named Joseph Smith during the foment of religious revivals in upstate New York that historians call the Second Great Awakening. But non-­Mormons—­known as Gentiles to the faithful—­grew to resent the church’s isolationist tendencies and unorthodox theology (from the viewpoint of most Americans), its growing political and commercial influence, and the newly sanctioned practice of polygamy, and in June 1844 a vicious mob in Nauvoo, Illinois, took matters into its own hands and murdered Smith and his brother. During this nadir, Brigham Young emerged to lead the fractured flock, and he quickly determined that the safest refuge for the Mormons lay to the west, outside the boundaries of the United States near the Great Salt Lake. John C. Frémont’s 1844 California expedition had described “a region of great pastoral promise abounding with fine streams . . . [and] soil that would produce wheat” along the Wasatch Front. For Young and the Mormons, this would be the place.

Claiming and Taming the Land  83

The Saints’ Young-­led migration was a feat of organizational skill and coordination; there would be no wandering in the desert for this Mormon Moses and his people. Their flight from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley would be church-­organized, church-­financed, and church-­led, establishing both Young and the lds apostles as the authorities in the region. In the beginning, in their new Promised Land, the church was omnipresent, and it placed a strong emphasis on cooperation, community, and environmental stewardship. As Young preached, “It is our privilege and our duty to search all things upon the face of the earth, and learn what there is for man to enjoy, what God has ordained for the benefit and happiness of mankind, and then make use of it without sinning against him.” This religious “land ethic” and insistence on the divinity of nature—­“It does not matter whether I or anybody else owns it, if we only work to beautify it and make it glorious, it is all right”—­suffused early Mormon settlement of the American West and set it apart from the many individualistic and capitalistic pursuits that had dominated other Euro-­American colonization efforts. Thus, even in the driest years, community welfare prevailed, and everyone received at least some water to irrigate their fields and farms. When Young and the Mormons settled in their Great Basin kingdom, they confronted long-­term challenges—­aridity and isolation in particular—­that their earlier nomadism had avoided. Their theocracy integrated Young’s call for environmental stewardship into daily life and practice as it laid out and assigned new communities and distributed land based on family size and ability to cultivate. Even more importantly, it presided over a collective communal irrigation system that initially was a notable departure from the “prior appropriation” (i.e., first-­in-­time, first-­in-­right) allocation practices in other parts of the West. Young proclaimed that the faithful would take the “fallen” deserts of northern Mexico (because the desert still belonged to Mexico at that time) and turn them into the Garden of Eden. Water was the key. And redemption of the land was the means to the Saints’ salvation. For the Mormons, this winning of the West extended far beyond water allocation, however; it was about stewardship of the divine. Smith had earlier instructed his followers that “all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man,” and Young’s 84  Claiming and Taming the Land

abiding belief in the interconnectedness of all things, both spiritual and material, shaped his religious and temporal teachings and guided his frontier conservation ethic. In lds scripture, Smith reiterated the idea from Genesis that God had invested the trees and animals, like humans, with “living souls.” Smith’s successor, Young, believed his task and goal as the Lord’s steward, then, was the promotion of the Mormons’ earthly and spiritual welfare, which he effectively fused when he preached, “It is not our privilege to waste the Lord’s substance.” The Saints’ survival necessitated a reckoning with the reality of arid scarcity and a meting out of natural resources. Yet for Young, the religious nature of Mormon settlement meant that waste was nothing short of sinful: “It is all good, the air, the water, the gold and silver; the wheat, the fine flour, and the cattle upon a thousand hills are all good. . . . But that moment that men seek to build up themselves . . . and seek to hoard up riches, . . . it proves that their hearts are weaned from their God; and their riches will perish in their fingers, and they with them.” Instead, lds doctrine clearly articulates that “the Lord should make every man accountable, as a steward over earthly blessings.” “The Lord’s Beavers,” as environmental historian Donald Worster has labeled the hardworking Saints, utilized strategies similar to earlier Indian and Mexican-­origin practices of communal control and usufruct rights in their remarkable conquest of the desert they chose to make bloom. Native peoples had lived in the region for thousands of years, of course, and had altered the natural environment to suit their own needs. Paleolithic hunters had stalked mammoths perhaps into extinction, and ancestors of the Anasazis had extracted life from the harsh and arid environs through hunting and gathering until the rise of agriculture and irrigation allowed the Anasazi and Fremont cultures to thrive. The Utes and Paiutes encountered by the Mormons used fire for hunting and to promote open grasslands enticing to game. Spanish-­Mexican settlements had also embraced collectivized agriculture and water distribution in the West. Water rights on ejidos (communally farmed lands) functioned as a regulated commons, while complementary rules and regulations governing land use and labor discouraged monopoly and promoted subsistence. Historian Devon Peña argues that the acequia institution—­the communally managed irrigation works of Mexican-­origin Claiming and Taming the Land  85

peoples—­was “not just a sustainable irrigation technology but an important civic institution for local self-­governance.” Indeed, the collective, communitarian ethic that suffused the acequia system, he argues, reinforced the inseparable connections between land and water and the use of both, creating the foundation for what he calls a “watershed democracy.” All community members were expected to share in the maintenance and upkeep of the system, which reinforced the equitable distribution of the water resource in this usufruct system of commons access and in sharp contrast to the market-­ based system of commodified water (prior appropriation) that emerged in much of the rest of the West. As Peña notes, “In times of drought, scarcity is shared and everyone uses less water, so that all may continue to farm.” While the Latter-­day Saints would adhere to many of these same principles, it was the scale of the Mormon transformation that was so striking. Although they brought zero experience in water management with them, by 1850 the Mormons were irrigating more than 16,000 acres in what Worster has called “one of the most river-­deprived areas in the United States.” By 1890 these thrifty and persevering pioneers—­who called their provisional state Deseret, which means “honeybee” in the Book of Mormon—­had adopted the beehive as the symbol of their work ethic and were watering more than 260,000 acres to support a population in excess of 200,000. The church planned, financed, and managed the web of canals and dams that produced bountiful harvests, which, in turn, filled the pantries of enterprising Saints, albeit with non-­native plants and animals. Young and his followers fulfilled their promise to “make the desert bloom as a rose,” but the environmental price for success there and in the rest of the American West would be high. Heeding the call to come to “Zion” and “be gathered unto one place,” more than seventy thousand Mormons trekked to Utah over the two decades following Young’s arrival, bringing about significant changes in this arid land lying at the foot of the Wasatch Range. Although their religious zeal distinguished the Saints from other overland migrants, their basic outlook on the natural environment mirrored that of pioneers generally. They, too, sought fertile soil for their non-­native crops, sufficient grasslands and meadows for their non-­native livestock, and suitable timber stands for building materials. The Mormons also exposed local Indians to deadly waves of smallpox and 86  Claiming and Taming the Land

measles, and while they grudgingly acknowledged Native people’s title to ancestral homelands, they often failed to respect it. The long-­term success of Mormon settlement belies some initial ecological difficulties. For example, the nearly two thousand original migrants who struggled through the first winter in their Deseret Eden faced drought conditions and a plague of crop-­destroying crickets the following spring. Although flocks of seagulls soon descended to feast on the insects, the chirping hordes continued to menace these newest agriculturalists for years to come (and still billow up in vexing clouds today). Starvation and food shortages plagued early settlers, and various predators further compounded the Saints’ subsistence struggles by preying on their farm animals. Hungry pioneers soon depleted the region’s big game populations at the same time as they introduced thousands of sheep, cattle, and other easy prey—­nearly 70,000 domesticated animals by 1870. The predictable livestock mortalities led to a pioneer war on predatory “wasters and destroyers.” As one Salt Lake Valley resident explained, “There is a general raid by the settlers on bears, wolves, foxes, crows, hawks, eagles, magpies and all ravenous birds and beasts.” One two-­month toll was impressive and shocking: eighty-­four men had slaughtered 2 bears, 2 wolverines, 2 bobcats, 9 eagles, 31 mink, 530 magpies, hawks, and owls, 1,026 ravens, and 1,192 foxes, coyotes, and wolves. Indeed, as historian Victor Sorensen humorously observes, “one way to ‘keep the wolf from the door’ was to kill and eat it.” Additionally, one of the earliest ordinances of the new territorial legislature of 1850 was a $2 bounty on wolves, coyotes, and foxes. Pelts were also acceptable legal tender for tithing credits in the Salt Lake Stake for a time. This enmity directed at “noxious vermin” continued into the twentieth century, enabling entrepreneurial hunters to earn a $100 reward for every wolf killed near Kanab, for example. In September 1912, the newspaper there dutifully reported that “W. E. Hamblin, S. L. Lewis, Sixtus and Jett Johnson, Frank and Jos. Hamblin have gone on the range to hunt wolves.” This hatred for wild predators seems incongruous with the teachings of Young and the early prophets, yet the Saints embraced these exemptions to God’s sacred creation in the animals they viewed as enemies of their efforts to sanctify Zion in the desert. Within a decade of their arrival, Salt Lake settlers Claiming and Taming the Land  87

had also ravaged local timber stands and their livestock had overgrazed the grasslands, which in turn led to damaging flash floods and debris flows. Woody sagebrush and exotic Russian thistles (tumbleweeds) capitalized on the disturbed soils and soon drove out native bluestem and grama grasses. Although the church endeavored to manage Deseret’s natural resources for the good of the people, all of the people, the mirage of Edenic paradise soon faded; Mormon economic stability would ultimately rest to a large extent on a growing trade with westward-­bound migrants along the overland trails. That, too, would take a toll. As the lds faithful shifted their production efforts to supply growing demand from extralocal consumers, they became inextricably entwined in the larger emerging market economy. It was ultimately unsustainable. This change in focus from local, ecclesiastically governed subsistence to national and even global, secularly motivated commerce fundamentally transformed Mormon lifeways and gradually drew Utahns away from Young’s communal land ethic. The short-­term effect of Young’s land policies had produced numerous flourishing, stable settlements scattered across Deseret. But the long-­term consequence was environmental erosion; it became impossible for Mormons to continue to live as they had initially lived in the American West. For the Saints, this meant that Young’s land ethic lost its prescriptive relevance and that their original godly focus on environmental stewardship became more secularly oriented toward expansion and development. Quite simply, the farther Mormon settlement diffused across Deseret, the less effective Young and the lds church’s centralized control, scrutiny, and oversight became. Local adaptations that made sense economically, if not environmentally, help explain why Young’s initial teachings were not maintained over the long term. By the 1890s, the degradation was sobering: numerous species in peril, overgrazing and land erosion, and obvious limits to once abundant resources. The Mormons’ long-­term prosperity derived from their successful communal conquest and transformation of nature, as well as their fortuitous settlement at an important waypoint along the California and Oregon Trails. Thus, when a California Mormon named Samuel Brannan bellowed “Gold!” through the streets of San Francisco in 1848, spilling James Marshall’s secret, the Saints stood poised to make a handsome profit by supplying the rush of 88  Claiming and Taming the Land

forty-­niners destined to flow through their territory. For the United States, the timing of the California gold rush was perfect. Just as the Mexican-­American War concluded and California passed into American hands, the nation hit the jackpot about fifty miles northeast of present-­day Sacramento. On the eve of the discovery, California was sparsely populated by about 14,000 non-­ Indians and the remnants of disease-­ravaged Native peoples; in less than two years, there were more than 100,000 settlers, and by 1852 the two-­year-­old state’s population had soared to 250,000. As the world rushed in, however, the rising human tide brought with it destructive gold-­mining techniques that paid little heed to the environmental costs such a bonanza incurred. Initial discoveries like those of Marshall focused on the gold nuggets that settled out along the streambed edges of California’s rivers, so miners adopted various “placer” techniques to swirl and scratch the precious metal from the earth. Placer mining relies on the relative density of gold versus other alluvial deposits—­the loose rocks, sand, and soils left behind by flowing water. Miners swish the sediments around in some water, and the dense gold pieces settle to the bottom while the other, lighter materials get washed away. The simplest technique is panning for gold, where the miner literally scoops up some sand, gravel, and water in a shallow pan, swirls it around, and picks out the shiny pieces—­simple but also very small in scale. Usually, once a miner located a gold deposit, he (rarely she) switched to rocker boxes and sluice boxes. As its name suggests, the rocker box was like a big cradle that the miner could agitate, like a much larger version of the pan, to sift through significantly greater amounts of silt, sand, and gravel alluvium. If “rocking the golden baby,” as rocker boxing was known, still seemed too small in scale, miners could employ a sluice box. This technique utilized a long chute or walled run (usually three to ten feet long) with a corrugated or stepped bottom. Miners shoveled debris into the top of the box, and rushing water then sluiced the material over the rungs, grabbing the heavier gold and flushing away the lighter “waste rock.” For the most part, none of these early placer techniques extracted a significant environmental toll because they were all still relatively small in scale. But as obvious surface deposits quickly played out, miners resorted to more elaborate schemes of river mining. Between about 1853 and the early 1880s, Claiming and Taming the Land  89

11. Malakoff Diggings [sic], California, 1905. In an effort to maximize mining efficiency,

entrepreneurial extractors shifted from small-­scale panning and sluicing to large-­scale hydraulic mining, which strafed entire hillsides with high-­pressure water jets to expose valuable ores and caused serious environmental damage. Today, the Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park interprets this former hydraulic mining site. Photo by Carleton E. Watkins. banc pic 1905.17175.099, Hearst Mining Collection, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

increasingly aggressive techniques diverted entire streams through chutes to expose the gold lying in now-­dry beds and then quickly shifted to hydraulic mining, which eroded entire mountains and washed countless tons of silt and debris downstream. The rationale was simple: the more gravel miners could process, the more gold they could discover. The hydraulic process that California gold seekers perfected involved trapping water in holding ponds and diverting it through increasingly narrow channels until the concentrated stream finally blasted out of a canvas hose like a mighty water cannon and erosionary force. One observer remarked that “the stream when it leaves the pipe has such force that it would cut a man in two if it should hit him. Two 90  Claiming and Taming the Land

or three and sometimes even six such streams play against the bottom of a hill, and earth and stones, often of great size, are washed away until at last an immense slice of the hill itself gives way and tumbles down.” The scale of these hydraulic operations was epic. Armed with these water cannons, miners strafed entire hillsides and sent roaring debris rivers through enormous sluices in their quest to strike it rich. It was monstrously successful. In just over thirty years, hydraulic extraction yielded eleven million ounces of gold, worth more than $700 million—­the equivalent of approximately $20.6 billion in 2022 dollars! California gold rush miners may have perfected hydraulic mining, but the environmental costs were staggering and enduring. Moreover, miners introduced this stunningly efficient and massively destructive technique throughout the Rocky Mountain West, providing the model for subsequent fortune hunters to wreak havoc on other mountain ecologies. Historian Raymond Dasmann has estimated that this three-­decade onslaught caused more environmental damage along the Sierra Nevada than any other event in the past six hundred million years. Hydraulic mining across the region flushed torrents of rubble down on farmlands, fouled streams and rivers, and destroyed salmon runs. Debris streaming down into the Central Valley of California, for example, raised the overall level of the area by seven feet, threatening the agricultural endeavors of farmers with sterile soils and raging spring floods, as well as pitting these two extractive resource users against one another. One contemporary hydraulic critic lamented, “Hills melt away and disappear under its influence. . . . The desolation which remains . . . is remediless and appalling.” The “diggins” (or, sometimes, “diggings”), as California’s vast extractive operation was known, also required huge amounts of timber for fuel and construction, and both mines and communities dramatically accelerated the deforestation of the territory. This in turn exposed big game animals to hungry hunters, who decimated California’s elk herds to feed the insatiable demands of the burgeoning mining camps. By the 1890s, for example, the entire population of tule elk, native only to California, flirted with extinction as its population plummeted to just twenty-­eight individuals from an Claiming and Taming the Land  91

estimated high of five hundred thousand animals. Pronghorns faced a similar threat of eradication. River diversions and dams also altered historic stream flows and in some cases relocated waterways wholesale into new channels and beds. Aquatic flora and fauna simply could not follow or adapt rapidly enough. Flushed sediments clogged flow regimes, muddied waters, and silted up lakes and harbors. Returning salmon, which rely on clean gravel beds for their redds (spawning nests) and are extremely sensitive to changes in water temperature, turbidity, and flows, found a muddy mess. The twin pressures of miner overfishing and polluted habitat sent salmon numbers into a free fall—­a collapse that rippled throughout the California ecosystem. Salmon constitute an invaluable component of any riparian nutrient cycle; having spent much of their lives fattening up in the oceans, salmon return to their freshwater origins to spawn and die, and their decaying carcasses nourish everything from aquatic invertebrates to eagles, bears, and humans. California may still proudly fly a state flag emblazoned with a grizzly from a brief period of independence as the Bear Flag Republic (in 1846), but without salmon to sustain them, the big bears disappeared in just a couple of generations. Although the courts finally banned hydraulic mining in 1884 as “a public and private nuisance,” the salmon runs would never recover. The environmental impact of gold lust reached far beyond California; the gold rush, it turned out, was also bad for bison. The forty-­niners and other western fortune seekers had to get to California first, and to do so, some of them crossed the Great Plains. There, they helped precipitate a momentous ecological collapse that would have deep and abiding historical repercussions. For white emigrants, the Great Plains presented a great obstacle—­a formidable, seemingly endless stretch of grass and wind that lay between them and the promised lands of California and Oregon. For Native people like the Comanches, though, the wide-­open prairie offered opportunity. Indian adoption of horse culture in the eighteenth century and participation in a wider market economy had enabled them to effectively exploit the bison wealth that teemed all around them. Or so it seemed. Buffalo were central to Plains Indians’ lives, providing the foundation of their diet, their material culture (attire, tipis, etc.), their religious identity, and their primary means 92  Claiming and Taming the Land

of trade. But by 1840 the herds had fallen into serious decline. Yet the “usual suspects” in this story—­white overland travelers, hide hunters, or the U.S. Army—­were not the main culprits. In fact, several historians have demonstrated that white emigrants could not possibly have precipitated such a disastrous bison decline all on their own. For one thing, the early pioneers were notoriously lousy hunters who had neither the time nor the energy to devote to the hunt—­they were pressing hard to beat the November snows in the Sierra Nevada to reach their California or Oregon destinations. Plus, bison numbers had already begun to drop precipitously by 1840, before the main incursion of white settlers; indeed, many emigrant journals describe the skeletal remains of these shaggy beasts along the trails, indicating that the die-­off was already well under way. Hide hunters and the army arrived only in the final years of bison decline. The near extinction of bison, then, was not the result of some single, catastrophic event or agent but rather the consequence of a complex web of colliding changes that beset the Great Plains at a particular and critical moment in history. In other words, any one of the challenges, in and of itself, would not have been enough to deliver the knockout blow. It was instead the collective barrage—­the perfect storm—­that doomed bison and, in turn, the people whose lives depended on them. The Comanches, Arapahos, and Cheyennes shouldered some but certainly not all responsibility, since they used bison for both subsistence and trade. “Buffalo robes” (cured bison hides) had become the medium of exchange on the plains, and Indians needed this form of cash to buy commodities such as agricultural foods, guns and ammunition essential to warfare, alcohol, and other items, and so they hunted well beyond their need for meat and subsistence. Unfortunately, to get more guns to defend and take hunting grounds, Indians had to kill more bison, for which they needed more guns—­it was an insatiable and ultimately unsustainable cycle. The robe trade also focused on female bison, thus constricting the reproductive abilities of the herds. But other significant factors were also at work. Just as white emigrants crossing the plains infected Indians with deadly diseases such as smallpox and cholera, their livestock transmitted deadly diseases, such as anthrax and bovine tuberculosis, to bison. Both people and animals suffered predictable Claiming and Taming the Land  93

population declines as a result. These same emigrants and their livestock also competed with Indians, their horses, and the bison for grass. But by winter, the emigrants had moved on to greener grounds in the Far West; the Indians, horses, and bison had to fend for themselves in the increasingly depleted microenvironments of the plains, such as river bottoms. When spring finally arrived, all three emerged weakened, only to repeat the cycle in a downward spiral of starvation, desperation, and increased market dependency. Already vulnerable due to these multiple stresses, both human and animal plains populations teetered on the edge of survival at precisely the moment that drought seared the region. From the mid-­1840s to the 1860s, there was too little grass and too many mouths. It was too much. White market hunters streamed onto the plains in the 1870s to finish the job that nature, white emigrants, and Indians had set in motion. They slaughtered bison by the thousands, taking only their valuable hides to sell and leaving their carcasses to rot. By 1882 the deed had been done. As one bison hunter remembered, “There settled over them [the plains] a vast quiet. . . . The buffalo was gone.” Buffalo-­centric Indians met a similar fate of drastically reduced numbers and confinement to reservations. The bison story is an illustration of both Liebig’s law and the tragedy of the commons. As discussed in the introduction, ecologist Garrett Hardin introduced the tragedy of the commons dilemma in a 1968 article arguing that individuals acting in their own self-­interest will ignore the best interests of the larger society and deplete “common” resources. In this instance, the common resource was the unregulated, shared prairies of the Great Plains. As more lives came to depend on this ultimately finite resource, the limited supply of grass became too depleted and could no longer sustain the bison ecology. Liebig’s law led to declining populations that, at least for bison, flirted with extinction. In the end, then, change, both economic and environmental, devastated bison. To be sure, change had wrought wondrous progress for the nation, too, which celebrated the realization of its manifest destiny to “overspread the continent.” But at what cost? Exploration had opened up vast new territories to Euro-­American settlers from the United States and immigrants from abroad, revealed previously unknown peoples, as well as plant and animal species, and ensured that the nation would have a natural resource 94  Claiming and Taming the Land

base capable of catapulting it to the forefront of world power and influence. Exploitation of the West’s bounty was the most obvious way to supply the demands of the burgeoning country; in 1783 the nation’s population had been just 3.25 million people, but in 1850 there were 30 million Americans, and immigrants continued to pour in every year. Yet, while the West’s natural resources constituted the region’s greatest asset, they would also ensure its colony-­like status for more than a century. Quite simply, eastern factories would render western raw materials into finished products for decades. The same market-­driven perspective that had opened the West, bringing so-­called civilization and progress, had also driven beavers and bison (and numerous other species) to the brink of extinction, fouled pristine waterways in the fevered search for gold, introduced exotic agricultural species into an arid West that, in turn, demanded irrigation works on a scale previously unimagined, and systematically destroyed Indian lives and culture at a level frequently approaching genocide. This was never Eden. The West may have been “the right place” for some, but the arriving multitudes took a heavy toll on the region’s land and water and displaced and dispossessed Native peoples already living there. Abundance bred abuse. As environmental historian William Cronon has suggested, “The people of plenty were a people of waste.” Suggested Reading

Diana L. Ahmad, “‘I Fear the Consequences to Our Animals’: Emigrants and Their Livestock on the Overland Trails,” Great Plains Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 165–­82. Kent Curtis, “Producing a Gold Rush: National Ambitions and the Northern Rocky Mountains, 1853–­1863,” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 275–­97. Sara Dant, “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land: Brigham Young’s Environmental Ethic,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, ed. Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 29–­46. Raymond F. Dasmann, “Environmental Changes before and after the Gold Rush,” California History 77, no. 4 (Winter 1998–­99): 105–­22. Eric Jay Dolin, “The Precious Beaver,” in Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York: Norton, 2010), 13–­23. Claiming and Taming the Land  95

Jared Farmer, “Ute Genesis, Mormon Exodus,” in On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–­53. Kelly Feinstein, “Fashionable Felted Fur: The Beaver Hat in 17th Century English Society,” University of California, Santa Cruz, History Department, 2006, available at https://​humwp​.ucsc​.edu​/cwh​/feinstein​/Main​%20page​.html. Dan L. Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 465–­85. Also “Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah,” Environmental Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 325–­44. William H. Goetzmann, “The Mountain Men,” in Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: History Book Club, 1993). Ben Goldfarb, “Dislodged,” in Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (White River Junction vt: Chelsea Green, 2018), 37–­60. “The Gold Rush,” American Experience, produced by Randall MacLowry and Laura Longsworth, aired November 6, 2006, on pbs, available at https://​www​.pbs​.org​ /wgbh​/americanexperience​/films​/goldrush​/​#film​_description. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–­48. William Lang, “Describing a New Environment: Lewis and Clark and Enlightenment Science in the Columbia River Basin,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 105, no. 3(Fall 2004): 353, 360–­89. Rosalyn R. LaPier, “Closed Season: The Blackfeet Winter,” in Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 64–­81. Also “Why Is Water Sacred to Native Americans?,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 8 (Fall 2017), available at https://​editions​.lib​.umn​.edu​/openrivers​/article​/why​-is​-water​-sacred​-to​-native​ -americans/. Marcus B. Nash, “Righteous Dominion and Compassion for the Earth,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, ed. Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 263–­74. Jennifer Ott, “‘Ruining’ the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fur Desert Policy,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 166–­95. Devon G. Peña, “Ecological Revolutions in El Norte,” in Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 70–­72. 96  Claiming and Taming the Land

Victor Sorensen, “The Wasters and Destroyers: Community-­Sponsored Predator Control in Early Utah Territory,” Utah Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 26–­41. William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (April 1980): 159–­80. B. Toastie [Brian Oaster], “Missing Map by William Clark Turns Up with an Unflattering Revelation,” High Country News, March 2, 2022, available at https://​www​ .hcn.​ org/​ articles​/indigenous​-affairs​-history​-missing-​ map-​ by-​ william-​ clark-​ turns​ -up​-with​-an​-unflattering​-revelation. Stewart L. Udall, The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West (Washington dc: Island Press, 2002). Elliott West, “Lewis and Park: Or, Why It Matters That the West’s Most Famous Explorers Didn’t Get Sick (or at Least Not Really Sick),” and “Becoming Mormon,” in The Essential West: Collected Essays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 15–­43, 176–­93. David M. Wrobel, “Exceptionalism and Globalism,” in Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire and Exceptionalism, from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 21–­47.

Claiming and Taming the Land  97

The Great Barbecue

4

In 1886, after a summer of scorching heat, drought, and wildfires that incinerated the prairie grasses so essential to open-­range grazing, November snows signaled the start of a brutal winter. Then in January, an Arctic outbreak screamed down the eastern side of the Rockies, unleashing more than a foot of snow in just a few hours and dropping temperatures to −60°F. Howling winds intensified the polar blast, creating massive snowdrifts that blocked trains and froze solid their livestock cargoes. On the exposed, overgrazed plains, the consequences were especially deadly. Weakened cattle drifted blindly ahead of the storm, only to pile up and die against barbed wire fences, as did thousands of pronghorns that had never evolved the ability to jump. Tragic stories of conscientious ranchers venturing out to check on their animals during the blizzard only added to the grim toll. That spring, when warm Chinook winds finally melted the frozen landscape into roiling streams and rivers, the extent of the disaster on the range became evident: between 60 and 95 percent of the cattle—­hundreds of thousands of animals—­had starved to death and were now rotting and fouling the landscape. One devastated rancher named Theodore Roosevelt summed up the scene in the Dakotas, writing, “Well, we have had a perfect smashup all through the cattle country of the northwest. The losses are crippling.” This Great Die-­Up, as it came to be called—­a macabre wordplay on “roundup”—­not only ended Roosevelt’s ranching career but also 99

closed the era of open-­range ranching outfits and the cowboy culture of the West they had inspired. While much of mid-­nineteenth-­century American history often focuses on slavery and the Civil War, these traditional markers of time were not central to the issues confronting westerners. To be sure, as the nation became increasingly agitated by the slavery question during the 1850s, the fate of that “peculiar institution,” as it was sometimes called, became intimately intertwined with the West’s lands. Would slavery extend all the way to the Pacific or remain confined to the Deep South? But even as these debates widened the fissure between the North and the South until civil war convulsed the nation, the West’s relationship to the rest of the country remained largely unequal, dependent, and colonial. For the West, the real consequence of the Civil War was that it significantly ramped up the Industrial Revolution in the eastern portion of the country, which in turn created heavier demands for the natural resources from the western portion. Thus, while Union forces battled their Confederate foes over questions of slavery and states’ rights east of the Mississippi River, the federal government began binding the West to the nation by subsidizing the building of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad and fighting wars to force the region’s Indian nations onto reservations. As discussed in the previous chapter, rapid U.S. territorial acquisition meant that by the 1850s, the entire West was open to American settlement—­a process the federal government sought to promote as the surest means of extending national sovereignty over the region. But, as always, successful settlement was beholden to the realities of the natural environment. Lack of trees and water on the Great Plains had pushed earlier Overland Trail pioneers on to California and Oregon, but new federal laws would encourage migrants to reconsider these assumptions and revise their homestead and ranching plans. The rise of corporate capitalism and big business, particularly after the Civil War, would also fuel an extractive frenzy in the West. This, too, the federal government encouraged by eagerly adopting legislation designed to funnel the resultant ores, timber, cattle, and produce to a hungry and economically expanding East. Historian Vernon Parrington called this giveaway the Great Barbecue: “Congress had rich gifts to bestow—­in lands, 100  The Great Barbecue

tariffs, subsidies, favors of all sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be. A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited.” This exploitative environmental attitude would help establish a long-­term pattern of unsustainable resource consumption destined to haunt the United States until the present day, but not everyone saw the West in this way. In 1878 Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell laid before Congress a document that writer and editor T. H. Watkins has characterized as “quite possibly the most revolutionary document ever to tumble off the presses of the Government Printing Office”: Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Despite its rather dry title, Powell’s account of the American West outlined a radical new proposal for the logical and rational utilization and settlement of this largely waterless region, so different from the East. Beginning in 1867, this intrepid explorer and scientist had roamed far and wide across the Great American Desert—­ascending its peaks, traversing its basin-­and-­range topography, and pioneering its rivers. By 1878, perhaps no single man in the nation knew the West’s geography more intimately than Powell. Armed with his careful observations, particularly of the Mormon model of collective and cooperative resource use, Powell felt confident endorsing a novel approach to settlement in the region. He divided the arid West into three categories: irrigable lands, timberlands, and pasturage lands. Each of these, he argued, demanded a unique approach—­an environmentally responsible land-­use solution. With these demands in mind, he called for a halt to all settlement of the West until federal surveyors could complete a thorough classification of the entire region. Needless to say, Powell’s caution clashed with western boosterism, prompting bullish capitalists and a gung-­ho Congress to ignore his rational vision of tempering extractive western settlement with solid science that might well have moderated future scarcities and environmental problems. Instead, they aggressively sought to “boom” the region’s natural resources and transfer public lands into private hands as quickly as possible. In the end, western development would bear little resemblance to Powell’s proposals, for better and for worse, yet his prescient observations masterfully identify many of The Great Barbecue  101

the sustainability challenges still confronting the West even in the twenty-­ first century. Discussions of western settlement and development, and thus the region’s environment, often fail to account for the significant influence of science. But in the nineteenth century, the scientific method began to reshape not only the ways in which people interacted with nature but also the very ways in which they understood the world and how it worked. Inventions, such as the steam shovel and nitroglycerine, and hydraulic mining operations radically altered the scope and scale of mineral extraction in the West, but scientific innovation was also beginning to explain species’ diversity and change over time in rational, logical ways. No one was more influential in this area than the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who published his paradigm-­shifting On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin’s simple and profound conclusion was that the diversity of all life on earth was the product of generations of evolution, branching from a common origin through a process of natural selection. Darwin’s discovery of the signal importance of the environment to all life forms certainly influenced the thinking of Powell and others. For example, following the publication of Darwin’s masterpiece, what had previously been vaguely lumped together as “natural history,” separated out into the distinct fields of botany, zoology, and ethnology. In 1879 Powell became the first director of the nation’s new Bureau of Ethnology, dedicated to the linguistic, archeological, and ethnographic study of North American Indians—­the nascent field of anthropology. In western environmental history, Darwin’s influence is most apparent in the writings of George Perkins Marsh, whom some consider America’s first environmentalist. In 1864 Marsh published Man and Nature, a pioneering work that introduced the concept of ecology—­the study of the relationship among and between organisms and their environment (although the term “ecology” first appeared in an 1866 German publication). A brilliant linguist, scholar, and scientist, Marsh served in a variety of public capacities—­foreign ambassador to Turkey and later Italy, congressional representative from Vermont, member of that state’s railroad commission, and so on—­that gave him a rich foundation upon which to base his argument. His keen observations and experiences in Europe in particular convinced him that the primary 102  The Great Barbecue

culprit in the collapse of ancient Mediterranean civilizations (e.g., Rome) had been environmental degradation (deforestation in particular). And quite remarkably for the time, Marsh did not hesitate to name the primary perpetrator: “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.” Technology and myopic economic development had enabled humans to conquer and “civilize” in the name of progress, he conceded, but at what cost? Man and Nature, every bit as influential in its time as Darwin’s Origin of Species, painstakingly detailed the destruction and degradation of plants, animals, forests, water, and land: “the ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature [has] established.” Surprisingly, this unflinching nineteenth-­century polemic remains strikingly modern. Marsh understood the symbiotic relationship between “man and nature”—­how each shapes and is in turn shaped by the other. As his book states, “We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.” For the West, Marsh’s ideas translated directly into policy. His observations of destruction in the Alps, backed by impeccable science, led him to conclude that in the arid West, where lands were fragile and water was scarce, public stewardship of mountain streams and watersheds was essential, lest private interests wreak havoc on communities in their blind pursuit of profit. “When the forest is gone,” he argues, “the great reservoir of moisture . . . returns only in deluges of rain[,] . . . the well-­wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock[, and] . . . the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy and malarious plains.” This early expression of the later Progressive conservation ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number illustrates the forward nature of Marsh’s thinking and set in motion the movement that would become in time the preservation of public lands (as national parks, forests, wilderness, etc.). Interestingly, Powell disagreed with this idea, recommending instead that the “timber lands must be controlled by lumbermen and woodmen,” while fire protection “will be largely accomplished by removing the Indians.” But Marsh’s insights signaled the emergence of scientific conservation. The Great Barbecue  103

For the American West, Marsh’s focus on wood and the protection of watershed-­source forests was insightful. By the mid-­nineteenth century, the nation’s voracious appetite for timber was beginning to produce the very degradation about which Marsh had warned. Until the Civil War, 95 percent of Americans heated their homes with wood. Steamboats, mines, and the nascent (and soon to boom) railroads all demanded wood. Americans constructed their homes out of wood, fenced their property with wood, and built their saloons and wharfs and city halls and sidewalks out of wood. They sat on it, slept on it, ate on it, and occasionally got paddled at school with it, too. Wood was the building block of American society. In the decade from 1850 to 1860 alone, this timber appetite consumed thirty million acres of forest, and the acquisition of new territory in the West unleashed the heavy harvest on the region’s vast timberlands. The ability to easily transport raw lumber via the railroads to eager eastern consumers and nascent western boomtowns would only exacerbate the destruction. As the United States added more territory, the previous and current residents of the West found themselves bound by East Coast interests intent on funneling western natural resources to eastern markets. With the Civil War erupting around them, members of Congress representing the Northern states schemed to harness this economic engine by connecting the West to the East via railroad. The vision of a great connective steel ribbon had emerged as transportation to and through the West evolved during the first half of the nineteenth century. By this time, horse or mule wagon trains had begun to replace steamship travel, as entrepreneurs sought more efficient—­in terms of time and money—­means of connecting the resources of the West to the markets of the East. The federal government provided both political and economic support for these efforts. By the 1860s, the short-­lived but already legendary Pony Express (1860–­61) had given way to more predictable Wells Fargo stagecoaches, whose freight monopoly expanded to include passenger service. Traveling at roughly 10 miles per hour, people and parcels crossed the vast West in about three weeks, rather than the four months endured by earlier overland pioneers. Still, stagecoaches and wagons could not haul raw materials in any large quantities. The railroad was the obvious solution. But the road’s route would be critical—­the economic boom it would bring (or 104  The Great Barbecue

the bust its absence would ensure) led to intense sectional rivalries between the North and the South. The Civil War resolved the debate. Southern secession, which began in December 1860, not only removed eleven states from the Union for the war’s duration but also eliminated the South’s ability to influence the route for the first transcontinental railroad. Thus, in 1862 Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act authorizing a cooperative federal-­private construction enterprise linking the Midwest to the West. The Central Pacific Railroad was built eastward from California while the Union Pacific Railroad was constructed westward from roughly the hundredth meridian. Their fevered construction competition would lay track across California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Nebraska—­a decidedly northern route—­before the two rival companies finally met on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah, about fifty miles west of Ogden. Ultimately, the railroad would serve as a mighty conduit of settlement, development, and market expansion as it metastasized across the landscape, forging an economically vital continental connection that in many ways reconfigured American sectionalism away from its historic north-­south orientation and toward an east-­west alignment. The railroad became the primary means of connecting the West’s supply of natural resources—­timber, gold, silver, coal, copper, iron, wheat, cattle, and more—­to the East’s nearly insatiable demand and began to transform the nation into an eventual world powerhouse. Between 1850 and 1900, the total U.S. population ballooned from twenty-­three million to seventy-­six million people, which meant that in addition to the growing raw materials demands of eastern factories and the need for gold to fund the Civil War machine, eastern population growth had outpaced the production capabilities of local farmers, necessitating importation of foodstuffs. Environmental historian Richard White has documented the extensive nature of West-­to-­East railroad commerce, which included such diverse commodities as livestock, sugar, wine, fruit, freight, and cash. Science and the Industrial Revolution prompted western farm families to move away from subsistence agriculture, in which they planted a variety of crops on each farm and sold whatever modest surplus they had locally. Instead, their production became commercial, focusing on single, more The Great Barbecue  105

12. Transcontinental railroads to 1900. After the United States completed construction

of the first transcontinental railroad, in 1869, the nation’s network of rails expanded dramatically. By 1900, five transcontinental railroads linked the East to the West and more than two hundred thousand miles of track crisscrossed the country. Map by Amber Bell.

specialized crops intended for the market: corn in the Midwest, wheat on the Great Plains, dairy farming in New England, cotton in the South, and fruits and vegetables in the West. Complementing this shift were improvements in mechanization that enabled fewer farmers to cultivate larger and larger acreages. Reapers (grain cutters), steel plows, threshers (grain separators), and tractors were all manufactured in eastern factories and shipped west on the railroads to supply the region’s demand for finished consumer goods. The postwar period also witnessed the spectacular boom and bust of the cattle industry. By the end of the war, the Union strategy of dividing the Con106  The Great Barbecue

federacy in two via control of the Mississippi River had effectively isolated millions of longhorns in Texas from the plates of eager consumers. And the spectacular growth of eastern urban areas like New York City, with their nearly insatiable desire for beef, created an obvious and lucrative business prospect. Grass on the open ranges of the Great Plains would provide free fuel to power this new livestock economy, and the labor of low-­paid cowboys—­ many of whom were Mexican vaqueros or newly free Black men—­would ensure maximum profitability. It was a can’t-­miss proposition: buy a cheap calf, fatten it up for free on the open range, pay some cowboy just enough for whiskey and women at trail’s end, buy your beeves a one-­way ticket to the slaughterhouse, and pocket a handsome profit. The key was the market; a western cow’s value increased tenfold in the East. The result was the great cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s, when cowboys trailed hundreds of thousands of animals across the Great Plains, headed ultimately by rail—­in a “great tide of animal flesh”—­for the stockyards of Chicago, where the waste from the meatpacking industry fouled the Chicago River. Refrigerated railcars further expanded the market. But the potential for quick and easy profits soon flooded the prairies with hungry cattle that overgrazed native grasses such as bluestem, facilitated invasive species such as Canadian thistle, and directly competed with and thus depleted bison herds. This shifting plant and animal landscape was a tragedy of the commons in the making. As historian William Cronon writes, “Although the product of thousands of people each making innumerable independent decisions about their own livelihoods, it had a coherent collective shape consistently structured by the logic of the market.” Ultimately, it was untenable and unsustainable. An additional spur to railroad development had been the California gold rush, which by 1860 had boosted that state’s population to 380,000, along with subsequent ore bonanzas in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. These strikes acted as powerful magnets drawing easterners to the West, especially as the Panic of 1857 created economic hardship throughout the country. The possibility of striking it rich was a tantalizing temptation. The railroads would provide not only the conduit for transporting settlers out West but also the means to ship the products of their labor back East. As Powell’s Report declares, “The railway has brought to our doors the harvest of The Great Barbecue  107

our fields; handed to our mints the vast resources of our mines, and opened to us direct communication with the older worlds.” Faced with wide-­open western spaces, growing eastern consumer demands, and population pressure, Congress responded with a series of settlement acts, beginning with the Homestead Act (1862), passed on May 20 in the same year the Pacific Railway Act went into effect. It was no coincidence; these two pieces of legislation formed the halves of a larger whole. The Homestead Act represented a concerted effort on the part of the federal government to lure settlers onto the Great Plains. It was also what some historians have called a cruel hoax. Under the Homestead Act, anyone over the age of twenty-­one who had never raised arms against the United States and who intended to become a citizen could file an application for 160 acres (a quarter section) of federal land. After five years, if the settler had made “improvements,” a very loosely defined and oft-­fudged term, he or she could file for a deed of title and the land would thus pass from federal ownership into private hands. While the act was designed to promote the yeoman farmer of Jeffersonian agrarianism, in reality it was fraught with problems. To begin with, the Jeffersonian 160-­acre parcel size, an obvious legacy of the Land Ordinance grid system (discussed in chapter 3), was an eastern ideal wholly unsuited to the aridity and soils of the West. This was Powell’s concern. In a region where dry farming—­cultivation without irrigation—­was not feasible, 160 acres was far too large for an individual farmer to afford to irrigate. It was also too small for ranching; aridity made vegetation sparse, and it simply took far more acres to sustain cattle or sheep in the thinly leafed West than in the lush, green East. Powell himself said, “I think it would be almost a criminal act to go on as we are doing now, and allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they cannot maintain themselves.” The federal government complemented the Homestead Act with the Desert Land Act (1877) and the Timber and Stone Act (1878) in a naïve effort to solve the problem of settlement in the arid West. The first of these offered an adult married couple the opportunity to purchase 640 acres (a full section) at the bargain price of $1.25 per acre if they irrigated the land within three years. The government’s complete misunderstanding of the issue was 108  The Great Barbecue

obvious: if 160 acres was difficult to irrigate, how could 640 acres be better? The Timber and Stone Act of the following year offered the enshrined 160-­ acre parcel at $2.50 per acre to those who wished to log or collect building stone (for homesteaders) on the West’s public lands. All three of these acts ably fulfilled the federal government’s purpose of settling the West, but they also played into the hands of land speculators, who used dummy claims to gain control of tens of thousands of acres of public lands. Cattle owners could assemble vast spreads by setting up each of their ranch hands as dummy claimants, while others “proved” they had irrigated their lands by pouring out a bucket of water in front of witnesses who were personal friends. Arguably, though, one of the most influential, exploitative, and certainly long-­lasting federal acts designed to encourage western migration and settlement was the Mining Law (1872), which is still largely in effect today. Like the aforementioned acts, the Mining Law was born out of economic necessity and exigency. The California gold rush had poured thousands of eager miners into the newly acquired territory without adequate laws to govern either the miners’ rights to their claims or the federal government’s sovereignty over the land. The result had been a hodgepodge of local ordinances of questionable legal standing that had inspired violence and claim jumping (often at gunpoint). Successive western ore strikes and the gold and silver rushes that followed had only exacerbated the problem of justice by lynch mob, which finally forced Congress to act. In its original configuration, the Mining Law allowed a miner to stake a claim on public lands—­and thus keep competitors at bay—­for the usual gold, silver, and copper, but it also permitted “other valuable minerals” to fall under the law’s purview. Once a miner had actually discovered a mineral, he or she could then transfer the public domain into private property for the bargain price of between $2.50 and $5.00 per acre, no matter how rich the lode might prove to be (remarkably, these prices per acre remain largely unchanged in the twenty-­first century). Subsequent twentieth-­ century legislation would withdraw petroleum, coal, oil shale, and sand and gravel from these sales, but the Mining Law furthered the capitalist resource plunder of the West significantly. None of these acts and laws, however, would effectively promote the thoughtful and rational settlement of the West, and perhaps no one understood that fact better than John Wesley Powell. The Great Barbecue  109

In 1878 the man who knew the West was Powell. Born in New York State in 1834, he and his family gradually drifted westward, through Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Although he had limited formal education, Powell possessed a voracious appetite for natural history and pursued knowledge of the peoples, plants, and animals around him with a passion. His life’s trajectory and abolitionist convictions landed him in the middle of the Civil War, where he fought for the Union, met and forged a close bond with General (and future president) Ulysses S. Grant, and lost his right arm in the pyrrhic Union victory at Shiloh in April 1862. The horrors of war led many men, including Powell, to look to the West as the source of national renewal. It was their and the nation’s manifest destiny, after all. In 1867 Powell headed west to Colorado on what would become the first in a long series of exploratory expeditions on which he collected geological samples, made extensive ethnographic notes and observations of flora and fauna, and meticulously mapped the terrain. Perhaps the most famous of these adventures was his epic nine-­hundred-­mile journey down the previously uncharted, wild Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869. “What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not,” he wrote in his journal, adding, “Ah, well!” These experiences provided the foundation for his visionary 1878 analysis, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region. Although the term “bioregionalism” is a twentieth-­century creation, Powell was one of the first to see the West in this way. The term refers to “a geographic area defined by natural characteristics, including watersheds, landforms, soils, geological qualities, native plants and animals, climate, and weather . . . [which] includes human beings as a species in the interplay of these natural characteristics.” Geographers have broadened the concept, defining a bioregion as “a kind of unifying principle, a way of thinking about land and life within a regional framework . . . an action-­oriented cultural geography.” More recently, environmental historians have utilized the approach in an effort to draw “the boundaries of the places we study in ways that make real sense ecologically and topographically.” The ultimate goal of bioregional analysis is to supersede arbitrary political boundaries and gain insight into the dynamics of the natural world. 110  The Great Barbecue

13. J. W. Powell’s Arid Region map. In his provocative Report on the Lands of the Arid Region

of the United States (1878), John Wesley Powell offered a radical alternative to traditional township and range grid settlement patterns. In order to combat western aridity, Powell proposed partitioning the whole of the American West into what he called watershed commonwealths (shown here), defined not by political boundaries but by the waterways themselves. His plan outlined sustainable settlement and development patterns. U.S. Geological Survey, “Arid Region of the United States, Showing Drainage Districts,” in J. W. Powell, Eleventh Annual Report of the United States Geographical Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1889–­’90, Part II—­Irrigation (Washington: gpo, 1891), plate LXIX (p. X).

Powell fits the bioregionalist definition as someone who keenly understood that western state, county, and property boundaries derived from a Land Ordinance grid system that paid no attention to the natural geography of the land. In the green East, these arbitrary demarcations were of less consequence, but in the brown West, where access to water could mean the difference between life and death, Powell recognized that the settlement of the West could fail on a scale unimaginable—­economically, socially, and environmentally—­w ithout thoughtful and careful planning. His Report thus proposed partitioning the whole of the American West into what he called watershed commonwealths, defined not by political boundaries but by the waterways themselves, and it outlined sustainable settlement and development patterns. He understood that westerners had to live within the limits of nature, aridity, and the environment; they had to homestead where there was water. Powell’s vision for the West included a comprehensive federal survey of the region’s geology and topography, although the federal government would not occupy a supervisory role (thus assuaging some western concerns). The day-­to-­day land-­use decisions would be local and communal, creating a novel federal-­private hybrid model to conform to the unique challenges the West presented. His theme was simple: westerners must adapt to the land and not vice versa. Aridity could be overcome, but only through cooperative efforts, much like those of Utah Mormons and Hispanic peoples in New Mexico. The desert could “bloom,” he argued, but only in oasis settlements. “There are values too critical and resources too perishable to be entrusted entirely to private exploitation,” Powell’s biographer Wallace Stegner has argued. Politics and the federal government were to play a pivotal role in the West, Powell believed, by overseeing the development of irrigation and the regulation of forest and pasturelands to promote democracy and ensure “the growth and prosperity of the Arid Region.” Even if the government did not get land management right all of the time, the alternative was worse. Later, in testimony before Congress, Powell proposed that “the General Government organize the arid region . . . into irrigation districts by hydrographic basins.” Although “some of these districts lie in two States,” Powell nevertheless argued that the states should ignore these artificial political boundaries and 112  The Great Barbecue

“provide statutes for the organization of the districts and for the regulation of water rights, the protection and use of forests, and the protection and use of pasturage”—­bioregionalism before its time. Powell’s “integrated understanding of the requirements of western lands was profound, if not prophetic,” historian William deBuys has observed. Powell’s ideas were also enormously unpopular at the time. His assertion that the West’s aridity limited settlement possibilities seemed to fly in the face of America’s can-­do spirit, not to mention the greedy desire to exploit resources and get rich quickly. While his proposals were logical and sound, they were a bitter pill politically. Congress had designed federal land policies to encourage the rapid settlement of the West—­to transfer public lands into private hands as quickly as possible. Orderly surveys and watershed analyses were not only lacking in glamour but time-­consuming as well. And Powell’s emphasis on communalism failed to square with American virtues of rugged individualism, democracy, free enterprise, and independence. In the end, the massive effort to survey the irrigable lands of the West took too long, obstructed eager migrants, and ran afoul of the nation’s unshakable manifest destiny convictions. Watershed governance may have looked good on paper, but it could never surmount the politics involved, and Congress took out its frustration on Powell by slashing the budget of his U.S. Geological Survey, created in 1879, ultimately forcing him to resign. The federal government may not have been interested in pursuing Powell’s surveys, but it had been keen on building transcontinental railroads. To facilitate western exploration, exploitation, and settlement, Congress struck a deal with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads and later track-­builders. The government offered financial incentives for each mile of track laid, including cash payments that varied based on terrain ($16,000 per mile for level ground, $32,000 in foothills, and $48,000 in mountains), and grants of alternating sections of land alongside the “iron roads” amounting to sixty-­four hundred acres per track mile. To maximize their profits, the railroad companies had to sell these lands, even on the Great Plains. It was a win-­win for the United States: empty-­space settlement expanded national sovereignty, while railroad corporations raked in even larger earnings. The result was often fantastic advertising claims designed to lure unsuspecting The Great Barbecue  113

immigrants and naïve easterners to try their luck farming on the prairies. “This is the sole remaining section of paradise in the western world,” claimed one promotion. “All the wild romances of the gorgeous Orient dwindle into nothing when compared to the everyday reality of Dakota’s progress.” And it worked. Thousands of sodbusters poured onto the plains, claiming homesteads and buying railroad lands in the hopes of plowing their way into middle-­class stability. It also worked because western boosters and eager easterners were far more willing to believe railroad advertisements that promised “rain follows the plow” than a dour geologist like Powell, who predicted drought. There was even “science” to back up the railroads’ dubious claim. According to a railroad-­hired biologist, farmers’ plows tilling packed prairie soils would churn dust into the atmosphere, thereby attracting tiny water particles like a giant sponge and, voila!, increasing rainfall. The “proof ” for such a theory? Ever since the passage of the Homestead Act, annual rainfall totals had increased across much of the Great Plains, and thus “dry farming” (not irrigated) west of the hundredth meridian had been possible for much of the 1870s and early 1880s. “Rain follows the plow,” this amateur scientist promised. Clearly, what the arid West needed was not “watershed commonwealths” but more farmers. This faulty science ignored the reality that for millennia the climate of the Great Plains had cycled between wet and dry years, often with wild unpredictability. The late 1870s and early 1880s were unusually wet, but the key word here is unusually; no amount of plowing could stave off the withering drought that bore down on these financially strung-­out farmers (and ranchers). The epic year of 1886 in particular followed up a searing, fire-­scorched summer with an early, harsh, snow-­lashed winter that was by many accounts the worst in memory. Eager homesteaders had thwarted the treeless prairies by building sod houses, fencing with barbed wire, and burning cow and buffalo dung for heat. But they had also torn up deep-­rooted prairie bunchgrasses to plant seasonal wheat and corn crops, exposing the region’s precious topsoil to erosion by nearly ceaseless winds that laid the foundation for the future Dust Bowl of the 1930s. By the mid-­1880s, short growing seasons, declining rainfall, accelerated erosion, and poor soils were further frustrating Great Plains farmers, leaving them with anemic crop harvests, 114  The Great Barbecue

mounting debts, and collapsing grain prices. Confronted by the very aridity Powell had predicted, many homesteaders packed up and moved back East, signaling a major bust at the end of the frantic boom that had lured too many west of the line of aridity. On the side of his loaded wagon, one thoroughly defeated sodbuster painted a fitting epitaph for this prairie experience: “In God We Trusted, in Kansas We Busted.” The boosters were wrong. Powell was right. And farm families paid the price. Giant corporate agribusinesses quietly acquired these failed family farms one by one and began to transform the plains into endless amber waves of grain. Historian Richard White has compellingly shown that for all the hype about progress and civilization heaped upon the transcontinental railroads (by 1900 there were five), they categorically failed to improve the lives of westerners. The region was simply “too arid, too infertile, [and] too distant from markets to sustain the density of settlement and agricultural development” promoted by the railroads—­proving Powell’s points perfectly. In the end, despite western demand for it, the railroad’s environmental impact was twofold: it created an efficient extractive pipeline for sending western raw materials eastward, while its construction and boosterism left behind long-­term scars on western lands and peoples. Furthermore, the railroads, and the mines and towns they sustained, ramped up the regional appetite for raw materials to rapacious levels. As Marsh had so wisely predicted, the timber toll on the West was staggering. On average, a mile of track consumed more than twenty-­five hundred ties, most of which were treated with a toxic mercury bichloride that could leach into surrounding soils. But the iron road also demanded wood for support beams, bridges, fences, and even railcars and stations, and for the telegraph poles that marched along side it. By the late 1880s, the railroads alone were consuming nearly one-­quarter of the nation’s timber production. The Homestead Act had encouraged timber exploitation by railroad companies and timber barons, who used the same “dummy claim” tactics as their farming and ranching compatriots. Although the entire West bore the cutting burden, western law scholar Charles Wilkinson has argued that “the fraud was most pervasive in the Pacific Northwest, where the spruce, cedar, redwood, and Douglas fir stands amounted to green gold.” Once The Great Barbecue  115

again, speculators had successfully redefined the ecological wealth of the West in capitalist terms. To supply this nearly insatiable demand, independent western timber contractors cut on both railroad-­owned and federal lands and sold directly to the railroads. One of the major concerns early on in the building of the railroads, however, was the excessively high cost of ties, primarily due to transportation costs. The solution that readily emerged was to eliminate the most costly aspect of tie supply, which was overland transport, and replace it with the free labor of the region’s rivers. During the winter months, then, tie contractors deployed cutting crews into the steep canyons of the mountainous West to cut and roughly shape logs into ties, which they left piled on the banks of frozen rivers. During spring floods the ties would be flushed downstream to the waiting railroads. These tie and log drives were common all along the Rocky Mountain front—­in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Once the major railroads had moved through, the flow of timber continued, providing replacement ties for railroad maintenance and supplying booming mines (such as the silver strikes of Park City, Utah) with support timbers and cordwood. Not surprisingly, these massive tie and log drives could wreak significant destruction when they finally cut loose, destroying riparian zones (ecosystems along water bodies), causing massive backup floods, and clogging the rivers to the detriment of aquatic flora and fauna. In addition to concerns about property destruction caused by the tie and log drives, the rate at which timbers were being cut and removed from the region’s watersheds had also begun to cause alarm. In February 1895, for example, at the monthly meeting of the Utah Forestry Association, Dr. H. J. Faust proposed the creation of a state park encompassing “the headwaters of the four rivers known as the Provo, the Bear, the Weber and the Duchesne . . . so that the timber could be protected—­which timber is fast being destroyed by timber men being employed from time to time in cutting ties and other timber.” The primary justification for such protection, Faust argued, was “to protect the snows that fall so deep in the winter time and which afford us water for irrigation.” The worst offenders, Faust continued, were “the tie men [who] destroy more than any other class of lumber men.” 116  The Great Barbecue

14. Early clear-­cutting damage. Timber harvest in support of railroad construction and

mining development in the West took a heavy toll on mountain watersheds. Photo by Charles W. Carter. Used with permission of the lds Church History Library.

While Faust understood that this would cause economic hardship to the “tie men,” he argued that “the most good to the greatest number of people should be observed.” The following month, the Utah legislature memorialized its support for Faust’s proposal to protect the four watersheds “with a view to increasing the water supply for irrigation purposes.” Faust’s concerns were further validated by a rather remarkable and extreme­ly thorough 1902 survey of Utah’s forests compiled by the federal Bureau of Forestry, which described the condition of that state’s (and, by extension, much of the interior West’s) forests at the turn of the twentieth century. The account describes the impact of mining, sawmills, and stockThe Great Barbecue  117

yards on the forests. For almost every canyon of the Weber and Provo Rivers in northern Utah, the report details the remnants of the previous years’ tie and timber harvests—­old sawmills, camps, and areas “cut out.” Top-­grade timber had become a rare commodity in many mountain valleys by the turn of the century, and sheep ranching had fully invaded the now timber-­less high country. Indeed, the evidence for the overuse of the mountain areas was extensive, corroborating Marsh’s own observations. Mountain watersheds were routinely sloughing landslide debris down bare slopes into the irrigation works and settlements of the intrepid Mormon communities nestled up against the Wasatch Front. As environmental historian Dan Flores has concluded, by the 1920s “a widespread land collapse had begun,” paving the way for Marsh’s proposed federal protections, if not Powell’s watershed commonwealths. Yet despite these obvious and unsustainable consequences, tie drives still plied the region’s rivers for the first three decades of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1920, for example, Standard Timber prepared “to bring down 100,000 ties from the upper reaches of the [Blacks Fork] river” in Wyoming, and, according to the local forest ranger, “the company is already planning for an energetic campaign of tie cutting, to begin immediately after the spring drive.” The plains were also suffering by the turn of the twentieth century. The decimation of the tallgrass prairies by farmers wielding McCormick reapers, twine binders, harrows, and plows rippled out across the ecosystem. Historian Geoff Cunfer notes that “between about 1870 and 1930 Americans plowed more than 100 million acres of biologically diverse grassland ecosystems and replaced them with single-­species cropland.” Since the sales of land, whether federal homestead or railroad property, conformed to the artificial township and range grid established by the Land Ordinance of 1785 and ignored environmental obstacles and problems, settlers were motivated to clear forests and drain wetlands on their potential farmlands. Settlement, agriculture, and competing cattle nearly eradicated prairie species like black-­tailed prairie dogs and pronghorns across the region. Industrial hunting for the hide trade, complemented by the efficiency of transcontinental railroad transportation, pushed bison to the brink of extinction. In the “at what cost” arithmetic of prairie grass, more cattle plus more horses equaled fewer 118  The Great Barbecue

15. Waiting for a Chinook. Artist Charles M. Russell conveyed the desperation of western cattle

herds ravaged by drought and blizzards during the brutal summer and winter of 1886–­87 (a tragedy known as the Great Die-­Up) far more poignantly than any written description. Illustration by Charles M. Russell. Used with permission of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody wy. Gift of Charles Ulrick and Josephine Bay Foundation, Inc., 88.60.

bison. Herds that had once measured several miles wide all but vanished into the maw of the market. And as contemporary naturalist Joe Truett explains, “The foot of the buffalo was necessary for their [prairie dogs’] existence. As soon as the ground ceased to be tramped hard and the grass and weeds grew[,] they perished.” Without the prairie dogs, black-­footed ferrets and burrowing owl numbers collapsed as well. Runoff from exposed farm fields caused streams and rivers to become clogged with silt and, in combination with intensified harvests, crippled native fish populations. Everywhere, the loss of species diversity—­including charismatic predators like wolves, bears, and mountain lions—­accompanied the movement of the masses into the West. And once again, the insatiable demands of eastern urban markets had thoroughly transformed western ecosystems. As Cunfer concludes, there was never a condition of “sustainable agriculture” on the Great Plains. The Great Barbecue  119

The story on the cattle frontier read much the same. For decades, profit-­ hungry ranchers had severely overgrazed the western ranges. Cattle die-­offs in the early 1880s had been a harbinger of the Great Die-­Up that finally materialized in 1886–­87, the desperation of which painter Charles M. Russell captured hauntingly in his work titled Waiting for a Chinook. A Dakota neighbor augmented future president Theodore Roosevelt’s spring “smashup” description by noting that “countless carcasses of cattle [were] going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the stiffened legs of a carcass would point skyward, as it turned under the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding ice cakes.” The brief cattle boom had busted, and by the 1890s these small-­time outfits could no longer simply turn their livestock onto the open range to fatten up on public lands. Now, to satisfy the growing urban market demand, ranch owners had to fence in their herds, feed their cows over the winter, experiment with “better” breeds that carried more beef on the hoof, and generally operate like a real, full-­time business—­one that prioritized converting grass and ultimately corn into meat—­rather than some romantic cowboy novel. “As grassland gave way to pasture,” Cronon concludes, “and pasture to feedlot, the general tendency was for people to replace natural systems with systems regulated principally by the human economy.” For Indians, the consequences of this commercialization and commodification of the Great Plains were even more dire. After the Civil War between the North and South ended in 1865, another kind of war, between East and West—­between whites and Indigenous groups—­began in earnest. Although the federal government had been engaged formally in the forcible removal and relocation of Indians since the Jacksonian era, the shocking 1864 massacre of peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek, Colorado, and the subsequent Plains Indian wars mowed down Native peoples, communities, and cultures with stunning efficiency. Applying tactics and strategies perfected by the Union Army, military commanders began to remove Indians systematically, arguing that they were “obstacles to progress.” Union general Philip Sheridan, for example, who had utilized a scorched-­earth tactic (that Shenandoah Valley locals simply called “The Burning”) to defeat Confederate troops and destroy the Southern ability and will to fight, employed a similar 120  The Great Barbecue

technique on the Native nations the army assigned him to subdue. Called “winter campaigning,” Sheridan’s strategy was to attack Indian encampments during the lean winter months, when food and resources were scarce and populations were smaller (during the summer months, by contrast, some Native encampments could exceed three thousand individuals). By this time, extensive horse herds, white settlement, and habitat erosion had fundamentally weakened plains ecology and economy. With their bison teetering on the brink of extinction, their horses slaughtered or starving, and their ecological homelands destroyed and overrun by eager homesteaders, ranchers, and railroads, fleeing Indian bands could neither rest nor hunt and soon succumbed to the relentless pursuit of an army well supplied by the railroads. The December 1890 massacre of desperate Lakotas at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, signaled the final and complete collapse of Plains Indian resistance as the last remaining bands reported to reservations. This slaughter in the name of “progress” meant that white settlers were now free to fill the West. In the years following the Civil War, the federal government eagerly promoted western settlement and resource extraction with little oversight or regulation. This laissez-­faire mining of resources without consequence found broad support within the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which had abandoned the plight of former slaves by the 1870s and embraced instead the more exciting and lucrative lures of big business. The Great Barbecue also coincided with an age of invention and innovation that not only produced new and more efficient means of wresting wealth from the West (dynamite for mining; reapers, binders, and threshers for farming; refrigerated railroad cars for the cattle industry; steam engines and steam-­ powered sawmills for logging) but also for transporting it to eastern urban markets via the railroads. It was a classic tragedy of the commons. In the end, John Wesley Powell’s more sustainable West failed to jibe with national expansionist goals, leaving the region to its arbitrary political borders, more than a century of wrestling with aridity, and a largely subordinate role as larder to the East. The question was whether the voices of scientists like Powell and Marsh, and the few politicians who listened to them, would be able to sustain the region’s natural wealth and ecological health for the future of both “man and nature.” The Great Barbecue  121

Suggested Reading

Thomas Andrews, “‘Made by Toile’? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858–­1917,” Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (December 2005): 837–­63. William Cronon, “Annihilating Space: Meat,” in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), 207–­59. Geoff Cunfer, “Pasture and Plows,” in On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2005). Sara Dant, “Driving Utah’s Rivers: Working Water in the West,” Utah Historical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Spring 2022): 110–­32. Also “Bioregional Politics: The Case for Place,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 103, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 439–­51. Richard Evanoff, “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan: An Interview with Peter Berg,” Japan Environment Monitor, email ed., no. 97 ( June 1998), available at www​.sustainable​ -city​.org​/intervws​/berg​.htm. Robert S. Fletcher, “That Hard Winter in Montana, 1886–­1887,” Agricultural History 4, no. 4 (1930): 123–­30, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/3739414. Dan L. Flores, “Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah,” Environmental Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 325–­44. Pekka Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December 2016): 481–­509. Roger D. Hardaway, “African American Cowboys on the Western Frontier,” Negro History Bulletin 64, no. 1–­4 (2001): 27–­32, available at https://w ​ ww.​ jstor.​ org/​ stable​ /24766998. David Lowenthal, “Nature and Morality from George Perkins Marsh to the Millennium,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 1 (2000): 3–­27. Randy McFerrin and Douglas Wills, “Searching for the Big Die-­Off: An Event Study of 19th Century Cattle Markets,” in Essays in Economic and Business History 31 (2013): 33–­52. Edmund Morris, “The Winter of Blue Snow, 1886–­1887,” in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 361–­67. John Wesley Powell, Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell, ed. William deBuys (Washington dc: Island Press, 2001). Martin Ridge, “Disorder, Crime, and Punishment in the California Gold Rush,” in Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World, ed. Kenneth N. Owens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 176–­201. 122  The Great Barbecue

James E. Sherow, “The End of the Trail,” in The Chisolm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 250–­77. Andrew Sluyter, “How Africans and Their Descendants Participated in Establishing Open-­R ange Cattle Ranching in the Americas,” Environment and History 21, no. 1 (2015): 77–­101, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43299718. Paul S. Starrs and Lynn Huntsinger, “The Cowboy and Buckaroo in American Ranchhand Styles,” Rangelands 20, no. 5 (October 1998): 36–­40, available at https://​ journals.​ uair.​ arizona.​ edu/​ index.​ php/​ rangelands/​ article/​ viewFile/​ 11398/​ 10671. James Tejani, “Dredging the Future: The Destruction of Coastal Estuaries and the Creation of Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1858–­1913,” Southern California Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 5–­39. Joe C. Truett, “Migrations of Grassland Communities and Grazing Philosophies in the Great Plains: A Review and Implications for Management,” Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences 13, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 3–­26. Stewart L. Udall, “The Beginning of Wisdom: George Perkins Marsh,” and “The Beginning of Action: Carl Shurz and John Wesley Powell,” in The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 69–­82, 83–­96. Gerald Underwood, “The Vaquero,” in Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 1–­66. David L. Wheeler, “The Blizzard of 1886 and Its Effect on the Range Cattle Industry in the Southern Plains,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 94, no. 3 ( January 1991): 415–­34. Richard White, “Introduction,” “Creative Destruction,” and “Appendix,” in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), xxi–­x xxix, 455–­93, 519–­34.

The Great Barbecue  123

The Pivotal Decade

5

On January 1, 1889, during a rare solar eclipse, a Northern Paiute man named Wovoka had a prophetic vision of environmental renewal. Since his birth approximately thirty-­three years earlier, this mystic, also known as Jack Wilson, had witnessed the rapid and often destructive transformation that the shift from Native to white dominance had visited on the American West: typhoid fever and other European-­introduced diseases had killed one out of every ten of his people, while drought and diminished populations seriously impeded Paiute subsistence hunting and foraging efforts. In fact, by 1900, white settlers’ agricultural practices, encouraged by the Homestead Act, and cattle ranching had almost completely eradicated traditional Paiute food sources such as piñon nuts, grass bulbs, and Lahontan cutthroat trout. Faced with severe economic hardship, starvation, and crisis, Wovoka sought salvation and healing through faith. Synthesizing various Indian ceremonial traditions with Christian tenets and an earlier variant of the Paiute Round Dance, this modern messiah envisioned a restorative ritual called the Ghost Dance that would bring about earthly renewal, material abundance, and the disappearance of whites. The five-­day ceremonial circle-­dance Wovoka prescribed was hope made manifest. Ultimately, thirty western tribes adopted, adapted, and participated in the Ghost Dance in an almost desperate attempt not only to retain Indian authority and identity but also to address the real failure of white promises of “progress” and “civilization.” 125

16. The Ghost Dance by the Ogallala [sic] Sioux at Pine Ridge Agency, Dakota. Famed west-

ern artist Frederic Remington drew this scene of the Oglala Lakota Ghost Dance at the Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, in 1890 from sketches he made during the ceremony. Illustration by Frederic Remington. lc-­u sz62-­3726, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Historians are often reluctant to write about watershed years, and mostly with good reason, as currents of history rarely begin or end at a particular point in time, yet the 1890s come as close to being a pivotal “moment” as any. These years not only inspired a new and influential historical interpretation of the genesis of American character fundamentally shaped by the West but also witnessed a time when Americans attempted to grapple with the environmental costs of their rapid westward expansion even as they celebrated the romantic and nostalgic icons they had nearly destroyed. By 1900 the transition from subsistence to market had been so effectively implemented by Euro-­American pioneers and settlers that the environment of the American West looked profoundly different than it had just a century earlier. In many cases, scarcity or absence replaced natural abundance. All residents of the West—­whether Indian, Anglo, Hispanic, or others—­would have to live with and adjust to this new reality. 126  The Pivotal Decade

At the close of the nineteenth century, Native peoples were not the only westerners anxious about their future. Four years after Wovoka’s vision, in the summer of 1893 the World’s Columbian Exposition created a utopian “White City” amid the entrepreneurial vitality, urban upheaval, and industrial squalor of daily life in Chicago that exemplified a nation struggling to reconcile its rural, frontier past and an urban, industrial future. Over six months, between May and October, nearly twenty-­seven million people visited this celebration of the four-­hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. In addition to offering midway attractions such as the first Ferris wheel, the fair celebrated and demonstrated technological innovations such as electrical generators, transformers, and motors. It featured historic steam engine and log cabin displays and provided scholarly lectures and public performances by prominent musicians. Perhaps one of the most enduring elements of this fair was a talk delivered on a sweltering July evening at the meeting of the American Historical Association. The speaker was a thirty-­one-­year-­old history professor named Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” did not garner much attention that July, but over the next decade he presented versions of it to countless civic organizations and historical societies. Consequently, by the beginning of the twentieth century his “frontier thesis,” as it came to be called, had become the dominant explanation for American exceptionalism—­the nation’s self-­professed historical uniqueness and qualitative superiority—­and it would influence writing and thinking about the American West well into the twenty-­first century. The essence of Turner’s oft-­quoted thesis is that “the existence of an area of free land [the frontier], its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner’s blatant Anglo-­Saxon chauvinism defines the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” but his thesis about its formative influence contains strong Darwinian undercurrents. In the story he tells, Europeans both shaped and were shaped by their interaction with the American natural environment and ultimately had to evolve into a new and better adapted species, a kind of Homo americanus. As they struggled against the land and Indigenous peoples, Turner argues, these evolving Americans developed a The Pivotal Decade  127

“composite nationality” (called the melting-­pot effect by a later generation) and self-reliant individualism. Americans embraced economic independence and physical mobility, and their confrontation with the frontier promoted the “growth of democracy.” The unique contribution of Turner’s thesis then and ever since was that it identified the frontier—­the wild environment, really—­as the source of American uniqueness and as a mighty engine of change. The inspiration for Turner’s thesis had been a relatively simple statement by the U.S. Census Bureau. As of 1890, the agency announced, delineating an American “frontier line” was no longer possible since the previously identified frontier portions of the country, those containing fewer than two persons per square mile, were now too scattered to officially demarcate. In short, the nation had effectively occupied its open spaces. But the seeming finality of such a pronouncement exerted a significant cultural influence and forced a national reckoning with the nation’s future, that of the formerly “empty” West in particular. In essence, the country would have to ask itself, “Where do we go from here? What’s next?” For Turner, the bureau’s findings were sobering: “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” Many other Americans were worried, too. Without a frontier to assimilate immigrants, in a nation more urban than rural, what would provide moral order and vital physical health for the nation? What would maintain American exceptionalism? Although other historians have since attacked Turner’s frontier thesis and its bigoted underpinnings, his basic argument about the formative influence of nature in the West has endured. For many, it simply made sense that “civilization” had arrived when people conquered nature. Turner believed, as did a majority of the U.S. population at the time, that whites were this civilizing agent in the West and that Indians served as a “common danger” and unifying force against which evolving (white) Americans struggled for success and identity. Turner’s focus was fundamentally exploitational, agrarian, and xenophobic. His hero was the (white male) yeoman farmer, whose ingenuity, integrity, and resourcefulness allowed him to triumph over the adversity of the wilderness and bring agrarian order out of environmental chaos, much as Jefferson had advocated nearly a century earlier. Scholars have pointed out that Turner’s thesis essay ignored Native peoples, other nonwhites, and 128  The Pivotal Decade

women. Indeed, historian Patricia Limerick has labeled his core idea, “the frontier,” as the “f-­word” in western history for its racist, sexist, and oversimplified explanations of the American past. For all of its shortcomings, however, Turner’s nationalistic, patriotic thesis that American cultural identity was indeed a product of the frontier experience has endured in part because he told a story (white) Americans wanted to hear about themselves and in part because he was correct in asserting that a way of life in the West was passing from the land. No one understood this more clearly than Native peoples. By 1890, Indigenous societies had collapsed to their nadir; their collective populations would never be lower. The natural environments of the West in which they had lived for tens of thousands of years also reflected their removal and relocation onto reservations. Although variations on this story could be told for Indians in the deserts of the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Northwest, the plains in particular could no longer sustain an Indian-­horse-­bison ecology. As discussed in chapter 3, bison were already experiencing decline by 1850, but by the 1890s they were teetering on the brink of extinction. Plains Indians had long traded horses and many Indian peoples had traded furs and hides, including buffalo robes, but after the Civil War those bison hide robes, particularly winter cow hides, became a valuable market commodity on a global scale. Industrial America prized bison leather for making machine belts to power steam engines, as well as for furniture upholstery, lap robes for carriages, flannel-­lined coats, shoes, and so on, and aggressive hide hunters and increasingly market-­oriented Indians fanned out across the plains in pursuit of these lucrative animals. At a time when many day laborers struggled to earn a dollar a day, a single bison hide robe could bring anywhere from three to fifty dollars, although by the 1870s the robe trade had disappeared as greater efficiency in leather processing took hold and prices dropped. Bison proved especially vulnerable to eradication because of their docile demeanor and herd mentality. Indeed, William T. Hornaday, who would perform heroics to save bison in the early twentieth century, cited “the phenomenal stupidity of the animals themselves” as a major culprit in their extermination. But he also decried the “unsportsmanlike, unfair, ignoble, and utterly reprehensible” practice known as the “still-­hunt.” Quite simply, The Pivotal Decade  129

if a hunter shot the lead cow, her dying and death would provoke the entire herd to mill, at which point it was possible to methodically pick off hundreds of bison, one by one, with a Sharps or Remington rifle. It was the big game equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. As Hornaday explains, “The policy of the hunter is to not fire too rapidly, but to attend closely to business, and every time a buffalo attempts to make off, shoot it down. One shot per minute was a moderate rate of firing, but under pressure of circumstances two per minute could be discharged with deliberate precision.” In less than an hour, then, it was possible to slaughter more than a hundred bison within something like a two-­hundred-­yard radius. Bison hunter Frank Mayer recalled simply, “It was a harvest. We were the harvesters.” Skinning crews then moved in to strip the hides and ship them to eastern tanneries. They left the carcasses to rot. As environmental historian Richard White writes, “What was left looked less like a corpse than a stillbirth,” and the revolting stench of “tens of thousands of rotting corpses” spread like a pall over the plains. Passengers crossing the country on the newly constructed transcontinental railroads also wantonly shot buffalo from trains purely for sport and with no pretense of harvesting any part of the animal. Hornaday estimates that in the three-­year period from 1872 to 1874, more than three million bison were killed on the southern plains alone. This decimation of buffalo ecology, so central to Plains Indian food, clothing, shelter, and ceremony, likely telescoped white control over the Great Plains by a decade or more. And the federal government tacitly approved. In 1874 President Ulysses S. Grant pocket-­vetoed a bill granting federal protection for bison. While his inaction ultimately allowed the market hunt for animals to continue to flourish and hastened Indian removal from potential homesteads to reservations by helping to eliminate their subsistence sources, there is no indication that Grant himself intended such consequences. Still, as White concludes, “the whole episode was pathetic.” By the time of the Ghost Dance, which promised to restore bison as part of an overall environmental renewal, there were only about 350 wild bison left in the United States, 200 of which lived in Yellowstone National Park. A few hundred more lingered in Canada. By 1892 even the Yellowstone herd had dwindled to fewer than 25, the ghostly remnants of a vast shaggy ocean that 130  The Pivotal Decade

had once undulated across the prairies in numbers estimated at 30 million. The deadly convergence of market hunters and a global market for bison hide leather, as well as white settlement, disease, drought, competition for grass from cattle and horses, and the removal of Indian stewards, had finally eroded the ecological niche that this buffalo superorganism had not only occupied but thrived in for thousands of years. The costs were ruinous. As bison historian Martin Garretson has written, “It was a decimation of race as well as species.” In 1884 more than a quarter of the Blackfeet population starved due to the loss of their bison sustenance. By the turn of the century, captive breeding efforts by Native peoples and white ranchers had rescued bison from complete eradication, but they never restored the wild buffalo commons that had so dominated the western landscape. Unlike wild deer, elk, or pronghorns, bison remained a commodity, a new form of domesticated livestock animal whose ecological relationship to the plains conformed to the supply-­ and-­demand dictates of a capitalist market system. Bison lost their wildness. Unfortunately, the destruction of the West’s great wild bison herds was not the only natural catastrophe marked by the symbolic closing of the frontier. Instead, it was one of several examples of species and natural resource depletions that began to alarm some Americans. Historian Joseph Cone has suggested that the most appealing definition of the Pacific Northwest is “anyplace the salmon can go.” Or at least where they used to go. By the 1890s, once-­mighty salmon runs showed obvious decline and this precious subsistence resource that had seemed limitless to early settlers was now in peril. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of the first peoples in the Americas, six species of salmon and steelhead had teemed in almost every river that flowed through the Pacific Coast region. Some of these fish were monsters, too; Columbia River “June hogs” or “royal Chinook” bound upriver for Canada could weigh as much as 125 pounds. Each year, currents swept millions of young salmon, known as smolts, from their natal freshwater gravel redds to the sea, where they fattened up for as many as five years before returning home to their exact birthplace to spawn and die in a round-­trip journey that could exceed ten thousand miles. On their journey downstream, salmon smolt fed countless birds and other fish; on the upstream return, adult salmon not only filled the bellies of people, The Pivotal Decade  131

eagles, and bears, but their spent bodies provided a nutrient-­rich fertilizer for adjacent lands. Writer Bruce Brown has remarked that salmon “are an engine of general enrichment, and an important element in the long-­range stability of the Pacific Coast ecosystem.” In the early nineteenth century, their sheer numbers were astounding and their rich flesh ably sustained sizable human and animal communities. In 1805, during Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journey west for President Thomas Jefferson, Clark had recorded in his journal (in his typically poor spelling) that the Columbia River was “crouded with salmon.” Pacific Coast peoples depended on salmon as fundamentally as Plains peoples depended on bison. Historians have estimated that prior to the arrival of Euro-­Americans, the annual catch in the Columbia River system alone approached forty-­two million pounds. It is roughly five million to eight million pounds annually today. As discussed in chapter 2, traditional fishing grounds demarcated community boundaries, while the harvest itself defined family and gender roles: men fished, women cleaned and smoked the salmon, children gathered wood. To ensure the safe and plentiful return of their essential animal totem or symbol, Native peoples developed elaborate rites and religious customs such as the Coast Salish’s First Salmon Ceremony. This widely practiced observance—­usually the ritualistic capture of the first salmon in the run, its preparation and distribution among the tribe, and the return of its bones to the river—­honored and reinforced the relationship between the people and their food source. Because salmon provided the foundation for Native trade economies, communities also protected this important resource (as a kind of commons) by implementing various conservation measures such as seasonal closures, exclusive fishing rights, and laws prohibiting waste. Each year thousands of Indians converged at what is now The Dalles, Oregon, to barter for items such as shells, obsidian (for making arrowheads), bison robes, pipestone, and feathers. As the Supreme Court ruled in 1905, salmon were “not much less necessary to the existence of the Indians than the atmosphere they breathed.” In 1846, when the United States extended its sovereignty over the Pacific Northwest, Native peoples theoretically retained control over their lands and fishing rights, but successive treaties deprived them of both title and 132  The Pivotal Decade

access, making way for large-­scale commercial interests to move in. In 1854–­ 55, for example, Washington’s territorial governor Isaac Stevens negotiated a series of ten treaties that granted the federal government clear title to most of the present-­day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana and diminished tribal landholdings by 80 to 95 percent. Although all of Stevens’s treaties promised that tribes would retain the “right of taking fish, at all the usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” those rights quickly fell victim to the supply-­and-­demand whims of an emerging capitalist system and hostile state governments. Like bison, salmon soon became a valuable commodity for the global market and the once sustainable harvests careened toward a crash. According to the ominous observation of legal scholar Charles Wilkinson, “There would be a great toll on the river, and also on Indian people and societies, and on the fish themselves.” He was right. Like bison, salmon suffered from the devastating combination of excessive harvest and habitat loss. By the 1890s, the depredation of the seemingly invincible salmon runs by industrial fishing and canning industries had produced a collapse. Although the fish-­canning process had originated in the early 1800s, the scale was at first too small to exert an environmental influence. By the 1860s, however, the commercial potential of Columbia River canned salmon had inspired innovation. Fish already evaded hooks, gill nets, traps, weirs, harpoons, and occasionally even dynamite, but soon superefficient fish wheels were scooping salmon from the rivers in staggering numbers. Fish wheels harvested day and night, operating much like an indefatigable water-­ powered mill wheel. A single wheel could potentially catch more than four hundred thousand pounds of fish in a season. In 1883 alone, forty Columbia River canneries neatly packed nearly thirty-­seven million pounds of the highest-­quality Chinook salmon (and threw away lower-­quality varieties) into one-­pound cans that they shipped across the country and the planet. The total Chinook harvest for non-­Indians that year was forty-­three million pounds, a pinnacle Columbia fishers would never again attain. As early as the 1870s, catch, gear, and season restrictions began to emerge in Oregon and Washington Territories, in dim recognition that salmon runs were in fact not limitless. But they accomplished little. It simply made no sense for fishers to conserve salmon for their competitors. Consequently, The Pivotal Decade  133

17. Fish wheel on the Columbia River, Oregon. Operating much like a water-­powered mill

wheel, fish wheels first appeared on the Columbia River in the 1870s, where they facilitated the dramatic expansion of the canning industry and ultimately helped decimate the river’s salmon runs. Gerald W. Williams Regional Albums, Oregon State University Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.

with no break in the harvest, salmon fisheries could never fully recover. By the 1880s, spring and summer Chinook salmon runs were in notable decline, which led to intensified harvests of other species. The dominance of market fishing by the late 1880s also meant that, as with bison, Indian tribes such as the Nez Perces and Yakamas became active and aggressive participants in the enterprise that was undermining the foundation of their way of life. By 1894, after just twenty-­six years of commercial fishing in the Pacific Northwest, an official with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries declared that “not only is every contrivance employed that human ingenuity can devise to destroy the salmon of our west coast rivers, but surely more destructive, more fatal than all is the slow but inexorable march of these destroying agencies of human progress, before which the salmon must surely disappear as did the buffalo of the plains.” In addition to the human predation of industrial-­scale fishing, the opening of the “frontier” ushered in other changes to the natural environment that salmon depended upon for their survival. Timber clear-­cuts, livestock grazing, and hydraulic mining all fouled pristine gravel spawning redds with silt and chemicals, and irrigation works and dams increasingly blocked rivers and streams. Like the bison, salmon teetered in the balance. The tragedy of the commons, in this case free access to salmon runs, played out once again as the frontier closed. While the destruction of bison and salmon represented the profound, if not entirely intended consequences of an unrestricted harvest of seemingly infinite wildlife for national and global markets, elsewhere in the West some species faced the threat of eradication as the result of very concerted efforts. For the earliest settlers who arrived in North America from Europe, the “wilderness” they encountered constituted a threat; it was filled with the dangerous, predatory animals that provided the scare in every children’s fable. As white settlers moved onto the western frontier during the nineteenth century, they brought these attitudes with them and encouraged both private and governmental agencies to eliminate the danger these “killers” seemed to represent. The result was yet another war on nature, this time on any animals that white settlers deemed a nuisance. That list was long. At the top of it were wolves. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the West teemed with wolves. Deer, elk, antelope fawns, and bison The Pivotal Decade  135

provided a wealth of prey for the canny Canis lupus, and even the initial arrival of white immigrants failed to blunt their numbers as wolves quickly understood that wasteful hunters often left discarded carcasses behind. As discussed in chapter 3, it was the fur trade, primarily beavers, that lured white trappers westward, “indirectly bringing wolves into the maw of a colonial economy,” according to historian Michael Robinson. By the mid-­1850s, wolf pelts were worth about seventy-­five cents each, and some entrepreneurs managed to sustain themselves through the winter months by baiting the above-­mentioned abandoned carcasses with the poison strychnine. Like bison robes and canned salmon, wolf pelts became a lucrative commodity in national and transatlantic trade systems. Ultimately, it was not for their fur that wolves died. By the 1840s, as western ranchers began to graze livestock on the prairies, they also began systematically eliminating species that competed with their cattle and sheep for grass (bison, deer, elk, pronghorns) or threatened their investment (wolves, mountain lions, bears, etc.). Refrigerated boxcars, which appeared after the Civil War along with the transcontinental railroads, made beef an important national commodity. Millions of hungry customers in American cities provided increased motivation for ranchers to protect their herds. This market reality proved deadly for wolves. By the end of the nineteenth century, bighorn sheep had disappeared from the plains and pronghorn antelope wobbled on the brink of extinction. Ranchers had successfully exterminated several subspecies of elk in New Mexico and Arizona, and bison, of course, had all but vanished. With their primary prey sources so fully depleted, wolves naturally turned to the readily available substitute: open-­range cattle and sheep, which proved too tempting for hungry packs needing to feed their young and find their next meal. It was a fatal choice; stock raisers were not about to sit idly by and allow wolves to ravage their herds. The first efforts at systematic wolf eradication were private and commercially motivated. Stock growers’ associations began offering bounties—­cash payments for dead wolves—­as early as the 1860s. These influential cattle barons soon convinced their territorial and state legislatures to follow suit. By the time of Turner’s frontier thesis, most western states and territories offered up rewards for dead wolves, bears (especially grizzlies), mountain lions, coyotes, 136  The Pivotal Decade

18. “The January catch of Forest Service hunter T. B. Bledsaw, Kaibab National Forest, ca.

1914.” According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Bounty programs initiated in the 19th century continued as late as 1965, offering $20 to $50 per wolf. Wolves were trapped, shot, dug from their dens, and hunted with dogs. Poisoned animal carcasses were left out for wolves, a practice that also killed eagles, ravens, foxes, bears, and other animals that fed on the tainted carrion.” Item no. 100-­0002130. Used with permission of the Arizona Historical Society.

and bobcats. Most were in addition to private bounties. In 1889, for example, Colorado paid $1.50 for each wolf or coyote killed and $10 for a mountain lion or bear, as much as most factory workers earned in a week. Between 1883 and 1928, Montana’s bounties on nearly a million wolves and coyotes consumed a whopping two-­thirds of its annual budget. The commodification of dead wolves worked to accelerate their decline; by the 1890s, they were “very scarce” in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. But unlike bison, whose near extinction finally brought about a public outcry to save the species, the big, bad wolf was almost universally detested. As Robinson writes, “Wolves remained at the bottom of a moral hierarchy so obvious that it needed no articulation.” Yet, despite these concerted efforts, wolves persisted The Pivotal Decade  137

into the twentieth century, albeit in greatly reduced numbers, in part because their litter sizes increase when faced with adversity and also because the few surviving wolves became far more wary and reclusive. As with wolves, the role of the economy in the health of the West’s natural environment was central and ominous. By 1900, the United States had become the most productive industrial economy in the world thanks to three key ingredients: capital, labor, and the natural resources of the West, especially minerals and timber. The market system still bound the West to the East like a colony, but commodification of bison, whales, redwoods, and salmon had dramatically depleted the western store. As homesteaders poured into the West to take advantage of free land, their numbers swelled the region’s population and accelerated their agricultural and ranching toll on the landscape. By 1890, there were 3.5 million irrigated acres in the West. Salinization (excessive salt accumulation) began to affect some of the region’s soils, runoff poured chemicals and sediments into formerly pristine salmon runs, and the dams and irrigation works necessary to water the arid West irreparably altered and blocked riparian zones. Exotic flora and fauna introduced by these agrarian entrepreneurs on the frontier pushed native species to the margins and sometimes into extinction; by the end of the nineteenth century, for example, California had lost between 50 and 90 percent of its native grasses to invasive weeds. “Weeds” is the general term applied to non-­native plants that thrive in disturbed environments, typically reproduce quickly and prolifically, and drive out endemic species. As biologist Richard Mack explains, there are three means by which humans transport weeds: accidental (in animal feed or manure, for example), utilitarian (imported food staples, erosion control), and aesthetic (landscaping). By the end of the nineteenth century, the West had become exceedingly weedy. Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa agriculturalist, knew the exact source: “Now that white men have come and put manure on their fields, these strange weeds brought by them have become common.” Naturally, some parts of the West were more susceptible to invasion than others. On the plains, for example, those areas still covered in the original buffalo grass and grama grass that had coevolved with heavy bison grazing proved more resistant to exotic weeds. However, places that lacked this long-­ 138  The Pivotal Decade

standing relationship between grass and grazing, such as the mountains of the interior, quickly became infested once European settlers introduced cows and sheep, which weakened and ultimately eliminated native bunchgrass cover. Cheatgrass is a perfect example. The U.S. Forest Service reports that today, this noxious European import that arrived in the late nineteenth century is “most prominent and invasive in the Intermountain West,” especially in the sagebrush steppe and bunchgrass regions (without bison) of Nevada, Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. In Montana, transportation and agriculture provided a weedy one-­two punch. Railroads, five of which crisscrossed the landscape in the thirty years between 1880 and 1910, efficiently tore up soil and sowed exotic seeds such as those of tumbleweeds. So did roads. Agriculture and accompanying irrigation augmented invasive distribution, as plowing disturbed huge tracts of land and canals transported the insidious seeds of field bindweed and spotted knapweed across a wide range of environments. As early as 1895, for example, Russian thistles, as tumbleweeds are also known, had become such a menace that the state passed a law declaring them a “common nuisance” and requiring their removal. Historian Mark Fiege argues that this emerging “weed commons” led to the creation of collectivized weed districts in Montana not unlike the watershed commonwealths advocated earlier by John Wesley Powell. But once loose, these ferocious interlopers proved tough to tame and continued to vex extension agents well into the twenty-­first century. As mentioned above, California’s experience provides further evidence of the aggressiveness of the exotic plant invasion of the West. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the number of native plant species in future California numbered around five thousand. Yet, by the early twenty-­first century, nearly one out of every five plants in the state was non-­native. The weed onslaught had begun almost as soon as the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, and it gathered momentum through the gold rush, agricultural development, and modern eras, in what Mack describes as one of “the great historical convulsions of the earth’s biota.” Today, highly invasive Cape ivy, originally introduced as a landscape and house plant, now strangles oak woodlands and coastal scrub communities and releases toxins into water sources. The salt cedar, or tamarisk, imported as an ornamental and also used for riparian The Pivotal Decade  139

erosion control and windbreaks, now overconsumes scarce water, increases soil salinity, and drives out native watershed vegetation like cottonwoods. Predictably, these ecological changes took a toll on native animal species such as quail, squirrels, and bobcats that coevolved with California’s acorn forests; aquatic species like frogs, fishes (including steelhead salmon), and salamanders; as well as the bighorn sheep, native bees, and the now-­endangered southwestern willow flycatchers that inhabit the West’s stream environments. As one study concluded, “Those pests and transformers have changed and continue to change California’s ecological landscape, significantly altering some of the ecosystems and communities they have colonized.” The West’s people suffered, too. By the turn of the twentieth century, California’s Indigenous population was a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier, before the gold rush pulverized the state’s mountains, contaminated soils with mercury, and fouled rivers and streams. Between 1870 and 1890 alone, the state lost 46 percent of its Indian population. In his 1873 book Life amongst the Modocs, Joaquin Miller laments that Indians were “moving noiselessly from the face of the earth” and that “the whole face of the earth was perforated with holes; shafts sunk and being sunk by these men in search of gold, down to the bed-­rock.” Hydraulic mining in California had caused such severe flooding and devastation that the state’s Supreme Court finally outlawed the practice. Undaunted miners replaced it with arguably even more destructive practices, like stream dredging, open-­pit extraction, and the beginnings of cyanide heap leaching. Elsewhere in the West, Oregon’s Indigenous population declined by 56 percent between 1870 and 1890, and during that same brief period, in Jack Wilson’s home state of Nevada, Native populations fell by nearly 70 percent. The 1890s also saw the beginnings of the oil boom in California, Texas, and Oklahoma, and within two decades the West would supply 75 percent of the nation’s petroleum products and begin to suffer the pollution and contamination consequences of drilling and refining. As if all of this were not enough, in 1890 Congress organized the Territory of Oklahoma and threw open its doors to white settlement on Indian lands, once again displacing tribes such as the Sac and Fox, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas, and the Five Tribes. 140  The Pivotal Decade

By the 1890s, as the West’s Native peoples and its iconic animals faced fundamental threats to their very existence, timber exploitation further undermined environmental stability. A national recognition that a unique era in American history was passing, as Turner articulated in his frontier thesis, inspired some to conservation efforts, but exploitation still ruled the day. Ironically, it was the Timber and Stone Act (1878) that facilitated rapacious western timber harvests. Congress designed the act to extend national sovereignty by transferring public lands considered unfit for farming into the private hands of individuals, but it was timber barons like A. B. Hammond who took advantage of the act by snapping up the green gold of the Pacific Northwest—­Douglas fir, giant redwood, spruce, and cedar stands—­through dummy claims and other schemes, as discussed in the previous chapter. Transportation difficulties confined most harvesting to the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest until the 1880s, however. But the 1883 completion of the Northern Pacific Railway, linking the Pacific Coast to the Great Lakes region, made it possible to connect the rich forests of the Pacific Northwest to eager eastern markets. Ever the entrepreneur, Hammond built his own railroads, like the Astoria and Columbia River Railroad, to make this West-­ to-­East conduit even more profitable. While some of the harvest stayed in the West, rebuilding San Francisco after the twin blows of the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire, Hammond and others reinforced western resource colonialism by extracting and shipping wood wealth across the nation and around the world and often relying on eastern financing to pay the bills. Like the iconic salmon, towering old-­growth forests served as ancient totems of the region. By the close of the nineteenth century, the Pacific Northwest had come to the fore of the nation’s timber harvest after corporations had reduced the forests of the Great Lakes region to endless stumplands. However, despite the extensive control the timber barons exerted over the Pacific Northwest, it was the federal government that was destined to play a major role in managing the West’s forests. As discussed in the previous chapter, early concerns about clear-­cutting forests were less about the visual abomination they presented and more about protecting the headwaters of the West’s rare rivers to ensure that summer irrigation waters ran predictably. George Perkins Marsh had sounded the alarm in 1864 by arguing that deforThe Pivotal Decade  141

estation could lead to desertification. By the 1870s, the idea of conservation to promote the wise use of natural resources began to appear more widely in scientific circles. New organizations such as the American Forestry Association pushed for forest reform and regulation, and their concerns about erosion and flooding found a receptive audience in Congress. In 1891 Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, which allowed the president to withdraw public forestlands from further settlement and appropriation, although it did little else initially. There were no provisions for protection and management, for example. Despite these omissions, by 1893 Presidents Benjamin Harrison (1889–­93) and Grover Cleveland (1885–­89, 1893–­97) had added eighteen million acres to the system. Then, in 1897, Cleveland more than doubled that by adding another twenty-­one million acres in honor of George Washington’s birthday. Some westerners were furious. In their minds, the distant (eastern) federal government was directly interfering with their right to exploit and plunder the public commons for private commercial gain. But without federal oversight, there was a clear and present danger that the Pacific Northwest would repeat the cut-­over deforestation precedent set in Michigan. So, who would control the public forests? In 1897 the pendulum of power swung decisively toward the federal government when the Organic Act went into effect. It created and provided funding for the national forest system and outlined new criteria for managing the nation’s forest reserves. According to the act, the reserves were intended “to improve and protect the forest within the reservation, . . . securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” This supervision represented a significant shift. Prior to the 1890s, the primary effort of the federal government in the West had been to give lands away. Now it began to regulate and manage them for the good of all the people, in a nascent effort to thwart the tragedy of the commons. Notwithstanding the potential of a federally managed forest reserve commons, in the 1890s timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest often mimicked the extractive ruin pioneered in California’s gold fields. It was not just coal that stoked the industrial engines of the United States in the late nineteenth century; those steam engines, steamboats, boilers, and stoves had devoured 142  The Pivotal Decade

thirty-­six billion board feet of timber by 1900. Much of this wood wealth came from the West. In the 1890s, the timber giant Weyerhaeuser began permanently relocating its operations from the stumped-­over Great Lakes region to the largely untapped timber reserves of the Pacific Northwest, and the swath of devastation it had left behind earlier would soon reappear along the coastline. By the end of the nineteenth century, California and Oregon were each supplying the market with more than seven hundred thousand board feet of timber annually, while Washington State outproduced both of them combined. Despite the destruction, or perhaps because of it, the effort to conserve at least some elements of the natural West spawned a powerful frontier nostalgia that artists like Frederic Remington and Charles Russell sought to capture before it faded away forever. Both Remington and Russell journeyed to the West for the first time in the 1880s, and the closing of the frontier had a profound impact on their art. In his paintings, bronzes, and magazine illustrations, Remington sought to capture all of the wild romance, danger, and action-­ packed adventure of the Old West, and his work, along with Russell’s, became instrumental in the development of “cowboy art” as a genre. Remington’s simplified, glamorized West meshed almost perfectly with Turner’s frontier, where good (white) guys in white hats triumphed over bad (nonwhite) guys in black hats (or Native headwear). The natural environment merely served as background. Art critics and collectors celebrated his nostalgic frontier art as modern and quintessentially American, and his first one-­man show appeared, fittingly, in 1890. The Remington school, as his work and that of scores of imitators was sometimes called, focused on the people and animals of the late nineteenth-­century West and often featured the galloping horse as a central image. President Theodore Roosevelt would later proclaim that “the soldier, the cowboy, the rancher, the Indian, the horses and cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes for all time.” Like Remington, Charles Russell also strove to re-­create an authentic vision of the fast-­disappearing West on canvas and in bronze, but his work was more sympathetic to Indians, particularly tribes of the northern Rockies such as the Blackfeet, and even to the animals paying the price for white “progress,” such as bison, wolves, and bighorn sheep. Russell’s formative experiences The Pivotal Decade  143

included his time as a cattle hand in Montana, where he began to record his firsthand impressions of the evolving ranching business, the demise of bison, and the defeat of Plains Indian peoples. He, too, saw that the West was no Eden. His 1890 oil on canvas titled Cowboy Sport—­Roping a Wolf, for example, offers a perfect snapshot of this fleeting moment, both for cowboys and for wolves. Russell himself lamented that he was glad he had known the West “before natures enimy [sic] the white man invaded and marred its beauty.” As historian-­artists, Remington and Russell helped establish a simplified western iconography that endures into the twenty-­first century—­cowboys and Indians, cattle and horses, saddles and guns. But as historian Dan Flores has argued, “what Russell’s art offers . . . is not so much the celebration of the cowboy world that everyone assumes, but actually the basis for a very valid critique of the history of the West.” Russell’s title for his 1911 one-­man show seemed to sum up this exact sentiment: The West That Has Passed. Remington and Russell were internationally recognized and respected artists to be sure, but for mass appeal, perhaps no cultural expression captured the era’s romantic fascination with the mythic “frontier” better than Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. In 1893 William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s spectacle played twice a day, every day, right next door to Frederick Jackson Turner at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Cody even invited members of the American Historical Association to see the show, calling them “fellow historians” of the West. Cody, the show’s founder and star, had lived an iconic western life. Before creating the Wild West (he never called it a show), Cody served in the Civil War, rode for the Pony Express, fought in the Indian wars, and hunted buffalo, among other endeavors. For many, he was the epitome of the rugged, individual, masculine Homo americanus Turner believed the frontier had forged. Cody’s Wild West, which debuted in 1883 and played for three decades, was middle-­class mass entertainment: part circus, part theater, part variety show, all action. Looking backward, it celebrated not only the taming of the plains by virile white men protecting their women and children from marauding Indians and Mexicans but also the West’s seemingly inevitable Turnerian transformation from “savagery” to “civilization.” Crowds thrilled to reenactments of stagecoach attacks, the Pony Express, and even the Battle 144  The Pivotal Decade

of the Little Bighorn, as well as shooting demonstrations (including by the famous Annie Oakley), various rodeo-­type events and races, parades of Indians (including Sitting Bull, who joined the show in 1885), Mexican vaqueros and bandits, and of course Cody, whose skilled horsemanship was accompanied by frequent costume changes that allowed him to be a scout, Indian fighter, frontiersman, and hunter. The Wild West was multiethnic and wildly entertaining, but it was also designed to be educational, and it generated and reinforced a powerful (white) western mythology and iconography. The show also conveyed a certain ambivalence about the frontier; it was a simultaneous celebration of the nation’s triumphant conquering of the wilderness and a reckoning with the costs of such a victory. Yes, the cowboys had displaced the Indians, but audiences also recognized that the Indians and bison and even the cowboys they cheered were only the faintest remaining echoes of what had once been, in their minds, the Wild West. Yet for all of their entertainment value, Cody’s Wild West performances were remarkably place-­less. True enough, they contained all the familiar western icons accurately rendered and outfitted, but the Indians and cowboys and bison and horses existed completely out of context relative to the natural environment that had sustained them. The West itself was missing. In its place was a generic stage. The show’s spectacle and theater played equally well in Chicago, New York, London, and Paris precisely because it ignored the historical setting that had generated the “frontier” in the first place. Cody simply appropriated shorthand symbols of the region to spin a nostalgic American mythology—­the western—­with little consideration for the root cause of change: the West’s environment could no longer sustain traditional subsistence economies and complex ecosystems against the onslaught of market capitalism. Instead, it would fall to Mary Hallock Foote, artist, novelist, and reluctant westerner, to capture perhaps most effectively the transformation of the West. Unlike Remington and Russell, Foote, a self-­professed “eastern soul” who followed her husband three thousand miles from New York to California in 1876, lived in the West—­California, Colorado, Idaho—­for more than half a century. Her twelve novels, four short-­story collections, and countless illustrations offer a significant counterpoint to the masculine, The Pivotal Decade  145

often violent depictions of cowboy art and Cody’s Wild West. Hers is a decidedly woman’s West. Foote’s narratives, characters, and art, drawn from her own experience in the region’s mining camps, reveal the domestic, rural, agrarian, and feminine elements that contributed just as much to the closing of the frontier as did the cattle drives and warfare. They also give voice to her own conservative, white, upper-­class biases; she found Boise society women “poky and provincial,” for example, and there is in her novels a palpable sense of longing for the gentility and refinement of the East along with an impatience for western colonialism. Frustration with her husband’s failed business schemes provoked her to write to a friend about his next venture in “darkest Idaho”: “I couldn’t count this appalling undertaking as anything more than the stuff of wakeful nights for mothers of young babies.” That elemental anxiety finds almost perfect expression in her illustration The Coming of Winter (1888). In it, a young mother holding a swaddled newborn stands behind her armed husband outside their crude homesteader cabin nervously eyeing the darkening sky—­the antithesis of Eden. And yet, although she wrote of herself that “no girl ever wanted less to ‘go West,’” Foote came to appreciate the stark beauty of her “exile” and lovingly depicted the transformation she witnessed by producing drawings like The Irrigating Ditch (1889). Foote was keenly aware that water was the key to what she called “making a country” in the arid West, and this drawing of a well-­dressed woman with a baby on her hip smiling approvingly at the life-­giving water flowing at her feet, as a distant man regulates the flow, elegantly captures the Turner-­approved white agrarian domestication of the frontier. Indeed, perhaps nothing better illustrates the western art yin and yang of Foote, Remington, and Russell than her evocative drawing Between the Desert and the Sown (1895). In the foreground, a Victorian gentlewoman (the title of her later reminiscences and perhaps Foote herself) in a white dress looks off into the distance where a lone (dark) cowboy pulls up on a galloping horse. And slashing through the center, literally dividing “civilization” from the Wild West is a broadly flowing irrigation canal. Checkmate. For Buffalo Bill and Frederick Jackson Turner, access to free land in the West had been the defining characteristic of American life. The process of 146  The Pivotal Decade

19. Between the Desert and the Sown, 1895. Mary Hallock Foote’s body of work depicted

a woman’s perspective on the West and, in this illustration, the striking demarcation of the “frontier” separating the “wild” from the settled. Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote. Published in “Conquest of Arid America,” Century Magazine, May 1895. Wash drawing. lc-­d ig-­cai-­2a12521, Cabinet of American Illustration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

winning the West, whether by vanquishing Indians in Cody’s Wild West or plowing the prairies and establishing log cabins in Turner’s thesis, had made Americans unique. And now, at the end of the century, the West was “won.” But at what cost? By the 1890s, the environmental degradation that accompanied the triumph of Turner’s “civilization” over “savagery” was sobering: numerous species in peril, overgrazing and land erosion, and obvious limits to once abundant resources. Local self-­regulated commons (e.g., bison, salmon, timber stands) had often utilized effective resource management customs and practices, only becoming unstable when outside capitalists (including other westerners) attempted to satisfy extralocal market demand with limited resources, resulting once again in a tragedy of the commons. Both Cody and Turner worried about what the end of the frontier meant for The Pivotal Decade  147

America and the West, but neither offered a viable answer to the inevitable follow-­up question: now what? Wovoka’s Ghost Dance echoed these lamentations of loss and offered a vision for the future. This peaceful pan-­Indian religious response to the closing of the frontier proclaimed that the earth itself would be renewed, which was essential in an arid landscape devastated by decades of invasive mining and failed agriculture. In many ways, it constitutes an early environmental protest. Wovoka’s prediction that Indian salvation would come through the redemptive power of nature not only expressed a Native requiem for the “West that has passed” but also sought to restore a reverence for the natural environment that offered an alternative to exploitation by emphasizing the deep connections between people and the land. Various Native nations synthesized the Ghost Dance ritual with their own beliefs, but all ceremonies interacted intimately with the environment—­some circled around a sacred tree, others incorporated animals into ceremonial garments, most “shook the earth” with pounding feet and chanted “the buffalo are coming.” Like Turner’s thesis and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Wovoka’s Ghost Dance ritual recognized that the “frontier” had closed, but unlike the first two, the latter also understood that life in the West would have to be lived differently and that a healthy, sustainable environment was central to future success. Indians who participated in the Ghost Dance, worked hard, and lived clean, honest lives would not only be saved from the coming natural disaster that would purge the land of white people and reunite them with their dead ancestors, they would be restored to a new world teeming with the animals and plants that had always sustained them. Wovoka’s millennial vision prophesied that “elk and deer and antelope and even the vanished buffalo will return in vast numbers as they were before the white man came. And all Indians will be young again and free of the white man’s sicknesses.” Not surprisingly, the Ghost Dance spread quickly. Among the groups who welcomed Wovoka’s message of salvation during these grim times were western Lakotas (a.k.a. Sioux) in South Dakota. In 1890 the federal government had violated its treaty agreements with the tribe and carved up their reservation into five smaller units to force assimilation (incorporation into white society) and the practice of individualized agri148  The Pivotal Decade

culture. When the lands proved too thin to support agrarianism—­plains droughts withered Lakota crops as effectively as they did busted-­out homesteader farms—­the government punished “lazy Indians” by cutting federal rations in half, making the specter of starvation very real. Faced with the near extinction of vital bison, economic decline, and desperation, abject Lakotas sought spiritual assistance by embracing the Ghost Dance. But white Indian agents on many reservations feared that the Ghost Dance was some kind of war dance, particularly because in the Lakotas’ version of the ritual, the Ghost Dance was believed to render Native shirts “bulletproof ”—­the warriors couldn’t be killed. Alarmed that the dance was simply another stage in the prolonged Plains Indians wars, panicked white Indian agents called in federal troops. On December 15, 1890, events came to a head; as soldiers arrested the Lakota leader Sitting Bull for failing to halt the spread of the Ghost Dance, a tribal police officer accidentally shot and killed him. His murder provoked a small band, which included women and children, to flee the reservation on foot with the U.S. Army in hot pursuit. It was winter in South Dakota; the Lakotas didn’t get far. On December 29, at Wounded Knee Creek, officers forced the desperate, cold, starving group to surrender their weapons. When a scuffle ensued, the soldiers opened fire. By the time the shooting stopped, 153 Lakotas (again, mostly women and children) lay dead. Although public outrage erupted over the shameful massacre and resulted in the restoration of full treaty rights and rations for Lakotas, the massacre effectively ended Plains Indian resistance and eliminated their central role in the complicated ecosystems of the region. Not surprisingly, the millennial fervor of the Ghost Dance waned considerably in the wake of Wounded Knee, although other elements of the faith endured well into the twentieth century. But the closing of the frontier had meant something entirely different to Indian people than it had to Turner and Buffalo Bill. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man lamented, “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” Turner and Cody may not have had a clear vision of the postfrontier West, but a Scottish immigrant named John Muir did. Muir’s veneration of the natural West was not economic but aesthetic and echoed the sentiments The Pivotal Decade  149

of Wovoka. As Muir writes, “Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would see that his appropriation of Earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty by all.” In 1892, the year prior to Turner’s frontier thesis, Muir co-­ founded an alpine hiking group called the Sierra Club that would become a leading advocate for environmental protection in the twentieth century, one that sought to promote sustainability rather than Edenic mythology. It seemed the fulfillment of George Perkins Marsh’s prescient prediction nearly four decades earlier that “the destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances civilization, until the impoverishment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted.” Muir would make preservation his passion. Suggested Reading

Pamela T. Amoss, “The Fish God Gave Us: The First Salmon Ceremony Revived,” Arctic Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1987): 56–­66, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​ /stable​/40316132. Robert Block, “Frederick Jackson Turner and American Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 1 (March 1980): 31–­42, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2562823. Carla C. Bossard and John M. Randall, “Nonnative Plants in California,” in Terrestrial Vegetation of California, ed. Michael G. Barbour, Todd Keeler-­Wolf, and Allan A. Schoenherr, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 107–­23. Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: As Recounted by Maxi’diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman) (ca. 1839–­1932), originally published as Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation, ed. Gilbert Livingstone Wilson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1917), available at https://d​ igital.​ library.​ upenn.​ edu/​ women/​ buffalo/​ garden​ /garden​.html. Census Office, Department of Interior, Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska) at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington dc: gpo, 1894), available at https://w ​ ww2.​ census.​ gov/​ prod2/​ decennial/​ documents​ /1890a​_v10​-01​.pdf.

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William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1987): 157–­76. Richard W. Etulain, “Frontier Novels” and “Frontier Art,” in Re-­Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 5–­30, 52–­76. Mark Fiege, “The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape,” Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 22–­ 47. Also “Iron Horses: Nature and the Building of the First U.S. Transcontinental Railroad,” in Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 228–­70. Dan L. Flores, “Wolfsong Redux,” in American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 136–­60. Also “Frederic Remington’s Kiss of Death” and “In the End, What Was Charlie Russell Trying to Tell Us?,” in Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 151–­57, 204–­11. Greg Gordon, “The Oregon Land Frauds,” in When Money Grew on Trees: A. B. Hammond and the Age of the Timber Baron (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 199–­218. William T. Hornaday, “Part II—­The Extermination,” in Extermination of the American Bison, reprint ed. (Washington dc: gpo, 1889), 124–­212. David Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 2 (May 2000): 159–­92. Christopher Knowlton, “The Demise of the Bison,” in Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 3–­14. Richard N. Mack and W. Mark Lonsdale, “Humans as Global Plant Dispersers: Getting More than We Bargained For,” BioScience 51, no. 2 (February 2001): 95–­102. Darlis A. Miller, “‘Darkest Idaho,’” in Mary Hallock Foote: Author-­Illustrator of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 81–­140. Joaquin Miller, Life amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History (Berkeley ca: Heyday, 1996). James Muhn, “Early Administration of the Forest Reserve Act: Interior Department and General Land Office Policies, 1891–­1897,” in The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium, ed. Harold K. Steen (Durham nc: Forest History Society, 1992), available at https://​foresthistory​.org​/research​-explore​/us​-forest​-service​ -history​/places​/the​-national​-forests/. Brian Richard Ott, “Indian Fishing Rights in the Pacific Northwest: The Need for Federal Intervention,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 14, no.

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2 (December 1987), 313–­43, available at http://​lawdigitalcommons​.bc​.edu​/cgi​ /viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=​1596​&​context​=​ealr. Rodman W. Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (San Marino ca: Huntington Library, 1992). Kurt Repanshek, “The Great Slaughter,” in Re-­Bisoning the West: Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2019), 53–­72. Michael J. Robinson, “Last Feast on Wild Meat,” in Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 36–­44. Louis Warren, “The Ghost Dance Arrives,” in God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 93–­114. Also “Wage Work in the Sacred Circle: The Ghost Dance as Modern Religion,” Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 141–­68. Richard White, “Creative Destruction,” in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), 455–­93. Charles F. Wilkinson, “‘The River Was Crouded with Salmon,’” in Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (Washington dc: Island Press, 1992), 175–­218. John Willis, “The End of the (Old) World,” in US Environmental History: Inviting Doomsday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 28–­49.

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Conservation and Preservation

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“I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.” In 1903 this charming and unusual request came to John Muir from none other than President Theodore Roosevelt. Muir could not resist. That summer the two men set out on an intimate three-­night camping trip through the spectacular scenery of Yosemite in California to “talk conservation.” Although the state administered Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove at the time, Muir hoped to convince the commander in chief that both areas deserved protection within the national park. While the specifics of their talks and rambles remained private, the outcome of their adventure was not only the federal preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove and a preliminary outline for what would become the Antiquities Act but also effusive declarations of respect and affection from both men. “I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir,” Roosevelt wrote, while Muir simply gushed, “I fairly fell in love with him.” As this rapprochement illustrates, these two men, who often appear as oversimplified adversaries—­ Roosevelt the conservationist versus Muir the preservationist—­in fact aligned closely on many key environmental issues. Both men dedicated their lives to protecting the scenic wonders of nature, and both viewed wilderness as a necessary respite from civilization. By the time he left office, Roosevelt had created 5 national parks (many influenced by Muir), 18 national monuments, 55 national bird reservations and game preserves, and 150 national forests. 153

20. President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir atop Glacier Point in Yosemite during

their formative May 1903 camping trip. Wikimedia Commons.

“We are not building this country of ours for a day,” Roosevelt avowed. “It is to last through the ages.” Muir’s writings and advocacy ultimately established his legacy as the father of the national parks, and his biographer Donald Worster has argued that Muir’s mission was nothing less than “saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism.” But for all their points 154  Conservation and Preservation

of agreement, the two men also had their differences. Ironically, Yosemite would provide the setting for both their happy 1903 camping expedition and their apocryphal showdown over damming the park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. As the twentieth century dawned, exploitative market demands and the West’s resource-­based, colonial-­like status continued—­acerbic writer Bernard DeVoto labels the early West “the plundered province”—­but the region began to assert its own unique identity as a result of its extensive public lands. This federal variation on the commons concept, comprising forest reserves, parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges, quickly became the distinguishing hallmark of the American West and began to establish a new way to assign value to nature beyond commodification. In 1889 a former Interior Department secretary, Carl Schurz, had railed that Americans were “a spendthrift people recklessly wasting [their] heritage” and saddled with “a government careless of the future”; four years later, Frederick Jackson Turner ominously warned that “the frontier has gone and with it has closed the first period in American history.” So, what was next? Roosevelt and Muir. Together these two men personified the foundational ideas—­conservation and preservation—­that would shape both thought and policy about the natural environment of the West well into the twenty-­first century. Public commitment to protecting natural resources grew through the first two decades of the twentieth century as one of the central issues championed by Progressives. As a political ideology, Progressivism sought to improve the human condition through governmental reforms designed to redress the social inequalities that emerged as the nation rapidly urbanized and industrialized. Although it began at the local and state levels as a kind of municipal housekeeping, Progressive reform had become a full-­fledged national phenomenon by the turn of the century. Avid modernizers, Progressives were typically white and held middle-­class values, used science and statistics to support their causes, promoted efficiency and education, and viewed government, especially at the federal level, as a positive instrument for social change. Progressivism also had a strong religious undercurrent that attempted to reconcile Protestant morality with capitalism and democracy to promote a kind of Christian stewardship of the nation and its resources. Never a really unified movement per se, Progressivism championed causes Conservation and Preservation  155

as diverse as temperance, birth control, urban sanitation, anti–­child labor laws, settlement houses, antiprostitution campaigns, women’s rights, and environmental protection. In this final area, Progressive concerns about the limits of the nation’s natural resources prompted two different, if related, responses: conservation and preservation. While by the late twentieth century these two terms had become interchangeable in popular parlance (along with “environmentalism”), at the beginning of the century each had a unique meaning and associated values. Essentially, conservation advocated the wise use of nature, while preservation advocated the protection of nature from exploitation. Conservation was utilitarian and emphasized the role of science and rational planning in the efficient development and use of natural resources, especially in the West. Conservationists advocated protecting resources for the good of the nation to ensure that they would always be available for future consumers. Theodore Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, would become the most high-­profile advocates for this idea, which arose out of concerns about the nation’s declining timber supplies. The myth of inexhaustibility in the nation’s forests had begun to reveal its perfidy as early as the 1870s with the stark deforestation of the Great Lakes region. Interior secretary Schurz had lamented that “the destruction of our forests is so fearfully rapid that if we go on at the same rate, men whose hair is already gray will see the day when . . . there will be no forest left worthy of the name.” He was right. By the 1890s, the avaricious take had also stripped many West Coast forests of their best trees to feed housing booms in San Francisco and Los Angeles and provide milled timber to East Coast markets. Congress had responded with the Forest Reserve Act (1891), discussed in the previous chapter, which empowered the president to set aside and conserve forest reserves for the future. The subsequent Organic Act (1897) reinforced this conservation agenda by stipulating that the reserves were designed to “furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” In 1898 President William McKinley appointed the thirty-­three-­year-­old Pinchot to preside over these forest holdings, and by the turn of the twentieth century the system comprised more than forty-­ seven million acres. 156  Conservation and Preservation

In 1901 McKinley’s assassination suddenly thrust Vice President Theodore Roosevelt into the Oval Office. At the news, one conservative senator purportedly lamented, “Now look! That damned cowboy is president!” But for the West, the elevation of that “cowboy” proved a fortuitous promotion. Progressives now had a powerful new ally in the White House, and so did Pinchot. An early and avid advocate for protecting the wild places of the American West, the once-­frail president had used ranching and hunting in that region to reinvent his sickly eastern self as a virile and manly “cowboy” and so shed early, effeminate nicknames such as “Jane-­Dandy” and “Punkin-­ Lily.” In the early 1880s, Roosevelt made several trips to the Dakotas, even buying a couple of ranches and working on them before “busting out” in the Great Die-­Up of 1887. The experience had been transformative, allowing him to harden himself, bulk up, shed childhood ailments like asthma, and even swap out his squeak for a voice “hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.” “Cowboy” was apt. In 1887, as part of his effort to protect the very West that Turner and Buffalo Bill would soon warn was vanishing, Roosevelt co-­founded the Boone and Crockett Club, named after frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, to “promote the conservation and management of wildlife, especially big game, and its habitat.” A kind of grown men’s Boy Scouts, the club’s socially elite membership advocated ethical hunting and sportsmanship and began lobbying for the protection and conservation of wild animals—­at least the ones these sport hunters liked to hook and shoot—­and American masculinity. As good Progressives, they believed that the federal government served as the best steward of the public’s natural resources and guardian against rampant capitalist exploitation. As president, Roosevelt was in a unique position to implement change. By the end of his administration, the nation could boast wildlife refuges and game preserves in seventeen states and three territories for the protection of the few remaining bison and elk herds, as well as the fast-­disappearing birds favored by the plume trade. In his quest to protect the West’s charismatic megafauna, Roosevelt had a number of prominent allies, including William Temple Hornaday, the prolific author, taxidermist, and director of the New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo). Like Roosevelt, Hornaday had grown alarmed by the near extermination of bison and other western game Conservation and Preservation  157

species, and he became a convert to conservation. “Here is an inexorable law of Nature,” Hornaday wrote, “to which there are no exceptions: No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes.” Hornaday’s pithy law certainly applied to almost all of the natural resources of the West. Roosevelt concurred. By the turn of the century, for example, feathered hats for women had become a major fashion statement, much like beaver felt hats had been earlier. And like beavers, the bird species favored by the millinery trade suffered catastrophic losses. One astonishing census taken by an ornithologist on two 1886 walks through the center of the fashion district in Manhattan, for example, counted 172 hats adorned with nearly 40 different bird varieties. Some hats sported fancy sprays of breeding plumage, while others featured the entire taxidermied bird. The rarer the bird, the greater the prestige. This rapacious plume trade quickly pushed herons, egrets, and numerous other sea-­and shorebirds to near extinction as commercial hunters raided rookeries during nesting season to supply the market with ornamental feathers worth twice their weight in gold. The chicks were left to die. By 1900 the annual avian death toll had reached more than 200 million individuals in North America alone. As the primary consumers of this millinery form of commodified bird life, women were also perfectly situated to bring about reform and change. In 1896 two Boston socialites, Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall, co-­founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society and began recruiting members by combing through the Boston Blue Book, a who’s-­who register of the city’s wealthy and prestigious families. Soon nearly one thousand society women had pledged to protect endangered birds by joining the group’s growing boycott of feathered hats. Within two years, similarly dedicated state Audubon Society groups appeared across the country, including in Texas and California. By 1901 these societies had allied together in a national federation, formalized as the National Audubon Society in 1905, that successfully lobbied Roosevelt to establish the first national wildlife refuge (Pelican Island in Florida) in 1903. As classic science-­based Progressive Era conservation organizations, these Audubon societies dedicated their members’ efforts to the protection of birds and the natural habitats that sustained them. Believing 158  Conservation and Preservation

that the federal government was the real solution to the endangered bird problem, these Progressive reformers ultimately secured the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918), which prohibits the killing, capturing, selling, trading, and transport of protected migratory bird species. It remains one of the most powerful laws protecting wild birds in North America. In 1905 Roosevelt also set aside the nation’s first large game wildlife reserve, the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve in Oklahoma (formerly part of the Kiowa-­Comanche Reservation), as a cooperative bison restoration effort between the federal government and Hornaday, who donated fifteen of the Bronx Zoo’s captive bison to reestablish the species. Indeed, Hornaday has historically received the bulk of the credit for rescuing bison from the brink of extinction. His book Our Vanishing Wildlife, published in 1913, passionately called for wildlife reform; the “birds and mammals now are literally dying for your help,” he warned. But Hornaday was in fact only one of several bison saviors. Indian activists also played an important bison-­restoration role, and their connection to this “kindred mammal” was much more cultural and far less commercial. The naturalist and writer George Bird Grinnell, for example, detailed the role of Samuel Walking Coyote (a.k.a. Short Coyote) in establishing the Flathead Valley buffalo herd. While there are multiple accounts of the herd’s origins, Grinnell’s described Walking Coyote, a Pend d’Oreille man, bringing a small group of bison to the Flathead Valley of Montana in 1878. Tribal oral histories give the credit to Latití (a.k.a. Joseph Blanket Hawk), Walking Coyote’s stepson. In either case, the two bulls and four heifers that were trailed west over the Rocky Mountains soon became the foundation of a bison herd purchased approximately four or five years later by Charles Allard and Michel Pablo. By 1902 the vibrant Pablo-­Allard herd had reached a total of more than three hundred animals, produced about fifty calves each year, and roamed free across the Flathead Indian Reservation. Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s execution of legislation (the Dawes Act) dividing up the reservation into individual private allotments forced the sale of the herd. The Pablo-­Allard bison ultimately went to Canada after the U.S. government’s offer proved far too parsimonious. One American newspaper lamented Canada’s acquisition of an estimated six hundred buffalo as “a Conservation and Preservation  159

striking coup d’etat, [by which they] secured the greatest herd of bison in captivity.” Despite this loss, however, by 1919 numerous restoration efforts had initiated a slow rebound to ecological health, from a frighteningly low point of a few hundred wild individuals to nine growing herds. To manage the growing federal wildlife reserve system, Roosevelt consolidated several agencies into the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905, which merged into the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940. The agency’s focus, however, remained the protection of fish and game, not predators, which it continued to exterminate in astonishing numbers. It would take the ecological imagination of later individuals, such as Aldo Leopold, a forester who embraced both conservation and preservation, to begin seeing habitat protection as a whole, rather than as piecemeal attempts to protect trophy species and eliminate their predators. But the wildlife refuges constituted a start and an important foundation upon which the coming environmental movement could be built. The same year that he organized the Biological Survey, Roosevelt transferred the country’s forest reserves to the newly minted U.S. Forest Service, renamed them “national forests,” and designated Pinchot as chief of the Forest Service. Significantly, the Department of Agriculture houses the Forest Service, an assignment befitting the conservation mission of the new agency. Trees were a crop, and the service would manage them accordingly. Pinchot himself argued that “the object of our forest policy is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful . . . or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness. The forests are to be used by man. Every other consideration comes secondary.” A classic Progressive, Pinchot combined a formal education in forest management with practical experience gleaned from his family’s private estate. Pinchot adhered to the gospel of efficiency—­an almost religious dedication to the scientific management of the forests (as a crop)—­to ensure “that the water, wood, and forage of the reserves are conserved and wisely used for the benefit of the home builder first of all.” This multiple-­use philosophy sought to avoid the tragedy of the commons by regulating cutting, mining, grazing, and recreation to ensure that the forests could be both used and saved—­the hallmark of efficient conservation. The national forest system flourished 160  Conservation and Preservation

under Roosevelt, and by the end of his tenure in the White House he had set aside or enlarged 150 federal forests. In the West, Pinchot endeavored to counter the heavy hand of this new, often resented federal landlord by creating in the U.S. Forest Service a hierarchical bureaucracy that placed most administrative responsibilities and decisions in the hands of local rangers and regional supervisors. Ultimately, however, the agency bowed to efficiency of scale, and Pinchot frequently gave preferential treatment to large cattle and timber operations over small resource users because it made good conservation, if not democratic, sense. In the end, he argued, conservation meant the “greatest good” to the “greatest number in the long run.” Like many of the West’s natural resources, timber was regarded as a commodity and so the market determined its ultimate value; scientific management of the forests made them profitable. Not all Progressives followed Pinchot’s utilitarian lead, however, and an important and often competing ideology emerged at the turn of the century: preservation. Preservationists advocated the protection of nature for its own sake and for the physical and spiritual health of people rather than purely for economic utility. This was the argument of John Muir, who believed that “the hills and groves were God’s first temples.” In many ways, Muir serves as an illustrative transitional figure between the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and the environmentalism of the twentieth. Both Romantics and Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had emphasized the primacy of the imagination and emotions, celebrated the individual, and waxed rhapsodic about the wonders of nature. Muir’s writings certainly bore the imprint of these influences. Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir and his family immigrated to America when he was eleven. A curious, if eclectic, student, Muir took college courses in the sciences and read Thoreau, Emerson, and George Perkins Marsh. He absorbed natural history and developed an abiding appreciation for “the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature.” For several years, Muir traipsed across much of the West, including Alaska, studying at what he called the “University of the Wilderness.” By the 1870s, he was making his living as “John of the Mountains,” writing about wilderness and the West’s wild places he had come to love. Like many Progressives, Muir believed that Conservation and Preservation  161

the federal government could most effectively and efficiently protect these natural wonders. As historian Thomas Wellock has argued, “Muir blended the idealism of Henry David Thoreau with the political activism befitting a modern lobbyist.” In classic Progressive fashion, Muir co-­founded the Sierra Club in 1892 as an organization “to explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them; to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the government in preserving the forest and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” He also cultivated friendships with business leaders and powerbrokers like Edward Harriman, head of the Southern Pacific Railroad, President Roosevelt, and even Pinchot, because they had the political and financial clout to translate his advocacy into action, as the chapter-­opening Yosemite anecdote illustrates. These pragmatic alliances also reveal that the divide between conservation and preservation could often be more imagined than real. During the Roosevelt years, however, conservation won the day. The American West was still developing economically and serving as a national resource warehouse, so that Muir’s preservationist ideals seemed a luxury, even a waste, to many people in the region and the nation. The Sierra Club and Muir continued to lobby for the protection of sublime nature, but these more romantic notions about the environment would not attain primacy in the West or the United States as a whole until after World War II, when tourism became a mass phenomenon and middle-­class and even blue-­collar Americans began taking vacations to enjoy the wilderness. Nowhere was this triumph of conservation more evident in the West than in the push for reclamation—­the effort to use irrigation to reclaim arid lands. Despite the federal government’s best efforts and intentions to distribute western lands cheaply and quickly via the Homestead Act and similar legislation, settlers inevitably ran up against the vexing aridity of much of the West: too dry to dry-­farm and too vast to irrigate. Progressives once again turned to the federal government for assistance, and in 1902 Congress passed one of the most transformative laws for the West: the Newlands Reclamation Act. The Reclamation Act alluded to the vision of John Wesley Powell, who had vigorously advocated for a West settled and developed around watershed 162  Conservation and Preservation

basins managed by the federal government (see chapter 4). Powell’s proposals may have been too restrictive for gung-­ho settlers, but in the Progressive Era the idea that the federal government should fund large-­scale water projects—­ dams, canals, irrigation—­found many adherents. In contrast to Powell’s plan, though, reclamation endeavored to bring water to the people instead of settling people where there was water. Essentially a concept of multiple use for rivers, reclamation promoted the rational, efficient development of water resources to manage power and provide irrigation, flood control, navigation, and recreation. Indeed, the reclamation movement tugged hard at long-­held, core American values: it promised to make the desert bloom, promote Jeffersonian democracy by providing for the yeoman farmer, and prevent corporate monopolies. As one of reclamation’s biggest boosters, irrigation engineer Elwood Mead proclaimed, “The result will determine whether Western agriculture will be corporate or cooperative; whether rivers shall become an instrument for creating a great monopoly, as the dominant element of Western society, or be a free gift to those who make a public return for their use.” With a Progressive in the White House, the reclamation movement gained momentum. Roosevelt explained how reclamation fit within the conservation movement in a December 1901 speech written by Pinchot: “The forests alone cannot . . . fully regulate and conserve the waters of the arid region. Great storage works are necessary to equalize the flow of streams and to save the flood waters.” Conserving water for future use. Congress agreed and soon passed the historic Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), named after Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada, the act’s sponsor. The act created the federal Reclamation Service within the Department of Interior (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923), provided that all states on or west of the hundredth meridian (Texas was added in 1906) receive federal funds for reclamation projects, and proclaimed its intention to serve the small family farmer by limiting access to reclaimed water exclusively to local residents irrigating between 40 and 160 acres of land. The optimistic act also stipulated that the projects would pay for themselves within ten years through land sales and farmers’ payments. Not surprisingly, western states chafed at federal control over western resources, and so to mollify them the Reclamation Act also Conservation and Preservation  163

provided for a strange hybrid of federal funding for reclamation projects and state control over the water they conserved. Social critic Bernard DeVoto summed up the West’s desired arrangement: “Get out and give us more money.” Reclamation represented a utopian, democratic vision of the West not wholly incompatible with Powell’s. And like most utopian visions, it was doomed to failure, as corporate agribusiness and booming cities soon monopolized the water intended for small family farms. Reclamation projects did spur western settlement, however. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, settlers filed far more homestead patents than ever before, and reclamation water accounted for nearly 30 percent of the irrigated acreage in the eleven westernmost states. In its first five years, the Bureau of Reclamation began about thirty projects, but the fiscal and environmental costs proved excessive. Farmers’ meager profits left them unable to repay the high costs of dams and irrigation projects. To address this problem, Congress began to stray from the actual language of the Reclamation Act, first by extending repayment periods out to four decades, then by eliminating interest on building loans, and finally by allowing the debts to linger, in some cases, until the present day. According to one estimate, “86 percent of the total reimbursable construction costs have not been and will not be repaid.” It was an enormous taxpayer subsidy but not to the intended small family farmers. Like the Homestead Act before it, the Reclamation Act quickly came to benefit entrepreneurs, who identified water as the lucrative western commodity. Cheap land plus cheap water proved a powerful lure to agribusiness speculators, who snapped up 160-­acre parcels and took advantage of a reclamation loophole that allowed families to manage collectively each member’s individual (maximum) holding and then lease the entire combined tract to corporate farmers. In other words, a family of six could claim six separate 160-­acre land parcels, along with the federally subsidized reclamation water to irrigate it, and then lease all 960 acres and the cheap water to an agribusiness entrepreneur. The bigger the “family,” the bigger the leased parcel. Like earlier Homestead Act dummy claims, these reclamation sleight-­of-­hand maneuvers undermined the act’s original Jeffersonian intent to support small farmers. California speculators elevated the subterfuge to a near art form. Lobbyists for the state’s 164  Conservation and Preservation

development managed to convince Congress to exempt the entire Imperial Valley from the acreage limitations stipulated in the act, while agribusiness farmers in the Central Valley circumvented the same restrictions when the Army Corps of Engineers built their hydraulic system. Throughout the West, the Corps of Engineers often competed with the Bureau of Reclamation for federal funding to build dams, canals, and flood control projects. The Corps of Engineers’ water, it turned out, was not bound by reclamation laws and, ultimately, neither were federal bureaucrats, who found it increasingly inconvenient if not impossible to enforce the act’s limitations. In his influential book Rivers of Empire, environmental historian Donald Worster argues that the legacy of the Newlands Reclamation Act was the development of a “hydraulic society,” where ownership and control of the West’s massive reclamation infrastructure became consolidated into the hands of an oligarchic elite comprising large western landowners and federal technocrats from the East. Instead of the utopian, democratic ideals the act seemed to embody, Worster argues, the massive scale of arid lands reclamation created a “coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.” In the West, capitalism had captured the water. Los Angeles and San Francisco certainly fit this description. Growing and thirsty, their grasping for water added another layer of complexity to the West’s environmental history while provocatively demonstrating that not all western water projects were federally funded. William Mulholland personified Worster’s “power elite,” and he had a vision for Los Angeles. For the City of Angels to become a thriving metropolis, it would need water—­lots of it. And as the head of that burgeoning city’s Department of Water and Power, Mulholland was painfully aware that the go-­go growth of Los Angeles was quickly outstripping the thirst-­quenching ability of the Los Angeles River. He also understood the basic premise of western water law: first in time, first in right. The answer to LA’s aridity riddle, Mulholland realized, lay two hundred miles north of Los Angeles on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in the valley of the Owens River. There, small farmers eagerly awaited the kind of federal reclamation that the Newlands Act promised would make their desert bloom. Mulholland had a different idea, one that would make LA bloom instead. Conservation and Preservation  165

21. “There it is—­take it.” William Mulholland (at right, above the flag) presiding over the

initial rush of water through the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct that transfers water from the Owens Valley to thirsty Los Angeles, November 5, 1913. Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1913.

In 1905, after securing a vaguely worded municipal bond issue for the “purchase of lands and water and the inauguration of work on the aqueduct,” the City of Los Angeles began quietly buying up Owens Valley farmland and the riparian or water rights-­of-­way along the Owens River. By the time local residents figured out the hijacking scheme, it was too late. Mulholland supervised construction of the 233-­mile, gravity-­powered Los Angeles Aqueduct that took the river south and over the mountains into Los Angeles. Along the way, it also provided irrigation to the San Fernando Valley, just north of the city. Developers and investors in on Mulholland’s confidential plan snapped up dirt-­cheap, soon-­to-­be-­irrigated property in the San Fernando Valley before its real value became apparent. On November 5, 1913, when the water began to flow, Mulholland, like a good oligarch, empirically declared, “There it is—­take it.” So what about the small family farmer who was supposed to benefit from reclamation? Ever the pragmatic and efficient Progressive conservationist, Roosevelt embraced the “greatest good of the greatest number” reasoning and threw his support behind the Owens River water transfer as “a hundred 166  Conservation and Preservation

or thousandfold more important and more valuable to the people as a whole.” Federal reclamation abandoned the Owens Valley and doomed its farmland to aridity. The loss of the river also devastated the local Owens Valley environment. The Owens Lake ecosystem, which once served as an important rest stop for millions of migrating waterfowl, shriveled into a parched alkali flat that still generates debilitating dust storms. A second aqueduct to Los Angeles, built in the 1970s, further exacerbated the situation by siphoning off the valley’s springs and seeps and withering groundwater-­dependent vegetation and the valley’s lush meadows. Although two environmental lawsuits and court-­levied fines finally forced the city to restore water to a sixty-­two-­ mile stretch of the Owens River in 2007, desertification had already taken a heavy toll. In an area that receives less rainfall than Phoenix, saltbrush and tumbleweeds now flourish where native grasses and wildflowers once thrived. Today, the Owens River supplies between 30 and 50 percent of the water needs of distant Los Angeles, and the dried-­out local lakebed constitutes one of the largest sources of dust pollution in the United States. As one resident complained, “The city of Los Angeles regards Inyo County as a resource colony to be exploited to whatever means they see fit. They are taking all the water they possibly can. Water tables are dropping precipitously.” Los Angeles built the aqueduct in spite of farmers and ranchers who bombed and vandalized it in the California water wars of the 1920s. In the end, the Owens River flowed out of its valley into a concrete ditch and made a distant metropolis, not the desert, bloom. In 1890 50,000 people had called Los Angeles “home”; by 1900 that number had doubled to 100,000; by 1910 the population had exploded to 320,000; and by the 2020 census, Los Angeles was a city of 4 million. As Worster concludes, “The smaller, weaker party lost out to the more powerful one while the federal government looked on and abetted.” For John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, the sometimes conflicting objectives of conservation and preservation, evident in the Owens Valley, came into even sharper focus in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite. Once again, the catalyst was water. Like Los Angeles, the city of San Francisco sought a reliable source that could slake its thirst for decades into the future. In 1903 city officials proposed damming the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Conservation and Preservation  167

Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to create a public water supply. It was classic conservationism. Outraged, Muir and the Sierra Club protested vigorously, arguing that such a proposal violated the preservation mandate of the park. Following the devastating earthquake and ensuing fires of 1906, however, San Francisco’s quest took on a new urgency; the city needed a bigger, better, more reliable source of water. The Roosevelt administration, largely at the prodding of utilitarian-­minded Pinchot, agreed and shifted its support to the proposal. The Hetch Hetchy clash pitted two groups with different visions of the valley against one another: Muir and other preservation activists, who hoped to promote nature tourism and scenic protection through the development of hotels and campgrounds, versus conservationists, who wanted to dam the valley to create a public water supply and thwart avaricious private utility companies that could ransom power to the highest bidder. Both sides slung epithets. Muir blasted his opponents as “Satan and Co.” and “temple destroyers” who were beholden to the “Almighty Dollar.” Dam supporters ridiculed preservationists as “short-­haired women and long-­haired men” and argued that the economic utility of damming Hetch Hetchy outweighed the sentiments of tourists, who could always go marvel at Yosemite Valley. Conservation won this round. In 1913 Congress passed the Raker Act, authorizing the city’s construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam, completed a decade later, and the creation of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Muir was devastated; he died the next year. Yosemite and what photographer Ansel Adams called the “Range of Light” may have brought Roosevelt and Muir together to hike and camp in 1903, but Hetch Hetchy demonstrated that sometimes conservation and preservation were irreconcilable. In the early twentieth-­century West, the development and exploitation mind-­set still prevailed, although sometimes by the hands of westerners themselves, and a full-­blown commitment to preservation was only a faint glimmer in the distant future. The Hetch Hetchy fight may have broken Muir’s spirit, and perhaps even his heart, but preservationists emerged from it more powerful and influential than ever before, and ironically their loss in Yosemite helped ensure that other national parks, like the Grand Canyon, would not suffer such a fate. Unlike federal and municipal reclamation, the parks movement 168  Conservation and Preservation

allowed conservation and preservation to overlap extensively. Conservationists championed national park use for the enjoyment and moral and physical health of visiting tourists, while preservationists celebrated federal protection of scenic wonders. By the time Roosevelt took the presidential oath of office, the United States had already committed itself to the idea of parks for the people, particularly in the West, where the federal government still held and controlled much of the land. In 1872 Congress had set aside Yellowstone as the first national park and assigned its administrative duties to the Department of Interior. In 1886, when the agency proved unable to keep poachers and squatters out of the park, the U.S. Army took over and expanded its jurisdiction over the next two decades to include each newly added western jewel in the park system, such as Yosemite, Sequoia, General Grant (which later became Kings’ Canyon), Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, and Glacier. Progressives enthusiastically embraced the park concept, and so did Roosevelt, especially after 1906, when Congress passed the Antiquities Act. The Antiquities Act gives the president rather extraordinary and unchecked executive authority to bypass the cumbersome congressional park designation process and unilaterally set aside “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” as national monuments. Roosevelt, as well as his successor William Howard Taft, wasted little time putting the new law into action; Devils Tower, El Morro, Montezuma Castle, Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, Lassen Peak, Grand Canyon, Jewel Cave, Natural Bridges, and Mount Olympus all came into the system as western national monuments. Significantly, these first parks and monuments were visually stunning and economically marginal, so setting them aside didn’t jeopardize western development. During Roosevelt’s tenure alone, from 1901 to 1909, the conservation president designated eighteen national monuments and five national parks, which in addition to other federal holdings ultimately protected more than three hundred million acres of public land. By 1911 the number of national parks and monuments administered by various governmental agencies had swollen to nearly forty. The time had clearly come to create a new agency to manage this public resource commons collectively rather than individually. Conservation and Preservation  169

The national parks have been called “America’s best idea,” and it makes sense that their organizational genesis lies in the Progressive Era. The Hetch Hetchy fight had demonstrated the vulnerability of the parks, and the effort to establish an agency to manage them had gained serious momentum by the time Woodrow Wilson came into the White House in 1913. Sources of support for such a federal agency ran the gamut, from governmental administrators to tourist organizations, but the complaint of borax millionaire Stephen Mather finally tipped the scales. In the summer of 1914, Mather visited Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks and became incensed at their poor management. He wrote of his concerns to his friend, Secretary of Interior Franklin Lane, who responded quite simply, “If you don’t like the way the parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run them yourself.” Mather took the bait. As someone who had been on the losing side of the Hetch Hetchy fight, Mather understood that both he and the parks needed to finesse a delicate balance between conservation and preservation, and so Mather began a national campaign of articles and photographs to drum up support for a federal parks agency. In 1916 Mather’s crusade triumphed when Congress passed and President Wilson signed the National Park Service (nps) Organic Act and named Mather the agency’s first director. The nps’s stated mission was “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” This hybrid and often contradictory assignment would prove difficult to carry out in the long run. With “tourism” as its prime directive, the newly minted nps struggled to reconcile protecting the sublime with providing pit toilets. Furthermore, the aesthetic appreciation for nature born out of leisure experiences such as hiking, camping, hunting, and fishing often gave conservationists and preservationists an elitist perspective. Although the creation of the park system seemed to reinforce core democratic values of community and openness, the parks themselves were really only accessible to those with the financial resources to travel and explore. Not until the postwar boom in the 1950s and 1960s would travel to the national parks become a mass phenomenon. 170  Conservation and Preservation

Conserving nature for recreation and tourism at times meant preventing subsistence users from hunting, gathering, fishing, and utilizing timber resources. In other words, parks tended to benefit the white middle and upper classes at the expense of nonwhite Americans and the rural poor. Policies of Indian removal at Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite, for example, attempted to create a “pristine” and “safe” wilderness experience for (white) park visitors as part of a larger attempt to “protect” nature. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had already primed audiences with a nostalgic western Indian mythology, but these romantic portrayals only resonated once Native peoples no longer constituted any real threat or danger. Interestingly, all three parks were willing to pay local tribes to “play Indian” for visitors, so long as this controlled contact constituted the extent of their presence in the park. To be sure, several of the new national parks and monuments protected Indian sites such as Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Gran Quivira, but they were all ruins, the silent, ghostly, abandoned reminders of an ancient America that had long since vanished. Tourists expected that their parks would be uninhabited, and that required dispossession. Yet for all its shortcomings and seeming frivolity, public lands tourism nevertheless served as a cultural common denominator, and the region’s iconic landscapes, flora, and fauna proved especially captivating. It is also important to understand that while Roosevelt, Hornaday, and Pinchot might have been ahead of the times on many issues—­true Progressive reformers for conservation and preservation, for example—­they were also men of their time. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this dualism than their acceptance of the pseudoscience theories promoted by Madison Grant. A well-­to-­do explorer, zoologist, and conservationist, Grant became one of the leading advocates of the day for a racist and classist ideology known as eugenics, which argued for the improvement of humans through selective breeding for “ideal” genetic traits. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American eugenicists eagerly promoted and justified white supremacy, discrimination, and dispossession in the name of science. Roosevelt (and Pinchot) and Hornaday were among those associated with Grant’s pseudoscientific racism. As fate would have it, what brought them together was bison—­vanishing bison, to be more precise. Conservation and Preservation  171

22. Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde. Once home to the Ancestral Puebloans, Mesa Verde became

a national park in 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt set it aside to “preserve the works of man.” Photo by Rationalobserver, Wikimedia Commons.

Roosevelt’s commitment to conservation and protecting bison from extinction led him to collaborate with Grant, a fellow Boone and Crockett Club member, to found the New York Zoological Society in 1895, which in turn led to the opening of the Bronx Zoo in 1898. Unlike most contemporaneous facilities, the Bronx Zoo embraced larger, more natural settings for animals and served as both a major tourist attraction and an invaluable wildlife laboratory. Grant was one of the zoo’s primary fundraisers and promoters. The zoo’s first director was Hornaday, and under his leadership the zoo engaged in an aggressive program of breeding captive bison to provide animals for release on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, as discussed earlier. In 1896 Hornaday successfully lobbied Congress to create national bison ranges. And together, Roosevelt, Grant, and Hornaday helped found the American Bison Society in 1905, using the subsequent loss of the Pablo-­Allard herd to Canada to raise public awareness and save bison from extinction. Yet, the very next year, in the name of “science,” Hornaday and Grant collaborated on the exhibit of a live human—­a Pygmy teenager from Central Africa—­set up in the Bronx Zoo’s “Monkey House.” Roosevelt’s most obvious association with Grant’s thinking, aside from his praise for Grant’s eugenics diatribe, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), as “a capital book,” was his promotion of the racist “white man’s burden” idea in foreign policy to justify white American imperialism. Tangentially, even Muir’s beloved Sierra Club, founded in 1892, remained a bastion of white privilege, some would argue, well into the twenty-­ first century—­a legacy the group continues to work to address and correct. To be sure, both the conservation and preservation movements represented an important shift in the relationship between the federal government and the nation’s public lands. Prior to the Progressive Era, the government’s primary objective had been putting public lands into private hands through massive incentive programs such as the Homestead Act (1862) and the Mining Law (1872). Now, however, the federal government aggressively set aside lands in the public domain with the specific goal of preventing their conversion into private property. By doing so, the government, through its various land management agencies, ensured that it would continue to be a dominant presence in the West. Ultimately, the twin Progressive Era reform impulses of conservation and preservation sought to remedy open-­access Conservation and Preservation  173

exploitation through federal oversight and regulation and avoid the tragedy of the commons. However, the association of many Progressive reformers with eugenics proponents like Grant certainly complicates their legacies and must be factored into the era’s “at what cost” calculus. Clearly, “progress” is a problematic term. Progress for whom? At what cost? In this transitional era of American environmental history, the nation had to confront many consequences of its past actions. It did not always do so admirably. Yet national forests, wildlife preserves, reclamation, and parks—­ variations on the federal commons theme—­would nevertheless ensure that no matter how zealously individual Americans pursued their own economic self-­interest, there would always be sufficient natural resources to fuel the nation’s growth and development, as well as sublime landscapes where one could discover, as Muir evangelized, “that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” Suggested Reading

Elizabeth D. Blum, “Women, Environmental Rationale, and Activism during the Progressive Era,” in To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History, ed. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 77–­92. Marshall E. Bowen, “Crops, Critters, and Calamity: The Failure of Dry Farming in Utah’s Escalante Desert, 1913–­1918,” Agricultural History 73, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 1–­26. Lincoln Bramwell, “When the Mountains Roared: The 1910 Northern Rockies Fires,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 60, no. 3 (Autumn 2010): 54–­69, 96. Douglas Brinkley, appendix to The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 818–­30. Also “TR’s Wild Side,” American Heritage 59, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 26–­35. Michael Brune, “Pulling Down Our Monuments [with reader comments],” Sierra Club, July 22, 2020, https://​www​.sierraclub​.org​/michael​-brune​/2020​/07​/john​ -muir​-early​-history​-sierra​-club. Gregory J. Dehler, “Director of the Bronx Zoo,” in The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 74–­94.

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Andrea DenHoed, “The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement,” New Yorker, April 27, 2016, available at https://w ​ ww.​ newyorker.​ com/​ books/​ page​ -turner​/the​-forgotten​-lessons​-of​-the​-american​-eugenics​-movement. Bernard DeVoto, “The West against Itself,” in The Western Paradox: A Conservation Reader, ed. Douglas Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 2001), 45–­73. George Bird Grinnell, “The American Bison in 1924,” in Hunting and Conservation: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club, ed. George Bird Grinnell and Charles Sheldon (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1925), 356–­411, available at https://​www​ .google.​ com/​ books/​ edition/​ Hunting_ ​ and_ ​ Conservation/​ IU9DAAAAIAAJ?​ hl= ​ ​ en​&g​ bpv​=1​ & ​ d​ q= ​ H ​ unting+ ​ and+ ​ Conservation:+ ​ The​+Book​+of​+the​+Boone​+and​ +Crockett​+Club​&​printsec. “How We Lost a Chance at Bison,” Harrisburg [pa] Telegraph, December 7, 1911, available at Newspapers.​ com, https://w ​ ww.​ newspapers​.com​/clip​/632932​/harrisburg​ -telegraph​-pa​-dec​-7​-1911how/. In the Spirit of Atatice (Bison Range Restoration, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, 2018), film, 29 min., available at https://​bisonrange​.org/. Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Conservation, Subsistence, and Class at the Birth of Superior National Forest,” Environmental History 4, no. 1 ( January 1999): 80–­99. Robert B. Keiter, “Nature’s Cathedrals,” in To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea (Washington dc: Island Press, 2013), 13–­40. Robert H. Keller Jr. and Michael F. Turek, “From Yosemite to Zuni: Parks and Native People, 1864–­1994,” in American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 17–­29. Christopher Klein, “How Teddy Roosevelt’s Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies,” History​.com, August 11, 2020, https://​www​.history​.com​/news​/teddy​ -roosevelt​-race​-imperialism​-national​-parks. Tom Knudson, “Outrage in Owens Valley a Century after L.A. Began Taking Its Water,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 2014, https://​www​.sacbee​.com​/2014​/01​/05​ /6046630​/outrage​-in​-owens​-valley​.html. Aaron Mair, Chad Hanson, and Mary Ann Nelson, “Who Was John Muir, Really?,” Earth Island Journal, August 11, 2021, available at https://​www​.earthisland​.org​ /journal​/index​.php​/articles​/entry​/who​-was​-john​-muir​-really/. Kathy S. Mason, “Out of Fashion: Harriet Hemenway and the Audubon Society, 1896–­1905,” The Historian 65, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 1–­14, available at https://​www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/24450931.

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Curt Meine, “Roosevelt, Conservation, and the Revival of Democracy,” Conservation Biology 14, no. 4 (August 2001): 829–­31. John Muir, “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” in Essential Muir: A California Legacy Book, ed. Fred D. White (Berkeley ca: Heyday Books, 2006). David A. Nesheim, “Profit, Preservation, and Shifting Definitions of Bison in America,” Environmental History 17, no. 3 ( July 2012): 547–­77. Michelle Nijhuis, “The Long Road Home: Indigenous Nations Are Spearheading a Movement to Fully Restore Bison to the American Landscape,” Sierra, Summer 2021, 24–­31. Parks (podcast), Indigenous Perspectives on the National Parks, episodes available at https://​podcasts​.apple​.com​/us​/podcast​/parks​/id1554571337. “Plume Trade,” copyright by Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, 1988, available at https://​web​.stanford​.edu​/group​/stanfordbirds​/text​/essays​ /Plume​_Trade​.html. Jedediah Purdy, “Environmentalism’s Racist History,” New Yorker, August 13, 2015, available at https://​www​.newyorker​.com​/news​/news​-desk​/environmentalisms​ -racist​-history. Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). See also the four-­part documentary by the same name, aired June 2000 on pbs. Robert W. Righter, “Two Views of One Valley,” in The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66–­95. Adam Rome, “‘Political Hermaphrodites’: Gender and Environmental Reform in Progressive America,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 ( July 2006): 440–­63. Thomas C. Rust, “‘The Work Is Not a Military Duty,’” in Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army’s Experience in America’s First National Park, 1886–­1918 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 17–­54. Iker Saitua, “Encroaching upon Forbidden Ground: Basque Immigrant Sheepherders and the Creation of National Forests in Nevada,” in Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880–­1954 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019), 83–­110. Mark David Spence, “First Wilderness” and “Crowning the Continent,” in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55–­70, 83–­100. Jonathan Peter Spiro, “From Conservation to Preservation,” and “Saving the Redwoods,” in Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of 176  Conservation and Preservation

Madison Grant (Lebanon nh: published by the University Press of New England for the University of Vermont Press, 2009), 52–­72, 266–­96. Ian Tyrrell, “Colonies, Natural Resources, and Geopolitical Thought in the New Empire,” in Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 39–­54. James Wilson to The Forester [historians believe Gifford Pinchot authored the letter for Wilson’s signature], February 1, 1905, available at Forest History Society, https://f​ oresthistory.​ org/​ research-​ explore/​ us-​ forest-​ service-​ history/​ policy-​ and​ -law​/agency​-organization​/wilson​-letter/. Donald Worster, “The Troubled Nature of Wealth,” in A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also “Incipience: A Poor Man’s Paradise,” in Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 61–­126. Michael J. Yochim, “Beauty and the Beet: The Dam Battles of Yellowstone National Park,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 53, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 14–­27.

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Roll On

7

On September 30, 1935, more than ten thousand people braved scorching 102°F desert heat to hear President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) dedicate “the greatest dam in the world,” Boulder Dam, on the Arizona-­Nevada border. Begun in 1931 and completed in 1935, Boulder Dam was a world-­class construction feat accomplished during the darkest days of the Great Depression (Congress renamed it Hoover Dam in 1947 in honor of former president Herbert Hoover and after the death of his rival, FDR). Built by the Bureau of Reclamation and twenty-­one thousand laborers, it was the highest dam on earth at the time, and even today its graceful, almost delicate arching form gleams in the Black Canyon as it holds back twice the annual flow of the once raging lower Colorado River. It was a triumph of human ingenuity and innovation. It also looms ominously in Navajo/Diné history and memory. As the goad for the benignly named “Navajo Project,” Boulder Dam catalyzed a disastrous federal effort to reduce Navajo livestock herds in the name of erosion control. Concerned that silt loads flushed from the reservation’s Colorado tributaries would menace the dam, Commissioner John Collier and the Bureau of Indian Affairs believed that the solution was to “save your soil and thereby save your life.” Calling the Navajo Reservation “practically ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ in causing the Colorado Silt problem,” Collier and the bureau proceeded to decimate Navajo herds in the name of conservation but without any sound science to guide their actions. The 179

23. View looking downstream, showing Boulder Dam, intake towers, and the spillways,

from the Nevada side of the river, April 26, 1935. Used with permission of Weber State University, Stewart Library, Special Collections.

results were ecologically ineffective and socially devastating, bringing fear, malnutrition, disease, and crippling poverty to a population that had been notably self-­sufficient. As one Navajo later lamented, “Although we were told that it was to restore the land, the fact remains that hunger and poverty stood with their mouths open to devour us.” In many ways, Boulder Dam stands as a monument to the federal government’s rising power over the West’s economy and environment—­what historian Adam Rome has called “the environmental-­management state”—­ during the period between the end of World War I and 1940. The region’s relationship to the rest of the nation remained largely unchanged during this interval between the wars as the West continued its frenzied exploitation of raw materials such as food, timber, ores, and petroleum to fuel eastern factories, support western development, and expand foreign trade. But unlike 180  Roll On

the rest of the country, much of the West did not enjoy the Roaring Twenties economic boom before the Great Depression bust. Instead, the region’s heavy reliance on natural resource extraction sent it on a roller coaster of economic boom and bust—­California mostly boomed, while the intermountain West mostly busted—­nearly a full decade before the 1929 stock market crash jolted the rest of the country, revealing the environmental toll that market-­based decisions had wrought. Conservation ideals remained viable in the West during the lull between the wars, as reclamation and new federal agencies like the Soil Conservation Service promoted the wise use of nature. But as extraction continued to link inextricably the region’s environment and economy, there was little consideration for long-­term sustainability. Too few really asked, “At what cost?” In the summer of 1914, Europe collapsed into war. The United States attempted to remain “neutral in thought as well as in action,” as President Woodrow Wilson encouraged, but the truth was that the United States cared a great deal about who won the Great War. (It wasn’t known as World War I until there was a second great war and thus the need to number them.) The nation had far stronger ties with the Allies, especially Great Britain, though German immigrants had swelled the American population in recent decades. Long the primary U.S. trading partner, Great Britain had also enjoyed increasingly strong diplomatic relations with the United States since Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House. By 1917, the United States could no longer ignore the carnage across the Atlantic, and it reluctantly joined the war “to make the world safe for democracy,” as Wilson declared. Despite the nation’s April entry into the fray, however, it took nearly a year before the full force of American troop strength made it to the front. In the meantime, the United States became the Allies’ primary economic supplier. To facilitate the most efficient production and distribution of critical war goods, the federal government created the War Industries Board (wib) and tapped into the natural resource wealth of the West. The wib’s influence on the western economy, and indirectly on the western environment, was significant. During its two-­year period of operation (1917–­ 19), the agency set industrial production quotas and prices, implemented wage hikes to keep down labor unrest, and allocated raw materials to key Roll On  181

manufacturers. The result was a spectacular 20 percent increase in industrial productivity. While production and labor incentives primarily affected the East, the wib’s influence over raw materials had long-­term consequences for the West. The agency became directly involved in shaping the region’s extractive economy and used slogans such as “Food will win the war,” “Save gasoline, it’s a war necessity,” and “Uncle Sam says—­garden to cut food costs.” However, on January 1, 1919, the federal government brought this massive agency’s broad powers over the national economy to a screaming halt. The guns of the Great War had fallen mercifully silent the preceding November, and with the ceasefire came the end of the nation’s federally managed economy. In the East, factories attempted to retool from war-­to peacetime production—­from tanks to washing machines—­even as labor unrest erupted into deadly strikes. In the West, however, the cancellation of wib price supports and federal largesse contributed to the region’s steady slide into economic recession and depression, ahead of much of the rest of the nation. Initially, as the wib set prices and encouraged production in the name of patriotism, western farmers, miners, loggers, and oil drillers answered the call. The result was an unprecedented expansion of extraction. During the 1910s, above-­average rainfall across the Great Plains washed away earlier concerns (and experiences) that the region might not be the best place to raise wheat and corn. Federal wib incentives and the still-­active Homestead Act, which granted land to individuals, encouraged farmers to till previously unplowed prairies and “send wheat to the Allies!” This demand only grew after late 1917, when Europe’s primary wheat producer, Russia, pulled out of the war to contend with its own communist revolution. The United States, especially the West, stepped into the void. wib price supports also helped keep mines and timber companies operating at full capacity. At the wib’s behest, mining companies ramped up production to meet wartime demands and shifted their priorities from precious metals such as gold and silver to industrial metals such as copper, zinc, and molybdenum (used in metal alloys). Ore extraction had always exacted a steep environmental toll on the lands of the West, but the twentieth century ushered in a devastating new practice: open-­pit mining. Open-­pit mining involved 182  Roll On

epic-­scale excavation; mining corporations literally moved mountains. They leveled hills and dug deep holes in the earth, crushed and processed tons of rock, and deposited the toxic tailings (leftover rubble) into huge terraced piles. Mining operations appeared throughout the interior West, but Utah and Arizona soon surged to prominence, especially after the “richest hole in the earth,” Bingham Canyon, began operating. In 1906 steam shovels made their first cuts into Bingham Canyon, located twenty-­eight miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The man who made Bingham was Daniel Jackling. A classic greatest-­good-­for-­the-­greatest-­number conservationist, Jackling did not concern himself with the big pit’s at-­what-­cost environmental consequences. Instead, he pioneered open-­pit mining as the most efficient means of translating low-­grade ore into a hugely profitable enterprise using an economy of scale, much like Henry Ford would do in the automobile industry. Jackling was wildly successful. And the scale is enormous. The Bingham Pit is still among the biggest human-­constructed features on the planet—­an astonishing two and a half miles wide and three-­ quarters of a mile deep. Jackling’s open-­pit technique also transformed what many had considered nearly worthless ore deposits into a multibillion-­dollar bonanza. The demand for copper wiring skyrocketed as the Great War gathered momentum and the nation embraced electricity as the power source to drive the second Industrial Revolution. The Bingham Pit not only helped satisfy the nation’s voracious copper demand but also provided innumerable consumer and industrial products on its way to becoming one of the largest open-­pit mines in the world. Not surprisingly, the scale of excavation at the Bingham Pit has led to numerous environmental problems. In 2020, for example, Rio Tinto Kennecott, which owns the mine, pulled sixty-­two million tons of ore from its eleven-­thousand-­acre mine. The at-­what-­cost price for this extractive industry is that The Pit is by far the single largest source of toxic pollution in Utah. Heavy metals such as lead and zinc found in its mine waste are linked to health problems, including brain damage, developmental delays, heart disease, and cancer. In fact, Utah now typically ranks in the top five of the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual “most toxic” states list. More than 90 percent of these toxic emissions come from the Bingham Pit, Roll On  183

and Kennecott has long led the list of the top-­polluting companies in the continental United States. The environmental “reach” of its Bingham Canyon operation in Utah extends to soil and groundwater contamination and the poisoning of the complex marsh and wetland ecosystems surrounding the Great Salt Lake. Wartime priorities often overrode preservation and conservation concerns, as Bingham Canyon and the environmental consequences of open-­pit mining suggest. In 1909, for example, President Theodore Roosevelt had set aside Mount Olympus National Monument on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, in part to protect its scenic beauty but also to conserve its herds of rare Roosevelt elk. The U.S. Forest Service (usfs) managed the monument and adjacent national forest in the classic Gifford Pinchot model of the greatest good for the greatest number, making little distinction between the two federal classifications. The Great War took precedence, however. The monument’s prime Sitka spruce forests became a prized Allied resource for airplane frame fabrication. In 1915 eager western timber barons convinced Congress to slash the size of the monument in half to facilitate both logging and mining. Much of the newly available spruce forest was located in rugged terrain, so the usfs excavated hillsides, dynamited tunnels, and financed thirty-­six miles of railroad track to expedite the harvest. In a bit of ironic timing, the Spruce Division Railroad laid its final tie just as the combatants signed the armistice in 1918, but the scar remained. Logging of the former monument’s lands continued into the 1920s as hundreds of millions of board feet of timber found its way into regional sawmills. The primary extractive challenge here was inaccessibility, a problem the usfs hoped to overcome “as other more accessible supplies are exhausted.” The solution: by 1931 it had constructed a road network that completely encircled the Olympic Mountains, making formerly elusive timber more accessible. Miners also benefited from the downsized Olympus Monument, and their claims pockmarked the original acreage. Prospectors dug and excavated in search of gold, silver, copper, and manganese and shipped tons of ore to regional smelters throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Only the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt brought a merciful end to the worst of the extraction. 184  Roll On

In 1933 FDR transferred management of Mount Olympus National Monument, like all national monuments, into the hands of the National Park Service (nps). Five years later, he signed legislation that redesignated the monument as Olympic National Park and doubled its size. Depression-­era work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps helped to develop roads within the park, but nps management shielded Olympic from further extractive endeavors. By the end of the 1920s, thanks in part to the war and the wib, a new extractive industry had become king in the American West: petroleum. In 1901 the Spindletop gusher on the Gulf Coast in eastern Texas (slightly east of the hundredth meridian) had anointed the state as the oil capital of the West. Bolstered by the nearly insatiable petroleum demands of war, the region quickly became the nation’s leading oil producer, pumping out more than 70 percent of the country’s total production. The entire Lone Star State had produced a mere one thousand barrels per year in 1896; Spindletop and other wells like it pushed oil production to an astounding twenty-­one million barrels per year just six years later. By 1910 oil fever had infected north-­central Texas, and by the 1920s the Texas Panhandle had joined the rush. Wildcat drilling dotted the landscapes of Texas and Oklahoma with oilfields. California also joined the prospecting frenzy and often outproduced those two traditional oil powerhouses in the first four decades of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, for example, oil remained the Golden State’s largest business enterprise. But Texas surged to the zenith of petroleum production in 1930, when a wildcat driller once again struck black gold in eastern Texas and tapped into the biggest oilfield in U.S. history. The flows peaked in 1933, when the seemingly ubiquitous wells pumped out an astonishing two hundred million barrels per year and replaced cattle and cotton as the state’s leading industry. Spurred on by this liquid wealth, the rest of the state eagerly pursued black gold extraction, sinking wells in places like Odessa and Midland and along the Canadian River in the Panhandle. The environmental consequences of the nation’s long love affair with petroleum began to appear almost immediately. In addition to the aural and visual blight of clanking, nodding derricks on the landscape, the extraction process posed significant health and safety risks. Crowded wells erupted into Roll On  185

gigantic fireballs (Spindletop itself raged as an inferno for a week in 1902), and high-­pressure drilling often spewed thousands of gallons of crude oil into the air and saturated the surrounding soils with toxic sludge. Drilling and refining by-­products fouled surrounding ecosystems. Sulfurous strike fumes settled like a pall over nearby communities, for example, and the saltwater by-­product the wells brought up contaminated drinking water and got dumped in local rivers and streams, creating riparian death zones that stretched for miles. Oil also ended up in the water systems, polluting rivers and harbors, coating unsuspecting swimmers, and wreaking havoc on birds, fish, and other wildlife. Gas flares from the wells roared into the skies to burn off the then-­worthless natural gas by-­product. One resident even recalled driving through eastern Texas at night without headlights, the roadway perfectly illuminated by the massive flames. The booming petroleum industry weathered the transition from war to peace better than most western resource endeavors, in part because the 1920s ushered in America’s full-­blown love affair with the automobile. The Model T was first available in 1908. It cost $850 (equivalent to about $27,000 in 2022) and was available in any color, “so long as it is black,” Henry Ford said. Although Ford invented neither the automobile nor the efficient assembly-­ line technique for producing it, he had perfected both by the time the United States emerged from the Great War. By the 1920s, Ford had dropped the Model T price to $260 (roughly $4,300 in 2022 dollars) and his company manufactured two million cars each year. Its affordable price, reliable performance, and quality workmanship put the Tin Lizzie, as the Model T was affectionately known, within the purchasing reach of ordinary Americans. The result was that nearly half of all families owned a car by the end of the decade, although celebrities like “the most famous person who ever lived,” Charlie Chaplin, still indulged in world-­renowned status symbols like the 1929 Pierce-­ Arrow convertible ($8,000 new, approximately $139,000 in 2022 dollars). No one, however, owned more automobiles per capita than Southern Californians, who roared around with the top down through sun-­drenched, beachy air. Historian Tom McCarthy has called Los Angeles “a driver’s paradise . . . ideal for those twin pleasures of early automobiling, speeding and touring.” This “Eden at the end of the road of making it in America” soon 186  Roll On

boasted “the world’s greatest metropolitan freeway system, an engineering marvel that would triumphantly reconcile speed and safety.” The long-­term environmental repercussions of the nation’s love affair with the automobile, however, would include smog, urban sprawl, abandoned automobiles, and lead pollution (lead was first sold as a fuel additive in 1923 to help engines run more smoothly). It was hardly Edenic. But Americans clung tenaciously to their cars, even through the Great Depression. Despite numerous studies and growing complaints about the resultant noxious air pollution, which the federal government would eventually have to address, consumers continued to prioritize automobile ownership as a conspicuous measure of success. The federal government’s growing influence in the western economy and environment was nowhere more evident than in reclamation. The legacy of Progressive Era conservationism, the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers built dams and reservoirs for flood control and to harvest and hold the rare and valuable waters of the arid West’s rivers. Aqueducts then delivered water to the region’s growing cities, industries, and massive corporate farms, all of which demanded ever more in the name of economic growth and progress. Westerners had long since abandoned John Wesley Powell’s rational proposals to settle people near water sources, expecting instead that the federal government would bring the water to the people. “Water. It’s about water,” writer and historian Wallace Stegner replied succinctly when asked what a newcomer should know about California. The same could also be said of the West as a whole. In addition to wartime production incentives, federal reclamation had boosted the region’s agricultural production rates and transformed the natural environment. The Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 repurposed the American West by bringing federally subsidized water to its parched lands. The Bureau of Reclamation built twenty-­two projects in the West during its first three decades. Those dams and water projects brought fourteen million new acres under cultivation and catapulted the region to the forefront of national agricultural production. Farm output surged during the Great War to meet Allied demands for food, but as Europe slumped into recession during the 1920s and could no longer afford American foodstuffs, prices collapsed. This early-­onset depression in some parts of the West sent farmers into an economic death spiral and Roll On  187

allowed the Bureau of Reclamation to emerge as the region’s economic hero. Corporate agribusiness was the primary beneficiary, as it bought out bankrupt farm families and used its wealth to monopolize scarce water resources. The federal government aided and abetted the coup. The bureau’s first major multipurpose dam was Boulder/Hoover Dam on the lower Colorado. Completed ahead of schedule and under budget in 1935, the dam was an engineering marvel and aesthetic wonder designed to supply water and electricity primarily to Southern California and to provide construction jobs during the worst period of unemployment in the nation’s history. Its spectacular success spawned nineteen more major Depression-­ era dam projects throughout the West. These water works fueled growth in cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, provided cheap electricity for nascent industry in the Pacific Northwest, irrigated megafarms in California’s Central Valley, and made the Bureau of Reclamation one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. At the Boulder Dam dedication, FDR clarified the economics of reclamation. “As an unregulated river, the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves,” he observed. Before the dam, the mighty Colorado River had been a tempestuous torrent that wound more than 1,450 miles from its headwaters in the Colorado Rockies to its mouth in Mexico’s Gulf of California. The only significant source of water in the vast, arid region, this fickle “lifeline of the Southwest” also often wiped out farms, irrigation projects, and communities with the massive sediment loads roiling in its spring fury of floods. Taming such a wild beast was too daunting for private interests, so the federal government had stepped in. Congress authorized the Boulder Dam project in 1928 with little thought to the environmental costs such a monumental project would incur. As the nation sank into the Great Depression and unemployment rates soared, however, dam construction became a rare bright spot in an otherwise grim economic landscape. Federal projects like Boulder Dam, Roosevelt argued, gave “relief to several million men and women whose earning capacity had been destroyed by the complexities and lack of thought of the economic system of the past generation.” As if uttering a mantra for the extractive West, Roosevelt continued, “Labor makes wealth. The use of materials makes wealth.” And when Boulder 188  Roll On

Dam was finished in 1935, the world stood in awe as the waters of Lake Mead began to rise behind the 726-­foot-­high, 1,244-­foot-­long marvel. The dam was just the beginning, Roosevelt believed: “Across the desert and mountains to the west and south run great electric transmission lines by which factory motors, street and household lights and irrigation pumps will be operated in Southern Arizona and California.” Continuing the conservation agenda of his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, FDR sought to use the wealth and might of the federal government to lift the West out of its economic malaise and make the desert bloom. The Boulder/Hoover Dam not only exemplifies the dominance of and the region’s dependence on the federal government during the protracted economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s but also illustrates the considerable environmental costs incurred by the West’s continued reliance on extractive industries to fuel the region’s economic engines. For environmental historian Donald Worster, “the death of the Colorado River began with Hoover Dam.” For FDR, though, the commodification of such a valuable resource was an occasion for celebration: “The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea. Today we translate them into a great national possession.” The environmental costs of this use-­it-­or-­lose-­it wholesale redistribution of the West’s waters were significant. In 1935 the gates closing on Boulder/ Hoover Dam, near present-­day Las Vegas, set in motion a series of long-­term consequences. First of all, the impounded Lake Mead would spread out over one of the most arid reaches of the American West, creating a gigantic evaporation pond, which in turn reduced the overall flow in the Colorado River. The dam also blocked the heavy sediment load that annually scoured down the river, thereby replenishing riparian zones and distributing fertile soil along the Colorado’s banks and floodplains. Without this yearly flush, lands adjacent to the river became nutrient-­deprived and salinized, and invasive plants began to take root and drive out native species. The water flowing in the river below the dam further exacerbated the destruction of native species. For eons, the temperature of the Colorado had fluctuated with the seasons, but the dam’s turbines drew water from deep below Lake Mead’s surface and then released it in a clear, cold rush downstream. Aquatic life, both floral and faunal, that had evolved in variable and murky flows Roll On  189

now found itself bathed by clean, 46°F water year round. The result was predictable: today four species of native fishes cling tenuously to survival under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, and non-­native plants have driven out much of the river’s natural flora. Conservation, it turns out, had unanticipated environmental consequences. It also had severe cultural consequences. In 1868 Navajos took possession of their current reservation lands straddling the state lines of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. By the following year, their sheep and goat herds, combined with farming, had created a self-­sufficient subsistence economy on some of the West’s most arid lands. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) actively supported and encouraged these developments as an essential aspect of assimilation. As Collier, the bia head, proudly proclaimed, the Navajos had “preserved intact their religion, their ancient morality, their social forms and their appreciation for beauty.” Land utilization outside the legal boundaries of the reservation had facilitated some of the livestock expansion, however; as reservation lands had experienced erosion patterns that shifted toward greater cutting and gullying, families had had to look elsewhere for sufficient grass and water for their animals. By the early twentieth century, this situation had brought the Navajos into conflict with white and Hispanic ranchers and presented the bia with two challenging problems. For federal officials the easy and obvious culprit of erosion was overgrazing. And the easy and obvious solution to both issues was Navajo livestock reduction. It was a tragically oversimplified understanding of the situation. Overgrazing may have been a secondary contributor to erosion, but the real culprit was not sheep but alternating cycles of drought and intense rainfall. Indeed, as a scientific report in the late 1950s concluded, “It is virtually impossible to ascertain what percentage of the measured sediment yield can be attributed to effects of land use.” Much of the impending disaster was instead a consequence of profound cultural misunderstanding. Federal officials approached the land erosion problem as a rational, economic issue of maximizing meat and wool production per acre. But for Navajos, sheep and goat herding is essential not only to subsistence and survival but also to kinship solidarity. In other words, it is both cultural and economic. Navajo herds conveyed security and respect 190  Roll On

and even social status but not necessarily material wealth. And large numbers of the sheep and almost all of the goats were owned by women, whom the bia routinely ignored. Moreover, the value of sheep could be measured by the renewable product (wool) they supplied, as well as their meat. Navajos regularly traded wool rugs and blankets for food staples, for example, and thus were only marginally market oriented. Heartier goats provided a similarly sustainable subsistence with milk, cheese, and meat. Both types of animals further acted as essential insurance against poor agricultural harvests or outright crop failure. But the animals meant more than just money. As one Navajo woman, ‘Asdzáá Nez, explained, “Our sheep are our children, our life, and our food.” By 1930, overgrazing had become a problem on Navajo lands, as 1.25 million sheep and goats became increasingly confined within reservation boundaries that had a carrying capacity of only 560,000. Yet none of this became urgent until reservation erosion seemed to threaten Boulder Dam. Rather than advocate for an expansion of the reservation, however, the bia’s solution was the Navajo Project, a forced stock reduction in the name of erosion control with the altruistic conservation goal of maximizing range productivity. It began in 1934 with an immediate reduction of 100,000 sheep, which the Navajos shrewdly met with old, weak, and cull animals. This was followed by a targeted goat cull that ignored the role and ownership rights of women. When some of the goat herds proved too remote to send to market, bia agents slaughtered them and left them to rot. The cultural wound was deep. As Diné elder Howard Gorman later recalled, “It was a terrible sight where the slaughtering took place. . . . The women folks were crying, mourning over such a tragic scene.” The annual reductions continued, however, disproportionately undermining the ability of poor families with small herds to weather economic hardship. The actions of Collier and the bia resulted in almost no notable erosion control, especially since most of the culled Navajo sheep and goats were immediately replaced by cattle owned by white and Hispanic ranchers. Collier had to concede that the government’s actions were unjustifiable, an ironic failure to understand the consequences of drought on the landscape in the era of the Dust Bowl. It led to yet another tragedy of the commons. In the Roll On  191

end, Collier and the bia demonstrated that the federal government was really only interested in the market, not Navajo subsistence or Indian autonomy. By 1945 livestock numbers had fallen below the reservation’s carrying capacity, and wartime wage work, including uranium mining, had replaced herding and temporarily blunted the economic blow of the Navajo Project. But as the nation transitioned to peace, the Navajos transitioned to poverty and dependency. They derived no benefits from Boulder Dam. And in 1948 new data increased the life expectancy of the dam’s reservoir to more than four centuries. As historian Richard White concludes, “Stock reduction ultimately neither restored the lands of the reservation, revitalized the Navajo livestock economy, nor made the Navajos a predominantly farming people. . . . Instead, it made them wage earners and welfare recipients.” Nez’s assessment is more strident: “I really hate John Collier. . . . He has ruined our home, our lives, and our children, and I will hate him until the day I die.” Unfortunately, Boulder/Hoover Dam was not an anomaly, only a beginning. In many ways, the massive Grand Coulee Dam functioned as the Pacific Northwest’s counterpart to Hoover, and salmon paid the environmental price for the dam’s cheap hydropower and irrigation. In 1925 Congress had authorized a study of the Columbia River system, which seemed a vast, untapped, and untamed resource. The result was a report recommending ten dams along the Columbia’s main stem, from its mouth to the Canadian border. The worsening Depression, which hit its nadir in 1932, combined with the election of Franklin Roosevelt that same year, meant that such an ambitious agenda was now feasible. Thus, in 1933 Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers (another reclamation arm of the federal government) and the Bureau of Reclamation to build the Bonneville Dam, on the Washington-­Oregon state line, and Grand Coulee Dam, in northern Washington State, respectively. Bonneville’s completion in 1938 paid some heed to the dam’s potential for environmental destruction. Such a mighty plug, located forty miles upstream from Portland, could wreak havoc on the river’s $10 million annual salmon catch, so in response to public outcry the dam’s overall structure incorporated the latest in fish ladder technology. Engineers designed a switchbacking water stairway “ladder” to facilitate fish passage and allow spawning salmon to scale 192  Roll On

the dam. While mature fish were mostly able to navigate this new barrier, spring smolts (young salmon) were not. These small fry depended on the Columbia’s strong currents to sweep them downstream, tail first, and out to sea. But the slackwater pool behind the dam meant that the young ones had to turn around and swim, using up their scant energy reserves and also making them much more vulnerable to hungry predators. Moreover, the top entrance of the fish ladder was not easy for the little fish to find, so they often ended up either lost and milling along the length of the dam, which again made them easy prey, or getting sucked through the power-­generating turbines. So long as Bonneville was the only dam on the Columbia, however, the fish ladder solution proved reasonably effective. But Bonneville was just the first of many, and Coulee was no Bonneville. Coulee was an engineering marvel and “the biggest thing on earth,” boasted one booster. Congress authorized it in 1933, and the Bureau of Reclamation completed it swiftly, in 1942, and under budget, like Boulder/Hoover Dam. Grand Coulee Dam provided irrigation and cheap hydropower to the central Washington region and promised to make the arid interior of that state into an apple and hop garden. But unlike Bonneville, Coulee made no provision for fish passage. At 550 feet in height and a stunning 5,200 feet in length (the equivalent of twelve city blocks and more than three times the size of Hoover), this concrete leviathan was literally a dead end for fish, blocking spawning salmon from access to more than 1,000 miles of habitat and bringing the extirpation of all anadromous species above the dam (an estimated loss of more than a million fish annually). In 1941, when the gates closed on what some called the eighth wonder of the world, tens of thousands of steelhead, Chinook, and sockeye that had surmounted more than 600 miles of Columbia River obstacles and challenges swam in bewildered circles at the dam’s base, cut off from their ancient spawning redds by the latest extractive industry of the West. These were the costs of conservation and reclamation. At the time, most Americans were willing to accept or ignore these environmental losses and celebrate the economic profits. Contemporary folk singer and labor activist Woody Guthrie paid homage to these dam wonders in his iconic songs “Roll On, Columbia” and “Grand Coulee Dam,” singing about the mighty river’s Roll On  193

24. Colorado River Compact region. Map by Amber Bell.

power “turning our darkness to dawn.” Guthrie celebrated the new reality that “at Bonneville now there are ships in the locks” and that Grand Coulee Dam, “the mightiest thing ever built by a man,” could now “run the great factories and water the land.” Today, there are fourteen major dams on the Columbia River. Above Coulee, the river is salmon-­less. For perspective, law scholar Charles Wilkinson observed that “the 1214-­mile-­long river, which drains an area larger than France and whose annual discharge into the ocean is more than twice that of the Nile, is now a series of placid, computer-­regulated lakes.” By the 1970s, a similar fate had befallen almost all of the West’s major rivers, including the Colorado. 194  Roll On

In the Southwest, the Colorado River serves as the wellspring of the region’s “hydraulic society.” The federal government manages the mighty river according to the so-­called Law of the River, a suite of compacts and agreements among and between Mexico and the seven states with straws in its waters. The foundation of this entangled bureaucracy is the Colorado River Compact (crc), which some have called the western equivalent of the Constitution. Signed in 1922 during the interwar era, the crc defines the often strained relationships and water allocations between the upper basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) and the lower basin states (Arizona, Nevada, and California). Over the years, the crc has been a lightning rod of contention, particularly because the upper basin states supply the water that the lower basin states suck dry. In 1922 the crc codified an estimated annual river flow of 17.5 million acre-­feet as the basis for allocation. Each basin received 7.5 million acre-­feet annually, Mexico received 1.5 million acre-­feet annually, and the surplus could be divided among the lower basin states (with everyone understanding what this really meant: California). And the fighting began. California refused to ratify the crc until Congress authorized the Boulder Canyon Dam project (among others benefiting California), Arizona wanted to know exactly who was getting exactly what in the lower basin or it would refuse to ratify, and so on. Finally, in 1928 six of the seven states (all except Arizona) ratified the compact, and the drawdowns began in earnest. California, which adds not a drop to the Colorado River, nevertheless took (and still takes) the biggest drink, 4.4 million acre-­feet annually, which never sat well with the other lower basin states. Significantly, for the long-­term management of this resource, the 17.5 million acre-­feet (maf) estimated annual flow has proven to be an inflated prediction rather than an accurate annual flow. Instead, according to a 2020 U.S. Geological Survey study, the Colorado River’s flow has declined by about 20 percent on average over the last century and well over half of that decline is due to warming temperatures across the region. More specifically, the average annual flow between 1906 and 2015, measured at Lee’s Ferry, for example, recorded only 14.8 maf—­fully 16 percent lower than the crc allocation. And in the twenty-­first century’s extended drought, this annual Roll On  195

average flow has dwindled to 12.4 maf—­nearly a third lower than the crc allocation. Yet the once mighty river’s tamed water was the elixir the arid West craved if it was to realize its potential as the nation’s breadbasket. The new, grand-­scale cultivation the Colorado made possible was perhaps most remarkable in California. By 1930 the Golden State had become home to fully half of the entire West’s population (5.5 million out of 11 million). Blessed by its geography, California benefits from a weather pattern called the Pacific High—­a high-­pressure system that parks just off the coastline and diverts incoming storms northward, thereby bathing the Golden State in sunshine from March through October. This fortuitous climate condition also happens to occur precisely in what environmental scientist Garrison Sposito has called “the richest agricultural region in the history of the world”: the Central Valley. Cradled between the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Range, the Central Valley encompasses the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds, stretching five hundred miles from Redding south to Bakersfield and varying in width between sixty and one hundred miles. The late nineteenth-­century twin innovations of the transcontinental railroad and refrigerated boxcars had sent California produce coursing across the continent. New Yorkers savored Sunkist oranges and Sun-­Maid raisins during the long, dreary winter months, and by the 1920s California was producing more than two hundred commercially grown crops in the thirsty and arid West. Much of this early agricultural success was the result of tapping into underground water resources. But as drought threatened the state in the late 1910s and early 1920s, an all-­too-­familiar tragedy of the commons crisis began to develop. Overpumping depleted the resource, and by the 1930s desperate farmers were once again turning to the federal government. It had the perfect solution: reclamation. The Central Valley Project (cvp) began as a state effort in 1933. However, the nation’s economic collapse rendered California too short of cash to continue, and so the federal government came to its rescue in 1935. Beginning in 1937, under the Bureau of Reclamation’s oversight, dam and irrigation projects began to rise from the valley floor, starting with the forty-­eight-­ mile-­long Contra Costa Canal east of San Francisco. The project continued the following year with the erection of Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River 196  Roll On

(just north of Redding), the keystone of the whole cvp. By the twenty-­first century, the massive plumbing project included twenty dams and reservoirs, eleven power plants, five hundred miles of canals, and managed water for approximately one-­third of California’s nine million farmable acres. As one proud cvp worker proclaimed, “Mister, we’re moving the rain!” In addition to salvaging the drought-­threatened farms of the valley, the “golden faucet,” as Worster has called the cvp, would also bring three million newly irrigated acres on line. The beneficiaries of this federal subsidy were mostly corporate agribusinesses. As analysts Edwin Wilson and Marion Clawson write, “This degree of concentration of land ownership is rarely encountered in the United States.” As with Hoover and Grand Coulee, this hydraulic “progress” in the name of conservation came at a disastrous environmental cost. Four species of native salmon that had called the rivers of the Central Valley home for tens of thousands of years found themselves cut off from their primordial redds by the massive concrete slabs that generated power for cities and provided navigation, irrigation, and flood control. The destruction of riparian zones along the rivers, loss of sedimentation, alteration of stream flows and temperatures, and the inundation of Native archeological sites were also added to the ledger. And perhaps most ironically, the rapid expansion of arable lands inspired by the flood of cheap, federal water accelerated the depletion of the valley’s groundwater aquifers as zealous corporate growers outplanted the water supply. This tragedy of the commons cost-­reckoning was not on the minds of contemporary California farmers or the Bureau of Reclamation, however. As Worster concludes, “Together these groups could proudly say that they had forced the earth to obey their wishes, that they had turned ‘waste’ into wealth, and never mind what or whom that wealth was for.” The most dramatic ecological repercussion of the West’s heedless economic boosterism, however, was the Dust Bowl, arguably the single greatest environmental disaster in American history. Between 1931 and 1937, an estimated one hundred million acres of the wind-­whipped, overtilled soils of the Great Plains blackened skies as far away as Washington dc and New York City and blanketed ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. It also bankrupted thousands of homesteading farm families who had answered the Roll On  197

siren call of agricultural demand during the booming war years and revealed the folly of federal policies that encouraged the cultivation of previously unplowed prairie lands. The Dust Bowl was a calamity born of hubris and unfettered agricultural expansion during the Great War, but it had a long history behind it. More than a century earlier, in 1819 and 1820, explorer Stephen Long had carried out a federally sponsored scientific expedition to the Great Plains (and the heart of the future Dust Bowl) and concluded that “it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” Indeed, the region’s only benefit, Long conceded, was as a “barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward,” and his maps identified the entire area as the “Great American Desert.” The federal government ignored its own experts. Four decades later, Congress passed the original Homestead Act of 1862 (granting 160 acres, the average size of a Virginia farm) to encourage settlement on western lands, and then followed it with the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 (granting 320 acres per adult) to entice settlers onto the more marginal, unirrigable lands of the Great Plains. Thousands answered the call. The causes of the Dust Bowl were complex and intertwined. Like a bull’s-­ eye centered over western Kansas, the affected area radiated into eastern Colorado and New Mexico and down across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. Reclamation projects may have slaked thirsty settlements in other parts of the West, but these farmers were counting on rainfall to water their ambitious crops. They shouldn’t have. Farmers who flocked to the plains to grow “wheat to win the war” planted intensively and aggressively, failing to practice crop rotation or fallow their stressed soils. Their efficient plows carved into the prairies, tearing out deep-­rooted bunchgrasses that anchored the topsoil and preserved moisture. Once farmers harvested their shallow-­rooted wheat for market, they failed to plant cover crops to protect the exposed soil. Unregulated grazing of cattle further eroded the public domain. And then the specter of drought, always a major factor on the Great Plains, reappeared in the 1930s, when these overworked, exposed, marginal soils were at their most vulnerable. The result was disaster. Great roiling storms picked up the precious topsoil and carried it away in black blizzards 198  Roll On

25. The Dust Bowl. Map by Amber Bell.

of choking dust. As one farmer lamented, “We’re through. . . . Our fences are buried, the house is hidden to the eaves, and our pasture, which was kept from blowing by the grass, has been buried and is worthless now.” Worster has argued that this epic environmental collapse was the inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism, unwise federal policies (e.g., the Enlarged Homestead Act), and above-­average rainfall totals that lured settlers onto untenable homesteads, dooming them to failure and the land to destruction. Other environmental historians have suggested that it was not overplowing but drought that was the major catalyst for the so-­called Dirty Thirties and that, as awful as it was, the “black rollers” that could reduce Roll On  199

visibility to just a few feet were part of the natural cycle of the plains and had occurred before in the region’s longue durée, or deep-­time history. As with Pleistocene megafauna extinctions and the near eradication of the bison, the answer likely lies at the nexus of these explanations, in the complicated interactions between humans and their environment. The Dust Bowl launched hundreds of thousands of Americans on a westward trek to California, Oregon, and Washington in a desperate search for jobs (memorably fictionalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath [1939]), but it also inspired some more environmentally conscious interactions with the land. The 1920s marked the population high point on the western Great Plains; the region has been in steady decline ever since. The combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl devastated local economies and led to the abandonment of thousands of homesteads. The Dirty Thirties also busted the homestead program for good, although Congress did not formally repeal the act until 1976. In 1934 the federal government withdrew the remaining public domain lands and consolidated them under the new Taylor Grazing Service, which became the Bureau of Land Management (blm) in 1946, when it merged with the General Land Office. Within a year, more than sixty-­five million acres had come under the jurisdiction of the grazing service, tasked “to stop injury to the public grazing lands [excluding Alaska], by preventing overgrazing and soil deterioration, to provide for their orderly use, improvement and development, [and] to stabilize the livestock industry dependent upon the public range.” By the end of the 1930s, the federal government had begun to shift its priorities away from free land enticements and giveaways and toward better management and conservation of the West’s natural resources and environment. In 1935, as part of this expanding environmental-­management state, the federal government created the Soil Conservation Service (scs)—­an expansion of the earlier Soil Erosion Service—­which linked a healthy economy to a healthy environment by acknowledging that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands . . . is a menace to the national welfare.” Like its regulatory companion the Taylor Grazing Service, which monitored stock raisers’ use of rangelands to protect against overgrazing, the scs supervised and supported farmers by implementing conservation 200  Roll On

practices designed to maintain healthy and productive landscapes. Aided by a return to relatively normal precipitation levels in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the scs’s new conservation-­style wise-­use techniques, such as contour plowing, strip cropping (alternating crops to maximize growing potential), and the planting of cover crops and hundreds of miles of windbreak shelterbelts (north-­and-­south-­running tree lines along the ninety-­eighth meridian to reduce wind velocity and prevent soil erosion) began to restore blighted lands and reverse or slow down the worst consequences of the Dust Bowl. By 1942, for example, the agency had planted 220 million shelterbelt trees across more than 18,000 miles. Congress also authorized the scs “to develop a program of land conservation and land utilization, in order thereby to correct maladjustments in land use, and thus assist in controlling soil erosion, reforestation, [and] preserving natural resources.” Known as the Land Utilization Projects, the program authorized the federal government to purchase 11 million acres of submarginal farmland that had busted out during the Dust Bowl and turn that land over to the scs to restore as native prairie. It was soil conservation at an unprecedented scale and created yet another federal commons. A comprehensive survey of Land Utilization holdings in the 1950s resulted in significant land transfers to the blm and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to expand grazing opportunities and wildlife refuges. In 1960 the remaining 3.8 million acres were assigned to the U.S. Forest Service to be managed as national grasslands. Today there are twenty such sites, all but three of which lie east of the Rocky Mountains. The Cimarron National Grassland (cng) in southwestern Kansas, about 160 miles east of Raton, New Mexico, for example, has restored more than 100,000 acres of land once dead center in the Dust Bowl bull’s-­eye. As the largest parcel of public land in the state, cng provides numerous ecosystem services—­the benefits humans derive from a healthy natural environment—­including wildlife habitat, water conservation, erosion control, and recreation opportunities. It also surrounds 23 miles of the historic Santa Fe Trail (the ruts are still visible), creates urban-­accessible open-­space recreation opportunities, and provides protection for diverse species, including prairie dogs, pronghorns, burrowing owls, reintroduced elk, and the rare and vulnerable lesser prairie chicken. Roll On  201

The legacy of the scs is mixed, however. To be sure, the agency’s scientific agronomy had the potential to make real in-­roads into people’s understanding about the fragility of the natural environment and to encourage questions about long-­term sustainability that conservation efforts often failed to consider. Instead, the unfortunate lesson that many learned from the Dust Bowl was that technology could provide a “fix” even for a disaster of this magnitude. Rather than accept that the high plains were poorly suited ecologically to raising wheat and grain crops, for example, farmers used new scs techniques and technology to continue farming in spite of the environment. Fickle rainfall had always been a hazard, but technology came to the rescue on this front, too. By the late 1930s, farmers had realized that there was water everywhere on the Great Plains; it was just hidden underground in the massive Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest subsurface water reservoirs in the world. Newly minted v8 engine pumps lifted this hydrocommodity to the surface and effectively washed away Great Plains aridity with arching tut-­tut sprinklers of precious “rain” (without any consideration for sustainability). scs-­supported efforts did halt soil erosion, but the exotic invasives planted in the shelterbelts (e.g., Russian olive trees and salt cedar/tamarisk) and as ground cover (e.g., Russian thistle, or tumbleweed) outcompeted native vegetation and fundamentally altered prairie plant and animal communities. Worster laments that a region that had once teemed with biological diversity like an American Serengeti was now “no more interesting than a parking lot.” Remarkably, even an event as epic as the Dust Bowl failed to capture the long-­term ecological attention of the nation. The resolution of this crisis was a continued emphasis on western extraction, as well as a conservation effort, especially at the federal level, to control and harvest wild nature, whether by damming the mighty Columbia and Colorado Rivers or instructing farmers in the art of contour plowing. Americans were not humbled by the Dirty Thirties but challenged. By the 1940s, many felt they had won a veritable war against the environment. The powerful weapon of technology seemed invincible. As Guthrie sang, “These mighty men labored by day and by night, matching their strength ’gainst the river’s wild flight, through rapids and falls they won the hard fight, so roll on, Columbia, roll on.” In 1930 the population 202  Roll On

of the entire American West was just thirty million, about the same as the single eastern state of New York. By the early 1940s, however, more than $40 million in federal funds had flowed onto the Great Plains alone, and that federal largesse yielded approximately $37 million in farm benefits—­hardly a savvy return on investment. The many had and would continue to subsidize the few in order to extract wealth from the West and make this arid region “bloom.” Roll on, indeed. Suggested Reading

Bernard Baruch, American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1921), 61, 63–­67, 69, 98–­100. Ken Burns, dir., The Dust Bowl, two-­part documentary, 240 min., aired November 18–­19, 2012, on pbs. Jeffrey P. Cohn, “Resurrecting the Dammed: A Look at Colorado River Restoration,” BioScience 51, no. 12 (2001): 998–­1003, available at https://​academic​.oup​.com​ /bioscience​/article​/51​/12​/998​/224044. Geoff Cunfer, “The Southern Great Plains Wind Erosion Maps of 1936–­1937,” Agricultural History 85, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 540–­59. William deBuys, “Washed and Worn,” “Bully Boys and Bureaucrats,” in Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 187–­222. Department of Interior, “Drought in the Colorado River Basin—­Insights Using Open Data,” interactive website, available at https://​www​.usgs​.gov​/tools​/drought​ -colorado​-river​-basin​-insights​-using​-open​-data. Leslie Aileen Duram, “The National Grasslands: Past, Present, and Future Land Management Issues,” Rangelands 17, no. 2 (April 1995): 36–­42, available at https://​ www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/4001053. Guy Fringer, Olympic National Park: An Administrative History (Seattle: National Park Service, 1990), 34–­54, accessed February 4, 2016, at http://​npshistory​.com​ /publications​/olym​/adhi​.pdf. R. Douglas Hurt, “The National Grasslands: Origin and Development in the Dust Bowl,” Agricultural History 59, no. 2 (April 1985): 246–­59, available at https://​www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/3742388. Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson, “Chapter 1: An Overview,” in The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4–­25. Roll On  203

Timothy J. LeCain, “The Pit,” in Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 108–­71. Tom McCarthy, “A Monstrously Big Thing” and “The Death and Afterlife of Automobiles,” in Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 2009), 30–­54, 77–­98. Emma Penrod, “Environmental Risk Is on the Rise in Utah, but Most Emissions Come from a Single Source,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 22, 2017, available at https://​www​.sltrib​.com​/news​/environment​/2017​/11​/22​/so​-the​-epa​-says​-utah​-is​ -rising​-on​-its​-list​-of​-the​-most​-toxic​-states​-in​-the​-nation​-should​-you​-be​-worried/. Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives on Modern America,” review of Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, by Harvard Sitkoff, Environmental History 7, no. 2 (April 2002): 303–­18. Frederick Simpich, “More Water for California’s Great Central Valley,” National Geographic 90 (November 1946): 645–­64. Joseph E. Taylor III, “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 437–­57. Marsha Weisiger, “Gendered Injustice: Navajo Livestock Reduction in the New Deal Era,” Western Historical Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 437–­55. Magner White, “We’re Moving the Rain,” Saturday Evening Post 212, no. 44 (April 1940): 18–­19, 36–­42. Richard White, “Southwestern Development and Navajo Underdevelopment,” in The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 250–­89.

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Booming the West

8

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote forester-­ecologist Aldo Leopold in 1948, adding, “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” This simple yet profound conclusion formed the foundation of Leopold’s land ethic, and it would become, in time, a bedrock of the environmental movement in America. The primary tenet of this land ethic was that economic considerations alone were not the most important. According to Leopold, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” and “it is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold’s beliefs derived from a lifetime spent observing the world around him at his various postings throughout the West as a U.S. Forest Service ranger. Leopold had not begun his career as a man concerned about the costs of development and resource consumption. Indeed, he had actively advocated for and participated in the eradication of “varmint” species like wolves during his early years in Arizona and New Mexico. But his experiences throughout the West began to reveal the great interconnectedness of all species and their environments. In perhaps his most famous essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold acknowledges his earlier role in facilitating the extermination of wolves in the West and articulates the true costs of his shortsightedness:

205

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-­rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—­something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-­itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Leopold’s epiphany was an insight into what ecologists call a “trophic cascade”: a situation where the removal of one species ripples, or cascades, through the food web or ecosystem. In Leopold’s case, the removal of the West’s wolves produced an irruption in their prey species, deer in particular. Without the balance that wolves provided, exploding deer populations devoured every leaf and blade, denuding entire mountainsides and leaving the south-­facing slopes wrinkled under the weight of their trails. In time, overpopulated deer herds collapsed, too. “I now suspect,” Leopold concludes, “that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” When he died in 1948, Leopold was at the vanguard of what would become the environmental movement of the 1960s. In 1949 his thoughtful and thought-­provoking essays, such as “Thinking Like a Mountain,” appeared in the posthumously published A Sand County Almanac, which became a handbook and manifesto for later activists. He was among the first to ask the simple question: at what practical and moral cost do we alter the world around us to suit human comforts and needs? In the years between 1945 and 1960, his was a lonely lament and oft-­ignored query, in part because the postwar period of “go-­go” development in the West seemed almost universally positive. The thought of questioning such progress rarely entered mainstream public consciousness. The United States emerged from

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World War II more powerful than any nation had ever been, and its citizens reaped the rewards of success in a booming, consumer-­oriented economy. Ironically, this emphasis on consumption opened American minds to a greater acceptance of conservation and preservation ideas but in a way that continued to define natural resources and parks as commodified consumer goods. Leopold’s own experiences in the environments of the West shaped his concerns, and by the end of the first six decades of the twentieth century, they would assume a far greater influence. But that day was still in the future. Between 1945 and 1960, the land-­as-­commodity idea prevailed and the federal government’s role in shaping both the environment and the economy of the twentieth-­century West accelerated dramatically. The Pacific theater in World War II significantly expanded federal presence and influence in the region in the form of airplane manufacturing and shipbuilding plants, military installations, and research facilities. The decades following the war continued this trend as massive federal funding coursed into the West for Cold War weapons development, power production, and transportation and recreation infrastructure. Indeed, by 1958, federal expenditures were exceeding tax revenues in all but three of the eleven western states. In other words, western states got more money from the federal government than they contributed to it in taxes. Uncle Sam also owned more than half the land in the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin, and federal land management agencies subsidized the West’s developing economies. Moreover, in the fifteen years after the war the population west of the Mississippi River boomed, from thirty-­two million to forty-­five million, and by 1962, California, with nineteen million residents, had surpassed New York, becoming the most populous state in the Union. The extensive influence of the federal government in the West during this period erased the last vestiges of colonialism and dependency and ushered in a new era of financial stability and economic and industrial leadership. Federal largesse ensured that this part of the country fully participated in the burgeoning prosperity of the 1950s. In these heady, pro-­development times, few heeded Leopold’s admonitions or questioned the long-­term costs to ecosystems and human health.

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In the postwar period, expansionism did not remain confined to traditional extractive endeavors such as farming, mining, timber harvesting, and petroleum drilling—­all of the familiar components of western “progress.” Significantly, between 1945 and 1960, the American West became central to the development of the most environmentally destructive innovation humans have thus far imagined and created: the atomic bomb. Work on the top-­secret effort known as the Manhattan Project began in 1939, and much of the research and development occurred at Los Alamos, New Mexico, near Santa Fe. There, scientists worked to convert radioactive uranium—­much of it mined in Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado—­into the most powerful explosive devices ever built. They succeeded. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Army conducted the first full-­scale atomic detonation test, known as Trinity, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. It billowed an iconic mushroom cloud 7.5 miles into the sky, scoured out a crater 250 feet wide, and incinerated the surrounding sand into glass. With the blast, the United States ushered in the atomic age. In less than a month it unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), with the hope that such a devastating display would bring a swift end to World War II in the Pacific. It did. The resulting deaths of two hundred thousand Japanese people, most of them civilians, and the threat of a third bomb (which the United States did not have) were powerfully persuasive. The Japanese emperor surrendered to the Allied powers on August 15, 1945, and the most destructive war in the planet’s history finally came to a close. But once released, the atomic genie failed to return to its bottle, and the environmental consequences were high. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in the Cold War—­a high-­stakes competition for the allegiance of countries across the globe. This freezing of diplomatic relations manifested itself in many ways, but militarily, it led to an all-­out arms race. In 1945 the United States was the only country in the world with an atomic bomb, and this monopoly elevated it to elite superpower status. Thus, in 1947, to maintain this atomic advantage, the federal government folded the Manhattan Project into the newly created Atomic Energy Commission and charged it with maintaining nuclear superiority. Bigger, 208  Booming the West

26. Mushroom cloud from the April 15, 1955, atomic bomb test at the Nevada Test Site.

National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, Wikimedia Commons.

better, more powerful weapons like the hydrogen bomb were the solution. And the country demonstrated its nuclear might regularly at the Nevada Test Site, located about sixty-­five miles northwest of Las Vegas. Between 1951 and 1992, the United States detonated more than a thousand nuclear bombs. In the 1950s these military tests were also tourist attractions; visitors sat in Booming the West  209

27. Nuclear fallout in the American West. A “downwinder” is someone who was exposed

to the radioactive materials, a.k.a. “fallout,” released at nuclear test sites or by nuclear production facilities. Map by Amber Bell.

bleachers wearing “protective” glasses and watched the mushroom clouds, often visible for a hundred miles in every direction, roil into the skies like a mighty fireworks display. But these mushroom clouds bore a sinister cargo. As the smoke and ash dispersed in the wind, radiation rained down, spreading sickness and related cancers to unsuspecting “downwinders”—­people living in the nuclear fallout zones, which included five counties in northern Arizona, six counties in central Nevada, and ten counties in southern Utah. Within a few years, reports surfaced of a “significant excess” of leukemia deaths suffered by 210  Booming the West

children in Utah who had been exposed to the fallout during the 1951–­58 period. Abnormally high rates of other cancers, thyroid disease, and genetic defects also emerged in these same areas, and the Nevada Test Site remains one of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the United States to the present day. Ultimately, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 limited signers to underground testing after this date, to prevent further fallout hazards, but for many the damage had already been done. In 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides monetary compensation for workers involved in the actual testing, as well as for individuals who have contracted cancer or other radiation-­related diseases. Nevadans and Utahns were not the only victims in the atomic West. In 1943 the United States had also built a nuclear production complex at Hanford in Washington State. Like the Nevada Test Site, Hanford became a major source of radioactive soils, water, and air pollution. Hanford discharged directly into the Columbia River the water used to cool the superheated nuclear reactors that manufactured plutonium (used in both the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bomb). On-­site reactors released radioactive isotopes into the air, resulting in contamination plumes that reached the Washington and Oregon coastal waters and spread downwinder symptoms throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada. One downwinder recalled that one of his earliest childhood memories was “many hospital visits and surgeries, being paralyzed and in [an] iron lung. Then, starting school with crutches and braces, and with sores all over my body, my teeth rotting out. My hair fell out twice. Waiting for the births of cows and sheep, praying that they would not be deformed . . . cows with two heads, 6 or 7 feet, some without eyeballs and so on.” The seventy-­five thousand square miles surrounding the Hanford reactor constitute the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, and its fallout has continued to plague the food web of the entire region, appearing in beef, cow’s milk, fish (especially salmon), and human breast milk. The uranium frenzy that fueled the atomic revolution also continues to exact a devastating toll on Navajo/Diné people and their lands. Four defunct processing mills and more than a thousand abandoned mines still scar the reservation, serving as silent, radioactive sentinels of the nation’s unquestioned-­at-­the-­time quest for global power. Since 2005, the Navajo Booming the West  211

Nation has prohibited all uranium—­leetso, which means “yellow dirt” in Navajo—­extraction within its borders, but the environmental contamination and long-­term health consequences of the atomic past persist to the present day. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the mid-­1980s, miners—­ including many Navajos—­extracted nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore from the Navajo Nation. It is worth noting that the federal government presented uranium mining as an employment “solution” for Navajos who had been negatively affected by the stock reductions discussed in the previous chapter. For many, it was a deadly option. Miners’ exposure to radioactive uranium, along with associated heavy metals (such as arsenic and lead), toxic chemicals (such as solvents and degreasers), and other contaminants (such as blasting agents), polluted Diné bodies, homes, lands, and drinking water and resulted in exceptionally high numbers of lung and bone cancers, as well as kidney problems, across the reservation. “So a lot of the Navajo ladies became widows,” notes Professor Esther Yazzie-­Lewis. The Navajos call leetso a monster: nayee, “that which gets in the way of a successful life.” According to Yazzie-­Lewis, “The Navajo people were the midwife of the monster, although they did not know it at that time.” Instead, uranium mining on the reservation seemed to provide local work, preferable to far-­off railroad jobs that many men had taken in the wake of stock reductions. But the at-­what-­cost human price has been high, says Yazzie-­Lewis, as downwind Indians “receive America’s worst health care.” Compounding this was an attendant “institutionalized violence” that accompanied family dispossession, upheaval, and “the sudden availability of alcohol (near the dry Navajo Nation),” as rural clan groups fell apart when their men pursued mining work. As Yazzie-­Lewis writes, “Abused children and brutalized women are as much the victims of atomic energy as others who suffer and die as the direct result of the atom bomb.” For many Navajos, the key to healing is knowing the monster and finding a more sustainable future. For Yazzie-­Lewis, the way forward is clear: “nuclear power must be recognized for what it really is—­a power that comes from abuse . . . [and] we must fight it as a monster.” In addition to inspiring and funding the West’s atomic evolution and revolution, the federal government continued to engineer the western environment to facilitate settlement and power production. Environmental historian 212  Booming the West

Donald Worster has called the West’s extensive and extravagant waterworks a “hydraulic society,” one dependent upon large-­scale water relocation via irrigation and dam infrastructure. Historians Richard Etulain and Michael Malone put it more simply, stating that “every major river of the West came, to a greater or lesser extent, under the control of the dam builders and water pumpers.” During the Great Depression, the Bureau of Reclamation (and the other federal dam-­building agency, the Army Corps of Engineers) had been busy harnessing the West’s mightiest rivers for power, irrigation, storage, and flood control. Behemoth construction projects such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams had brought jobs and cheap hydropower to the region during the depths of economic collapse. As a result, the public viewed these dams positively as symbols of American ingenuity and prosperity and the federal agencies that built them, as economic saviors. World War II’s acceleration of western industrial and commercial development had also ramped up power demands, and the call for more dams grew to a crescendo. The bureau, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, was ready and willing to build. The Bureau of Reclamation quickly realized that the best way to ensure full compliance with the Colorado River Compact (CRC) allocations, which divvied up the annual flow among eight western states and Mexico, was to store as much water as possible behind major dams along the river’s serpentine course. Their grand dam plan was the Colorado River Storage Project (crsp)—­a ten-­dam megaproject that would simultaneously solve the irrigation needs of the upper basin’s desperate farmers, who had barely survived the Great Depression, and keep the spigot on full blast for California’s burgeoning agricultural economy. Without such development, the Salt Lake Tribune cautioned its readers, Utahns were “likely to awaken to find their water in California.” In June 1950, to thwart this unthinkable outcome, the bureau proposed and the Interior secretary approved construction of a dam at Echo Park, within the boundaries of Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, “in the interest of the greatest public good.” It was classic conservationism. Established in 1915, Dinosaur National Monument lies across the northern border between Utah and Colorado. President Franklin Roosevelt had significantly expanded the monument in 1938 to encompass both its scientifically important dinosaur bone quarry and its scenic splendor. One Booming the West  213

reporter described the area as “seven or eight Zion canyons strung together, end to end, with Yosemite Valley dropped down in the middle.” In spite of these superlatives, the monument languished during the 1930s and 1940s; its remote location meant that visitors rarely made the trek to explore its rivers and canyons, and Congress spent no money to encourage them. But not everyone ignored Dinosaur. Federal hydropower generated by the proposed Echo Park dam would benefit residents across four neighboring states, sparking economic growth, while flood control measures promised to tame the wild Green River. These benefits would come at the cost of a free-­flowing river, however. The Bureau of Reclamation’s proposal unleashed a major battle between dam advocates and opponents, as both sides sensed that Echo Park would act as a test case for the sanctity of the national park system. Several other reserves faced similar pressure for development. For preservationists in particular, the prospect of flooding Echo Park rekindled painful memories of the earlier loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The director of the National Park Service (NPS), Newton Drury, protested that such a dam would flood a monument set aside for preservation, and he resigned rather than oversee its construction. Olaus Murie, president of the Wilderness Society, echoed John Muir’s laments regarding the fate of Hetch Hetchy when he wrote that an un-­dammed Dinosaur Monument was essential “for our happiness, our spiritual welfare, for our success in dealing with the confusions of a materialistic and sophisticated civilization.” Led by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, a coalition of nearly eighty national and more than two hundred state organizations joined the campaign to block the proposed dam at Echo Park. Through a barrage of media—­coffee-­table books, photographs, and articles—­preservationists touted the scenic beauty of Dinosaur, describing the sinuous canyons and quiet places that the dam’s reservoir would inundate. In 1950 Harper’s columnist and native Utahn Bernard DeVoto argued, “No one has asked the American people whether or not they want their sovereign rights, and those of their descendants, in their own publicly reserved beauty spots wiped out. Thirty-­two million of them visited the national parks in 1949. More will visit them this year. The attendance will keep on increasing as long as 214  Booming the West

they are worth visiting, but a good many of them will not be worth visiting if engineers are let loose on them.” Perhaps the most compelling publication, however, was a photographic collection edited by noted western writer Wallace Stegner entitled This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers. The publicity generated a blizzard of mail that ran 80-­to-­1 against the dam and forced congressional representatives to remove it from the Colorado River Storage Project authorizing legislation. Indeed, when the crsp became law in April 1956, it contained a provision that specifically prohibited the violation of national monument and park boundaries with dams and their reservoirs. The Echo Park controversy was a signal moment in the history of wild lands preservation, as it established the developmental inviolability of national parks and monuments and presaged the 1964 passage of the Wilderness Act. But the preservationists’ victory carried a high price, unknown to them at the time. In saving Echo Park, they had agreed not to oppose the rest of the crsp, which would go on to build a number of other dams, including one in Glen Canyon. Like Echo Park, Glen Canyon was virtually unknown in 1956. Its supine canyons and scenic wonders along the Utah-­Arizona border had attracted few visitors. But the Glen Canyon site remained in the final crsp bill, and once dam construction began that same year, the Sierra Club hurriedly tried to compensate, issuing yet another illustrated book, this one entitled The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado. It was too little, too late. A decade later, when the dam’s floodgates closed, much of Glen Canyon slipped quietly under the rising waters of Lake Powell. The dam became the most important link in the crsp, conserving 64 percent of the project’s total water storage and generating 75 percent of its power output. In 1958 Congress established the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which in 2019, together with Rainbow Bridge National Monument, attracted more than 4.3 million visitors, pumped more than $500 million into the local economy, and sustained 5,243 jobs. But the environmental costs had been high. The Sierra Club’s leader, David Brower, considered the loss of Glen Canyon the major failure of his life and “the biggest sin I ever committed,” and the episode served as a painful reminder to preservationists of the costs of bargaining away places “no one knew.” Booming the West  215

In neighboring Idaho, private power development also led to environmental problems. In 1958 the Idaho Power Company engaged in a horribly failed attempt to maintain viable salmon runs by transporting migrating salmon around the Oxbow Dam, then under construction on the Snake River. The sheer bulk of the dam presented a formidable obstacle to the spawning fish, so Idaho Power proposed an audacious solution to fulfill its obligation to preserve the salmon runs: it would scoop up the migrating salmon with skimmers, load them into trucks, haul them around the dam, and then redeposit them in the river. This expensive fish-­out-­of-­water proposal that prioritized the economy over the environment failed. Disaster struck the fall 1958 Chinook salmon and steelhead run when malfunctioning traps, poorly organized trucking—­with fish caught on the Idaho side of the river while the transport trucks waited on the Oregon side—­and the isolation of most of that year’s run in an unaerated pool below the dam led to what historian William Ashworth called “one of the greatest anadromous fish disasters in history.” In its December 1958 summary report on the so-­called Oxbow Incident, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated a loss of about four thousand adult Chinook salmon and steelhead. It also estimated “that 50 percent of the 14,000 salmon which were collected and transported around the project did not survive to spawn. The success of the 3,700 steelhead trout which were passed remains to be determined.” In addition to the fish tragedy, “the monetary loss from [the salmon’s] failure to spawn was literally incalculable.” Furthermore, the summary report concluded that these “losses could have been avoided, and that there is little justification for sacrificing this valuable living fish resource to a desire to expedite . . . the hydroelectric power development of the project.” The drama of thousands of dead salmon drew national attention to the shortcomings of technology. The next year, when the Army Corps of Engineers opened hearings on the revision of their original development plan for the Columbia River system in the wake of the Oxbow Incident, they drew an audience with a clear concern for the “fish problem.” In January 1961, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game added another voice by compiling a summary report that detailed the impact of dams on salmon. The conclusions were stunning: a decline of more than 50 percent 216  Booming the West

in the numbers of fall Chinook that reached the spawning grounds on the Middle Snake in 1958 and 1959 as compared to 1957, downstream migrant salmon and steelhead mortality rates as high as 78 percent in 1959, and the “apparent failure of most of the million fall chinook downstream migrants estimated to have entered the Brownlee Reservoir in 1959 to either pass through the reservoir or to be attracted to and trapped by the artificial outlets or skimmers.” The causes for the dramatic losses to the salmon and steelhead populations were many and varied. Two other dams on the Columbia River (downstream from its confluence with the Snake)—­McNary Dam (1953) and The Dalles Dam (1957)—­further complicated fish passage, as did the Ice Harbor Dam on the lower Snake (1961). The fall 1957 runs also sustained “considerable loss,” in the words of the assistant Interior secretary, due to a malfunctioning fish trap at Brownlee Dam. Further losses occurred as a result of the above-­discussed Oxbow Incident in 1958. Many of the downstream migration facilities at both dams, most notably the fish “skimmers” at Brownlee, failed in both 1957 and again in 1958, during the height of the downstream migration. Thousands of other smolts died as they passed through the dam’s turbines. Idaho Power eventually agreed to compensate for the salmon and steelhead that its dams exterminated by building an anadromous fish hatchery below Oxbow—­technology to the rescue once again. But at what cost? Hatcheries produce salmon, to be sure, but they don’t produce wild salmon. They produce hatchery fish that look like wild salmon, but they don’t behave like wild salmon. Fish hatcheries, with little to no scientific data to support them, were a market-­oriented solution to the “fish problem”—­the protection of the fishery rather than wild fishes. Good enough, one Idaho congressional candidate insisted when she refused to accept salmon’s endangered status—­ “How can I, when you go in and you can buy a can of salmon off the shelf in Albertsons?” But wild salmon are not commodities. And fish “production” unleashes a whole host of environmental problems. Because they are farm-­ raised in an artificial habitat, hatchery fish don’t learn how to feed themselves, defend against predators, find shelter in a stream, conserve energy, or develop vital survival techniques the way wild fish do. The consequence is that less than 1 percent of released hatchery smolts return to spawn. Yet Booming the West  217

this so-­called aquatic resource now accounts for 80 percent of the Columbia River’s salmon and steelhead population. Hatchery fish also thwart the natural selection process of evolution by introducing a melting pot of artificial, lab-­blended genetics into the ecosystem, swamping the inherited dna of salmon in a particular stream. A 2016 study, for example, found that 723 genes related to immunity and wound-­ healing in hatchery fish were functioning differently than those in wild fish. These farmed fish frequently fail to thrive, they stray rather than return home to their natal spawning grounds, and they displace wild stock, contaminate them with hatchery-­sourced diseases, and dilute their genetic diversity. Currently the federal government lists two wild species of Chinook salmon as endangered and seven wild salmon species as threatened. In the late 1990s, a damning scientific review of Columbia River fish production programs concluded that “hatcheries have generally failed to meet their objective [and] . . . have imparted adverse effects on natural populations.” Furthermore, “managers have failed to evaluate hatchery programs,” and the “rationale justifying hatchery production was based on untested assumptions.” True enough, the Echo Park dam controversy and the Snake’s Oxbow Dam salmon slaughter began to sour the public on big dams, but not before significant damage had been done. Today, for example, the more than 400 dams that riddle the Columbia River Basin block fish access to an estimated 40 to 60 percent of original salmon and steelhead habitat. The ecological consequences radiate out from this loss in a trophic cascade that is incalculable. Development won the day throughout the West during the 1950s. The Colorado River Storage Project ultimately led to the building of six major dams on the Colorado River and its tributaries (the Green, San Juan, and Gunnison Rivers) and to numerous other mammoth water management projects throughout the upper basin states. One of the largest of these projects, the Central Utah Project (cup), which allows Utah to develop its 1922 CRC-­ allocated share of Colorado River water, has quadrupled in costs compared with the initial estimates. Yet it is the extensive “hydraulic society” of the West that makes possible the lush lawns, emerald golf courses, air-­conditioning, and Las Vegas fountains that both residents and tourists demand in such an arid environment. Water projects also grow the lettuce, tomatoes, cotton, 218  Booming the West

almonds, roses, and other mass-­produced agricultural goods that flow from central California and the deserts around Phoenix to stock the nation’s stores 365 days a year. Historian Marc Reisner has complained “that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-­size section green—­and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable ground-­water.” But in the period between 1945 and 1960, few people questioned the costs of such amenities and simply enjoyed their seeming success at making the desert bloom. In addition to bombs and dams, the federal government’s extensive influence over the western environment was also evident in its development of the interstate highway system. Not surprisingly, Americans’ love affair with the automobile directly coincided with the rapid expansion of the nation’s roads. After the war, as industry spanned from Atlantic to Pacific and drivers took to the open roads for recreation and tourism, the need for an efficient transcontinental transportation network became readily apparent. In response to these demands, President Dwight Eisenhower championed a massive federally funded public works program to knit the country together. Authorized in 1956, the Interstate Highway System was inspired by the highly efficient German Autobahn, which Eisenhower had experienced (and appreciated) firsthand during his tenure as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II. Eisenhower initially called for the construction of forty-­one thousand miles of “broader ribbons across the land,” linking the nation’s major cities in an interconnected network. Funding for the massive road grid derived from federal fuel taxes, so that user fees directly paid for the majority of construction and maintenance costs. And conveniently, east-­west-­running interstates are numbered evenly and increase from south to north, while north-­south-­running interstates have odd numbers that increase from west to east. Although much interstate construction served to link the West’s oasis settlements with efficient straight-­line asphalt and concrete highways, the cities themselves experienced significant at-­what-­cost transformation. New roads left enormous footprints of blight, and they displaced—­especially near city centers—­poor and minority residents, who lacked the wealth and political clout to fight against “progress.” Historic neighborhoods such as La Booming the West  219

Sonorita, a Chicano barrio located in the shadow of the Phoenix skyline and pummeled by Sky Harbor Airport’s nonstop roar, paid a steep price for urban gentrification. Even today, the community’s poorly maintained streets and sidewalks, overgrown vacant lots, and dense web of power lines streaming to a major substation stand in marked contrast to the well-­manicured amenities maintained by the city in nearby affluent neighborhoods occupied primarily by white residents. The interstate also fundamentally changed the nation and shaped the American West in other key ways. First of all, it prioritized the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, for both individuals and commerce. Federally funded and maintained roads revolutionized interstate commerce as businesses moved away from track-­bound but more energy-­efficient freight trains toward infinitely adaptable long-­haul trucking. Individuals and families also relied more and more on the automobile to get them to far-­off destinations like grandma’s house back in Michigan, but also increasingly to work, grocery stores, school, places of worship, drive-­in movies, and to their refuge from the city: the suburbs. Between the war’s end and the mid-­1960s, rail passenger traffic declined by half, while total track mileage declined each year and big corporations bought out smaller independent railroads. The conversion to automobile and long-­haul truck primacy was unstoppable. The rise of the automobile and the Interstate Highway System facilitated suburbanization in the West, as it did elsewhere in the country, which allowed people to live outside the cities and directly contributed to urban sprawl. Postwar affluence enabled emerging middle-­class (usually white) city dwellers to flee blighted downtowns for the safety and open spaces of the suburbs. Nowhere was this phenomenon more pronounced than in California. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people had flocked to the sunny state in search of high-­paying defense industry jobs. The resulting population boom clogged the existing transportation system, and by 1947 California had committed itself to an extensive state freeway development program. Easy access to the sprawling lands lying outside of Southern California’s especially congested and crowded cities, combined with low-­interest government home-­loan programs such as the gi Bill, spawned a great white flight to single-­family housing in the new, car-­dependent satellite 220  Booming the West

communities that radiated out from older urban centers. Los Angeles was the poster child. Today, the city’s metropolitan area, which urbanist William Whyte characterizes as “an unnerving lesson in man’s infinite ability to mess up his environment,” extends across nearly forty-­nine hundred square miles. But sprawl is not unique to LA (statistically, it isn’t even in the top twenty worst cities); metropolitan expansion around cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Seattle, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake is also daunting. Aldo Leopold had earlier decried such unsustainable development, observing that “bureaus build roads into new hinterlands, then buy more hinterlands to absorb the exodus accelerated by the roads.” One unanticipated consequence of the sprint to the suburbs was the scourge of septic tanks. Having fled the public sewage systems of the cities, suburban homeowners turned to using individual, unregulated, underground septic systems to flush away their wastewater with little regard for who or what might be downslope. Ideally, of course, a septic system provides efficient effluent neutralization: waste drains from the home into the septic tank, where bacteria digest the organic matter; solids settle into a sludge, oil and grease scum float to the top, and the liquids discharge into a leach field to percolate harmlessly into surrounding soils. But “ideal” and “septic” rarely go together. In the 1940s, nearly a third of septics failed within the first three years. As one geographer reported, residents of Portuguese Bend, south of Los Angeles, learned this the hard way: “when the septic tanks of their new homes had saturated the shale beneath their 225-­acre hillside community, everything began to respond slowly to the tug of gravity—­lots, lawns, shrubbery, and 156 houses . . . gently slumped downhill as though they were so much custard pudding.” Beyond such a graphic landslide collapse and obvious “ick” factors, septic system failures posed numerous environmental problems. Effluent seeped into and contaminated potable groundwater sources and aquifers. In the arid West, pollution of such a scarce resource created a clear and present danger to both municipal and agricultural users. Synthetic detergents from suburban washing machines also created a sudsy nightmare for sewage treatment plants in addition to fouling wells, making tap water taste “awful,” and foaming up rivers and lakes. Like other quality-­of-­life challenges, “clean water has become Booming the West  221

28. Suburbanization, with its curvilinear streets, and urban sprawl became standard fea-

tures of the postwar West, as this image of Albuquerque, New Mexico, demonstrates. Photo by author.

one of the nation’s major health problems,” according to one report, and in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson would warn that detergent-­contaminated water “may promote cancer by acting on the lining of the digestive tract, changing the tissues so that they more easily absorb dangerous chemicals.” Cleaning up these messes would ultimately require federal legislation and regulation. Nevertheless, home and garden magazines such as Sunset and House Beautiful touted and celebrated energetic postwar western suburbanization. One article extolling the iconic low-­to-­the-­ground, long-­eaved “ranch” house style as the essence of “California living,” for example, encouraged readers to “try to visualize the social values that such a house represents.” By the 1950s, the California ranch rambler accounted for nine out of every ten new houses. Garages replaced front porches, and families prioritized privacy by erecting fences and hedges to shield them from the prying eyes of curious neighbors and strangers. Curvilinear streets and cul-­de-­sacs replaced older grid systems 222  Booming the West

and created small sub-­communities of homogeneous, similarly valued, one-­ story homes, each with a lawn and a backyard. Mixed-­use neighborhoods—­ those with shopping, services, restaurants, theaters, offices, and healthcare all mixed in together—­disappeared, ensuring that every household had to get into a car and drive to meet even their most basic subsistence needs. Suburbanization was also directly responsible for the emergence of the two-­ car family; in 1956 there were more cars than households in America and the station wagon became the virtual symbol of the suburban phenomenon and a way to keep up with the Joneses. Indeed, by the 1950s more Americans were living in suburbs than in cities, and each year they spent more time and drove more miles in their cars. Suburbia was also racially and culturally segregated. Legally. “Redlining” is a term derived from practices implemented by the federal Depression-­era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation that color-­coded maps to distinguish “desirable” white neighborhoods (in green) from “hazardous” neighborhoods with nonwhite, immigrant, or Jewish residents (in red). Not surprisingly, researchers have discovered a strong correlation between urban gas and oil well sites and redlined neighborhoods in more than thirty cities, including Los Angeles. Pollution-­related health concerns resulting from close proximity to these urban wells meant many in these minority communities experienced inferior food access and disproportionate rates of heart and lung disease, fetal development complications, anxiety, and depression. As the study concluded, “structural environmental racism contributed to the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in racially and socially marginalized neighborhoods.” Moreover, “many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-­production, can contribute to ongoing pollution.” Unfortunately, westerners’ love affair with their automobiles and suburbanization also brought about the rapid collapse of urban mass transit, and no company worked harder to facilitate the end of the trolley and cable car era in the West than automobile manufacturer General Motors (gm). Between 1936 and 1950, as historian Tom McCarthy has shown, gm converted forty-­five cities over to its bus lines, National City Lines. The conversion was so thorough and swift that by 1955 “88 percent of the nation’s electric streetcar network was Booming the West  223

gone.” Buses, however, were an ineffective solution—­they were often inconvenient, expensive, and soon forsaken, as gm hoped they would be, for the automobile. Unlike the bus (and railroad), cars take passengers exactly where they want to go. As McCarthy concludes, “Urban mass transit worked for millions, especially as routine transportation between home and workplace, but it simply could not compete with the multifaceted allure of the automobile.” In the twenty-­first century, however, public transportation began to rebound. Voters in cities like Denver, Colorado, supported new municipal debt to fund massive, metrowide transit programs like FasTracks. With more than one hundred miles of light rail and commuter rail, FasTracks complements the city’s FreeMetroRide hop-­on-­hop-­off downtown bus system, generates jobs, and has infused billions into the local economy. Similar light rail commuter trains exist along Utah’s Wasatch Front (FrontRunner), between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico (Rail Runner), and in Portland, Oregon (max). Nevertheless, as the car became a status symbol, an obvious icon of success, and a measure of the “good life” for many Americans after the war, public transportation increasingly seemed “second class.” Advertisers played into this value system by asking provocatively, “Why be part of the ten-­cent common herd?” Automobiles were the golden ticket to freedom and upward social mobility. Regardless of the cultural cachet that car ownership imparted, the environmental impact of such an automotive acceleration was significant. Between 1945 and 1960, Americans drove a lot more cars a lot farther. The number of passenger cars speeding along the nation’s highways soared from 25.8 million to 61.7 million, and the annual mileage driven nearly tripled, from 200 billion to 587 billion miles. Gasoline consumption followed a predictably similar trajectory, and, even as late as 1954, nearly 80 percent of it came from the West, primarily Texas, Oklahoma, and California. Thus, at every stage of what environmental historians call the product life cycle—­raw material extraction, manufacturing, consumer use, and disposal—­ the automobile exerted an ever-­expanding influence. Every year, for example, five million defunct automobiles ended up in junkyards. Unfortunately, according to McCarthy, the “golden decade” of the automobile in the 1950s coincided directly with the “dark ages” of its environmental impact. The acceleration of raw material extraction and mining, proliferation of automobile 224  Booming the West

factories, consumption of fossil fuels, pollution of the air, and desertion of old cars—­these were the costs of the nation’s auto mania. Aldo Leopold had felt this personally and lamented the “loss” of his beloved White Mountain in Arizona in the 1920s, vowing never to return: “I prefer not to see what tourists, roads, sawmills, and logging railroads have done for it, or to it.” For most westerners, the automobile’s most obvious effect in this four-­ phase product life cycle was smog—­choking, smoky fog (thus, “smog”) that hovered over car-­intensive cities and suburbs like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. Indeed, by the 1940s Los Angeles had become so synonymous with the phenomenon that it earned the nickname Smog Town. As it turned out, the same sunny marine climate that was so ideal for year-­round agriculture was also ideal for trapping car and industry emissions. Normally, as solar radiation warms the earth’s surface, air temperature decreases as elevation from the surface increases. But under certain circumstances, this temperature gradient becomes inverted as warmer, less-­dense air above traps colder, denser air below, shutting off air-­exchange convection currents and trapping smoke and other pollutants—­smog—­near the surface. Los Angeles experiences these conditions on 340 or more days out of every year on average, as its bowl-­like geography, with ocean to the west and mountains to the east, provides a perfect smog-­collecting trap. As McCarthy has argued, for a city and an area renowned for its clean air and healthy environment, “dirty air struck at Southern California’s very identity and posed a direct threat to one of the central tenets of the region’s marketing”—­it was a breach of climate contract. By 1949, for example, automobile-­produced smog in Los Angeles County was damaging leafy crops such as lettuce and spinach, costing farmers there hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 1954 heavy smog shut down the city’s schools and industries for much of October. In the twenty-­first century, climate change is further compounding the problem; 2020 was one of the smoggiest on record and on September 6 of that year, a blistering heat wave that saw LA County exceed 120°F for the first time ever led to the highest ozone pollution count recorded in more than a quarter century (185 ppm) in downtown Los Angeles. Californians were not about to leave their cars at home, however, so the onus for solving the problem rested on automobile manufacturers, who began Booming the West  225

developing the catalytic converter to trap noxious emissions. In the 1950s, though, the auto industry deemed the device too expensive for commercial use, and consumers failed to demand change. The catalytic converter would have to wait until the 1970s. The reason was simple, writer Thomas Hine argues: Americans failed to question the environmental costs of their automobile habit because after the deprivation of war, they experienced an “outright, thoroughly vulgar joy in being able to live so well . . . [and] the sense that a new car [was] an achievement worth celebrating.” U.S. automakers gladly joined in the celebration by offering cars with increased horsepower, fueled by gas-­guzzling, growling v8 engines and ever-­more dazzling refinements such as chrome tail fins. In their Cadillac-­catatonia, few consumers wondered what happened to the chemicals (discharged directly into local rivers, streams, and lakes) that made their cars so shiny or what the environmental costs of open-­pit iron mines, offshore oil wells, and junked Fleetwoods and Eldorados might be. As Hine concludes, “In some part of his being, every American wanted a Cadillac.” Oblivious to the long-­term ecological effects of their automotive lust, postwar Americans and their touring cars took to the open road and new interstates and visited national parks, monuments, forests, and recreation areas—­the new federal commons—­in record numbers. The end of World War II and onerous wartime rationing liberated people from concerns about “over there,” and they set out to explore the nation’s scenic wonders in a frenzy of recreation travel and adventure. Tourism ignited the West’s economy as busted-­out mining towns transformed themselves into ski resorts, campgrounds proliferated, and families loaded their station wagons with bologna-­and-­cheese-­filled ice chests and set out to “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” as one ad jingle encouraged. By 1950, historians Malone and Etulain calculate, “nearly two-­thirds of all Americans took vacations, and four-­fifths of them went by car.” After dramatic declines during the war years, the national parks experienced an explosion in visitorship. In 1940 an American population of 130 million had enjoyed 22 million acres of national parks; only two decades later, the population had swelled to 183 million, but the park system still languished and suffered visibly from overuse and disrepair. By 1960 most parks were experiencing a doubling of 226  Booming the West

their prewar tourist numbers, and major parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon were logging well over a million visitors annually. Open spaces and public lands constituted yet another commodity that fulfilled rapacious postwar consumer demand. Leopold had anticipated this auto excess when he wrote, “Everywhere is the unspecialized motorist whose recreation is mileage, who has run the gamut of the National Parks in one summer.” By 1956 deferred maintenance and the parks’ basic inability to adequately handle and serve the crush of new tourists finally prompted the National Park Service to implement Mission 66, an aggressive ten-­year plan to modernize, develop, and generally spruce up the national parks’ infrastructure by the fiftieth anniversary of the nps, in 1966. The most notable amenity added under this program was the visitor center, now a foundational institution at every park, but Mission 66 also included improved roads, employee housing, interpretive displays, and utilities. The West continued to provide a disproportionate share of its scenic splendor to the federal system through additions such as Grand Teton (1950) and Petrified Forest (1958) National Parks, as well as through newer federally managed recreation areas like Coulee Dam/Lake Roosevelt (1946) and Glen Canyon (1958). In 1951 the parks had hosted 37 million visitors. By 1956, when Mission 66 began, the numbers had exploded to more than 60 million, and by the program’s conclusion in 1966, visitorship had more than doubled again, to 133 million. Such intense pressure on the parks came at a cost: Americans were loving their parks to death and in many cases ruining the very scenery that had justified park protection. It was a classic tragedy-­of-­the-­commons dilemma. As Leopold had predicted, “Mass-­use involves a direct dilution of the opportunity for solitude. . . . When we speak of roads, campgrounds, trails, and toilets as ‘development’ of recreational resources, we speak falsely in respect of [solitude].” The key, he concludes, was for humans to begin to recognize their membership in an integrated community, not just with other humans but with the entirety of the world around them. “In short,” Leopold argues, “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-­ community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-­ members, and also respect for the community as such.” Booming the West  227

In the wake of world war, American affluence contributed to a surge in outdoor recreation and a corresponding sense that “quality of life” now included beautiful places in which to recreate and contemplate. As historian Samuel Hays has demonstrated, “evolving environmental values were closely associated with rising standards of living and levels of education.” Unquestioned championing of success and “progress,” in the form of industrialization and a vibrant economy, had produced unintended and increasingly unacceptable consequences such as atomic radiation, dammed rivers, declining species, pollution, sprawl, and overcrowded public spaces. Surely a people who had triumphed over fascism could have it all—­economic prosperity and a healthy environment—­or, as Hays says simply, “beauty, health, and permanence.” In 1949 Leopold’s assertion that “conservation is a state of harmony between men and land” garnered too few adherents, but in little more than a decade, with the environmental costs of the heady development-­centric decade of the 1950s beginning to mount, Leopold’s conservationist consciousness began to evolve into the modern environmental protection movement. Suggested Reading

Ernie Brannon et al., “Review of Salmonid Artificial Production in the Columbia River Basin: As a Scientific Basis for Columbia River Production Programs,” Northwest Power Planning Council, 1998, available at https://w ​ ww.​ nwcouncil.​ org/​ sites/​ default​ /files​/98​-33​.pdf. Sara Dant, “Evolution of an Environmentalist: Senator Frank Church and the Hells Canyon Controversy,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 51, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 36–­51. Susan E. Dawson, Perry H. Charley, and Phillip Harrison Jr., “Advocacy and Social Action among Navajo People: Uranium Workers and Their Families, 1988–­1995,” in The Navajo People and Uranium Mining, ed. Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-­Lewis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 57–­77. Sarah Elkind, “The Nature and Business of War: Drilling for Oil in Wartime Los Angeles,” in Cities and Nature in the American West, ed. Char Miller (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 205–­24. Jared Farmer, “Glen Canyon and the Persistence of Wilderness,” Western Historical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 210–­22. 228  Booming the West

Daniel William Foster, “La Sonorita: Survival of a Chicano Barrio,” Confluencia 27, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 212–­18, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/i40064348. Steven M. Fountain, “Ranchers’ Friend and Farmers’ Foe: Reshaping Nature with Beaver Reintroduction in California,” Environmental History 19, no. 2 (April 2014): 239–­69. Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, “How a Salmon Farm Disaster Changed Northwest Aquaculture Forever,” High Country News, July 1, 2022, available at https://​ www​.hcn​.org​/issues​/54​.7​/fish​-how​-a​-salmon​-farm​-disaster​-changed​-northwest​ -aquaculture-​ forever​#:​~:​text​=P ​ arasites​%20and​%20pathogens% ​ 20proliferate% ​ 20in​ ,fish​%20too​%20weak​%20to​%20survive. David J. X. Gonzalez, Anthony Nardone, Andrew V. Nguyen et al., “Historic Redlining and the Siting of Oil and Gas Wells in the United States,” Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, April 13, 2022, available at https://​doi​.org​ /10​.1038​/s41370​-022​-00434​-9. Samuel P. Hays, “Introduction” and “From Conservation to Environment,” in Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–­1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–­39. Jim Klein, dir., Taken for a Ride (public transit documentary) (New Day Films, 1996). Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986). Eric Loomis, “When Loggers Were Green: Lumber, Labor, and Conservation, 1937–­ 1948,” Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 421–­41. David B. Louter, “Wilderness on Display: Shifting Ideals of Cars and National Parks,” Journal of the West 44 (Fall 2005): 29–­38. Susan J. Matt, “Coming of Age in Consumer Society,” in Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–­1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 148–­81. Tom McCarthy, “Cadillacs and Community,” in Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 2009), 99–­129. Mirian Melendez, “Redlining in Los Angeles, ca: The Effects of Historic Redlining in Today’s LA Cities,” Arcgis StoryMap, May 7, 2021, available at https://s​ torymaps​ .arcgis​.com​/stories​/7c68f65bb296484cbac51eb21dce3999. Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History 10, no. 2 (April 2005): 184–­210. Linda Nash, “The Fruits of Ill-­Health: Pesticides and Workers’ Bodies in Post–­World War II California,” Osiris 19 (2004): 203–­19. Booming the West  229

National Park Service, “2014 National Park Visitor Spending Effects: Economic Contributions to Local Communities, States, and the Nation,” April 2015, available at https://​www​.usgs​.gov​/publications​/2014​-national-​ park-​ visitor-​ spending-​ effects​ -economic​-contributions​-local​-communities. Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, “Uranium Hearing,” available at https://​www​.nrc​.gov​/docs​/ML0835​/ML083520177​.pdf. Susan Rhoades Neel, “Newton Drury and the Echo Park Dam Controversy,” Forest and Conservation History 38, no. 2 (April 1994): 56–­66. Eliot Porter, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, 25th anniversary ed. (Layton ut: Gibbs Smith, 2000). Bob H. Reinhardt, “Drowned Towns in the Cold War West: Small Communities and Federal Water Projects,” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 149–­72. Mark Reisner, “Introduction: A Semidesert with a Desert Heart,” in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 1–­14. Also Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature. Complete 4-­tape vhs set, pbs Video, 1997. Adam Rome, “Septic-­Tank Suburbia: The Problem of Waste Disposal at the Metropolitan Fringe,” in The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–­118. Marguerite Shaffer, “Performing Bears and Packaged Wilderness: Reframing the History of National Parks,” in Cities and Nature in the American West, ed. Char Miller (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 137–­53. Daniel Simberloff, “Integrity, Stability, and Beauty: Aldo Leopold’s Evolving View of Nonnative Species,” Environmental History 17, no. 3 ( July 2012): 487–­511. Smart Growth America, “Measuring Sprawl 2014,” April 2014, available at https://​ smartgrowthamerica​.org​/resources​/measuring​-sprawl​-2014/. Ian Stacy, “Roads to Ruin on the Atomic Frontier: Environmental Decision Making at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, 1942–­1952,” Environmental History 15, no. 1 ( July 2010): 415–­48. Wallace Stegner, This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers (1955; Boulder co: Roberts Rinehart, 1985). Paul S. Sutter, “Driven Wild: The Problem of Wilderness,” Forest History Today (Spring 2002), 2–­9, available at https://​secureservercdn​.net/​ 45.​ 40.​ 148.​ 206/​ fc6.​ 039.​ mwp​ .accessdomain​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2016​/12​/DrivenWild​.pdf. John L. Thomas, A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land (New York: Routledge, 2000). 230  Booming the West

Washington State Department of Health, “An Overview of Hanford and Radiation Health Effects,” 2004, available at http://w ​ eb.​ archive.​ org/​ web/​ 20100106001013​ /http://​www​.doh​.wa​.gov​/hanford​/publications​/overview​/overview​.html. Christopher W. Wells, “Suburban Nation,” in Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 253–­87. Esther Yazzie-­Lewis and Jim Zion, “Leetso, the Powerful Yellow Monster: A Navajo Cultural Interpretation of Uranium Mining,” in The Navajo People and Uranium Mining, ed. Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-­Lewis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 1–­10.

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Building Consensus

9

In 1969, exactly a year before the first national Earth Day celebration, Idaho’s Senator Frank Church gave a remarkable speech simply titled “The New Conservation.” In it, Church warned that the nation’s environmental “imbalance has reached crisis proportions” and conservation “has become a ‘matter of life and death.’” These were striking words for Church, and they not only convey his deep concern with the mounting toll of pesticides and pollution but also the urgency of addressing these issues while there was still time. The following year, on the first Earth Day, Church reinforced his New Conservation message with a passionate speech entitled “Give Earth a Chance,” in which he lamented that our “mania for growth” had “savage[d] our national home.” It was here, on “the only life-­supporting system within the reach of Man,” he believed, that “the human race shall have its rendezvous with destiny.” He concluded his remarks solemnly, stating that “unless wisdom can at last overtake Man’s run-­amuck willfulness, the scales will tilt inexorably beyond the point of redemption.” This abiding commitment to the New Conservation, to “the task of achieving nothing less than a healthy and habitable environment for man,” suffused Church’s entire four-­term tenure in the U.S. Senate and resulted in his promotion of some of the most progressive, far-­reaching, and powerful conservation laws affecting plant and animal species, air and water, and public lands ever.

233

29. Church for Idaho, campaign poster. Frank Church, a Democrat, served as a U.S. senator

from 1957 to 1981 and helped craft some of the most influential state and national environmental legislation passed during that era. Used with permission of the Frank Church Papers, Boise State University Library.

The twenty-­four-­year career of Democratic senator Frank Church provides an invaluable and instructive window into this important era of environmental legislation. While the grassroots nature of evolving environmental awareness has always been a powerful, driving, and transformative force, sometimes a single person can facilitate profound change and, in the process, make a movement more accessible, comprehendible, effective, and human. Frank Church was one such individual whose visionary leadership shaped the environmental history of the West and the nation in the green florescence between 1960 and 1980. Without Church, Idaho certainly would not have the rich public lands it enjoys today, and the West and the nation would also have been poorer. Significantly, Church’s environmental contributions to wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, national forests, and land conservation—­new federal commons designations—­are evident not only in the legislation he succeeded in passing but also in the way he went about passing these laws. As a former lobbyist with the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club recalled, “Frank was among the handful of absolutely crucial leaders we turned to again and again,” adding that “he did not come across as a crusader . . . but rather as a quieter, careful workman who crafted the deft compromises and accommodations.” Church’s tenure in the U.S. Senate aligns with a period of unprecedented environmental protection at the federal level. Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon presided over nearly a decade and a half of landmark congressional lawmaking that focused national attention on preservation—­protecting nature from exploitation—­and during this remarkable stretch of years, environmental bipartisanism flourished. Today, the Wilderness Act bitterly divides advocates and opponents; in 1964, by contrast, the House of Representatives passed it by a whopping 373–­1 majority. In 1973 the House passed the now-­controversial Endangered Species Act in a landslide 355–­4 vote. Even Nixon, not known for environmental advocacy, jumped on the green bandwagon for a short ride. In 1972 he proclaimed that our “environmental awakening must mature finally into a new and higher environmental way of life.” Church’s Senate career powerfully illustrates the critical role of the individual in the machinations of environmental politics. His ability to galvanize consensus ensured that measures remained bipartisan Building Consensus  235

and popular, a win-­win model of environmental legislation. This “green pork” ideal, in which everyone wins politically, not only worked during the surge of environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s but also has the potential to bring together the remnants of bipartisan political consensus and provide a powerful framework for twenty-­first-­century sustainability initiatives. Church’s support and affinity for the environment grew out of his deep appreciation for the wild Idaho of his youth. Born in 1924, Church was a third-­generation Idahoan who spent his boyhood recreating with family and friends throughout the scenically spectacular and sparsely populated state. “I never knew a person who felt self-­important in the morning after spending the night in the open on an Idaho mountainside under a star-­ studded summer sky,” he liked to tell people. When he took office in 1957, he was only thirty-­two years old. He was green, certainly, but not necessarily in the environmental sense. His 1956 senatorial campaign had promised “to build your Idaho” by attracting industry and economic development to this natural resource–­rich, cash-­poor state. But Church was also a quick study, and his tenure on the Senate Interior Committee in particular began to reveal another way to calculate land values—­one that moved beyond board feet of timber and kilowatt-­hours of power to an appreciation of the intrinsic wealth of nature in its undeveloped state. He pioneered a way to value land beyond its extractive capabilities. Church came to understand that unbounded economic development was not only an unrealistic goal for Idaho, the West, and the nation but also an undesirable one, and for these reasons he championed some of the most important pieces of conservation legislation passed during the heyday of the environmental movement: the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. As a pragmatic politician, Church was also keenly aware that not all Americans, including many of his own constituents, shared his conservation zeal. Yet, instead of trying to out-­shout those who opposed him, Church pioneered a model of consensus and cooperation that incorporated competing concerns and demands; he accomplished environmental ends through diplomatic negotiation and compromise. During his Senate career from 1957 to 1981, he successfully mediated conflicts between natural resource users and protection 236  Building Consensus

proponents, demonstrating that economic development and environmental preservation are not mutually exclusive objectives. By the late 1950s, a growing public awareness of environmental degradation had begun to coalesce into a powerful movement to legislate change. While its sources were myriad, this nascent environmentalism, as it would come to be called, drew strength from the confluence of a thriving economy and rising standards of living, the revival of conservation and the emergence of ecology as a legitimate science, and widespread concern about the true costs of atomic energy and rampant industrialization. The outdoor recreation boom capitalized on this convergence. It had begun in the 1920s, accelerated during the 1930s, and exploded following World War II. Americans who felt secure economically and enjoyed the benefits of industrial technology wanted to add what remained of wilderness spaces and nature to their quality-­of-­ life calculation. Television brought the great outdoors into suburban living rooms nightly, and terms such as “wetlands” and “wilderness” supplanted “swamp” and “wasteland” as the national lexicon evolved to incorporate this new appreciation. Furthermore, as population expanded, production and consumption increased, and urbanization threatened to gobble up the countryside, the environmental toll finally registered with a growing portion of the general public. Americans were loving nature to death, and recreation supply failed to keep up with demand. In addition to Sierra Club members and bird fanciers, many hunters, anglers, and families joined the swelling chorus calling for a new biocentric environmental ethic—­a belief that humans are no more important than other life—­first suggested by Aldo Leopold. In the fall of 1961, Church found himself suddenly thrust into the limelight of one of the most contentious bills in the Senate at the time: the Wilderness Act. Congress had been debating federal protection for wilderness areas since 1956. The final version of the act sought to create a new kind of federal commons, stating that “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Church was keenly aware that such a definition incited strong opposition among natural resource Building Consensus  237

interests, like the Idaho timber industry, that feared the designation would block extraction, so he had avoided publicizing his support of the measure, preferring instead to work behind the scenes. But Church’s hopes of quietly voting “yea” evaporated when the wilderness bill’s original sponsor suffered a gallbladder attack on the eve of the Senate floor debate and asked Church to take over management of the legislation. Church’s measured and thoughtful presentation assured timber, livestock, and other user interests that wilderness designations would not “lock up” valuable natural resources. Instead, wilderness could become its own valuable resource: “wilderness areas will become a mighty magnet for the tourist trade . . . few industries have as much potential for us.” Public lands–­ laden western states would bear the brunt of the wilderness designations, he acknowledged, but they would also be “its chief beneficiaries,” not “rich easterners,” as detractors alleged. “It is in the West alone that a person can still escape the clutter of roads, signposts, and managed picnic grounds,” he argued, unlike in the crowded East. Moreover, federal agencies had already set aside as national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges and ranges, or Forest Service Primitive Areas all of the wilderness areas proposed in the pending bill. The wilderness legislation would not change this situation—­no private property would be affected—­and so would have “no adverse effect on anyone.” Much of the credit for the Senate’s overwhelming support for the bill (78–­8) that year went to Church, but trouble in the House of Representatives forced Church and other supporters to reintroduce the bill in 1963. Finally, in 1964, a joint House and Senate conference committee, which included Church, met to iron out points of contention. On September 3, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, immediately incorporating just over nine million acres of the nation’s public lands, the vast majority in the West, into the new National Wilderness Preservation System. Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall listed Church as “one of the two or three people in Congress” deserving the greatest credit for its passage, while his brother, Representative Morris “Mo” Udall (d-­a z), stated simply that without Church “there would have been no Wilderness Bill.”

238  Building Consensus

Church’s advocacy for the Wilderness Act had been a political risk in conservative Idaho, but by the late 1960s he believed that most of his Idaho constituents would support environmental legislation as long as they did not view it as a threat to their livelihood. “If it is really a choice of conservation or their job, they’ll take their job,” he observed, “but as long as it is sensible conservation and propaganda about loss of their jobs that they can sort out, they’ll take conservation.” Economy and environment can coexist. Significantly, that September 3, 1964, Wilderness Act morning in the Rose Garden of the White House was the setting for President Johnson’s signing of not one but two remarkable pieces of environmental legislation: the well-­ known Wilderness Act and the lesser-­known Land and Water Conservation Fund (lwcf) Act. “It is with a great deal of pride and pleasure and hope for the future,” Johnson proclaimed, “that we enact into law today by signing these bills some of the most far-­reaching conservation measures that a farsighted nation has ever coped with.” His assessment of their future significance was prescient. By the 1960s, the growing strength of the environmental movement had begun to translate public concerns about the ecological costs of unbridled postwar expansion into federal protective legislation. The two acts followed a similar legislative path to eventual bipartisan success, and together they formed a symbiotic relationship that ensured their mutual success. Church played a similar role in the passage of both. Support for both measures drew on an emerging national consensus that the federal government was the best guardian of the nation’s last, best places. Wilderness, parks, monuments, preserves, habitats, estuaries, and ecosystems all existed within a political system that enshrined private property and landholder rights. Environmental protection needed both law and land to succeed. Too often, environmental advocates observed, private resource users had proven to be poor stewards of the nation’s grazing lands, forests, rivers, and open spaces. Economic success brought ecological destruction. Earlier Progressive Era reformers had argued that public ownership and management seemed to offer the best solution to the problem of environmental degradation. In this nationalist spirit, protection proponents encouraged the use of federal dollars to transfer private lands back into public hands,

Building Consensus  239

reversing the older trend embodied by the Homestead Act. After World War II, as supporters continued to press for the preservation and protection of the nation’s natural wonders, their focus remained fixed on place. The fates of wilderness and the lwcf had long been inextricably intertwined, and the cooperative bipartisan effort that finally led to successful wilderness protection depended heavily on the politics of the lwcf. Officially called the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the measure’s objective was “to assist in preserving, developing, and assuring accessibility to all citizens” to the nation’s outdoor recreation resources. More specifically, the lwcf had two primary purposes: to provide funding for the management and acquisition of federal lands, including the purchase of private inholdings and the augmentation of existing wilderness areas, parks, and forests, and to provide matching grants to states for recreation planning, land acquisition, and facility development of projects such as urban parks and municipal playgrounds. To accomplish this goal, Congress organized the lwcf as a federal trust fund that could accumulate revenues up to an established annual ceiling. The lwcf was popular and palatable, constituting the kind of win-­win, “green pork” environmentalism that let legislators pick and choose the projects they wished to fund. One vexing but predictable problem soon emerged: as wildlands disappeared under urban sprawl, those that remained experienced soaring property values. The more rare the resource—­park inholdings (privately owned land within a national park, forest, etc.), for example—­the higher the price. Private landowners, even those with conservation sympathies, often concluded that the market favored commercial sale and/or development, since the federal government was a notoriously miserly bidder. Moreover, if the federal government proposed to condemn the land or acquire it at below market value for the public good, it met fierce opposition and faced accusations of assaulting sacrosanct private property rights. The lwcf sought to finesse this onerous private property issue, particularly in the West, by asserting that the federal government was the best long-­term steward of these last open spaces and that it was willing to pay current fair-­market prices for them. The creation of this mighty fund was a cooperative, bipartisan effort that drew “yeas” from both sides of the aisle and became (and remained until 240  Building Consensus

a hiccup in 2015) the principal source of federal monies for recreation lands. Those who wanted to preserve wilderness or parks out of preservationist idealism or in the name of ecological science often found pragmatic reasons to cooperate with those who saw opportunities for tourism dollars in pristine wilderness spaces (even if they fought over some details of legislation). Like its wilderness cousin, the lwcf grew out of recommendations contained in the 1962 report of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, a bipartisan congressional commission tasked to assess the nation’s outdoor recreation potential. In 1962 the original lwcf bill proposed to derive revenue from user fees at federal recreation areas, sales of surplus federal lands, a tax on motorboat fuels, and an annual levy on the use of recreation boats. This provision quickly drew the ire of recreation boat owners, who flooded Congress with telegrams of protest. However, in November 1963 the lwcf gained a powerful new ally when Lyndon Johnson, thrust suddenly into the nation’s highest office following the assassination of Kennedy, vowed to continue the work the fallen president had begun. Conservation figured prominently in his agenda. Johnson was not the charming and charismatic individual that Kennedy had been, but he was a far more experienced and skilled politician. By the following year, he had begun to sketch the outlines of his Great Society—­broad-­reaching social welfare programs that he hoped would not only forge consensus and enrich the impoverished but also improve every American’s quality of life. At the heart of Johnson’s liberalism was his belief that the federal government existed for the public good. Echoing President Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson insisted that government had a responsibility to uphold the well-­being of its citizens. “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all,” Johnson maintained, which meant leveling the playing field and providing every American with equal access to the American Dream and a healthy environment. For Johnson, that dream included “natural splendor”: “once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.” The lwcf thus fit Johnson’s vision for an act that could “create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.” Building Consensus  241

Frank Church concurred and managed the lwcf bill in the Senate at the same time that he was shepherding the wilderness bill, calling the lwcf a vital supplement to the “precious resource” of wilderness. “Daily, as the cities stretch their concrete tentacles farther and farther into the countryside, as superhighways chew through woods and hills,” Church argued, the states found it more difficult and more expensive to set aside recreational opportunities “for the use and enjoyment of all the people.” The lwcf would change all of this, permitting states to play a pivotal role in the development of outdoor recreation. Furthermore, under the lwcf’s provisions, states could transfer funds to counties and cities, thus ensuring local control over recreation development. The wilderness bill critics who had railed against federal control in the West found this local control provision in the lwcf bill reassuring—­a kind of political tit-­for-­tat that facilitated the ultimate passage of both pieces of legislation. On August 12, 1964, the lwcf’s bipartisan support was manifest as the bill passed the Senate by a lopsided 92–­1 vote. Johnson praised the harmony on display that September 3 morning, saying, “I think it is significant that these steps have broad support not just from the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party, both parties in the Congress.” Furthermore, he added, “this reflects a new and a strong national consensus to look ahead, and, more than that, to plan ahead; better still, to move ahead.” Church’s efforts to craft compromise allowed local and national interests to align, a rare occurrence in the experience of many westerners. Since 1968, the lwcf’s major source of revenue has derived from the mineral leasing receipts generated by oil and gas drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf (ocs). This shrewd political funding move not only provides a lucrative wellspring of money but also assuages a great deal of congressional guilt by allowing mineral exploitation to fund land and water conservation. The law originally stipulated that 60 percent of the monies from the lwcf be available to the states, while the federal government’s four land management agencies had access to the other 40 percent. Significantly, the law also contained a formula that set aside fully 85 percent of the federal funding for acquisitions east of the hundredth meridian. This provision not only allayed some western senators’ fears of a “federal land grab” but also ensured adequate spending on what Church called “the section of the country where 242  Building Consensus

30. Senator Frank Church accepts a pen from President Lyndon Johnson, who had just

signed the 1968 amendment to the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act authorizing the use of Outer Continental Shelf oil monies as a major funding source for federal, state, and local conservation. Used with permission of the Frank Church Papers, Boise State University Library.

land is most desperately needed for recreational purposes.” Thus, the lwcf allows federal agencies to buy inholdings in wilderness, park, and forest areas, but it also builds urban parks, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, and playgrounds where most Americans actually live—­an impressive fusion of conservation and preservation, indeed. The legacy of this unique fund was and is substantial. For more than half a century, the lwcf has acted as the principal federal revenue source for new recreation lands, providing billions of dollars to federal land managing agencies, as well as to state and local governments, for the purchase of millions of acres in nearly every state in the Union. In Montana, for example, the lwcf built swimming pools in Helena and Butte and funded new playground equipment in Billings and Hardin. Marbleton, Wyoming, received support Building Consensus  243

to build a community fishing pond, while the city of Gillette was able to afford a splash park and multipurpose fields. Moreover, the lwcf encourages both state and federal agencies to cooperate with nonprofit organizations and private companies to facilitate land and water conservation. This local control mechanism has placated states’ rights advocates (especially in the West) and has been central to the fund’s continued popularity. Unfortunately, however, in 2015, despite broad bipartisan support, the lwcf fell victim to political maneuvering led by Representative Rob Bishop (r-­u t), and Congress failed to reauthorize the fund. But even after its sunset, the lwcf’s abiding green goodwill forged a Church-­like coalition determined to restore this almost anonymous act that has arguably exerted a far greater influence on the nation’s environment than its more famous Wilderness Act cousin. In March 2019, the coalition succeeded when Congress resurrected the lwcf as a discretionary spending fund. Then, in August 2020, federal legislators went even further, crafting the Great American Outdoors Act (gao) and amending the lwcf to permanently appropriate (mandate spending of) its annual $900 million accrual beginning in fiscal year 2021. As a true reflection of the political harmony the lwcf has long inspired, the 15 cosponsors of the 2019 legislation included 7 Democrats, 7 Republicans, and an independent, and it passed the Senate by an overwhelming 92–­8 vote and the House by a 363–­62 vote. Similarly, the 2020 gao Act had 28 cosponsors, 18 Democrats and 10 Republicans, and passed in both houses by a 3-­to-­1 margin. The 2019 legislation also slightly alters the lwcf’s allocation structure so that “not less than 40 percent shall be used for Federal purposes,” primarily for land acquisition, and “not less than 40 percent shall be used to provide financial assistance to States,” primarily for outdoor recreation grants. To ensure full utilization of the lwcf, the gao Act of 2020 extends relatively broad powers to the president to allocate funding if congressional spending falls short of the $900 million. Together with the Wilderness Act, the lwcf continues to exemplify the kind of positive, consensus-­based, bipartisan environmental legislation Senator Church advocated during his time in office. At the same time that Church was embroiled in the wilderness and lwcf debates, he also grappled with a dam controversy on the Snake River, a 244  Building Consensus

potential hydroelectric powerhouse for Idaho. Competing proposals pitted public and private power companies against one another in a race to put a plug in Hells Canyon. As Church later recalled, the early Hells Canyon controversy “was not about whether or not a dam would be built but rather where it would be built and who should build it.” Church’s efforts to balance environment and economy meant that he initially supported federal development. However, one of the public dam proposals threatened to block the state’s famed “river of no return,” the Salmon River, home to 30 percent of the total anadromous fish spawn in the Columbia River basin and more than half of all its spring and summer Chinook. That was a cost Church was unwilling to pay. The economic gains did not justify the ecological losses. Thus, in March 1965, drawing on his involvement with the Wilderness and lwcf Acts, Church introduced the National Wild Rivers bill designed to protect sections of some of the nation’s scenic rivers from economic development. Calling the bill “a working partner to the wilderness bill,” Church believed the wild rivers bill would eventually take its place alongside the landmark Wilderness Act as “another first for America.” Yet, while Church believed the wild rivers proposal provided an important companion to the Wilderness Act, he emphasized their differences. Most important, he noted, was that the wild rivers bill did “not seek to create corridors of wilderness through which these rivers will flow.” Rather, the philosophy of multiple use generally would prevail, allowing grazing, timber harvest, mining, and road building to continue. Church considered the wild rivers system an “essential weapon” in the fight to save Idaho’s dwindling salmon and steelhead runs. For water, this meant moving away from an older Theodore Roosevelt–­era conservation/reclamation agenda that characterized unharnessed rivers as “wasted” commodities. “Once a dam is built,” Church argued, “a wild river is lost forevermore.” He hoped that in Idaho and elsewhere, conservation could be the “companion of development,” predicting that outdoor recreation “could be the most valuable money-­earner in the whole Idaho economy in another ten years.” Sometimes the best dam was no dam. On October 2, 1968, Church’s bill, now called the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, became law. In its final form, the new system included three categories for river preservation, a concession designed to please almost everyone and Building Consensus  245

ensure maximum river corridor protection. The most restrictive category was “wild river.” Designed to protect the “vestiges of primitive America,” these rivers would be “free of impoundments and generally inaccessible except by trail, with watersheds or shorelines essentially primitive and waters unpolluted.” The second category, “scenic river,” protected those rivers “still largely primitive and shorelines largely undeveloped, but accessible in places by roads.” The third and least restrictive designation, “recreational river,” protected rivers that were “readily accessible by road or railroad that may have some development along their shorelines, and that may have undergone some impoundment or diversion in the past.” In other words, untouched river areas remained untouched, and those with existing access remained open for recreation and even development. The new law immediately designated eight rivers, more than half in the West, including the Salmon, for inclusion in the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. It also harkened back to Church’s original goal by not only prohibiting the Federal Power Commission from licensing dams or other projects on any river within the system but also blocking licensing on “study” rivers (potential Wild and Scenic River System additions) for a five-­year period following enactment or during congressional consideration of a river’s inclusion in the system. Lack of inclusion did not leave rivers vulnerable or unprotected. In the previous century, under Theodore Roosevelt, the user-­oriented notion of conservation that called for the greatest good for the greatest number had sufficed. But by the mid-­twentieth century, a growing national ecological awareness had begun to reveal that this old-­school conservation philosophy could lead to the irreversible disruption of some of the planet’s most basic life systems. Much of this concern arose in response to biologist Rachel Carson’s classic work, Silent Spring. In that 1962 book, Carson wrote that “for the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” Her specific target was the country’s dramatically expanded use of pesticides, and the powerful dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (ddt) in particular, which by the late 1950s had fully supplanted all other pest control methods. A modern miracle to many, ddt and other chemicals promised to increase agricultural pro246  Building Consensus

duction and eradicate pesky insects, though few understood the ecological repercussions that massive spraying campaigns entailed. Few asked, “At what cost?” Rachel Carson did. As she saw it, these chemicals “should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’” Carson’s outstanding contribution to the raising of national environmental consciousness was her compelling explanation of the interrelatedness of all life. “As crude a weapon as a cave man’s club,” she argued, “the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life—­a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.” In the West, her exposé all but ended the U.S. Forest Service’s (usfs) indiscriminate aerial ddt spraying for moths and other forest pests and ultimately brought an end to federally sanctioned strychnine bait poisoning of coyotes. Carson’s warning helped launch a national movement of protest and reform in which the preservation of nature became integral to the question of the quality of life. Carson’s thinking influenced Church. Her biographer, William Souder, contends that the publication of Silent Spring “was a cleaving point—­the moment when the gentle, optimistic proposition called ‘conservation’ began its transformation into the bitterly divisive idea that would come to be known as ‘environmentalism.’” By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Senator Church also believed that the term “conservation” had become an anachronism with little relevance or meaning for modern society, and he began to call for change. In his April 1969 “New Conservation” speech before the Northwest District Conference of the National Recreation and Parks Association, held in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Church outlined the horizons of a modern environmental ethic. Noting that Theodore Roosevelt had sounded the call to conservation more than sixty years earlier, Church recounted the remarkable achievements the nation had made in the field: land-­and water-­use measures, national forests and national parks, the Wilderness and Wild and Scenic Rivers Acts, and the National Trails System Act (1968). Characteristically, Church illustrated this progress with examples from Idaho, noting that “the Wilderness Act insures that the future will not witness the ruination of our great primitive areas” nor the defilement of the Salmon and Clearwater Rivers. Yet he also insisted, “I want to go beyond the immediate conservation targets in Idaho Building Consensus  247

and focus instead upon the larger challenge which confronts the country as a whole.” The challenge, Church argued, was for conservationists to move beyond the “limited concept” articulated by Roosevelt, to the mission of the New Conservation: “a healthy and habitable environment for man.” This big-­ picture approach sought to integrate a biocentric land ethic, first expressed by Aldo Leopold, into mainstream environmental protection without negatively affecting economic development. It anticipated the twenty-­first-­century emphasis on sustainability. In outlining the battle ahead, Church drew heavily from new environmental studies that had begun to assess the costs of boundless American expansion. Obviously inspired by Silent Spring, Church’s New Conservation speech recounted the toll that pesticides, herbicides, and “other poisons” had exacted as they coursed through soil, air, and water systems of the nation and the world. He questioned the so-­called miracles of science, warning that insufficient attention had been paid to the “long-­term consequences on our whole environment.” Humans had to learn to cooperate with nature, Church explained, and the New Conservation “must point the way toward redressing the imbalance which now exists between man and the whole of his environment.” Church believed this imbalance had reached “crisis proportions” in four areas—­water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, and the recreation boom—­and if they remained unresolved, humans might themselves become an endangered species. Church quoted the Sierra Club’s David Brower, concluding that all life on earth was “part of an incredibly complex interwoven blanket,” yet “the rending of our life fabric goes on.” Truly, he argued, conservation “has become a matter of life and death.” Church’s use of Brower’s rhetoric was an important indication of the senator’s transition in thinking beyond rivers and dams to a wholistic concern for the natural environment. By the late 1960s, Brower and the Sierra Club had adopted an aggressive, proactive, national approach to environmental activism, perhaps most evident in their efforts to block two proposed dams in the Grand Canyon. As discussed in chapter 8, in 1956 Brower and other conservationists had unknowingly conceded to the damming of Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon, as the necessary price to save Echo Canyon in Dinosaur National Monument from a similar watery fate. It was a loss Brower bitterly 248  Building Consensus

regretted. A decade later, a Bureau of Reclamation proposal to dam the Grand Canyon seemed a cinch for congressional approval since it enjoyed the official backing of both President Johnson and Secretary of Interior Udall. The commissioner of the bureau, Floyd Dominy, had touted the many benefits of the dam, including the enhanced ability of tourists to enjoy the Grand Canyon from motorboats. None of them anticipated the battle Brower was willing to wage. In June 1966, the Sierra Club countered the bureau’s vision of motorboats in the Grand Canyon with a blistering, full-­page, Brower-­designed advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post. It provocatively asked, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Costing $15,000, the ad described the proposed dams and warned that “there is only one simple, incredible issue here: this time it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood. The Grand Canyon.” Oppositional mail poured into congressional offices. Ironically, when the Internal Revenue Service subsequently revoked the Sierra Club’s tax-­exempt status for attempting to influence legislation, it freed the organization to take an even more vigorous opposing stance, and membership soared. Brower’s tactic worked. In February 1967, Udall—­who had argued in his own 1963 book, The Quiet Crisis, for “a world in which physical affluence and affluence of the spirit go hand in hand”—­ announced that the Johnson administration had changed its mind about the Grand Canyon dams, and in 1968 Congress killed the proposal. As Brower later remarked, “If we can’t save the Grand Canyon, what the hell can we save?” The days of big dams were numbered. On April 22, 1970, the rising tide of environmental awareness culminated in a nationwide “teach-­in” called Earth Day. Across the country, twenty million Americans, or about 10 percent of the entire population, joined urban rallies, listened to speeches, and demonstrated against a litany of environmental assaults. Senator Gaylord Nelson (d-­w i) often receives credit for the idea of Earth Day, but like so many other initiatives of the era, this celebration and call to action in fact constituted a bipartisan, grassroots effort that drew significant support from diverse individuals and groups, including the United Auto Workers (Nelson’s co-­chair was Representative Pete McCloskey [r-­c a]). As Nelson later recalled, “Earth Day planned Building Consensus  249

31. This 1974 Environmental Action poster targeted the so-­called Dirty Dozen politicians

with the worst environmental voting records. Their faces are superimposed on a sports team image, with the letter D, for “Dirty Dozen,” emblazoned on their sweaters. From left to right: (front row) Burt Talcott (r-­c a, 16th district), Glenn Davis (r-­w i, 9th), William Hudnut (r-­i n, 11th), Sam Steiger (r-­a z, 3rd), Robert Mathias (r-­c a, 17th), William Scherle (r-­i a, 5th); (back row) Earl Landgrebe (r-­i n, 2nd), Dale Milford (d-­t x, 24th), Roger Zion (r-­i n, 8th), Samuel Devine (r-­o h, 12th), John Hunt (r-­n j, 1st), Frank Stubblefield (d-­ky, 1st). Used with permission of the Division of Political and Military History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

itself.” This powerful at-­what-­cost reckoning crossed political, racial, class, and economic lines and revealed the common environmental bonds that unite the American people—­all the people. And it endures. Today, according to Earth Day Network organizer Denis Hayes, the Earth Day ethical commons constitutes “the largest secular day of protest in the world.” In 2020, for example, on Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary, an estimated one billion people in more than 193 countries across the globe mobilized to advocate for environmental protection. 250  Building Consensus

The overwhelming success of Earth Day galvanized activists, who then set about creating several new organizations, such as Environmental Action (ea) and the League of Conservation Voters. Hayes and his allies quickly realized that many of the twenty million people who had participated in the first Earth Day were also voters who might be persuaded to register their environmental concerns at the ballot box in November. Their strategy targeted a so-­called Dirty Dozen politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, with the worst environmental voting records. It worked. Seven of the twelve lost their reelection campaigns that year (five Republicans and two Democrats), and the Dirty Dozen list became ea’s most effective reform tactic for the next two and half decades. Today, the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters, also spawned by the first Earth Day, continues to promote voter education, track congressional voting records with their National Environmental Scorecard, and publish the annual Dirty Dozen list. Church specifically and Congress in general benefited directly from the support of increasingly powerful, popular, and influential civic groups like the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Wilderness Society, Nature Conservancy, ea, and Friends of the Earth. Their lobbying both influenced and bolstered legislative initiatives. As Church’s New Conservation became a central element of politics and with encouragement from the Sierra Club, the senator turned his attention to the heretofore unassailable usfs. At issue was the agency’s increased reliance on even-­age management, or clear-­cutting, to keep pace with industry demands to expand the allowable cut in anticipation of a national housing shortage. The term clear-­cutting refers to the timber industry practice of harvesting all trees, regardless of size, in one operation, and then attempting to establish a new stand—­either from advanced reproduction or through natural seeding, stump sprouting, or direct seeding and planting—­that results in a uniform, single-­species, same-­aged forest. Occasionally in the 1960s and 1970s, logging companies bulldozed terraces into steeply sloped hillsides to make it easier to replant trees after clear-­cutting. This practice radically altered the topography of the landscape, caused significant ecological changes, and in effect turned natural forests into tree farms. By 1971, clear-­cutting accounted for more than half of the total Building Consensus  251

32. Clear-­cuts in the Lewis and Clark National Forest, Montana, looking west from Dead-

horse Creek, 1956. Photo by W. E. Steuerwald. usda Forest Service.

volume of wood removed from national forests annually. Critics charged that the usfs was abandoning its multiple-­use mandate and caving in to the timber industry. The agency maintained that clear-­cutting was an efficient, economical, and effective management tool, which naturally favored high-­ yield, shade-­intolerant tree species such as Douglas fir. This mantra of old conservation efficiency rang hollow in the dawning era of environmental preservation, however, and Church pounced. In the summer of 1971, Church scheduled congressional oversight hearings into the clear-­cutting practice. Though the usfs had produced several internal reviews of its forest management practices, criticism of the agency continued to mount and was particularly acute regarding the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana and several national forests in Wyoming. One damning assessment in 1970, known as the Bolle Report, charged that “multiple use management, in fact, does not exist as the governing principle on the Bitterroot National Forest.” Instead, the usfs was engaging in unsustainable 252  Building Consensus

“timber mining,” in which clear-­cutting and terracing could “not be justified as an investment for producing timber.” This negative publicity illuminated the agency’s inability to balance soaring demands for forest resources with the post–­World War II population explosion and the current boom in outdoor recreation. Calling Church’s quest for answers “welcome,” one editorial writer posited that “perhaps policies that were acceptable a few years ago, when forest products were abundant and competition for the use and enjoyment of national forest and wilderness areas between industry and ‘recreation’ was easily accommodated, are outdated.” It was a tragic mismanagement of the federal commons. Testimony at the Church hearings revealed the tremendous biological toll that clear-­cutting exacted from the land. As professional forester Gordon Robinson affirmed, clear-­cutting caused increased water runoff, which upset the watershed values of the forest. Heavily eroded soils leached of important nutrients made timber replanting and reproduction more difficult, which resulted in the widespread use of chemical defoliants to keep down competing vegetation. Even more alarming was that the loss of nutrients associated with clear-­cutting could so deplete the soil that after two cuts there would be “permanent eradication of productivity for saw timber production.” Furthermore, clear-­cutting’s promotion of monoculture forestry also created a perfect medium for epidemic disease, since many fungal pathogens affecting trees were often active during only one stage of tree growth. “Infection is direct and rapid” in forest stands containing one dominant tree species, Robinson noted, leaving absolute devastation in the wake of the infestation. Beyond these biological considerations, clear-­cutting came under fire during the Church hearings as a short-­sighted management technique that sacrificed forest health to economic concerns. Testimony revealed a number of cases in which the usfs had grossly overestimated the quantity of commercial timber in a “working circle” area designated for harvest—­in one case by nearly 800 percent. The disparity meant that to reach the timber quota specified in their contract with the usfs, contractors had to rely on clear-­cutting, instead of selective harvesting, to recoup the difference. Moreover, though there had been no significant increase in national forest acreage since 1950, the annual allowable cut had risen by more than 264 percent. The usfs had Building Consensus  253

increased its inventory by shortening cut rotation cycles, combining working circles, and embracing clear-­cutting. Much of the increase in annual timber sales consisted of “marginal species of timber growing on steep unstable soils.” This steep-­slope clear-­cutting frequently caused landslides with the potential to foul pristine endangered salmon and trout streams along the Pacific coast and in Alaska. A Federal Water Quality Administration official testified that sediment in streams increased by a factor of as much as seven thousand in improperly harvested clear-­cuts, prompting a stunned Church to ask him to repeat his findings. Finally, Robinson concluded, in addition to the ecological devastation, “clearcut areas have lost their recreational values for many years to come.” While Church’s concerns and questions regarding clear-­cutting won the approval of New Conservation–­minded witnesses, his consensus model ensured that both the usfs and the timber industry had an opportunity to present their perspectives before and during the oversight hearings. Members of the Industrial Forestry Association pointed out that lumber from the nation’s forests had built more than forty million homes in the past quarter century, while the management of timber constituted the fourth-­largest business in the country and played a vital role as a barometer of the health of the economy. Their statements clearly indicated that changes in usfs policy would have broad economic ramifications. To the Forest Service’s credit, its chief Edward Cliff noted that the agency’s own reports reflected its ongoing effort “to attain and maintain both a high level of timber productivity and a quality environment.” Both Church and the subcommittee noted, however, that the usfs’s testimony presented clear-­cutting mainly within the context of timber management, failing to incorporate the broader perspective of sustainable environmental policy. “A large piece of clearcut land has obviously usurped other uses,” Church argued, and “logging has become the dominant use.” In March 1972, Church’s Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands issued a new set of guidelines to regulate the practice of clear-­cutting on public lands. Commonly referred to as the Church Report or Church Guidelines, the document sought balance between economic and environmental concerns by calling for a periodic review and adjustment of allowable harvest 254  Building Consensus

levels on federal forestlands to ensure that they remained suitable for timber production and received satisfactory funding for intensified management practices. Although the guidelines did not eliminate clear-­cutting as a management tool, they severely restricted its use: “it can be applied judiciously and with expertise with favorable results, or it can be applied carelessly with unfavorable, even calamitous results.” After explicitly stating that clear-­ cutting should not be used in environmentally sensitive areas, the Church Report went on to caution that the method was only appropriate when “it is determined to be silviculturally essential” and should be “blended as much as possible with the natural terrain.” And finally, the Church Report stated that federal timber sale contracts should contain requirements “to minimize or avoid adverse environmental impacts of timber harvesting,” even if that meant lower net returns to the national treasury. The following day, usfs chief Cliff pronounced the guidelines sound and pledged that the agency would abide by them. In a private letter to Church, he added that the guidelines were “a clear expression of Congressional and public concern” that represented “a desirable and constructive policy statement for future Federal forest land management.” Compromise in the best sense, cooperation, and pragmatic politics form the core of Church’s legislative legacy. He later wrote that it had always been his policy “to attempt to consider and reconcile the legitimate concerns of the timber industry, environmentalists, and the Forest Service.” This ability to forge consensus out of conflict was also evident in Church’s continuing efforts to protect wilderness. In June 1976 and again in 1977, Church introduced the Endangered American Wilderness bill to preserve “remnants of the wilderness upon which we founded our society and culture.” The bill specifically sought protection for western tracts excluded by the usfs’s so-­called “sights and sounds” doctrine—­a purity standard invoked for areas that were too close to major urban centers such as Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, and Tucson. Since the late 1960s, the usfs had been engaged in a process known as the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (rare) to determine which of its lands were suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System. The horribly flawed process, which failed twice (rare I and rare II), resulted in the agency classifying a number of Building Consensus  255

western roadless areas as multiple-­use lands unsuitable for wilderness protection. Church and many environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, thus deemed them “endangered” by logging, mining, and mechanized recreation. As the senator argued, “It was not the intent of Congress that wilderness be administered in so pure a fashion as to needlessly restrict their customary public use and enjoyment.” The Endangered American Wilderness bill enjoyed widespread bipartisan congressional support despite predictable opposition from various natural resource user interests, and both the Senate and the House passed the measure by overwhelming majorities in February 1978. In its final form, the act reclassified 1.3 million acres of public lands across nine western states as seventeen new wilderness areas within the National Wilderness Preservation System. Congress also used the Endangered American Wilderness Act (1978) to admonish the usfs publicly, charging that undeveloped national forestlands were “not being adequately protected or fully studied for wilderness suitability by the agency responsible for their administration.” In the face of such negligence, the law reads, Congress “finds and declares that it is in the national interest” to protect these endangered areas as wilderness. usfs reform and a national commitment to wilderness designation were part of Church’s larger goal of compelling the federal government to “assume a leading role” in the fight against environmental degradation. He continued to back up his occasionally fiery rhetoric by building congressional support for some of the decade’s most innovative environmental protection laws, including the Clean Air Act and its amendments, the Clean Water Act and its amendments, the Clean Lakes Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, and numerous land-­use planning and wilderness acts. When, for example, Church spoke out against air pollution’s “biggest offender,” the internal combustion engine, which he predicted “may well be outlawed or die of its own unpopularity,” he sponsored legislation requiring the federal government to buy only those vehicles that operated on unleaded fuels. He also urged the nation to move cautiously in its love affair with nuclear power. “We have not given enough concern to the environmental problems which attend the pro256  Building Consensus

duction of atomic power,” he insisted as he fought to ensure that the Atomic Energy Commission received adequate funding to develop atomic reactor safety programs and improve atomic waste disposal methods. Beyond these regulatory acts, Church also cosponsored legislation to expand significantly citizens’ rights to sue the federal government to protect the environment, giving the courts greater authority to review actions by federal agencies. As political reporter Jon Margolis put it, in a democracy, “everyone sitting around the table has to get something, meaning everyone has to give something.” That democratic ideal is bound up in the legislation Frank Church helped to pass. Over the course of his four Senate terms, from 1957 to 1981, Church often wrestled with balancing the conflicting demands for resource use and preservation—­of economy and environment—­in Idaho, the West, and the nation. As he once conceded, “Getting action in Congress depends upon lining up the votes. I work in a political forum, where success usually depends on some measure of accommodation. I try to be effective without compromising end objectives.” Church both shaped and was shaped by a national sentiment that increasingly counted a healthy environment as an integral part of the good life and a measure of a higher standard of living. The senator also established a kind of symbiotic relationship with environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club: he needed their more radical positions to make him appear moderate in an increasingly conservative Idaho, while they needed him to craft the political compromises necessary to achieve environmental protection. This partnership set the tone for their long and fruitful cooperation, and together they translated grassroots activism into concrete legislation that helped build the foundation of the modern environmental movement and expand and enhance the federal commons. In the end, however, Church did not embrace environmental concerns because they were fashionable but because he genuinely believed they were right. In many ways, Church’s New Conservation echoes a sentiment similar to one Henry David Thoreau had expressed more than 150 years earlier, when he lamented the “maimed and imperfect nature” American colonization had wrought: “I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, Building Consensus  257

I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places.” Thoreau continued, “I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.” Church’s tenure fortuitously coincided with a moment in time when environmental legislation designed to protect and restore “an entire earth” found broad support in both Congress and the general public. However, in 1980 a growing national conservative movement culminated in the simultaneous election of the Republican Ronald Reagan to the White House and the defeat of Church in Idaho, ushering in an era of environmental backlash. Suggested Reading

LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer, “Against the Tide: 1970–­1972,” in Fighting the Odds: The Life of Senator Frank Church (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994), 343–­69. Frederica Bowcutt, “Tanoak Target: The Rise and Fall of Herbicide Use on a Common Native Tree,” Environmental History 16, no. 2 (April 2011): 197–­225. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, dir. Neil Goodwin, documentary originally aired on the pbs series American Experience, February 15, 1993, and released on dvd, June 26, 2007. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–­90. Sara Dant, “Idaho’s Frank Church and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act at 50,” The Advocate: Official Publication of the Idaho State Bar 62, no. 1 ( January 2019): 22–­27. Also “LBJ, Wilderness, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” Environmental History 19, no. 4 (October 2014): 736–­43, reprinted in Forest History Today 20, no. 1–­2 (Spring–­Fall 2014): 16–­21, available at https://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /24690643. Also “Making Wilderness Work: Frank Church and the American Wilderness Movement,” Pacific Historical Review 77, no. 2 (May 2008): 237–­72. Also “Evolution of an Environmentalist: Senator Frank Church and the Hells Canyon Controversy,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 51, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 36–­51. Also “Peak Park Politics: The Struggle over the Sawtooths, from Borah to Church,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 91, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 138–­49.

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John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act of 2019, Public Law No. 116-­9, sec. 3001, 133 Stat. 580 (2019), available at https://​www​.congress​ .gov​/116​/plaws​/publ9​/PLAW​-116publ9​.pdf. Richard W. Etulain, “Oregon Governor, Second Term, 1963–­1967,” and “Epilogue,” in Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 105–­50, 182–­88. The Great American Outdoors Act of 2020, Public Law No. 116-­152, 134 Stat. 682 (2020), available at https://​www​.congress​.gov​/bill​/116th​-congress​/house​-bill​ /1957​?r​=​2​&​s​=​3. John P. Herron, “The Call in the Wild: Nature, Technology, and Environmental Politics,” in The Political Culture of the New West, ed. Jeff Roche (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 310–­31. Robert G. Kaufman, “The Great Liberal Crackup, 1964–­1969,” in Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 161–­88. Andrew G. Kirk, “Environmental Heresies,” in Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 13–­42. Ed Marston, “Floyd Dominy: An Encounter with the West’s Undaunted Dam-­Builder,” High Country News, August 28, 2000. Richard M. Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress Outlining the 1972 Environmental Program,” February 8, 1972, available at the American Presidency Project, https://​ www​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu​/documents​/special​-message​-the​-congress​-outlining​ -the​-1972​-environmental​-program. Marc Reisner, “Dominy,” in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 214–­54. Adam Rome, “The Genius of Earth Day,” Environmental History 15, no. 2 (April 2010): 194–­205. Also “Organizers,” in The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-­In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014), 57–­115. William Souder, “Part I: Water World,” in On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 3–­168. Adam M. Sowards, “Toward a Wilderness Bill of Rights” in The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), 58–­80. Also “William O. Douglas’s Wilderness Politics: Public Protest and Committees of Correspondence in the Pacific Northwest,” Western Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 21–­42.

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Paul S. Sutter, “The Freedom of the Wilderness: Bob Marshall” and “Epilogue: A Living Wilderness,” in Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 194–­238, 239–­63. Also “Driven Wild: The Problem of Wilderness,” Forest History Today, Spring 2002, 2–­9, available at https://f​ oresthistory.​ org/​ wp-​ content/​ uploads​ /2016​/12​/Sutter​_DrivenWild​.pdf. Frederick H. Swanson, “Lee Metcalf and the Politics of Preservation: Part 1—­A Positive Program of Development,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 3–­91, available at http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24416302. Also “Lee Metcalf and the Politics of Preservation: Part 2—­Conflict, Compromise, and the Art of Leadership,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 58–­96, available at http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24416240. Henry David Thoreau, “March 23,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal VIII, November 1, 1855–­August 15, 1856, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 220–­22. James Morton Turner, “New Environmental Tools for an Old Conservation Issue,” in The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 101–­40. Stewart L. Udall, “Ecology to the Forefront: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring,” “The Flowering of Environmental Activism: David Brower and the Rise of the Sierra Club,” and “Howard Zahniser and the Fight for the Wilderness,” in The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1988), 195–­203, 204–­11, 212–­21.

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Environmental Backlash and the New West

10

“We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” vowed James Watt, whom President Ronald Reagan selected as his Interior secretary in 1981. With these nine terse words, Watt effectively announced the shattering of much of the environmental consensus that had developed over the previous two decades and ushered in what a Los Angeles Times editorial called his “outrageous reign of error.” The environmental tide had definitely turned. Although they were both westerners, James Watt was no Frank Church. Born and raised in Wyoming, Watt developed an early and powerful affinity for natural resource users and business interests. In 1976 he had established the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a law firm “dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system.” This “government-­is-­the-­problem” philosophy attracted the attention of newly elected President Reagan, also a westerner, who offered Secretary Watt a chance to impose his vision—­“to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns”—­on the nation’s public lands. For Watt, the term “occupation” was synonymous with exploitation. Watt may have been Interior secretary for less than three years, but in that short time he and his allies in government and business reversed the environmental politics represented by Frank Church and revived a nineteenth-­century 261

33. When I’m Secretary of Interior . . . This January 8, 1981, self-­professed “prescient” editorial

cartoon by Steve Greenberg anticipated the polarizing influence of soon-­to-­be-­confirmed Secretary of Interior James Watt. Illustration by Steve Greenberg. Used with permission of the artist.

throwback vision of unbridled exploitation of natural resources. In response, preservationists had to change tactics to defend the gains they had made in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than build on them. Watt and Reagan also left behind a deeply polarized political climate. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” Watt proclaimed. “It’s liberals and Americans.” Prior to Watt, environmental initiatives had been largely bipartisan, in the vein of Church, but after Watt and Reagan that cooperative spirit became far more elusive. During the 1980s, western user groups, including hunters and anglers, co-­opted classic Theodore Roosevelt/Gifford Pinchot “conservation” and rebranded it as “Wise Use,” a cleverly named movement advocating private property rights and reduced government regulation of and control over public lands. Environmentalists countered by digging in their heels and refusing to compromise on preservation efforts. The resulting clash between 262  Environmental Backlash

utility and stewardship—­between profit and protection—­produced bitter environmental controversies, harkened back to the early 1900s, and destroyed the bipartisan political consensus of the 1960s and 1970s. Watt’s brief tenure at Interior provided a national opportunity for western states’ rights fury to erupt into a full-­scale antienvironmental blaze that left a deep divide between preservation and development advocates that endures to the present. It is hard to know where to begin with Watt. In his reign at the Department of Interior, he essentially threw open nearly the entire U.S. coastline for offshore oil and gas drilling, including areas known to be unprofitable. He bragged openly about leasing “a billion acres” of coastal waters. In 1983 Watt presided over an Alaskan land swap that gave away $400 million in federal lands and subsurface oil and gas in exchange for a less-­attractive/extractive $6 million tract. But that’s not all. As part of the swap deal, Watt granted the private Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, a for-­profit Alaska Native (primarily Iñupiaq) entity, exclusive rights to drill a test well in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, such that it alone retains the data from that well, even to the exclusion of the federal government itself. This policy means that today a private corporation knows more about the oil and gas potential of these federally protected lands than the federal government does. Wherever he could, Watt eliminated or redirected funding away from data collection, analysis, and research that might support federal protection and instead prioritized resource leasing and exploitation—­profit. He bought no new park lands. He quadrupled the area of coal mining on public lands. Despite the historic nondevelopment precedents set in Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park, he believed that neither park nor wilderness designations conveyed real environmental protection. Before his tenure ended abruptly, Watt had been intending to lease public lands containing an estimated seventeen billion tons of coal, including deposits adjacent to Chaco Culture National Historical Park and the soon-­to-­be-­designated Bisti Badlands Wilderness Area in New Mexico. He also pushed for oil and gas seismic testing in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area of Montana. Even when Watt appeared to support public lands, as when he pumped more than $200 million into national park improvements (restrooms, visitor centers, etc.), he did so by cutting that same amount from the National Park Service’s Environmental Backlash  263

land acquisition budget. Better bathrooms make better parks? More like development trumps protection. Watt also assiduously avoided enforcing protective environmental legislation such as the Endangered Species Act (esa) and the National Environmental Policy Act’s environmental impact statement requirements. He vigorously whittled away at the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the 1976 law mandating that the Bureau of Land Management (blm) retain and manage public lands. As Interior secretary, Watt also actively sought to sell to the states what he believed were “excess” federal properties as part of his Assets Management Program, the first round of which would have auctioned off approximately 2.5 million acres were it not for his ouster. Before he left his cabinet post, however, he did manage to slash the blm’s land-­use planning budget by 25 percent and effectively derail the production of quality resource management plans, which provide guidance for future actions, by discouraging new data collection and research, in effect leaving the agency uninformed about its own lands. He also gutted many wilderness study areas by excising 1.5 million acres from wilderness consideration before environmental organization lawsuits finally stopped him. For Watt, economic development constituted his agency’s sole purpose. In New Mexico, for example, environmental advocates pressed for the above-­mentioned Bisti Badlands Wilderness designation, which they got in 1984, in order to protect the site’s desolate and strange rock formations and fossils from Watt’s rapacious reach. And finally, for more than two decades, Watt held the record as the Interior secretary who protected the fewest species under the Endangered Species Act in U.S. history—­holding out for 382 days before his first listing. Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (from Idaho), President George W. Bush’s appointee, eventually eclipsed him by going for more than two years without listing a single species, only to be outdone by the administration of Donald Trump, which listed only 25 species as threatened or endangered from 2017 to 2021. By contrast, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama listed 522 and 340 species, respectively, in a clear illustration of the esa partisanism ushered in by Watt and Reagan. As wilderness advocate Bill Cunningham, from the Montana Wilderness Association, summed up Watt’s legacy, “I can’t remember a single instance where Secretary Watt took an ecosystem approach to park management.” 264  Environmental Backlash

Watt’s tenure was not an anomaly, however. His actions mirrored and reflected Reagan’s politics and found support among increasingly conservative members of Congress and state governments in the West. It was no coincidence, for example, that the 1980 “Reagan Revolution” helped unseat the four-­term Church with a well-­coordinated Anybody but Church (abc) campaign. Watt’s term also coincided with the emergence of more radical environmental organizations like Earth First! Founded in 1979, Earth First! engaged in confrontational tactics, such as logging-­road blockades, tree spiking (to thwart logging), and tree sitting (to prevent logging), that alienated some traditional supporters. Their “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth” slogan also distanced them from Church-­style consensus as surely as Watt’s tactics did and helped widen the political gap. In the end, Watt’s exit from the top job at Interior came courtesy of Watt himself. Public outrage forced his resignation in 1983 after a bigoted quip in which he proclaimed that his agency’s coal leasing advisory panel was diversified. “We have every kind of mixture you can have,” he said. “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple. And we have talent.” Yet as Watt’s Interior predecessor, Cecil Andrus, marveled, “The astonishing thing about it was that his personal insensitive feelings brought about his eviction. It wasn’t this administration’s plunder of the natural resources that brought him down.” In 1983 Congress blocked some of Watt’s worst initiatives by placing a moratorium on the agency’s environmentally destructive and unprofitable coal leases to private developers. Similar congressional restraints on offshore oil and gas drilling followed, effectively shutting down the Department of Interior’s two major programs under Watt. In 1985 a federal judge also struck down Watt’s decision to allow strip mining in national parks. Watt’s mine-­drill-­cut mantra had gone too far. The Natural Resources Defense Council characterized Watt as one of the two most “intensely controversial and blatantly anti-­environmental political appointees” in American history. The other was his contemporary, fellow Reagan appointee Anne Gorsuch (Burford), director of the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2008 Time magazine listed Watt as the sixth-­worst cabinet appointee ever. Yet Watt’s antienvironmental stance resonated with many westerners. Between 1979 and 1981, one of the most contentious political skirmishes Environmental Backlash  265

in the American West was in many ways an antiwilderness crusade: the Sagebrush Rebellion. The campaign represented a legally dubious effort on the part of several western states to “reclaim” federal lands within their borders in order to expand their sovereignty and tax base. According to Rebel logic, the states owned the forests and ranges within their borders first and the federal government had wrongly usurped them, dictating from faraway Washington policies that had little relevance or benefit to local constituents. Put more simply, in neo-­West-­as-­colony rhetoric, the states essentially griped that since the federal government owns more than half of all the land in the West, states lose revenue income because they can neither tax nor sell these acres. The Rebels argued that if the federal government relinquished its control over the public domain, western economies would flourish. Armed with bullhorns and bulldozers, this take-­back-­the-­land movement found powerful allies in Watt and Reagan, who once urged a Salt Lake City crowd to “count me in as a Rebel.” The rebellion had actually begun in 1979, when the Nevada state legislature, looking to shore up the state’s ailing economy, passed a bill asserting its right to both own and manage the forty-­nine million acres of federal holdings within its borders. Sagebrush dotted much of the blm-­held land that ranchers utilized for grazing and some that the agency was considering for wilderness designation, hence the moniker Sagebrush Rebellion. The claim was largely symbolic, since the states never actually owned the original land and the federal government had no intention of surrendering its sovereignty. Nonetheless, the act captured the love-­hate relationship western states have long carried on with the federal government, the West’s dominant landlord. The rebellion had a special resonance in Utah, where two-­thirds of the state falls under federal control. Republican senator Orrin Hatch readily proclaimed his support for the movement—­a “second American Revolution,” he called it. Rebels would counter the influence of “selfish” and “radical” environmentalists, whom he derided as “dandelion pickers” and “a cult of toadstool worshippers” determined to “lock up” the state’s valuable natural resources. Such vitriol created deep divisions and provoked Utah’s environmental community to join in the chorus of opposition that labeled the rebellion the “sagebrush ripoff.” In August 1979, Hatch backed up his 266  Environmental Backlash

fiery rhetoric by introducing a bill in the U.S. Senate calling for the “return” of the West’s federal lands to their “rightful” state owners. Utah legislators attempted the same land coup as Nevada the following year, when they introduced the Public Lands Reclamation Act of 1980, going so far as to stipulate fifteen-­year jail sentences for blm officials trying “to assert jurisdiction over public lands.” The bill sailed through both houses of the state legislature, but before Governor Scott Matheson would sign it, legislators had to excise the criminal penalties for federal land managers. Matheson, too, believed that the act was largely symbolic, designed, as he later said, to increase “public involvement in the public land planning process at the state level.” In other words, the western states wanted greater influence over the public lands within their borders. The Sagebrush Rebellion ignited what historian Jedediah Rogers has called a “brushfire through the West,” and “embattled ranchers, miners, and other rural people, who felt that the federal government was an insensitive landlord and environmental legislation did not serve local interests, fanned its flames.” For many, wilderness designations represented the crux of the problem; they too severely restricted traditional “Old West” land uses such as mining, grazing, and logging. This pattern of restriction was especially evident in rural Grand County, Utah, home to the town of Moab, where federal landownership stood at 90 percent. This was country that writer Edward Abbey had proclaimed “the most beautiful place on earth.” The political conflagration got especially hot over Negro Bill Canyon (renamed Grandstaff Canyon in 2017), located just a few miles northeast of Moab. In late 1978, despite numerous mining claims in the canyon, the blm designated it a wilderness study area (wsa) and used boulders to close off motorized access. Defiant locals arrived with bulldozers to challenge the blm for control. In the summer of 1980, on the Fourth of July no less, Grand County commissioners themselves authorized a bulldozed “upgrade” of the canyon’s “road,” which was little more than an orv trail. To ensure that their position was crystal clear, the commissioners festooned the ceremonial road grader with an American flag and a sticker proclaiming “I’m a Sagebrush Rebel.” The bulldozer brigade, too, was largely for show, for when faced with a federal lawsuit, the Rebels agreed to restore the area to its pre–­July Environmental Backlash  267

4 condition. However, by the end of the year, in a conciliatory gesture, the blm had dropped an estimated 1.25 million acres in the Negro Bill Canyon area from the wsa. Bulldozers ultimately proved to be bad pr. Organizations like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society led a national effort to discredit the Sagebrush Rebellion. They distributed brochures, gave public talks, lobbied state legislators, worked phone banks, and made radio and television appearances in order to rally the environmental opposition. Their own experiences on the receiving end of derogatory epithets such as “tree hugger” and “granola lover” in previous decades motivated their efforts to inextricably link Sagebrush Rebels with “bulldozer diplomacy.” Although they failed to halt the passage of Utah’s Public Lands Reclamation Act of 1980, they succeeded in keeping environmental issues on the front burner, which in turn paved the way for more controversial organizations, such as the newly formed Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (suwa), to challenge emerging threats from the administration of President Reagan. In the end, the Sagebrush Rebellion languished due to the more states’ rights friendly, laissez-­faire attitude that Reagan and his pro-­development Interior secretary Watt brought into the federal government. Rebellion seemed less necessary with Reagan and Watt in control. Without a villainous federal windmill to tilt at, the Rebels switched off their dozers and moseyed on home. Yet the movement has had a long-­lasting legacy. In 2014, for example, a twenty-­year dispute between Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and the blm escalated into an armed standoff as federal officials began rounding up Bundy’s cattle for nonpayment of grazing fees. Bundy’s claim that he didn’t “recognize the United States government as even existing” attracted large crowds of supporters and militia groups to southeastern Clark County, Nevada, forcing the blm to halt the roundup “because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public.” By the end of 2022, Bundy still owed more than $1 million in back grazing fees—­more than all other ranchers combined—­a significant black eye for the blm’s efforts to seek a solution “administratively and judicially.” In January 2016, Bundy’s son Ammon led an armed militia takeover of a federal bird refuge in Oregon to demand that the government surrender its lands “to get the 268  Environmental Backlash

logger back to logging, to get the rancher back to ranching, to get the miner back to mining.” When law enforcement officials finally ended the weeks-­long standoff, one Bundy follower was killed and nearly a dozen were arrested, including Ammon and later Cliven, although all felony charges against the Bundys were ultimately dismissed by a federal appeals court in 2020. As historian Rogers concludes, the Sagebrush Rebellion “served to polarize, alienate, and entrench, not bring together.” Unfortunately, the polemics of groups like the Sagebrush Rebels as well as Earth First! had pushed pragmatic environmental politics to the margins. Interestingly, a notable counterpoint to the predominantly white Sagebrush Rebellion had arisen a few years earlier in New Mexico. In 1963 activist Reies López Tijerina organized a Chicano take-­back-­the-­land movement with a much stronger and more valid claim than any Sagebrush Rebel’s. Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (Federal Alliance for Free Land Grants) utilized civil rights–­era tactics to call for the re-­adjudication of Spanish and Mexican land grant claims arising from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Tijerina asserted that “none of these grant lands and waters which the United States asserts it acquired from Mexico under the treaty . . . ever formed any part of the public domain. These lands and waters therefore cannot be taken for that purpose.” Central to Alianza’s crusade was the U.S. Forest Service’s (usfs) regulation of Chicano grazing rights. In the 1960s, the agency had phased out free-­use permits that allowed for noncommercial use of the public lands for subsistence animals. Since much of this grazing activity naturally occurred close to settlements, the usfs had determined that free-­use permits led to environmental degradation. It had failed to consult with Chicano villagers, however, who valued their animals in other-­than-­commercial ways. The usfs’s free-­use permit constriction was further exacerbated by the agency’s simultaneous move to reduce and consolidate standard grazing permits. Much as had been the case for Navajo grazers in the 1930s, these federal stock reductions—­60 percent or more in just a few years’ time—­weighed heaviest on the poorest users. Thus, in 1965 and 1966 Tijerina and Alianza staged Chicano camp-­in protests on disputed usfs lands to draw attention to their cause and to Environmental Backlash  269

34. Reies Tijerina leading an Alianza protest. Photo by Henry Wilhelm. University of

California San Diego Library.

their land grant and grazing permit issues. Tensions escalated rapidly and ultimately turned violent and deadly. Tijerina was arrested and imprisoned but ultimately found innocent. In the aftermath, however, the usfs adopted a much more cooperative rangeland management plan—­dubbed “The People of Northern New Mexico and the National Forests”—­that better respects and incorporates Chicano cultural integrity and values. In 1972 a regional forester explained this more enlightened stance, stating that “the unique value of Spanish American and Indian cultures in the Southwest must be recognized and efforts of the Forest Service must be directed toward their preservation.” Today the social and cultural benefits derived from this heavily federally subsidized relationship, although not commercially viable, persist, even if most permittees are weekend ranchers with full-­time day jobs. The Sagebrush Rebellion represented the opening salvo in the larger Wise Use movement, a perverse play on words that uses classic conservation terminology to camouflage its exploitation and development intentions. The Wise 270  Environmental Backlash

Use movement continues to comprise a savvy and environmentally antagonistic collection of developers, states’ rights advocates, resource users, and private property interests. Pitting rural “freedom” against urban elites, Wise Use supporters seek to counter campaigns for wilderness, expanded parks, and public lands by dismantling environmental regulations and eliminating federal restrictions on development. The genesis for Wise Use was a 1988 conference in Reno, Nevada, that outlined a comprehensive Wise Use agenda. It called for, among other elements, the opening of “all public lands to mining and energy production,” intensified logging, timber harvesting, and grazing in the national forests and on all public lands, the weakening of the Endangered Species Act, and protection of private property rights from environmental regulation, and it asserted “states’ sovereign rights in matters pertaining to water distribution and regulation.” Taking their cues from environmental activists and cleverly employing old-­school conservation rhetoric, Wise Users mimicked their foes. They lobbied Congress, attended and testified at public hearings, organized fundraising and letter-­writing drives, developed appealing pr campaigns, and boycotted programs that advocated environmental protection. Often well funded by resource and extractive industries such as timber and mining corporations, Wise Use groups nevertheless portrayed themselves as grassroots champions of rural values and nature-­loving lifestyles—­a masquerade that many environmental organizations endeavored to expose. A current, more benign example of a Wise Use group is the BlueRibbon Coalition (brc), which boasts of its “members in all 50 states.” Its self-­stated purpose is a dedication “to defense and enhancement of recreational access via motorized, mechanized, and nonmechanized means, to public lands, and to the protection of the environment.” brc’s seemingly inclusive website, sharetrails​.org, vows to “Fight for Every Inch” against an ominous “30x30 campaign” led by “extreme groups,” which it describes as “a major effort to lock up 30% of the nation’s land by the year 2030.” The brc warns that “anyone who has read the details of how this plan will be implemented understands it is a clear effort to lock the American people out of their land” but then concedes that “there is no legislation to designate these exact parameters.” In another missive about suwa and wilderness proposals in Utah, the brc lauds its 10,000+ Project, intended to protect “access to over 10,000 miles Environmental Backlash  271

35. Spotted owls in a Pacific Northwest old-­growth forest. Photo by Jason Mowdy. usda

Forest Service.

of roads and trails. It’s that simple. We don’t want to give up a single inch.” The brc urges its membership to attend and testify at public meetings, sign and mail petitions, contact government officials, and donate to the cause. Bulldozers are out, participatory democracy is in. Like their environmentalist counterparts, Wise Users began to work within the system. The Wise Use movement illustrates the ongoing tension between economy and environment, and continues the century-­long dialogue about development versus preservation in the West. The increasingly radical voices in these debates echo the rhetoric of the past but in a transformed context, with a much more powerful preservationist coalition than in John Muir’s time. Nowhere was this late twentieth-­century fissure more evident than in Oregon, where Wise Use and the Endangered Species Act collided over the fate of a nocturnal predator called the northern spotted owl. The genesis of the controversy was the Endangered Species Act (esa) of 1973, which stipulates, among other requirements, that once the federal 272  Environmental Backlash

government lists a species, its protection becomes primary, reducing all other concerns, even economic and those of private property holders, to secondary status. Essentially, under the esa, preservation trumps profit. In 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (fws) listed the northern spotted owl as threatened. The most immediate consequence was a blanket protection, including a court-­ordered ban on logging, for the ecosystem the owls called home: the last remaining old-­growth forests of Oregon, Washington, and California. While most of the owls inhabited federal lands, significant numbers also resided on state and private property. The monster trees in these ancient stands also happened to be the bread and butter of the region’s flagging timber industry, which already faced serious economic challenges from automation and international competitors, including Canada. The superficial result seemed to be a classic environment-­versus-­economy brawl, one that drove the wedge between environmental advocates and resource interests even deeper. In one corner were esa proponents, who pushed for the spotted owl’s protection because of its role as an “indicator species,” which is one that acts as a barometer for the health of the entire ecosystem that it inhabits. Northern spotted owls are intolerant of habitat disturbances. In Pacific Northwest old-­growth forests, the red vole is similarly sensitive to habitat health, but it’s neither cute nor countable. The spotted owl is both. In addition to being charismatic and visually appealing—­a definite bonus for eliciting sympathetic public support for protection—­the medium-­sized, fluffy brown owl is relatively easy to find and thus count. Quite simply, if you “whoo” in the forest, the spotted owl will “whoo” back. By 1990 the owl’s numbers were plummeting as ever more vigorous logging efforts turned to valuable old-­ growth timber to sustain the traditional extractive local economy. Scientists estimate that in late 2022, the owl’s entire population in the Pacific Northwest numbers between three and five thousand individuals. In the opposite corner from owls and advocates sat the multibillion-­ dollar timber industry and the numerous small towns and rural families that depended upon logging for their livelihoods. For them, the owl acted as an indicator species, too; it indicated that their extractive way of life was in serious jeopardy. Both the logging industry and the U.S. Forest Service estimated the owl’s protection would cost thirty thousand jobs in economEnvironmental Backlash  273

ically hard-­pressed communities. Anti-­owl bumper stickers blossomed throughout the Pacific Northwest—­“Save a logger, eat an owl” and “I like spotted owls—­fried”—­and it was not uncommon to see cute little stuffed owl effigies smashed into the grilles of logging trucks thundering out of Pacific Northwest forests. For both sides, the spotted owl became the simplified totem of a much more complicated and nuanced struggle. In the polarized political climate ushered in by Watt, rational Church-­like consensus became as endangered and rare as the spotted owl. Environmentalists were not wrong to assert that old-­growth forests and the ecosystems they supported were in grave jeopardy. By 1990, old-­growth acreage had diminished to just 10 percent of its original range. Biologists predicted that at the current cut rate, old-­growth forests themselves would go extinct within ten to thirty years. At that point, the majestic giants would disappear, as would all the species that thrived in this particular environmental niche, while loggers and logging towns would still face the same economic dead-­end dilemma. Save the last ecological remnants now, esa advocates argued, before we lose it forever. It was a fair and rational argument. But this argument ignored the human costs associated with protection. What about the third-­and fourth-­generation logging families that depended on these same forests to pay their mortgages and send their kids to school? “Move.” “Get a different job.” “It’s inevitable.” These insensitive responses of owl zealots overlooked the reality that people are also part of nature—­that the old-­growth forest was their ecosystem, too. Both people and owls were in danger and endangered. One frustrated logger from Mill City, Oregon (about eighty miles southeast of Portland), lamented, “I love it here. I love the trees and the green. This is my world. But if they shut the mill down, there’s nothing for me but menial jobs. We’ll be down at Salem signing up for welfare.” Economic contraction at this scale means less money for schools and municipal services, along with attendant social and cultural discord; domestic violence, mental illness, and addiction often haunt those plagued with unemployment and hopelessness. In reality, the spotted owl did not cause timber industry woes, but it became an easy and effective symbol or target for both sides. Increased 274  Environmental Backlash

automation that replaced humans with machines, decades of clear-­cutting, and cheap wood from Canada and elsewhere that flooded the timber market and drove down prices constituted the real culprits. The region’s mills and logging operations could not compete, so they began shutting down. Old-­ growth harvests functioned as their economic Hail Mary. The most rational business executives and workers ultimately understood that even if they cut down every last colossal conifer, they could only temporarily stave off the impending industry crisis. From 1947 to 1964, for example, long before the spotted owl controversy, the number of Pacific Northwest logging jobs had declined by 90 percent. Once the towering cedars, firs, hemlocks, and spruces had disappeared for good, families and corporations alike would face the same hard retooling choices. Old-­growth was not timber’s salvation; at best it offered only a temporary reprieve to a traditional extractive industry that would have to undergo fundamental reorganization if it wished to survive into the twenty-­first century. Frustrated lumberjacks found blaming the spotted owl and “radical environmentalists” a simpler solution, however, and both provided more obvious targets for regional protests and rallies. By the early twenty-­first century, the spotted owl controversy had mostly subsided as expanding global timber demand raised hopes and economic revenues in the Pacific Northwest’s logging towns and communities. As one Oregon timber industry representative remarked in 2010, twenty years after the spotted owl’s esa listing, “It’s interesting that in spite of everything that’s happened to our industry, we’re still the second-­biggest industry in the state, behind high tech. But with that being said, our industry is not what it used to be. Hundreds of mills closed, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, and those jobs haven’t been replaced.” On the ecological side of the ledger, northern spotted owl numbers continue to decline by 3 to 7 percent each year, but the primary culprit is no longer habitat loss due to intensified logging. Instead, competition from invasive barred owls, which are bigger, more aggressive, and less ecologically sensitive, is causing the spotted owl to “circle the drain” in most parts of its range. The fws, the agency charged with protecting endangered species, now faces a perplexing problem: do you kill one owl to save another? Since 2013, the answer has been yes. Since that time, the fws has removed more Environmental Backlash  275

than thirty-­one hundred barred owls at a cost of $8.5 million. Studies show that it helps, but as forest biologist Eric Forsman admits, “You could shoot barred owls until you’re blue in the face, but unless you’re willing to do it forever, it’s just not going to work.” Like most environmental problems, this one defies simple solutions. Spotted owls remain threatened (and under consideration for endangered status) under the esa, as their numbers have declined between 50 and 75 percent since 1995 and their old-­growth habitat has shrunk by more than 70 percent since 1990. Worsening wildfires are amplifying these losses; between 2017 and 2021, for example, more than five million acres of critical owl habitat burned in massive wildfires. It’s a devastating trio of assaults—­barred owls, habitat loss, and wildfires—­and scientists estimate that without significant and continuing intervention, northern spotted owls likely will be extirpated within fifty years. Many Pacific Northwest timber towns remain economically threatened, too, as the region’s shift to a high-­tech economy fails to reach into rural areas, and laser-­controlled mills and automated logging, not owls, continue to eliminate timber jobs. In September 1996, President Bill Clinton added fuel to the Wise Use fire when he used the powerful Antiquities Act of 1906 to create the nearly 1.9 million-­acre Grand Staircase–­Escalante National Monument (gsenm) in southern Utah, the largest national monument in the system. It was a bold and controversial stroke, worthy of Theodore Roosevelt. Clinton gave the state’s governor and congressional representatives only twenty-­four hours’ advance notice, knowing that his actions would ignite a firestorm of criticism, especially within Utah. The president was not mistaken. In fact, Clinton tried to avoid the heat by announcing the gsenm dedication not in Utah but at the Grand Canyon in Arizona—­a state he desperately needed to win (and did) in his 1996 reelection campaign. Utah’s Senator Hatch gave voice to the opposition of local ranchers, farmers, developers, and gas, coal, and oil extractors whose economic development prospects for this section of Utah’s back country were suddenly cut off when he decried the creation of the new monument as “the mother of all land grabs.” The gsenm derives its name from early Spanish explorer Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and an early geological survey of the region that 276  Environmental Backlash

described as a “great stairway” the unique, candy-­colored sandstone cliffs that ascend through the park from the Sonoran Desert into coniferous forests. The monument is situated in the heart of scenic southern Utah, adjacent to Bryce Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and is divided into three areas: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Canyons of the Escalante. Significantly, the blm manages the monument—­a first for the agency—­rather than the National Park Service, which has contributed to the gsenm’s polarizing presence. The blm’s long-­standing contentious relationship with local ranchers and mechanized recreationists stems from the agency’s efforts to manage its arid holdings in southern Utah by attempting to strike a balance between environmental stewardship and economic utility. The result has been a running battle between blm officials and monument vandals in yet another clash between protection and development. The gsenm further reveals the fractured environmental consensus brought on by Watt and his allies. Although Clinton’s designation certainly shored up his electoral numbers in the region, it also directly responded to the wilderness/Sagebrush controversies mentioned above. The monument’s protection not only ensured that management of sensitive potential wilderness areas would preserve their integrity but also effectively blocked the massive Andalex coal mine, which had set its sights on the remote and lucrative Kaiparowits Plateau. The rugged, isolated, piñon-­and juniper-­dotted plateau, sprawling over sixteen hundred square miles, holds hundreds of archeological sites, dinosaur fossil beds, a diverse and complex high-­desert ecosystem, and between five billion and seven billion tons of recoverable coal. The original proposal to build a 3,000-­megawatt coal-­fired power plant fed by the plateau’s fossil fuel resources emerged in 1965, but its unfortunate timing coincided with the fight over Glen Canyon Dam, which drew negative attention to extractive resource use in scenic but remote areas. The escalating costs to withdraw the region’s coal reserves finally killed the project in 1975. In 1991, however, Andalex Resources revived the plan. It proposed the extraction of 14,000 tons of coal every two days (2.5 million tons per year), hauled by 300 trucks per day (24/7), on $75 million taxpayer-­subsidized roads through Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, two wsas, the Paiute Environmental Backlash  277

Indian reservation, and several small towns. Andalex anticipated that the entire project would potentially attract 1,400 new residents, directly employ more than 450 people, and pump more than $12 million into the state’s coffers. Environmentalists blanched at the blatant development calculus. An attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said simply, “There are no substitutes for the wilderness value of this area.” To develop or not to develop, that was the question. President Clinton’s designation of the gsenm provided one answer: not here. Edward Abbey had always argued that “the idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs more defenders.” For the Kaiparowits Plateau, this defender was Clinton. Nevertheless, to assuage offended constituencies and redress potential economic losses, the Utah Schools and Lands Exchange Act of 1998 swapped out state lands and mineral rights within the monument for other federal lands in Utah and gave the state an additional $50 million. This generous federal compensation that attempted to bridge the economy/environment chasm seldom merits mention by those still angered by Clinton’s act. While many aspects of the monument’s creation and management could start a fight in an empty bar, the most controversial issue affecting gsenm and other parts of the West remains Revised Statute 2477 (rs 2477), a one-­ sentence powerhouse left over from the nineteenth century. Congress passed rs 2477 in 1866, a time when the federal government actively promoted western settlement, access to mineral deposits, and the transfer of public lands into private hands (e.g., through the Homestead Act of 1862). The act declared that “the right-­of-­way for the construction of highways over public lands, not reserved for public uses, is hereby granted.” The passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (flpma) of 1976 repealed rs 2477 but provided a loophole big enough for southern Utahns to drive a bulldozer through. “Nothing in this Act, or in any amendment made by this Act,” the flpma states, “shall be construed as terminating any valid lease, permit, patent, right-­of-­way, or other land use right or authorization existing on the date of approval of this Act.” Road rights prevailed. Therein lies the rub: what exactly constitutes a highway or road? Landowners, wilderness advocates, recreation users, and agency managers all have their own definitions, and they rarely agree. In 2000, in obvious homage to 278  Environmental Backlash

36. An example of a questionable state “road” claim under rs 2477 in a disputed wilderness

study area of the Dirty Devil River in southeastern Utah. Photo by Ray Bloxam. Used with permission of Diane Kelly.

the Wise Use/Sagebrush Rebellion ideology, the state of Utah informed the Department of Interior that it intended to pursue legal authority over twenty-­ five thousand so-­called roads, some of which it admitted were no more than orv tracks and dry streambeds. The challenge was not a hollow one, however. Relying on the clause in the Wilderness Act of 1964 that stipulates that “there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness area designated by this Act,” antiwilderness crusaders mounted their earth movers to cut “roads” through wilderness study areas in the hope that such scars would nix designation. In gsenm, for example, local rights activists and several Utah counties protested vehemently that under rs 2477, preexisting stretches of land they considered roads gave them title and access to roads crossing the newly declared monument, thus negating federal authority. In 2003, seeking to avoid tens of thousands of court cases and endless legal skirmishes, the state of Utah and the Department of Interior signed a memorandum of understanding (mou) outlining a fair process for determining Environmental Backlash  279

the validity of rs 2477 road claims. In 2010, as evidence of the possibility for successful resolution under this compromise solution, the federal government recognized the validity of one rs 2477 claim and relinquished quiet title to the gsenm’s Skutumpah Road to Kane County. The county, not the federal government, controlled the road. However, in 2012, under the conservative administration of Governor Gary Herbert, the state resumed its lawsuits-­for-­ roads tactic and declared victory in March 2013, when, after tens of thousands of dollars had been spent by opposing sides, the courts granted the state title to eighty-­nine miles of road out of the more than thirty-­five thousand miles Herbert claimed. In response, the Utah Wilderness Coalition bowed up and dramatically expanded its citizens’ proposal of 2013 to demand protection for 9.1 million wilderness acres across the state. In January 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear arguments in Kane County, Utah v. United States, effectively confirming the right of environmental groups like suwa to intervene against county rs 2477 claims. But the vastness of the gulf that still separates the two constituencies—­s uwa calls many of the rs 2477 claims “hoax highways,” while the brc rails against the “radical green agenda”—­seems insurmountable. Watt’s wedge politics endure. Yet for all of the division and shouting that followed Reagan’s assumption of the presidency, there were some positive developments in western environmental history in the late twentieth century. One was the return of the wolf. Interestingly, the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, a man once committed to eliminating wolves, played an important role in their restoration. Bruce Babbitt, Interior secretary under Clinton, explained the connection: “In January 1995 I helped carry the first grey wolf into Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated by federal predator control policy only six decades earlier. Looking through the crates into her eyes, I reflected on how Aldo Leopold once took part in that policy, then eloquently challenged it. By illuminating for us how wolves play a critical role in the whole of creation, he expressed the ethic and the laws which would reintroduce them nearly a half-­century after his death.” Babbitt, like so many others, had come to appreciate the trophic cascade so deftly predicted by Leopold—­the rippling effect through an entire ecosystem that the elimination of keystone species (one that has a disproportionate impact on its environment, like the wolf) 280  Environmental Backlash

produces. It can send the whole delicate balance careening toward ill health and degradation. Wolf reintroduction helped reverse the decline, not only restoring the individual species but also contributing to the health of the larger ecosystem. And biologists deferentially named the first wolf group that formed in Yellowstone the Leopold Pack. The fws first listed the gray wolf as endangered in 1974, one year after passage of the esa. Wolf numbers had plummeted to just twenty breeding pairs in northern Minnesota and a few on Isle Royale, Michigan, as a result of predator control programs, loss of habitat, and the destruction of their traditional prey base (bison, elk, beavers, etc.). In addition to providing a last-­minute save from extirpation in the contiguous forty-­eight states, federal esa wolf protection also allowed for capture-­and-­release as well as captive breeding programs to begin to rebuild populations for reintroduction into their former habitats. The Mexican gray wolf, for example, is a smaller relative found in the American Southwest. The rarest subspecies of gray wolf, the Mexican wolf had all but disappeared from the wild by the 1970s, when biologists captured the last four wild males and last wild female in Mexico and initiated a captive breeding program to maintain the wolf ’s genetics sufficiently to thwart its disappearance. In 1980, coincidentally, a wild gray wolf pack from Canada—­the Magic Pack—­crossed into Glacier National Park in Montana and began to reestablish the canids’ historic role in the western environment. A decade and a half later, Secretary Babbitt helped restore wolves to Yellowstone, and their populations have continued to expand ever since. Although they once ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, gray wolves now make their limited home in the West in the mostly forested lands of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, while small populations of Mexican gray wolves fight extinction in Arizona and New Mexico. In the age of the Wise Use movement and political polarization, however, wolf reintroduction was not without significant controversy. Major opposition around Yellowstone and in nearby Idaho arose primarily from ranchers and hunters, who feared that the return of this effective predator would negatively affect livestock and big game populations. Furthermore, in the states’ rights mind-­set of the West, wolf reintroduction represented yet another example of the heavy hand of the federal Environmental Backlash  281

government imposing its will on voiceless locals, who nevertheless had to bear the financial consequences of bureaucratic decisions made in far-­off Washington dc. As Renee Askins, executive director of one organization that had collaborated on the return of wolves to Yellowstone, testified, “When ranchers talk about wolves they say, ‘You know, it’s not the wolves we’re worried about, it’s what the wolves represent; it’s not what they’ll do, it’s what they mean.’” In an effort to mediate the environment-­versus-­economy dispute and acknowledge and offset ranchers’ concerns, the environmental organization Defenders of Wildlife established a “wolf compensation fund” that paid more than $1.4 million to private livestock owners for predation losses until 2010, when a federal/state compensation program replaced it. Further compromise emerged when the fws agreed to reintroduce wolves in both Yellowstone and Idaho as “non-­essential experimental populations,” which significantly relaxed strict esa-­mandated protection requirements. From a low of fewer than 300 individuals, wolf numbers had grown to more than 6,000 in the lower forty-­eight states by 2020, one-­third of them in the American West. The success of esa gray wolf recovery proved short-­lived, however. In January 2021, after a series of regional de-­listings and judicial reinstatements, one of the last acts of the Trump administration saw the fws officially de-­list the canids from all federal protection, unleashing aggressive state-­managed “harvests.” In May of that year, for example, Idaho authorized a 90 percent wolf population reduction with few restrictions on methodology, which included the now-­legal use of orv, snowmobile, and helicopter pursuit, baits and spotlight hunting at night, and horrific snares. The consequence of these “harvests” was a 27 to 33 percent decline in gray wolf populations across the lower forty-­eight in a single year. Hunters also killed more Yellowstone wolves (that wandered outside the park boundaries) in the fall 2021 season than at any time since their reintroduction. The toll included the complete elimination of the Phantom Lake pack, which had once boasted 13 healthy pups. That level of loss prompted environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity to sue for gray wolf esa reinstatement, and a coalition of more than a hundred biologists joined them in urging the fws to restore protection. Mexican wolves remain protected—­all 241 of 282  Environmental Backlash

them as of early 2023—­and the fws issued a revised management plan for their continued recovery in September 2022. Nevertheless, the restored presence of wolves has had a profound effect. As the fws discovered, “within two years of the [Yellowstone] wolf reintroduction, researchers found that wolves had killed half the coyotes in the area, forced elk to become more vigilant, and provided many opportunities for scavengers to share their kills. Because there are fewer coyotes, rodents and small animals such as fox may be more plentiful, a boon for predators like hawks and bald eagles.” The tendency of wolves to hunt weak, diseased, and physically impaired prey also moderates the health of other species and acts as a check on their prey populations, encouraging survival of the fittest deer, elk, bison, and other wildlife. Additionally, the presence of wolves along with other predators in the park helped restore beaver populations, which had become extirpated in Yellowstone, and improved the health of aspen and willow stands. In a classic trophic cascade, wolf predation likely contributed to willow and aspen recovery as more wary elk changed their browsing patterns. Willows are also a primary food source and building material for beavers. With elk on the move and willow and aspen stands recovering, so, too, did beavers. Wolves, it turns out, even help to fatten up grizzly bears. Recent scholarship demonstrates that in Yellowstone, wolves’ effect on the park’s elk population has lessened the elks’ consumption of berry-­producing shrubs, which in turn leaves more berries for the bears. Echoing the earlier sentiments of Leopold, ecologist Robert Beschta concluded that “as we learn more about the cascading effects they have on ecosystems, the issue may be more than having just enough individual wolves so they can survive as a species. In some situations, we may wish to consider the numbers necessary to help control overbrowsing, allow tree and shrub recovery, and restore ecosystem health.” To be sure, wolf reintroduction alone did not and cannot restore a degraded ecosystem, which is subject to a host of complex and dynamic environmental factors, including changing climate, rainfall patterns, and natural fluctuations in animal populations. But it’s a start. In many ways, the continued clashes between developers and preservationists and between Sagebrush/Wise Use proponents and esa/public lands advocates in the post-­Watt West erupted with such force during the Environmental Backlash  283

last two decades of the twentieth century because the West itself had been evolving from extractive to attractive. The New West’s financially attractive powerhouses of tourism, service industries, and technology supplanted Old West resource-­based extractive economies founded on mining, ranching, agriculture, timber, and salmon, with the notable exception of the recent oil fracking boom in North Dakota. While neither fluid nor foregone, this Old West/New West transition varied widely across the region, and the result often manifested as Old West politics and politicians railing against New West ideas and values about nature that threatened “traditional” western ways of life. In-­migration from the rest of the country exacerbated these differences. By 2020, California and Texas alone contained nearly 21 percent of the nation’s population, and Utah had become the fastest-­growing state in the Union. States like South Dakota, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming had expanded minimally, however, and North Dakota had actually lost population until the fracking boom. Newcomers with little sense of the historic West were often less sympathetic to entrenched extractive industry, as exemplified in the spotted owl controversy. Moreover, new westerners gravitated to the cities, where these natural resource industries played less important roles in the local economy. For these New West urban-­and suburbanites, wolves and wilderness, not cattle and mines, constituted the nostalgic remnants of the Old West/Wild West that they longed to protect. These differences played out in election returns, too, revealing the clear red/blue divide between rural areas and cities that has sharpened since Reagan and Watt. Perhaps the most striking example of this New West economy is Las Vegas, a glittering jewel set in the arid Nevada desert. Between 1980 and 2000, the Clark County population, which includes both suburban Las Vegas and the casino-­packed Strip, exploded from 463,087 to 1,375,765. In the next twenty years it nearly doubled, to 2,265,461 in 2020, fueled by an economy based on tourism and gaming, which in turn powers its service and consumer sectors. Founded as a railroad town and a conduit for extractive mining goods at the beginning of the twentieth century, Las Vegas expanded with the construction of Boulder Dam during the Great Depression. But the legalization of gambling in 1931 boosted the city’s attractive economy and made Las Vegas a true tourist destination, as did atomic bomb test viewing parties. By the turn 284  Environmental Backlash

of the twenty-­first century, one-­fifth of the city’s jobs were gaming related and Las Vegas boasted the highest rate of new job growth in the country, disproportionately focused on New West business activities like gaming, hospitality, and construction. Old West natural resources, agriculture, and mining employed just over 3,000 people in the county out of a labor force of nearly 895,000, for example, and just 28,500 worked in manufacturing. New West “arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food services,” by contrast, employed nearly 263,000. Historian Samuel Hays argues that the shift to a New West economy also affects attitudes about environmental protection. “Those areas with a long history of urbanization where urban demands had influenced the course of politics for many years,” he observes, “provided the strongest environmental support, and those where rural and raw-­material-­producing influences persisted well into the twentieth century had the lowest.” In the post-­Watt West, this shift has meant that the attractive-­oriented Pacific Northwest region and California usually lead the way in environmental protection and legislation, while the still somewhat extraction-­focused Mountain West states and Arizona lag behind, and the Great Plains region remains actively resistant. That new westerners sought out the environmental amenities that Old West industries threatened—­open spaces, public lands, unmarred views, abundant wildlife, clean air, and free-­flowing rivers—­only exacerbated enmity. With their imported dollars, these new residents built trophy homes where urban areas and wildlands meet and buried the bones of the Old West under sprawling decks and four-­car garages. Red Lodge, Montana, is a good example. This former busted-­out mining town boomed again as a blue-­ribbon trout fly-­fishing and snow-­sports destination because of its environmental amenities. Park City, Utah, found that its ghost town mining skeletons provided a rustic and colorful backdrop for downhill skiing and the Sundance Film Festival. And the uranium extractive frenzy that had once made Moab, Utah, roar gave way to mountain bikers and Jeep enthusiasts who flock to the spectacularly attractive red rock and rimrock country in adjacent Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Another trend emerged in the wake of twenty-­first-­century covid closures as many companies embraced remote employment and freed erstwhile cubiEnvironmental Backlash  285

cle workers to relocate to more attractive locales, which accelerated housing booms in so-­called Zoom towns. These newcomers often have both the time and money to devote to environmental activism, and they have become a powerful constituency that frequently aligns itself in direct opposition to traditional mining, ranching, logging, and prospecting interests. Even in largely extractive Montana, for example, the state’s constitution guarantees all of its citizens “the right to a clean and healthful environment.” The new tourist industries offer jobs in many areas where extractive industry had declined, although these service-­oriented jobs typically pay less and come with fewer benefits or protection by a labor union than the mining, oil, and timber jobs of the past—­a “devil’s bargain,” according to historian Hal Rothman. Watt and other Reagan appointees shared the view that environmental values were neither deeply nor widely held by the American public but were instead the agenda of a few radical activists who had temporarily (they hoped) captured the public imagination. Watt’s appointment vigorously tested this theory and revealed that, while deep divides still rend the American West, the question had shifted from whether to which species and natural environments should be protected and how. Westerners, it turned out, were unwilling to sell off wholesale the last best places just to save a few cents on their utility bills. Certainly each side had strong opinions about the appropriate means for achieving a healthy economy and a healthy environment, but in the end, open dialogue proved the only way to achieve this balance. Watt was not the answer. As the American West entered the twenty-­first century, the region faced ongoing Old West versus New West challenges to be sure, but the specter of accelerating global climate change now threatened to disrupt traditional ecosystems and imperil the health of the many species, including humans, who call it home. The West would have to reconcile environment and economy, as well as the cultural and political divides that shaped how westerners thought about them, in order to rediscover its center. Suggested Reading

Renee Askins, “Releasing Wolves from Symbolism,” Harper’s Magazine 290, no. 1739 (April 1995), available at https://​www​.thefreelibrary​.com​/Releasing​+wolves​+from​ +symbolism.​-a016637249. 286  Environmental Backlash

Bruce Babbitt, “Federalism and the Environment: An Intergovernmental Perspective of the Sagebrush Rebellion,” Environmental Law 12, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 847–­61. Nate Blakeslee, “A Good Day in the Park,” in American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (New York: Broadway Books, 2017), 229–­46. Campaign for Nature, “30x30,” December 31, 2021, available at https://w ​ ww.​ campaign fornature​.org​/home. Leisl Carr Childers, “Understanding Cliven Bundy: Using Narrative, Geographic, and Visual Empathy in Public Lands History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 96–­107. George Cameron Coggins and Doris K. Nagel, “‘Nothing beside Remains’: The Legal Legacy of James G. Watt’s Tenure as Secretary of the Interior on Federal Land Law and Policy,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 17, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 473–­550, available at http://​lawdigitalcommons​.bc​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​ .cgi​?article​=​1533​&​context​=​ealr. David Correia, “The New Mexico Land Grant War,” in Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 120–­45. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–­90, available at www​.williamcronon​.net​/writing​ /Cronon​_Trouble​_with​_Wilderness​_1995​.pdf. Michael J. Dax, “Triumph and Collapse,” in Grizzly West: A Failed Attempt to Reintroduce Grizzly Bears in the Mountain West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 187–­215. William deBuys, “Land and Cattle,” in Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 223–­43. Robert A. Goldberg, “The Western Hero in Politics: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” in The Political Culture of the New West, ed. Jeff Roche (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 13–­50. Marcus Hall, “Repairing Mountains: Restoration, Ecology, and Wilderness in Twentieth-­Century Utah,” Environmental History 6, no. 4 (October 2001): 584–­610. Brian Leech, “Protest, Power and the Pit: Fighting Open-­Pit Mining in Butte, Montana,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 62, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 24–­43. Michael McCarthy, “The First Sagebrush Rebellion: Forest Reserves and States Rights in Colorado and the West, 1891–­1907,” in The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium, ed. Harold K. Steen (Durham nc: Forest History Society, Environmental Backlash  287

1992), available at https://​foresthistory​.org​/research​-explore​/us​-forest​-service​ -history​/places​/the​-national​-forests/. William Ripple, “Of Bears and Berries: Return of Wolves Aids Grizzly Bears in Yellowstone,” Oregon State University press release, July 29, 2013, available at https://​ today​.oregonstate​.edu​/archives​/2013​/jul​/bears​-and​-berries​-return​-wolves​-aids​ -grizzly​-bears​-yellowstone. Jedediah S. Rogers, Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013). Also “The Volatile Sagebrush Rebellion,” in Utah in the Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 367–­84. Hal K. Rothman, “Residence-­Based Resorts: Second Homes and Outside Influence,” in Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-­Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 227–­51. Jeffrey C. Sanders, “Animal Trouble and Urban Anxiety: Human-­Animal Interaction in Post-­Earth Day Seattle,” Environmental History 16, no. 2 (April 2011): 226–­61. Brian Shovers, “The Old Works Golf Course, Anaconda, Montana,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 64–­70. James R. Skillen, “Public Lands Rebellion,” Utah Historical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 108–­14. Douglas W. Smith, Rolf O. Peterson, Daniel R. MacNulty, and Michel Kohl, “The Big Scientific Debate: Trophic Cascades,” Yellowstone Science 24, no. 1 (2016): 70–­ 71, available at https://​www​.nps​.gov​/articles​/the​-big​-scientific​-debate​-trophic​ -cascades​.htm. Ellen Stroud, “Returning to the Slough: Environmental Justice in Portland, Oregon,” in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change, ed. Char Miller and Jeff Crane (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2018), 79–­99. Yvette Towersap Tuelle, “Public Lands and American Indians: Traditional Use and Off-­Reservation Treaty Rights,” Utah Historical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 115–­20. James Morton Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96, no. 1 (2009): 123–­48, available at https://​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/27694734. Stewart Udall, “Encounter with Reaganism,” in The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1988), 257–­62. Craig Welch, “The Spotted Owl’s New Nemesis,” Smithsonian, January 2009, available at https://​www.​ smithsonianmag.​ com/​ science-​ nature/​ the-​ spotted-​ owls-​ new​ 288  Environmental Backlash

-nemesis​-131610387/​ ?​ sessionGUID= ​ 1​ db28138-​ d648​-7354​-3720​-c4932ea9a752​ &​noist​=​&​ page​=​1. Thomas R. Wellock, “The Dickey Bird Scientists Take Charge: Science, Policy, and the Spotted Owl,” Environmental History 15, no. 3 ( July 2010): 381–­414. “What Watt Wrought,” High Country News, October 31, 1983, 10–­14, available at https://​ www​.hcn​.org​/external​_files​/40years​/blog​/WattWroughtArticles​.pdf. Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 171–­85. Paige Williams, “Killing Wolves to Own the Libs?,” New Yorker, March 28, 2022. Michael Wise, “Killing Montana’s Wolves: Stockgrowers, Bounty Bills, and the Uncertain Distinction between Predators and Producers,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 51–­67.

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The Last Frontier

11

It is June 21, 2019, and I am sprawled on the spongy tundra at the end of the “day,” watching as the summer solstice sun completes an undulating orbit through the sky. Here, well above the Arctic Circle in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the long, languid days offer a tantalizing glimpse of the wealth of nature that was once America. On a two-­week float trip, Dan (my husband) and I have joined thousands of Porcupine caribou migrating north out of the Brooks Range along the Hulahula River to the Beaufort Sea. They follow an ancient circuit to calve their young before returning again to the mountains to face the wolves that await with their own young mouths to feed. It is impossible not to be gobsmacked by the experience. As the ambling mass of velvet-­antlered bulls and heavy-­bellied cows eddies and flows around our tent, I am simultaneously struck by the achingly beautiful wild landscape that is almost too vast and subtle to comprehend and by a deep foreboding for the future of this superlative Last Frontier. Can oil drilling and caribou mix? In a twenty-­first century challenged by climate change, can we find balance between environment and economy? Can we afford not to? From this rare vantage point at the far northern edge of the nation, I think it is possible to survey the recent environmental past and present and reflect on a possible future for the West and the world. The Arctic is not really the top of the world, of course, any more than Antarctica is the bottom, but the idea provides a useful concept for 291

37. The Porcupine caribou herd’s annual land migration of fifteen hundred miles through

the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to reach their calving grounds on the Beaufort Sea coastal plain is the longest of any land mammal on earth. Photo by Dan Flores. Used with permission of the photographer.

surveying the broad sweep and context of the North American continent’s deep history. In many ways, Alaska functions as a high-­powered magnification of the environmental challenges confronting the modern, contemporary American West. Our journey begins on June 15 with a 300-­mile flight from Fairbanks over the Yukon River flats to Arctic Village—­population 152—­where we have the privilege of meeting with Gwich’in tribal elder Sarah James. Now in her late seventies, James has been a tireless crusader for her people—­the People of the Caribou—­and their land, this place they both call home. She tells us that −70°F used to be normal for their winters, but this winter −40°F was the coldest it got, but with deep snow. Even in this extreme environment, the global warming experience is universal. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century, the greatest environmental threat to the West, the United States, and the world is global climate change (a.k.a. global warming). The long-­term rise in temperatures—­the big-­picture change over a century or more—­rather than short-­term variation, defines global climate change. Although the planet’s climate has always been in flux, 292  The Last Frontier

cycling between ice ages and warmer epochs, as described by Milankovitch cycles, what distinguishes recent trends is the rate of change. In the past, even minor temperature variations occurred over millions or even tens of millions of years; now scientists are measuring these changes in mere decades. To track these cycles, scientists use an index of global average temperatures, and they indicate a steady and disconcerting increase since the 1880s. The principal cause of this warming trend is the rise in carbon dioxide (co 2) emissions and other heat-­trapping greenhouse gases released during the Industrial Revolution. The primary source: the burning of fossil fuels. Since this time, the earth has warmed by approximately 2°F (1°C). Although this sounds like a minuscule shift, the earth’s ecosystems function much like finely tuned instruments, and even small changes can produce major consequences. Some of the consequences of global climate change are already evident, and the possibilities yet to come are frightening. By 2022, the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was more than 50 percent higher than in preindustrial times. According to one climate scientist, these unsustainable co 2 levels will produce “ever more damaging levels of climate change, more heat waves, more flooding, more droughts, more large storms and higher sea levels.” In the United States in 2020, for example, climate change–­fueled disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires caused nearly $100 billion in damage, double the figure for 2019. Because the American West is at the vanguard of these environmental shifts, the need to develop a long-­ term sustainable relationship between people and nature in this region has become urgent. “Humans are literally cooking their planet,” warns climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck. Significantly, the oceans absorb the vast majority of the heat produced around the world—­more than 90 percent since 1970—­and in 2019, a record-­ setting year, the oceans warmed as if five atomic bombs had been dropped in the water every second for the past twenty-­five years. This has real and devastating consequences. According to one study, rising ocean temperature “increases evaporation, and the extra moisture in the warmer atmosphere nourishes heavy rains and promotes flooding, leading to a more extreme hydrological cycle and more extreme weather (in particular hurricanes and typhoons).” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) The Last Frontier  293

now ranks 2020 as the hottest year on record, just slightly above 2016, since recordkeeping began in 1880. The average global temperature that year was 58.82°F, fully 1.84°F (1.02°C) warmer than the baseline 1951–­80 mean. The warmest seven years have all been since 2015, and July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet.

From Arctic Village, we board small bush planes for a stunning flight through Alaska’s Brooks Range. We fly well below the peaks—­at about 6,000 feet because there’s no cabin pressure adjustment—­and I am immediately struck by the scale of this landscape. Below us, wild, braided ice-­melt rivers rework their cobble beds, and I can’t help but compare them to the overworked, heavily dammed Colorado River that has sustained me through most of my life. We land on a small gravel bar at the headwaters of the Hulahula River, which flows almost due north into the Beaufort Sea. We are in the heart of the 19.2-­million-­acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr), the largest in the nation. Set aside in 1980, anwr also contains 8 million acres of designated wilderness and sits atop an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil. On this stunningly clear June day, we ten are alone in this vast landscape along our silver thread of water. Well, “alone” as people, since we’ve already spotted a red fox and a small wolf pack stalking about a dozen Dall sheep. And the caribou are coming. . . . This remote, wild Alaska river is about as different from the Colorado as it is possible to imagine. Aridity is the West’s reality, and the region’s water worries have intensified as high temperatures and parching drought have evaporated the water in the hydraulic systems essential for making the desert bloom. The 1,450-­mile Colorado River sates the water demands of 40 million westerners—­1 out of 8 Americans—­and irrigates 5 million acres of farmland, yet the allocation rates outlined in the 1922 Colorado River Compact grossly oversubscribed the average annual flow of this liquid lifeline. Chronic over-­ reliance on this diminishing resource has paved the way for unsustainable population growth and sprawl in the West. Since 2004, the Colorado River basin alone has lost an estimated 17 trillion gallons of water—­enough to quench the thirst of more than 50 million households for a year—­and the vast majority of that loss has been in groundwater. Groundwater is especially 294  The Last Frontier

38. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Set aside in 1980, the 19.2-­million-­acre anwr also

contains 8 million acres of designated wilderness and sits atop an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil. Map by Amber Bell.

critical because both farmers and municipalities utilize it as an essential reserve to compensate for years when rainfall fails to replenish more traditional irrigation sources. The consequences are far reaching. Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, the largest human-­made reservoir in the country, acts as a barometer for the Colorado basin, which some have called “the most over-­allocated in the world.” Since 2000, Mead has been dropping steadily, leaving an ever-­widening white bathtub ring around the reservoir that directly slakes the thirst of 25 million westerners. Lake levels are measured in feet above sea level, and the critical “call” line number for The Last Frontier  295

Mead that triggers Tier 1 water restrictions is 1,075 feet. Lake Mead flirted with this level in 2015 and 2016 but narrowly avoided restrictions thanks to increased runoff and augmentation from upriver Lake Powell. But the past two decades have been the driest in the last 1,200 years, worse even than the drought that forced Ancestral Puebloans to abandon Chaco Canyon and then Mesa Verde. So in 2019, as part of the multistate Drought Contingency Plan, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico agreed to cuts in their water allocations for the first time. At that point, the water level in Mead was 1,083 feet, just 8 feet above the “call” line. By August 2021, 95 percent of the West was experiencing drought, much of it “extreme.” That same month Lake Mead dropped below 1,075 feet, and the federal government declared a water shortage on the Colorado for the first time in history, prompting Tier 1 mandatory consumption cuts for Arizona (18 percent) and Nevada (7 percent). More severe Tier 2 cuts have a “call” line of 1,050 feet, and in August 2022, as the lake level continued to drop, federal officials pulled the trigger once again and declared a Tier 2 shortage for the coming year. This unprecedented restriction mandates deep industrial and household reductions beginning in January 2023 for Arizona (21 percent), Nevada (8 percent), and Mexico (7 percent). There are no restrictions for California, which exacerbates tensions among and between the Lower Basin and Upper Basin states. As Robin Silver, cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity complains, “In the Coachella Valley [of California], there’s at least 124 golf courses . . . countless water parks and then there’s the Disney operations there that have their own lagoons and lakes. . . . This is the desert. It’s time to grow up.” Lake Mead reaches “dead pool,” a condition that prevents water from flowing out of the dam and through its turbines—­meaning no water and no power—­at 895 feet. That may happen within a decade. The city of Las Vegas, which draws 90 percent of its water from the reservoir, was in no mood to wait for doomsday. In 2015 workers completed construction of a nearly $1 billion “third straw” project (Las Vegas now uses three intakes to draw water from various lake levels), and the state authorized an additional $680 million for pumps that could siphon trapped dead-­pool waters directly to this desert oasis and maintain the lush mirage. In December 2021, 296  The Last Frontier

hoping to proactively postpone Tier 2 cuts, water officials from Arizona, Nevada, and California had voluntarily signed on to the 500+ Plan, which requires the states to cut 500,000 acre-­feet of consumption for each of the next two years and contribute millions of dollars to fund water conservation programs throughout the lower basin. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell face a similar fate; the loss of their functioning would cut power to more than 350,000 homes, including the air-­conditioners that make life in Phoenix tolerable.

Our first day on the water, June 16, has us paddling our two rafts down the shallow, clear Hulahula River, occasionally scraping the bottom in the low flow (about 1,100 cubic feet per second) as we follow its winding path through the mountains and tundra. The twelve-­day trip will technically be a one-­day trip, since this far north and this close to summer solstice the sun never sets. Fortunately, we have hit the river’s narrow window of runnable water; without impoundments the spring’s runoff flashes through the Hulahula’s corridor in just a few weeks’ time. Climate change will accelerate all aspects of the West’s water woes. Global warming will likely decrease the Colorado River’s flow by at least 35 percent this century. Basically, for each 1.8°F of warming, flow decreases by nearly 10 percent. Global warming primarily affects the snowpack that feeds the river, both in terms of less runoff as well as reduced snow cover. Less snow reflects less solar heat back into space (i.e., the albedo effect) and leads to warmer soil temperatures, increased evaporation rates, and further reductions to the water supply. We’re already seeing the consequences. For California, 2021 was a particularly grim year. In May, it declared a drought emergency when snowpack was a mere 15 percent of average. For the Golden State, 2021 was the worst in 126 years of recordkeeping. The sere conditions were the double-­whammy combination of scant precipitation and “thirst of the atmosphere,” a term for the wicked evaporation rates brought about by warmer air that can absorb more water, which leads to drier landscapes and worse fires. Notably, the summer of 2021 tied the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 for hottest on record in the United States. The drought continued into 2022. Plummeting levels at the state’s two largest reservoirs, The Last Frontier  297

Shasta Lake (Central Valley Project) and Lake Oroville (State Water Project system), prompted mandatory one-­day-­a-­week outdoor water restrictions throughout the state. To adapt to this new reality, cities like Los Angeles are aggressively pursuing water capture and storage along with wastewater recycling. Urban planning professor David Feldman says, simply, “We need to think about water as a precious commodity.” The heat only intensifies water woes. Arizona’s groundwater levels are plummeting, especially in unregulated rural areas, where one in four wells has dropped by more than a hundred feet. This attempt to treat intensive groundwater pumping as a drought solution has severely depleted aquifers, and since it can take millennia to recharge them, scientists believe that this so-­called fossil water source is naturally now irrecoverable. But corporate agribusiness and industrial farms have been buying up rural land and the unregulated access to the groundwater that goes with it. Estimates are that 40 percent of water use in Arizona and California is groundwater. Utah’s idea of a solution to its aridity problem is a 140-­mile, billion-­dollar-­ plus pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George, but that will not solve the problem. By November 2022, Lake Powell was at only 23 percent of capacity with a 170-­foot bathtub ring marring the soaring sandstone cliffs that encircle the reservoir. Utah, the second-­driest state in the Union, is the highest per-­ capita water consumer in the West. Most of its water is used for agriculture, and most of its agricultural produce is alfalfa for livestock. In a 2022 survey on water-­use reduction, some Salt Lake City residents offered up plans to xeriscape their yards and take shorter showers, but a stunning 18 percent (nearly one in five) said they would make “no change” to their water consumption habits. That is unsustainable. More dams and reservoirs are not the answer. Elaborate hydraulic schemes are simply no match for prolonged drought. As former California governor Jerry Brown said matter-­of-­factly, “It’s a different world. We have to act differently.” Changing weather patterns and declining forest densities indicate that the Southwest is at the forefront of observable climate change effects. If the West is to weather a new era of aridity aggravated by climate change, it will have to embrace a far more sustainable relationship with its natural environment.

298  The Last Frontier

We make a fine camp in the willows that line the banks of the Hulahula. We call this our “caribou camp” not just because of the profusion of tracks in the mud all around our tent but because at some point in the “night,” we become aware that there is a significant life force surging all around us. The caribou are here. Their annual land migration of fifteen hundred miles, to their calving grounds on the Beaufort Sea coastal plain, is the longest of any land mammal on earth. It is flowing around our tent. There are thousands and thousands of them moving in elegant harmony and balance with the swift-­moving seasons here in the far north. In our West, the ecological imbalance wrought by a prolonged drought radiates out into the region’s forests. Since the turn of the twenty-­first century, average annual temperatures have risen faster in the Rocky Mountains than in the United States as a whole. In the past twenty years, climate change has unleashed a deadly one-­two-­three punch of heat and drought stress, ferocious wildfires, and tree-­killing insects that has decimated tens of millions of trees—­acreage the equivalent of the entire state of Colorado. Over the past two decades, for example, New Mexico has experienced a stunning decline in its coniferous forests, including its especially hard-­hit official state tree, the piñon pine. Estimates are that 350 million died statewide in the early 2000s, millions more a decade later, and now the state is experiencing round three of this calamitous collapse. These drought-­stressed piñons are also enduring yet another round of beetle infestations and die-­offs brought on by their inability to produce beetle-­repelling resins. Other tree species are also showing stress: Ponderosas, aspens, cottonwoods, and even junipers. It only takes six to eight inches of annual rainfall to sustain these forests, but the state simply no longer receives enough moisture to support the existing biomass, and so new ecosystems—­drier, more savanna-­like grasslands—­are emerging. In Utah, the Pando aspen grove is the most massive living organism on earth—­a kind of Avatar-­like symbol of interconnectedness. Although the Pando may look like a sprawling woods, each individual trunk—­all forty-­ seven thousand of them—­is actually a cloned shoot from a single male parent. Scientists estimate that this “forest of one” covers more than one

The Last Frontier  299

hundred acres, weighs thirteen million pounds, and has a root system that is eighty thousand years old. It is dying. As one ecology professor at Utah State University laments, “Something’s gone off in the last 30 years or so. If it’s been around that long and falls apart on our watch, it’s kind of a harbinger of how we interact with the Earth in general.” What’s “gone off ” with Pando is that there are no new trees, only “senior citizen” aspens. Most are more than a hundred years old. If the grove isn’t able to produce a new generation, it is doomed to decline. Unfortunately, the Pando’s unsustainable condition is exacerbated by burgeoning mule deer and elk populations with a taste for aspen saplings and no predators, as well as annual fall livestock drives that send more than a thousand animals wandering through the grove. Clearly, “the system is very out of balance.” This imbalance is also evident in California’s Sequoia National Park, where the namesake trees, called by some “the immortals” because of their extreme longevity, are also dying. One survey of the Sierra Nevada forests in the spring of 2015 estimated the arboreal death toll at more than 10 million, including sequoias, in the previous year alone. Then in 2020, in an “unprecedented mortality,” more than 10 percent of the world’s giant sequoias burned in the Castle Fire in California (an estimated total of 7,500 to 10,600 trees, many of which were thousands of years old). When the 2021 Windy Fire burned in the same area and killed another 44 of the monarchs, frantic crews draped the massive trunks of remaining trees in fire-­resistant wrap and air-­dropped protective gel on the forest. Normally, their towering height and thick bark protect the ancients and make them among the world’s most fire-­adapted species, but megadroughts combined with megafires have been devastating. Climate change–­fueled hotter summers combined with lower mountain snowpack and reduced runoff are dramatically altering and reducing these forests that filter our air, absorb carbon dioxide, and release life-­supporting oxygen.

On Day 3, June 17, fire dangers seem a faraway concern. Our tiny rafts are dwarfed by towering, cloud-­shrouded peaks as we thread our way toward the Arctic Coastal Plain with our caribou companions. It is a chill and wet day—­it snowed briefly this morning—­and I’ve got on between five and eight layers of wool and waterproofing. Although the world 300  The Last Frontier

39. From mid-­May to late June 2022, the Black Fire in southwestern New Mexico blew up

a huge pyrocumulus cloud on its way to becoming the state’s second-­largest fire ever and scorching more than 325,000 acres of the Gila National Forest. Photo used with permission of usda Forest Service.

around us is dripping and spongy now, by the time we reach the sea, wildfire smoke will have begun to obscure our mountain views even here. In the West, stressed and declining forests amplify wildfire risks. Wildfire season now typically stretches across seven months, fully two months longer than in the past. Astonishingly, Colorado experienced one of its most destructive fires ever—­more than 1,000 structures burned, tens of thousands evacuated, 2 fatalities—­on December 30, 2021. Fueled by 110-­mph downslope winds, the Marshall Fire raged out of control before a foot of snow and single-­digit temperatures snuffed it out late the next day. Then 2022 ushered in a nonstop fire season. In January more than 500 residents near Big Sur, California, had to evacuate from an area with almost no known wildfire history, certainly not in winter. By April, New Mexico had commenced a horrific fire season that blew up the state’s largest fire ever, the Hermits Peak/ Calf Canyon Fire (known locally as the “Monster in the Mountains”) that torched more than 341,000 acres across the entire backside of the Sangre de Cristo range near Santa Fe, even as the Black Fire, the state’s second-­largest The Last Frontier  301

fire ever, simultaneously scorched more than 325,000 acres in the forests northwest of Las Cruces. Although fire is a natural process that keeps forests ecologically balanced, much of the West is overgrown and overly dense due to human intervention, which long protected timber commodities at the expense of forest health. When these forests shed conifers in record numbers, they build up a tinderbox of dead and dying fuels that erupt into raging conflagrations. And that matters to the many westerners who live in the urban/wild interface around places like Flagstaff, Arizona, and Boulder, Colorado, and endure terrifying evacuations and devastating losses. As most Americans saw and smelled, 2021 was an annus horribilus for wildfires; more than 54,000 fires burned through nearly 7 million acres across the country, mostly in the West. When the first edition of Losing Eden appeared, 2015 was the worst fire year in history for the West. Almost every year since then has set a new “worst” mark. What’s more, the four years leading up to 2021 witnessed more than half of the 20 largest fires in California history and 8 of the top 20 fires in Oregon. In 2020 Arizona set a record for the most burned acreage in its entire history, while California’s million-­acre-­plus August Complex fire became the first-­ever gigafire. The next year, the 963,200-­acre Dixie Fire threatened to become the second. Record drought and heat driven by climate change fuel these conflagrations. Mid-­June 2022 was already the third worst year ever for wildfires. On average, the Rocky Mountain West now endures 18 large fires every year, an increase of nearly 75 percent since the 1980s, and wildfire smoke accounts for up to half of all the pollution in the West. In addition to drought stress and wildfires, the West’s forests, from Mexico to the Yukon, are under siege by the pine bark beetle, which has chewed its way through scores of millions of acres. These highly specialized members of the weevil family are actually native to the West and have coevolved with pines as an essential player in overall forest health: they cull weak trees and ensure the survival of the fittest pines. What makes their recent outbreaks remarkable is, again, their scale. Warmer temperatures mean that some populations of mountain pine beetles now produce two generations per year, dramatically boosting the bugs’ threat to lodgepole and ponderosa pines. 302  The Last Frontier

Milder winters fail to kill them off, and dehydrated trees cannot produce beetle-­repelling resins. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that southern Wyoming and northern Colorado lose one hundred thousand beetle-­infested trees a day. At this level of population density, the beetles no longer serve as mere forest product recyclers; instead, they become prime timber predators, taking out even healthy trees overwhelmed by the pest invasion.

On this layover day, June 18, we hike in the foothills of the Brooks Range—­no trees here—­to a ridge high above the lush U-­shaped valley cradling “our” river. We’ve been moving with the caribou and the wolves that are tracking them. From this stunning vantage point, I am struck by an unmistakable urgency to the movement of the caribou, one that seems to go beyond the primal need to put distance between themselves and wolf dens of new pups. Climate change has unleashed a cascade of disruptions that is transforming their home into a wetter, warmer, greener, and less icy region, as the Arctic warms more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Will they be able to keep up, I wonder? All plants and animals will have to respond to climate change. Range shifts for species are a normal part of adaptation, but this accelerated rate of global warming is too rapid to allow for evolution and ecosystem reorganization. Plants and animals simply can’t adapt fast enough. Biodiversity is deteriorating worldwide, but one need not venture far to see and experience the phenomenon. We are in the midst of a mass extinction, the sixth in our planet’s history and the first that is caused by humans. As one report noted, “the global rate of species extinction is at least tens of hundreds of times higher than it has been on average over the past 10 million years.” In 2018 the United Nations (un) released four comprehensive reports on biodiversity in the Americas. The conclusion: the Western Hemisphere’s plants and animals are declining and biodiversity is simplifying in dramatic fashion. One scientist for the reports observed simply, “We keep making choices to borrow from the future to live well today.” A notable exception, however, identified in a 2019 un Report on biodiversity, revealed that “nature managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities is under increasing pressure but is generally declining less rapidly The Last Frontier  303

than in other lands.” Traditional Ecological Knowledge (tek) is the term used to describe cooperative land and animal management—­government agencies working with Indigenous groups—­to protect biodiversity and bolster Indian cultural traditions, and it shows real promise. In the American West, for example, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes are now managing the National Bison Range in western Montana—­lands the federal government seized in 1908 to create the range and save bison. As Tom McDonals, Fish and Wildlife Division manager and tribal member, explains, “We treat the buffalo with less stress, and handle them with more respect,” and tek has also reintroduced “fire as medicine” to foster ecosystem resilience. These conservation efforts are critical because, although biodiversity downsizing will happen across the broad spectrum of species, big mammals—­ the charismatic megafauna—­w ill go first and fast. A perfect storm of a planet ravaged by habitat destruction, hunting, agriculture, urbanization, global warming, and an ever-­growing human population with insatiable consumption demands all contribute to the demise. Scientists estimate that the “window” for preventing mass species loss is rapidly closing—­10–­15 years without significant intervention. Normally it would take 10,000 years to lose 543 species to extinction, but now it takes only 100, and that pace is accelerating; in next 20 years, another 500 will disappear, the “natural” equivalent of 16,000 years. New Mexico is projected to lose at least 50 bird species to range shifts and decline. Bright blue piñon jays will struggle for survival as the state’s piñon forests disappear; these corvids have already experienced a cumulative 85 percent decline since 1966. Wild turkeys and ducks will face severe restrictions to their summer and winter ranges, and songbirds such as rosy finches may also vanish, making Rachel Carson’s warning of a silent spring seem eerily prescient. The West is simplifying. California’s deserts have lost nearly 40 percent of their native vegetation, which has cascading impacts on pollinators and the animals that eat them. Already, 16 of the state’s 23 butterfly species have shifted their migration patterns and now arrive earlier, which may throw off their historical breeding, pollination, and feeding behaviors. Western cutthroat trout and endangered salmon, which rely on glacier-­fed coldwater streams for survival, face an even more grave future as fewer mountain ranges are able 304  The Last Frontier

to maintain year-­round snowpack and their rivers subsequently warm up. In 2019, for example, Chinook salmon numbers had collapsed to around 1,500 and they continue to decline. Fisheries scientist Russ Thurow believes their ultimate demise is imminent: “These fish have maybe four generations left before they are gone. Maybe 20 years.” And that will have real consequences. Altogether, salmon provide ecosystem services to an estimated 137 species, and some cases studies show that “three-­quarters of the nutrients in some trees in Alaska and British Columbia are derived from salmon.”

anwr’s caribou population fluctuates, too, from a low, Sarah James tells us, of approximately 120,000 to their current, healthy rebounded numbers of 300,000. But oil and gas exploration in anwr poses a grave threat. As James says, “We are the ones who have everything to lose. The oil companies keep saying that all their roads and pipelines aren’t going to bother the caribou. But we know the caribou. We know they don’t like all that stuff, especially when they are having their calves. We are concerned about all the salt and chemicals they put on their roads. It can drain onto the tundra, get into the water, and be unhealthy for the young caribou. . . . If we lose the caribou there will be no more forever. . . . We care so much for the caribou—­we take care of them and in return they take care of us. We’re in their heart and they’re in our hearts.” Here on summer solstice eve, June 20, which is also my wedding anniversary, it is impossible to imagine how to reconcile this vast teeming-­with-­animals slice of wild America with oil rigs and pumping units. James says, “We have a right to be caribou people. We believe God put us here to take care of this part of the world—­Earth—­and we did well with our caribou.” For the Gwich’ins, the caribou is a powerful indicator species of both the health of the ecosystem and the vitality of the people. One more familiar indicator of overall environmental health in the West as well as the nation is the humble honeybee. Although an exotic species introduced to the Americas during the Columbian Exchange, the honeybee has become the foundation upon which much of the West’s floral health—­ and by extension human health—­is based. Because of their intimate and symbiotic relationship with plants, bees function as sensitive ecosystem monitors, a western version of the canary in a coal mine. In many ways The Last Frontier  305

they are, as journalist Hannah Nordhaus writes, “the glue that holds our agricultural system together.” Although they are not native to the Americas, their busy attention to flowering plants accounts for one out of every three mouthfuls of food Americans consume each day. In 2006 these essential insects began experiencing a catastrophic population decline—­30 to 90 percent mortality—­that scientists have labeled colony collapse disorder (ccd). This phenomenon, in which the entire worker bee population simply disappears despite the presence of an otherwise healthy hive structure (queen, comb, brood, honey), has proven to be a mystifying and maddening malady. The death toll is stunning: losses on the order of one-­third of all honeybee colonies nationwide every year. Scientists are stumped. Parasitic mites, pathogenic fungi, and pesticides, particularly a relatively new class of poisons known as neonicotinoids that attacks the central nervous system, are the primary culprits, but there are no definitive connections. As with bison demise and the Dust Bowl, the ultimate answer to the ccd riddle may not be one saboteur but many—­ the convergence of a perfect storm of stresses. What scientists do know is that since the 1940s the number of viable bee colonies in the nation has contracted by half. The plight of the honeybee may be symptomatic of our own environmental fate. The economics of plant and animal range shifts and disappearances are significant. In addition to food and water crises and fouled air no longer filtered by the planet’s biota, these changes threaten the very livelihoods of citizens and revenue generators in local, state, regional, national, and international economies. According to environmental scientist Claire Kremen, “Wild pollinators are least abundant in intensive monoculture production areas such as sunflowers, almonds and melons, where demand for pollination services is largest.” In California, honeybees make or break the $5 billion almond industry, by far the state’s most valuable agricultural export, and wild pollinators provide up to 39 percent of the state’s pollination services. Honey production itself provides nearly $6 million annually to Oregon. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that bees increase national crop values by at least $15 billion every year and $217 billion globally. Yet despite these pollinator demands, frustrated and disheartened commercial beekeepers 306  The Last Frontier

continue to hang up their veils—­nearly three-­quarters have called it quits since 2005. “It depresses the hell out of me,” lamented one. Native bees such as the American bumblebee, once the most common bee species in North America, the continent with the greatest bee species diversity, are also suffering. Bumblebees have disappeared completely from eight states, half of which are in the West: Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon. Overall, their populations have decreased by nearly 90 percent in the twenty-­first century as a consequence of the usual suspects—­pesticides, disease, and habitat loss compounded by climate change—­in addition to competition from honeybees. That matters because bumblebees are twice as effective as honeybees at pollination, especially of plants native to the Americas. In an 1842 soliloquy atop his eponymous peak in the Wind Rivers, the explorer John C. Frémont marveled at the tenacity of the “humble-­bee” he encountered there, invoking it as a symbol of the nation’s manifest destiny: “a solitary pioneer to foretell the advance of civilization.” On our Hulahula journey, more than 150 years later, these busy native pollinators have been our near-­constant companions, buzzing among the profusion of low-­growing alpine spring flowers. Pollinator health is directly connected to human health. Quite simply, pollen season now begins sooner, lasts longer, and produces more pollen. By comparison to the 1990s, for example, pollen season starts twenty days earlier and last ten days longer—­a full month of added health effects—­and pollen counts have increased more than 20 percent. According to biologist William Anderegg, “The main finding there is that climate change was far and away the dominant factor for pollen season length.” Interestingly, locally produced honey naturally alleviates many pollen allergy symptoms. Anecdotal evidence shows that as bees collect pollen spores and nectar from the plants that make people sneeze and wheeze, they transfer small amounts into their honey, which triggers an immune response, similar to a vaccine, in some sufferers. No bees means more sneeze.

Summer solstice and we are in sight of the Arctic Ocean. Today we travel through the white-­blue ice walls that soar alongside our slicing river. We stop on this blindingly bright day to marvel at the frozen wonder—­so The Last Frontier  307

foreign to an Arizona-­born girl—­and commune with this vital life force of the far north. The rapidly melting ice is also a beautiful and sobering reminder that things are becoming unstuck on our planet. The truth is: what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Earth Overshoot Day is an ecological footprint indicator that utilizes a year-­long calendar to identify the date on which human consumption of ecological services and resources “overshoots” the planet’s capacity for regeneration. It’s a rather ingenious, comprehendible sustainability index. Ideally, Earth Overshoot Day would fall on December 31. In the first edition of Losing Eden, I marveled that “in 2015, August 13 marked ‘Earth Overshoot Day.’ . . . It is the earliest on record.” In 2022 Earth Overshoot Day came on July 28. In other words, in just seven years, we’ve lost more than two weeks of rebound potential for the earth. It now would take 1.7 earths to make us sustainable consumers. As recently as 1970, Earth Overshoot Day was December 23. For the United States, the statistics are even more grim. If all the world lived and consumed like the United States, Earth Overshoot Day would fall on March 13. In other words, just to sate our national demands would require five earths! We’ve only got one. Clearly, we are moving in the wrong direction. We must move the date.

June 22, Day 8 on the water, and we have flushed out of the mountains and onto the Arctic Coastal Plain at last. The scale of the landscape is impossible to comprehend, and its most astonishing feature is the utter lack of visible human impact. No fences, no cows, no buildings, no utility poles, no oil wells. Occasionally a high plane leaves a polar-­route contrail across our endless blue sky, and sometimes a small Cessna servicing the coast gives us and our caribou companions a wing-­waggle salute, but otherwise, we are ten people in two boats and a few tents in the middle of the vast anwr. I realize I am extremely grateful that these big, empty-­ of-­us places endure in the twenty-­first century, but for how much longer? Global commitment to sustainability culminated in a un Climate Change Conference known as cop21. At that summit, held in 2015, 196 countries negotiated the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to less than 3.6°F (2°C) compared to preindustrial levels. The model for the world? California. 308  The Last Frontier

A western state with an economy that, if it were a country, would be the fifth-largest on the planet, California is at the vanguard of renewable energy development. As Paris delegate and state senator Kevin de León (D-­Los Angeles) explained, “California’s example shows that climate action can be an engine for broadly shared economic prosperity.” When the Paris signees met again in 2019, however, they faced the reality that not only had countries failed to halt their emissions but the two biggest polluters—­the United States and China—­had actually increased theirs. If this rate of greenhouse gas emissions continues, the report forecast, a 2.7°F (1.5°C) rise would occur as soon as 2040. That would be sufficient to inundate much of the world’s coastlines, where 40 percent of the global population currently lives, and intensify other climate change consequences such as catastrophic storms, drought, and the torrential downpours that exacerbate western erosion. In spite of these dire potential consequences, in 2020, the Donald Trump administration pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, an action then reversed by the incoming administration of Joe Biden in 2021. In late 2021, world leaders reconvened at the annual un Climate Change Conference (cop26), and participants committed to enhanced ambition toward mitigating climate change. To this end, leaders of more than one hundred countries encompassing approximately 85 percent of the world’s forests, agreed to end deforestation by 2030. More than eighty countries signed a global methane pledge to cut emissions by 30 percent by the end of the decade. The U.S. and European leaders said that tackling this potent greenhouse gas is crucial to keeping warming limited to 2.7°F (1.5°C). Another significant cop26 pledge saw six auto makers, including Ford and General Motors, and thirty countries commit to eliminating new gas-­and diesel-­ powered automobiles by 2040. These six corporations represent approximately one-­quarter of global sales. Unfortunately, however, the United States, China, and Japan declined to join the pledge, although California and Washington State gave their signatures. And near the end of the summit, forty-­six countries pledged to phase out coal, although once again the United States and China, along with India, were not among them. If we are truly committed to moving the Earth Overshoot Date—­and that really is not an option—­this must change. Although home to only 4 percent of the world’s The Last Frontier  309

population, the United States produces 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet developing nations, particularly those in the Southern Hemisphere, are most likely to endure the worst effects of the climate crisis, despite the small amount they contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. In the lead-­up to cop26, the research organization that hosts the Earth Overshoot Day website launched a #MoveTheDate campaign that featured “100 Days of Possibility: There’s No Benefit in Waiting.” Every day, starting July 29—­Earth Overshoot Day for 2021—­introduced tangible actions, some big and some small, to bring about real change. The site also offers an environmental footprint calculator, which lets people see how even simple changes in lifestyle can have positive, meaningful effects. On a larger scale, there are numerous, heroic climate intervention strategies underway, including various solar radiation modifications; geoengineering, which calls for injecting sulfur into the lower atmosphere to produce global cooling; and direct air capture devices that pull carbon out of the air through a giant fan and chemical bonding process. The more quickly we effect planetary cooling, the greater the environmental and social impacts. To be clear, none of these is a true solution—­each is more of a BandAid rather than a cure—­but it is where we are at this critical moment for our planet. As discussed in chapter 2, for example, even the Great Dying in the Americas triggered by European first contact, which removed human stewardship and resulted in secondary regrowth across about a Texas-­sized 1 percent of the Western Hemisphere landmass, only generated .27°F (.15°C) of atmospheric cooling. The scale of global warming is daunting.

It is Days 9 and 10 of our trip, and I am in a contemplative mood. It is first a slow day of paddling down an increasingly wide, shallow, braided river against a strong headwind before we pull out to camp and then portage the gear overland to the Okpilak River, which better aligns with our pick-­up spot in the Beaufort Sea. The sparkling sunny days have deteriorated into 40°F driving rain, and we all huddle in our fabric igloos to try and escape the weather. Here in this remote, suddenly gray and howling world, the furiously flapping tent incessantly reinforces just how small and incredibly vulnerable we actually are.

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As we move forward in the twenty-­first century and confront the effects of our long-­term exploitation of the planet, western aridity, particularly in the context of climate change, will force us to confront the myth of inexhaustibility. Someone recently asked climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe if she believed in climate change. “I don’t believe in climate change,” she said. “Belief doesn’t come into it; scientific verification does. Gravity doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, but if you step off a cliff, you’re going to go down.” She remains relentlessly optimistic. At a Utah Climate Week kick-­ off event in October 2021, Hayhoe reminded everyone that “it’s not about saving the planet—­the actual planet will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone. It’s about saving us.”

Oil extraction is what menaces anwr. It is June 25, Day 11 of our trip, and we have reached the northern tip of North America and the Beaufort Sea. We are camped on the shore looking out at walls and floating chunks of ice peppered with seals. The nearest thing to the north is the pole. Our last day on the river has been a bony slog that peters out into a wide mud delta. In camp that night, our eternally good-­natured river guide, Kevin McDermott, a.k.a. “Thirsty,” a western Colorado descendant of hard-­rock miners who married his high school sweetheart and stayed in his small hometown, gives an eloquent and emotional plea that we take this gift we have been given—­a nwr—­and do everything in our power to protect it. Protecting anwr means confronting and overcoming our oil addiction. In 1980, when Congress created anwr, it reserved the possibility of authorizing, at a later date, oil and gas development in a vast 1.5-­million-­acre undesignated-­ wilderness swath on the Arctic Coastal Plain in the heart of anwr. It is known as the 1002 (“ten-­oh-­two”) Area. The 1002 Area encompasses much of the Porcupine caribou calving grounds. As Sarah James explains, it is the “only place that porcupine caribou could have their calf safely, quiet, private and clean, and every birth needs that. Everybody knows that noise from oil drilling and industrial development drives these animals away. They’re not able to deliver their offspring anywhere else. They can’t do it on the foothills—­there’s predators there. They can’t do it on the mountain—­it’s

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40. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Map by Amber Bell.

too cold. So, the only place is that one small coastal area up in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” In 2019, lamenting that “for 40 years this country was unable to touch” the potential oil reserves in the 1002 Area, President Trump pried it open in the name of “energy dominance” and conducted a lease sale in January 2021 to begin drilling. Fortunately, there were few takers, and the new president, Joe Biden, swiftly issued an Inauguration Day executive order halting new Arctic drilling, which he reinforced in June by suspending all drilling leases issued by the previous administration. For some perspective on what this activity might have done to anwr, one need only look west of anwr’s 1002 Area, to Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, covering more 312  The Last Frontier

than two hundred thousand acres and originally containing approximately twenty-­five billion barrels of oil. It is pockmarked by crude production.

On Day 12, June 26, we wade through the Beaufort Sea, pushing our boats to the island rendezvous with the bush planes that will take us back to our first shower in two weeks. As we fly back home, soaring over this hauntingly beautiful land that I have come to love in a primal way, I can’t help feeling like an astronaut returning from space. I see the West, my West, our West, with clear eyes and renewed commitment. If collective human action can slow the emission of climate-­warming greenhouse gases, we have reason to be hopeful; much like the effects of quitting smoking, the positive consequences appear almost immediately and improve the longer healthy behavior continues. This means, however, that we are going to have to confront our dependency on fossil fuels, one of our most unsustainable practices and the greatest single contributor to climate change and runaway global warming. As we industrialized, fossil fuels were a low-­hanging, easy fruit, and the abundance and relative value of resources such as coal and oil allowed accelerated development and the economic miracle that was our twentieth-­century leap to superpower status. But the “at what cost” question reminds us that this kind of rampant development is unsustainable. The burning of fossil fuels for heat and energy is the largest source of global greenhouse gases. Coal accounts for the largest share—­40 percent of those emissions, while oil is second at 32 percent. As one un climate scientist, who argues that coal as an electricity source must decline from this level to a mere 1 to 7 percent by 2050, concludes, “There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal.” The West’s addiction to automobiles as the only “fix” to its urban sprawl problem has led to the voracious consumption of fossil fuels at all levels of production and use, as well as to the toxic spewing of exhaust that accelerates global warming. The single most significant environmental action an individual can take is to drive a fuel-­efficient car. Hybrid and electric vehicles are a fine solution so long as the electricity comes from renewable energy sources and not coal-­fired electric plants, as it still does now for many in the West. Yes, there will be economic repercussions as the economy shifts away The Last Frontier  313

from coal. The at-­what-­cost analysis will have to include financial support for coal mining regions to retool and retrain employees—­the spotted owl versus timber crisis in the Pacific Northwest provides powerful lessons for both how and how not to implement those kinds of changes. And researchers are developing new cost-­effective and carbon-­friendly ways to convert existing coal into carbon fiber for use in manufacturing. If we’re serious about moving Earth Overshoot Day back to December 31, we’re going to have to kick the coal habit. So what kind of technology will we have to embrace? The answer is greener, nonfossil fuel–­based clean energy: solar, wind, and geothermal. According to un reports, global reliance on renewable energy must increase from its current 20 percent of the electricity mix today to as much as 67 percent by 2050 in order to stay below 2.7°F of warming. In late 2019, for example, Heliogen, a clean energy startup backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, achieved a solar breakthrough. Using artificial intelligence (ai) and a field of mirrors, Heliogen created a solar oven capable of generating carbon-­free heat to replace industry-­consumed fossil fuels. As Heliogen’s founder, Bill Gross, argues, “We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and also not make the co 2 emissions. And that’s really the holy grail.” Indeed. Cement production alone accounts for 7 percent of global co 2 emissions, and according to Heliogen, concentrated solar energy can create the high heat that this and other industries such as steel and glass require. And sunlight is free. Heliogen’s “extremely clever” ambition is to create “green” hydrogen at scale. “That’s a game-­changer,” says Gross. Are there trade-­offs? Clearly. Already, though, in much of the world, solar and wind power is cheaper than coal and gas. And the West is at the vanguard of alternative fuels development; given the clear skies in this region, it only makes sense to replace something so damaging to our environment as coal with something so natural as the sun and wind. In the West, a sustainable future means that cities must incentivize green building projects, public transportation, recycling, environmentally appropriate landscaping, wise water use, renewable energy, and citizen education. Voters must demand responsive and responsible local, state, and federal representation that prioritizes environmental health and sustainability. And 314  The Last Frontier

individuals must strive to shrink their personal ecological footprint by reducing consumption, driving less, limiting transatlantic flights, and practicing recycling, composting, and participatory democracy. Simple steps such as supporting local food growers, eliminating single-­use plastics, eating less meat and a more plant-­based diet, conserving water, and voting with personal spending dollars for sustainably produced items can produce profound, long-­term, positive results. Other possibilities include habitat restoration and preservation. Westerners can protect the birds and the bees by providing them with water and bird nesting boxes, xeriscaping with native plants, eliminating pesticide use, and keeping cats indoors. Hobby beekeepers are helping sustain hives and pollination activities at the local level, which also creates a closer human bond with the natural environment even in the cities. The key is action. The future lies in environmental sustainability, in living within, not in spite of, the carrying capacity of the land. It is our realistic “geography of hope” in the West. For too long we have perfected the tragedy of the commons. We have exploited and commodified nature in the pursuit of ephemeral economic profits without considering long-­term ecological costs. The truth is that there is simply nothing in the world quite like anwr. And if we can’t make the kinds of changes necessary to save it, then what the hell can we save? As the writer Wallace Stegner so eloquently observed, Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

This is the true significance of the American West and the real value of its environmental history. It reveals that only a collective and cooperative The Last Frontier  315

41. We 10. The crew of our Hulahula River float trip in June 2019. From left to right: (back

row) Gene Gallegos, Christa Sadler, William deBuys, Deborah Harris, Kevin “Thirsty” McDermott, Dan Flores; (front row) Sara Dant, Don Usner, Erin Harris, Martha Peale. Photo by Don J. Usner. Used with permission of the photographer.

commitment to sustainability will enable us to survive and thrive. It is how we ten made it safely through our Arctic journey. It is the only way forward. Suggested Reading

Dan Baum, “Change of State,” Scientific American, August 2015, 64–­71. Tony Briscoe, “As Talks on Colorado River Water Falter, U.S. Government Imposes New Restrictions,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2022, available at https://​www​ .latimes​.com​/environment/​ story/​ 2022-​ 08-​ 16/​ colorado-​ river-​ basin-​ states-​ fail-​ to​ -reach​-drought​-agreement. Alan Buis, “Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth’s Climate,” Global Climate Change, nasa, February 27, 2020, available at https://​climate​.nasa​.gov​ /news​/2948​/milankovitch​-orbital​-cycles​-and​-their​-role​-in​-earths​-climate/. Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin, “Pando—­A Forest of One,” EarthDate, episode 162, aired May 28, 2020, available at https://w ​ ww.​ earthdate​ .org​/pando​-a​-forest​-of​-one.

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Lijing Cheng et al., “Record-­Setting Ocean Warmth Continued in 2019,” Advances in Atmospheric Sciences 37, no. 2 (February 2020): 137–­42. “The Climate Issue,” National Geographic 228, no. 5 (November 2015). William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–­90. William deBuys, “Phoenix in the Climate Crosshairs: We Are Long Past Coal Mine Canaries,” TomDispatch, March 14, 2013, available at https://​.tomdispatch​.com​/post​ /175661​/tomgram​%3a​_william​_debuys​%2c​_exodus​_from​_phoenix​/​#more. Earth Overshoot Day, available at https://​www​.overshootday​.org/. Daysha Eaton, “Sarah James: Fighting for What’s Sacred in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture, October 12, 2020, available at https://​crcc​.usc​.edu​/sarah​-james​-fighting​-for​-whats​ -sacred​-in​-the​-arctic​-national​-wildlife​-refuge/. Matt Egan, “Secretive Energy Startup Backed by Bill Gates Achieves Solar Breakthrough,” cnn Online, November 19, 2019, available at https://​www​.cnn​.com​ /2019​/11​/19​/business​/heliogen​-solar​-energy​-bill​-gates​/index​.html. Jared Farmer, “This Was the Place: The Making and Unmaking of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 185–­93. Christopher Flavelle, “As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces an ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb,’” New York Times, June 9, 2022, available at https://​www​.nytimes​ .com​/2022​/06​/07​/climate​/salt​-lake​-city​-climate​-disaster​.html. John C. Frémont, “A Report on an Exploration of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers,” in The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 7–­79. Christian S. Harrison, “A New Regional Paradigm: The Colorado River Basin Authority,” in All the Water the Law Allows: Las Vegas and Colorado River Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 187–­96. Katharine Hayhoe, “Section 4: We Can Fix It,” in Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (New York: One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2021), 131–­91. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Global Warming of 1.5°C,” October 6, 2018, available at https://​www​.ipcc​.ch​/sr15/. Intergovernmental Science-­Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, “un Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction

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Rates ‘Accelerating,’” May 6, 2019, available at https://​www​.un​.org​/sustainable development​/blog​/2019​/05​/nature​-decline​-unprecedented​-report/. Ferris Jabr, “The Social Life of Forests: Trees Appear to Communicate and Cooperate through Subterraneano Networks of Fungi; What Are They Sharing with One Another?,” New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2020, available at https://​ www​.nytimes​.com/​ interactive/​ 2020/​ 12/​ 02/​ magazine​/tree​-communication​-my corrhiza​.html. Jennifer A. Kingson, “Portland Will Still Be Cool, but Anchorage May Be the Place to Be,” New York Times, September 22, 2014. Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (March 1, 2019): 13–­36, available at https://​www​ .sciencedirect​.com​/science​/article​/pii​/s0277379118307261. Leia Larsen, “Bark Beetle Research Shows Future Evolution of Utah Forests,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 7, 2014. Nadja Popovich, “How Severe Is the Western Drought? See for Yourself,” New York Times, June 11, 2021, available at https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/interactive​/2021​/06​ /11​/climate​/california​-western​-drought​-map​.html. Daniel deB. Richter, “The Accrual of Land Use History in Utah’s Forest Carbon Cycle,” Environmental History 14, no. 3 ( July 2009): 527–­42. Jim Robbins, “How Long before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years,’” New York Times, September 16, 2019, available at https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/09​ /16​/science​/chinook​-salmon​-columbia​.html. Jedediah Rogers, “The Diminishing Pando Clone: History and Forest Management,” Utah Historical Quarterly blog, June 2, 2020, available at https://​history​.utah​.gov​ /the​-diminishing​-pando​-clone​-history​-and​-forest​-management​/​#​_ftn1. Sammy Roth, “At Paris Climate Talks, Nations Looking to California,” Desert Sun (Palm Springs ca), November 30, 2015, available at https://​www​.desertsun​.com​ /story​/news​/environment​/2015​/11​/14​/paris​-climate-​ talks-​ nations-​ look-​ california​ /75540806. Sara Sax, “Sowing Change: As Farmworkers Bear the Brunt of Climate Change, Activists in Washington Chart a New Path for Climate Justice,” High Country News, February 2022, 22–­37. Annie Sneed, “What Conservation Efforts Can Learn from Indigenous Communities,” Scientific American, May 29, 2019, available at https://w ​ ww.​ scientificamerican.​ com​ /article​/what​-conservation​-efforts​-can​-learn​-from​-indigenous​-communities/.

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Paul Stamets, 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World, filmed May 8, 2008, ted video, 18:17 min., available at https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​xi5frpv58tY. Wallace Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” Wallace Stegner to David E. Pesonen, December 3, 1960, available at Eco-­Speak, Stanford University, http://​web​.stanford​.edu​ /​~cbross​/Ecospeak​/wildernessletter​.html. John D. Sutter, “Climate Change: Why Beef Is the New suv,” cnn, September 29, 2015, available at https://​www​.cnn​.com​/2015​/09​/29​/opinions​/sutter​-beef​-suv​ -cliamte​-two​-degrees. Bryan Walsh, “The Plight of the Honeybee,” Time, August 19, 2013, 24–­31. Hannah Waters, “To See How Oil Drilling Would Transform the Arctic Refuge, Look Next Door to Prudhoe Bay,” Audubon, October 18, 2017, available at https://​www​ .audubon​.org​/news​/to​-see​-how​-oil​-drilling​-would​-transform​-arctic​-refuge​-look​ -next​-door​-prudhoe​-bay. Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’ Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 171–­85. Kyle Powys Whyte, “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and US Settler Colonialism,” in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change, ed. Char Miller and Jeffrey Crane (Louisville: University of Colorado Press, 2019), 320–­37. Michael Wines, “Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States,” New York Times, January 5, 2014. Also “States in Parched Southwest Take Steps to Bolster Lake Mead,” New York Times, December 17, 2014.

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Epilogue Our Lonely Planet

In 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi posed a deceptively simple question about extraterrestrial life to his lunch mates at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico: “Where is everybody?” In the vastness of the universe, he observed, with billions of other galaxies, some billions of years older than our own, there are almost certainly planets capable of supporting life. Surely at least some of them have experienced intellectual evolution sufficient to support interstellar travel; even earthbound humans are exploring these possibilities. If so, then extraterrestrial galactic colonization or visitation should take only a few tens of millions of years. Yet, as far as we know, no one has come. Why not? Are we alone? This inexplicable dilemma has become known as the Fermi Paradox. Scientists have spent the past several decades debating explanations for the Fermi Paradox. Hypotheses range from the simple—­we’re unique in all the universe—­to the bizarre—­there are aliens among us; we just don’t recognize them. But the theory that most focus on is some variation of the Great Filter, which argues that life, especially intelligent life, at some stage of development hits an evolutionary wall beyond which it can’t survive to engage in interstellar travel—­a developmental dead end. In the last half of the twentieth century, nuclear warfare seemed the mostly likely candidate for human self-­destruction on earth, but the real peril may be far more insidious: technological overreach. In other words, the rapid pace of resource extraction and consumption facili321

tated by ever-­improving technology may so imperil the ecological balance of the planet—­through global warming, species elimination, and food and water shortages—­that human extinction becomes inevitable. For centuries, human populations have transformed their natural environments through innovations such as the wheel, irrigation, and genetic modification, yet history is rife with examples of environmental overreach, as in ancient Mesopotamia or, more recently, in the American West, by the Ancestral Puebloans. Resource abundance devolved into resource scarcity and accompanying salinization of soils, deforestation, erosion, loss of species abundance, and exotic invasions. Time and again, when humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of their surrounding environment, they have paid with cultural decline and then scattered. But there is nowhere left on earth to scatter to today. Even the 2021 space shots by Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos (that included William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek) escaped earth for only a few moments, demonstrating that we are in fact inextricably bound to our big blue marble. Something is preventing interstellar travel; is it possible for a planet-­bound species to evolve technologically without destroying itself? The riddle of Fermi’s Paradox provides a powerful incentive for the West and the world to find a sustainable balance between environment, economy, and society. Climate change will continue to accelerate as the world’s population races toward a staggering 9.8 billion or more by 2050 (with more than 90 million in the American West). Humans have proved a remarkably successful species. In fact, archeology professor Curtis Marean has called us “the most invasive species of all.” Our population did not reach the 1 billion mark until the early 1800s. The second billion took 120 years. Yet, in the past 50 years, our numbers have more than doubled: 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998, 8 billion in 2022. How will we sustain the demands for clean air, clean water, healthy food, automobiles, refrigerators, and cell phones from such burgeoning numbers? We cannot. Global climate change and Earth Overshoot Day suggest that we have already significantly overburdened our planet’s atmosphere, oceans, and lands. In early 2020, another potential Great Filter candidate emerged with the novel coronavirus known as sars-­CoV-­2, which causes a complex illness 322 Epilogue

42. Earthrise. William Anders’s iconic photograph of the earth taken from Apollo 8 on

December 24, 1968, during the first mission to orbit the moon with onboard astronauts. Nature photographer Galen Rowell has called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Photo by William Anders. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

dubbed covid-­19. Within weeks, the virus had spread across the globe, giving the world a firsthand understanding of the kind of virgin-­soil epidemics that Indigenous Americans had experienced five hundred years earlier, albeit with less devastating consequences. covid-­19 is a zoonotic contact disease—­one that results from a virus that lives for an extended period in a nonhuman animal, in this case likely a bat, and then spills over into the human population. It perfectly reveals the close connection between people and nature. Charles Darwin had described this powerful linkage in his 1871 masterpiece The Descent of Man, although science writer David Quammen has summed it up most succinctly: “We are animals, too.” By late 2022, global covid-­19 Epilogue  323

deaths had exceeded 6.6 million, more than 1 million of which were in the United States, and new, more transmissible variants of the original virus were setting daily infection and hospitalization records even as scientists raced to develop effective vaccines. In his 2012 book Spillover, Quammen had eerily predicted just such an outbreak, but he admitted that “the only thing I was surprised by was how unprepared we were to deal with it.” For Quammen, overconsumption of natural resources lies at the heart of any pandemic: “We want it all? Okay, well, take this, too.” So, are we running headlong toward the Great Filter and an unfortunate rendezvous with Fermi’s Paradox? I’m willing to say “no” or at least “not yet.” The past is riven with potential Great Filters: the Pleistocene extinctions, disease epidemics, the near-­miss-­losses of bison, salmon, and wolves, global warfare, the Dust Bowl, nuclear fusion, hydraulic engineering, and now global climate change. The complex symbiotic relationship between humans and nature reveals that there has never been a “pristine myth” to which we should strive to return; the West as “Eden” has always been a false illusion, and it is time to lose this Edenic myth once and for all. Instead, the time has come for a new collective sustainability paradigm—­what I call a “triumph of the commons.” Just as no one person is responsible for environmental decline, no one person can hope to change the West’s—­or the planet’s—­environment. But when individuals act for the common good, rather than in pursuit of their own selfish interests, the results promise extraordinary dividends. There is reason to be hopeful. Despite the bitter divisions that pervade twenty-­first-­century national politics, for example, a strong majority of Americans actually supports clean energy development, carbon emissions reduction, and a national commitment to addressing global warming. In a 2021 survey of registered voters, almost 70 percent said “developing sources of clean energy should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress.” Huge majorities supported tax incentives and rebates to encourage energy efficiency, believed corporations should “do more to address global warming,” and approved of “transitioning the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to 100% clean energy by 2050.” One bipartisan option is carbon dividends. This strategy utilizes market incentives to fight climate change and creates a rare win-­win scenario 324 Epilogue

attractive to broad political coalitions by assessing a carbon price for the burning or consumption of fossil fuels with the goal of achieving net zero carbon pollution by 2050. In 2021 proposed congressional legislation outlined a process whereby fossil fuel extraction corporations would pay this carbon price like a tax (and likely pass it along to consumers) to the U.S. Treasury, which would amass the fees in a federal trust fund and then pay out monthly or quarterly dividends to all citizens. In effect this would offset higher prices, make the real costs of fossil fuels consumption more transparent (and hopefully distasteful), and directly reward those who consume less. In other words, an oil company might raise the price of unleaded gas to cover its carbon fees, but a consumer who drives an electric car powered by solar panels would realize a double bonus by earning the carbon dividend and not paying for the higher-­priced fossil fuel. In the United States, estimates suggest that about two-­thirds of Americans would ultimately receive more in dividends than they would pay in higher prices. Ideally, this carbon pricing not only reduces fossil fuel use but also incentivizes clean, renewable energy development and sustainable consumer consumption. Carbon dividends represent the possibility inherent in a cooperative “triumph of the commons.” Economist James Boyce argues that “carbon dividends are founded on the principle that nature’s gifts, in this case the atmosphere’s limited capacity to absorb emissions, belong in equal and common measure to all, not to corporations or governments. . . . Dividends pass the win-­win test for viable climate policy, bringing here-­ and-­now benefits today while protecting the planet for people tomorrow.” Here in this third decade of the twenty-­first century, two essential and interrelated things are also at stake if the United States is to continue to be a world leader in land and species conservation. We need to address the historical oversight that left our most spectacular wildlife setting, the Great Plains, with no grand game parks like those in Africa. And to do so, we need to reestablish a viable approach to large-­scale conservation that can work in these more politically charged times. As Frank Church and the New Conservation demonstrated, environmental stewardship was not and should not be a political issue; it should be neither left nor right, but simply American. Epilogue  325

43. The nonprofit American Prairie is the largest conservation effort in the lower forty-­

eight states. Situated along the Missouri River in central Montana’s shortgrass plains, this visionary project is an entirely modern conservation hybrid: a private endeavor built upon approximately 2.5 million acres of existing public lands in a region that otherwise has almost none. Photo by Dennis Linghor. Used with permission of American Prairie.

Interestingly, the center of the country offers just such a centrist and realistic New Conservation model: the nonprofit American Prairie (formerly American Prairie Reserve). As the largest conservation project in the lower forty-­eight states, it presents an exciting chance to re-­create a kind of American Serengeti in the Missouri River country of central Montana. This visionary project is an entirely modern conservation hybrid: a private endeavor built upon approximately 2.5 million acres of existing public lands in a region that otherwise has almost none. It is ecologically significant at scale. American Prairie’s goal is to purchase from willing sellers a sufficient number of ranches, joined to these public lands, to create a restored ecosystem larger than Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks combined. It’s a middle-­ground New Conservation effort designed to bridge the modern political divide and promote a collective “triumph of the commons” paradigm. Here’s how. Cooperative private-­federal-­tribal-­state management projects like American Prairie promise not only the restoration of historical landscapes and iconic North American animals but also the kind of bipartisan 326 Epilogue

conservation that once protected the nation’s original crown jewels as parks and monuments and made the United States the world’s leader in environmental protection. Make no mistake—­federally protected public lands are the foundation upon which any conservation project of a scale like that of American Prairie can be built. But American Prairie’s valuation of private enterprise and the free market attracts conservatives otherwise put off by big government and federal overreach. This New Conservation offers a rare political win-­win scenario: one that affirms Theodore Roosevelt’s historic commitment to federal land protection while effectively incorporating conservative private interests into a twenty-­first-­century model of consensus. If we think of our two major conservation accomplishments to date—­the so-­called “America’s best idea” in the creation of national parks at the turn of the twentieth century and the protection of wilderness and wild rivers at that century’s midpoint—­then perhaps the next logical “best idea” in this tradition is American Prairie in the twenty-­first century. Now is the time for action. The indomitable climate activist Greta Thunberg urges that “the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.” In the end, we all need clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment, which makes all of us environmentalists. Losing Eden is not only my valentine to the West but also my act of hope that we might yet learn the environmental lessons of the past lest we find ourselves the creators of our own Fermi Paradox Great Filter. Sustainability brought about by cooperation is essential to our survival, and the American West can lead the way. Indeed, as Wallace Stegner reminds us, “one cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.” As its environmental history attests, the West abides. Suggested Reading

Nick Bostrom, “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing,” mit Technology Review, May–­June 2008, 72–­77, available at www​ .nickbostrom​.com​/extraterrestrial​.pdf. Epilogue  327

James K. Boyce, “Carbon Dividends: A Win-­Win for People and for the Climate,” Scientific American, August 23, 2021, available at https://​www​.scientificamerican​ .com​/article​/carbon​-dividends​-a​-win​-win​-for​-people​-and​-for​-the​-climate/. Citizens Climate Lobby, Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, available at https://​energyinnovationact​.org/. “The Climate Issue,” National Geographic 228, no. 5 (November 2015). Joel E. Cohen, “Seven Billion,” New York Times, October 23, 2011. Ian Crawford, “Where Are They? Maybe We Are Alone in the Galaxy After All,” Scientific American 283, no. 1 ( July 2000): 38–­43. Count Us In—­Practical Action on Climate Change, available at https://​www​.count​ -us​-in​.org​/en​-gb/. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–­90. Charles Darwin, “The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form,” in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 21–­25. En-­r oads Interactive Climate Simulator, available at https://​en​-roads​.climate interactive​.org​/scenario​.html​?v​=​22​.3​.0. Jon Gertner, “The Search for Intelligent Life Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting,” New York Times, September 18, 2022. Elizabeth Howell, “Fermi Paradox: Where Are the Aliens?,” Space​.com, December 17, 2021, available at https://​www​.space​.com​/25325​-fermi​-paradox​.html. Anthony Leiserowitz et al., Politics and Global Warming, September 2021, Yale University and George Mason University (New Haven ct: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2021), available at https://​climatecommunication​.yale​ .edu/​ wp-​ content​/uploads​/2016​/01​/Politics​-and​-Global-​ Warming-​ Fall-​ 2015.​ pdf. Micah Maidenberg and Dave Cole, “Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here’s How Their Trips Differed,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2021, available at https://​www​.wsj​.com​/story​/photos​-richard​-branson​-and​-jeff​-bezos​-are​-going​ -to​-space​-heres​-how​-their​-trips​-will​-differ​-e04c32dd. K. K. Ottesen, “Greta Thunberg on the State of the Climate Movement,” Washington Post Magazine, December 27, 2021, available at https://​www​.washingtonpost​ .com​/magazine​/2021​/12​/27​/greta​-thunberg​-state​-climate​-movement​-roots​-her​ -power​-an​-activist/. David Quammen, “We Are Still in a Race against the Coronavirus,” New York Times, August 10, 2022. Also “And Then the Gorillas Started Coughing,” New York Times, 328 Epilogue

February 19, 2021. Also “Dinner at the Rat Farm,” in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York: Norton, 2012), 165–­208. Wallace Stegner, introduction to The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West (New York: Vintage Books, 2017). Greta Thunberg, “The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change,” ted talk, Stockholm, November 2018, available at https://​www​.ted​.com​/talks​ /greta_ ​ thunberg​_the​_disarming​_case​_to​_act​_right_ ​ now_ ​ on_ ​ climate_ ​ change​ ?language​=​en. Stewart L. Udall, “Notes on a Land Ethic for Tomorrow” and “Ecology and the Future,” in The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1988), 188–­91, 263–­70. Tim Urban, “The Fermi Paradox,” Huffington Post, updated December 6, 2017, available at https://​www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/the​-fermi​-paradox​_b​_5489415. Jeff Welsch, “Bozeman Author David Quammen Predicted ‘Scariest Virus on Earth’ 8 Years Ago,” Billings Gazette, April 5, 2020.

Epilogue  329

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. 306, 307; and railroads, 105–­6, 106, 114, 115; small/family farms, 71, 115, 163, 164, 166; Soil Conservation Service and, 181, 200–­202; Spanish/Mexican, 52, 60, 82, 85–­86; and species eradication, 118–­19, 125, 138; subsistence, 60, 105, 198; technology and, 106, 118; in wartime, 182, 198; water projects and, 163–­64, 167, 187–­88, 196–­97, 213, 295; and World War I, 162, 187, 197–­ 98. See also Colorado River Storage Project (crsp); irrigation; livestock; Neolithic Revolution; reclamation; water projects agriculture, Californian, 82–­83, 164, 196, 213, 218–­19; agribusiness and, 165, 188; threats to, 91, 156–­57, 196–­ 97, 225, 306; urban water use and, 165–­67 agriculture, Native, 10, 24, 82; alternatives to, 26; Ancestral Puebloan,

Abbey, Edward, 267, 278 Acomas, 54 Adams, Henry, 6 Africa, 17, 20, 173, 325; and the Columbian Exchange, 42; European trade with, 41, 45; human origins in, 10–­11. See also Serengeti, American agribusiness, 105–­6, 115, 163, 164–­65, 187–­88, 298 agriculture, 80–­81, 82–­83, 148, 251, 285, 304; and American ideals, 71, 108, 128, 146, 163; bees and, 306–­7; and conservation, 200–­201, 276; Department of, 160, 306; the Dust Bowl and, 198–­99, 200, 202; eastern, 105, 106; exotic species and, 83, 95, 114, 138–­39; federal funding and, 164, 187, 197, 203, 270; on the Great Plains, 114–­15, 118, 119; Mormon, 83–­84, 86, 87, 298; Neolithic, 23, 30; nonirrigated, 31, 108, 114, 162, 198; pesticides and, 233, 246–­47, 248, 256, 331

agriculture, Native (cont.) 28–­30, 85; fire use in, 33–­34, 47, 48; horse culture and, 58, 62; the Neolithic Revolution and, 16, 18, 20, 21–­23, 22, 28; Plains Indian, 31, 60, 63, 138, 149; Puebloan, 56, 190, 191, 192; women and, 50, 51, 60 air pollution, 187, 211, 248, 256, 306, 315; cars and, 187, 225, 256; dust, 167; ozone, 225; smog, 187, 225 Alaska, 12, 52, 68, 161, 200, 263; Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 263, 291–­ 92, 292, 294, 295, 312, 312; salmon in, 25, 254, 305 Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, 269–­ 70, 270 American Prairie, 325–­26, 326 American Revolution, 68, 69, 266 Anasazis. See Ancestral Puebloans Ancestral Puebloans, 28–­30, 29, 85, 172, 296, 322; environmental cost and, 30. See also New Mexico Andalex, 277–­78 Anderegg, William, 307 Anders, William, 323 Andrus, Cecil, 265 anthropology, 11, 12, 61; Native, post-­ contact, 73, 102; Native, pre-­contact, 13, 15, 16, 17–­18, 23–­24, 33 Antiquities Act, 153, 169, 276 Apaches, 31, 32, 54–­56 Arapahos, 31, 93, 120, 140 archeology, 19, 26, 102, 322; Grand Staircase–­Escalante National Monument and, 277; in the Great Basin, 27, 31; and Native remains, 15–­16;

paleoarcheology, 12, 13, 13–­14, 16, 18; and water projects, 197 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr), 263, 291–­92, 292, 294, 295, 299, 312, 316; 1002 area, 311–­13, 312; oil and natural gas in, 294, 295, 305, 308, 311, 312–­13; river trip, days 1–­7, 297, 300–­301, 303, 307–­8; river trip, days 8–­12, 308, 310, 311, 313. See also Hulahula River aridity, 77, 80, 103, 277; climate change and, 26, 294, 298, 311; and early colonization, 68, 95; groundwater and, 196, 202, 221; the Homestead Act and, 108, 114–­15; John Wesley Powell and, 101, 108, 110–­13, 111, 121; Las Vegas and, 218–­19, 284; line of, 31, 115; Mormon response to, 84, 85, 86, 112; water projects and, 138, 146, 147, 165–­67, 218–­19, 298; western, 1, 2–­3, 24, 203. See also deserts; reclamation aridity, Native response to, 10, 21, 54–­55, 56, 148, 190; irrigation, 29, 34, 85 Arizona, 53, 82, 183, 225, 276, 298, 308; and atomic testing, 210, 210; and the Colorado River Compact, 195; dam projects in, 179, 215; and Lake Mead, 189, 296–­97; Native peoples of, 28, 34, 190; species loss in, 136, 137, 205, 281, 285; wildfires in, 302. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Phoenix Army Corps of Engineers, 165, 187, 192, 213, 216 Ashton, Nick, 14 Ashworth, William, 216

332 Index

Askins, Renee, 282 Astor, John Jacob, 75, 76 Atomic Energy Commission, 208–­9, 257. See also power: nuclear atomic testing, 208–­11, 209, 210. See also uranium automobiles. See cars Aztecs, 46, 52 Babbitt, Bruce, 4, 280, 281 beans, 21–­23, 22, 28, 42 bears, 44, 87, 92, 119, 132; extirpation campaigns, 136, 137; grizzly, 74, 136, 283; short-­faced, 17 Beaufort Sea, 291, 292, 294, 295, 299, 310, 311, 313 beavers, 68–­69, 283; ecological importance of, 78–­79; fur trade and, 62, 72, 76–­78, 95, 136; in Native culture, 62, 77; and Native market participation, 62, 76, 77; population decline of, 79, 95, 281; prehistoric, 17, 78 bees, 44, 140, 305, 306–­7, 315 Beringia, 12, 17, 18, 20, 42, 45 Beschta, Robert, 283 Biden, Joe, 309, 312 big game. See megafauna bighorn sheep, 17, 31, 136, 140, 143 Bingham Canyon, 183–­84, 194. See also mining: open-­pit biodiversity, 17, 102, 119, 202, 303–­4, 307; and the Center for Biological Diversity, 282, 296 bioregionalism, 110–­13, 111 bipartisanship, 235–­36, 249, 256, 324–­25, 327–­28; and the Land and Water

Conservation Fund, 239, 240–­41, 242, 244; loss of, 262, 263. See also political polarization birds, 74, 131, 196, 304; conservation of, 153, 158–­59, 237, 268–­69, 315; hunting of, 87, 157–­58; plume trade, 157, 158–­59 bison, 30, 74, 93–­94, 114, 145; competition with cattle, 107, 118, 136; economic value, 30, 60, 93, 94, 129–­ 30, 138; effect on native grasses, 119, 138–­39; European hunting of, 94, 118, 129–­30, 131, 144; Native culture and, 58–­60, 79, 92–­93, 94, 131; Paleolithic, 17, 18, 28; place in food chain, 135–­36, 281, 283; pre-­European hunting of, 18, 31–­33, 77; pre-­European populations, 32, 42, 68–­69 bison conservation, 130, 137, 159–­60, 171; American Prairie, 325–­26, 326; captive breeding, 131, 159, 173; federal, 157–­58, 159, 173, 304; Pablo-­Allard herd, 159, 173 bison population decline, 135, 144, 157–­ 58, 200, 324; and competition with cattle, 107, 118–­19, 136; and competition with horses, 59–­60, 118–­19; cultural cost of, 131; fur trade and, 62, 118–­19, 129–­31; multiple causes of, 93–­95, 118–­19, 131, 306; and Native subsistence, 63, 121, 130–­31, 148, 149; near extinction, 121, 129, 149, 324 Bisti Badlands Wilderness Area, 263, 264 Bitterroot National Forest, 252–­53 Black Elk, 149

Index  333

Blackfeet, 31, 58, 143; and beavers, 77; and bison, 32, 77, 131 BlueRibbon Coalition, 271–­72, 280 bobcats, 87, 137, 140 Bonneville Dam, 192–­93, 194 Boone and Crockett Club, 157, 173 Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam), 180, 194, 213, 284; comparison with Grand Coulee, 193, 197; environmental cost, 188, 189–­90; Franklin Roosevelt and, 180, 188–­89; and Navajo dispossession, 179–­80, 191–­92, 212. See also Lake Mead Boyce, James, 325 British Columbia, 13–­14, 15, 25, 305 Bronx Zoo, 157–­58 Brower, David, 215, 248–­49 Brown, Bruce, 132 buffalo. See bison Buffalo Bill. See Cody, William (Buffalo Bill) Buffalo Bird Woman, 138 buffalo jump, 18, 32 bunchgrass, 114, 139, 198 Bundy, Ammon, 268–­69 Bundy, Cliven, 268–­69 Bureau of Biological Survey. See Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 179, 190–­92. See also Collier, John Bureau of Land Management (blm), 200, 201, 264, 267, 277; Bundy confrontation with, 268–­69; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266, 267–­68. See also Taylor Grazing Service Bureau of Reclamation, 163–­64, 187–­88, 193, 197, 213, 249; and the Army

Corps of Engineers, 165, 187, 192, 213. See also reclamation Bush, George W., 264 Caddos, 52, 56 California, 24, 158, 181, 207, 284; car culture in, 186–­87, 220–­21, 225–­ 26; Central Valley of, 91, 165, 188; Central Valley Project in, 196–­97, 297–­98; and the Colorado River Compact, 195–­96, 296–­97; and the Colorado River Storage Project, 213, 218–­19; drought in, 296–­97, 298; environmental degradation in, 91, 92, 140, 308–­9; environmental protection and, 285, 308–­9; gold mining in, 67, 88–­91, 90, 107, 109, 140, 142; Native peoples of, 25, 26, 33, 53, 89, 140; oil in, 140, 185, 224; Owens Valley of, 166, 166–­67; railroads in, 105, 107, 196; salmon in, 92, 140; Spanish colonization of, 42, 52, 54, 57, 139; species threats in, 91–­92, 138, 139–­40, 273, 304, 306; suburbanization in, 220–­21, 222; timber cutting in, 91, 143; U.S. acquisition of, 82, 89; water projects in, 92, 165–­68, 166, 188–­89, 195, 196–­97, 298–­99; white migration to, 68, 74, 82, 88, 92–­93, 100, 200; wildfire in, 300, 301, 302. See also agriculture, Californian; Frémont, John C.; Los Angeles; Yosemite National Park Calloway, Colin, 26, 28 Canada, 30, 68, 80, 131, 211, 281; bison and, 130, 159–­60, 173; timber cutting in, 273, 275

334 Index

canals, 28, 86, 139, 163, 165, 197. See also irrigation; water projects cancer, 183, 210–­11, 212, 222 capitalism, 84; definition, 61, 62, 131; European introduction of, 3, 50; global, 79, 133, 135, 136; and post–­ Civil War expansion, 100, 101, 155; and resource extraction, 109, 116, 133, 147, 157, 165, 199; v. subsistence, 145, 155. See also economics; markets carbon, 47, 310, 314, 324–­25 carbon dioxide (co 2), 47, 48, 293, 300, 314 carbon dividends, 324–­25 Caribbean, 42, 46, 52 caribou, 291–­92, 292, 294, 308, 311; Gwich’ins and, 292, 305; migration of, 299, 300, 303 cars, 186–­87, 223–­24, 226–­27; alternatively fueled, 309, 325; automotive industry, 183, 186, 224–­26, 322; environmental cost of, 219–­20, 225–­26; and interstate development, 219–­20, 226; and pollution, 187, 224–­26, 256, 313, 315; and suburbanization, 220–­ 21, 222, 223, 313 Carson, Kit, 75, 76 Carson, Rachel, 35; Silent Spring, 9, 222, 246–­47, 248, 304 Cascade Mountains, 24–­25, 27 Catholicism, Roman, 41, 49, 55, 81; missions, 52–­54, 53, 55, 57, 81. See also Christianity cattle, 43, 80, 108, 109, 211, 308; competition with native species, 118–­19, 125, 131, 136; as disease vectors, 47, 93; drives of, 107, 146; eastern market

for, 100, 105, 106–­7, 121; environmental cost of, 118–­19, 131, 139, 191, 198; federal agencies and, 161, 268–­69; the Great Die-­Up and, 99–­100, 119, 120, 157; and Mormon settlement, 85, 87; as Old West symbol, 119, 120, 143–­44, 284; railroads and, 105, 121; starvation of, 56, 99, 119, 120. See also livestock; overgrazing; ranching; wolves: extermination campaigns against Cayuses, 53, 58 Central Valley Project (cvp), 196–­97, 297–­98 Chaco Canyon, 28–­29, 29, 296 Chaco Culture National Historical Park, 29, 169, 171, 263 Cheyennes, 58, 93, 120, 140 Chicano groups, 220, 269–­70 China, 41, 75–­76, 309 Chinook salmon. See salmon, Chinook Christianity, 41, 48, 49, 54, 125, 155; and land use, 84–­85, 261; missionaries, 53, 80, 82; Puritans, 81, 82. See also Catholicism, Roman; Mormons Church, Frank, 233–­39, 234, 242–­43, 243, 244–­46, 256–­58, 261–­62, 265; and the Endangered American Wilderness Act, 255–­56; and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, 239, 240–­45, 243; and the National Wilderness Preservation System, 238, 255, 256; and New Conservation, 233, 247–­48, 251, 254, 257, 325; and the U.S. Forest Service, 251–­56; and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 236, 245–­46, 247. See also Endangered Species Act;

Index  335

Church, Frank (cont.) Environmental Protection Agency; Wilderness Act Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints. See Mormons civilization, 19, 68, 153; development and, 83, 127, 128, 146, 147, 150; European, 49, 103; and perception of Native culture, 49, 125, 127, 128, 144; and progress, 83, 95, 103, 115, 125 Civil War, 100, 104–­5, 110, 120, 121, 129, 136; veterans of, 101, 144 Clark, William, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 132 clear-­cutting, 117, 135, 141, 251–­55, 252, 275. See also Forest Service, U.S.; timber cutting Cliff, Edward, 254, 255 climate change, 311, 324; acceleration of, 286, 292–­93, 322; carbon dividends and, 324–­25; challenges of, 291, 293, 294, 303; the Great Dying and, 47–­48; greenhouse gases, 293, 309, 310, 313; oceans and, 293, 309, 322; pollinators and, 307; pollution and, 225; prehistoric, 14, 17, 18; and tree populations, 299–­300, 302; un conferences on, 308–­9; West as vanguard of, 1, 5, 297, 298, 299. See also global warming Clinton, Bill, 264, 276, 277, 278, 280 Clovis culture, 16, 17, 18, 28, 32. See also New Mexico coal, 105, 109, 309, 313, 314; mining on public lands, 263, 265, 276, 277–­78. See also fossil fuels Coast Salish, 25, 51, 132. See also Salish Cody, William (Buffalo Bill), 144–­45, 146–­47, 149, 157, 171

collapse, environmental, 9, 133, 199, 299; animal species and, 17, 92, 119, 206, 305, 306 Collier, John, 179–­80, 190, 191–­92 colonization: early European, 41, 44, 48–­49, 51–­52, 63, 135; Euro-­ American, 68, 69, 80–­81, 257. See also Mormons; settlement; Spain colony, West as, 4, 100, 136, 141, 146, 155, 207; modern era, 266 Colorado, 110, 137, 188, 198, 224, 299; and the Colorado River Compact, 195; Dinosaur National Monument, 213–­15, 248, 263; Echo Park, 194, 213–­15, 218; mining in, 107, 208, 311; Native peoples of, 28, 30, 58, 120; timber loss in, 116, 303; wildfires in, 301, 302 Colorado River, 110, 189, 202, 294; climate change and, 195–­96, 296–­97; damming and, 179, 180, 188, 189, 194. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Lake Mead Colorado River Compact (crc), 194, 195–­96, 213, 218, 294 Colorado River Storage Project (crsp), 213, 215–­17, 218, 294 Colter, John, 73, 75 Columbian Exchange, 42–­43, 43, 44, 82, 305. See also Columbus, Christopher; diseases Columbia River, 30, 74, 75, 78, 134, 211; water projects on, 192–­94, 202, 216, 217, 218 Columbia River salmon, 25, 50, 131–­32, 133, 134, 245; water projects and, 192–­ 93, 216, 218. See also salmon

336 Index

Columbus, Christopher, 10, 15, 34, 40–­41, 127. See also Columbian Exchange; diseases; Spain Comanches, 58–­59, 60, 92, 93, 140, 159 commodification, 60, 120, 158; of bison, 79, 129, 131, 138; of land, 49–­50, 70, 70–­71, 205, 207, 227, 250; of natural resources, 63, 138, 155, 207, 315; of salmon, 133, 138, 217; of timber, 118, 161, 302; of water, 86, 164, 189, 202, 245, 298; of wolves, 136, 137. See also fur trade; markets; timber cutting commodities, merchantable, 52, 60, 61, 75–­76, 79 commons, 139, 325; bison as, 131, 147; prairie as, 94, 200; salmon as, 132, 135, 147; timber as, 142, 147; triumph of, 324, 325, 326; water as, 5, 85–­86, 196, 197 commons, public land as, 155, 169, 174, 201, 226; Frank Church and, 235, 237; and timber cutting, 142, 251–­53 commons, tragedy of, 4–­5, 107, 121, 227, 315; conservation and, 142, 160, 173–­ 74; environmental cost and, 5, 147, 197; and market demand, 147, 196, 197; the Navajo Project and, 191–­92; species depletion and, 94, 135. See also Hardin, Garrett commons, triumph of, 324, 325, 326 Cone, Joseph, 131 conservation, 85, 155, 237, 239, 304, 325; the closed frontier and, 141, 143; conflict with employment, 239, 273–­74; definition, 156; and elitism, 157, 170–­ 71; environmental consequences of, 183, 190, 193, 197, 246; federal protection and, 118, 130, 169, 237, 263,

282; and forests, 156, 160–­61, 184, 252; and future resource use, 156–­58, 160–­ 61, 162, 170; “greatest good” ethos, 103, 161, 166–­67, 183, 184, 246; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 167–­68, 170; and hunting, 157, 170, 173; the Land and Water Conservation Fund and, 239, 240–­45, 243; the League of Conservation Voters and, 251; and Native dispossession, 171, 179–­80, 191–­92; New Conservation, 233, 247–­48, 251, 254, 257, 325–­27; and public opinion, 207, 228, 247, 251, 258; and salmon, 132, 133–­34; scientific, 103, 142, 156, 158; the Soil Conservation Service and, 181, 200–­202; and support for national parks, 168–­69; of water, 163, 167–­68, 189, 201, 216, 297, 315; Wise Use co-­optation of, 262, 270–­71. See also Bureau of Reclamation; Church, Frank; Forest Service, U.S.; Johnson, Lyndon; Muir, John; natural resources, conservation of; Pinchot, Gifford; reclamation; Roosevelt, Franklin; Roosevelt, Theodore conservation in Progressivism, 157; reclamation and, 166–­67, 187; twinned with preservation, 156, 171, 173–­74; use of science, 158–­59 conservation v. preservation, 50, 153, 156, 160, 252, 257; compromise and, 162, 169, 170, 236–­37, 241, 243; conflicts under Watt, 262–­63; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; northern spotted owls and, 272–­76. See also Church, Frank; political polarization; Sagebrush Rebellion; Wise Use

Index  337

cop21, 308 cop26, 309, 310 copper, 105, 109, 182, 183, 184 corn, 23, 25, 26, 120; in the European diet, 42, 55, 56; importance to Native peoples, 20–­21, 28, 30, 55–­56; and “three sisters” farming, 21–­23, 22, 31; in U.S. agriculture, 106, 114, 182 Corps of Discovery, 72–­74, 73, 75. See also Clark, William; Lewis, Meriwether cotton, 42, 81, 106, 185, 218–­19 cougars. See mountain lions (cougars) covid-­19, 46, 47, 285–­86, 322–­24 cowboys, 107, 145–­46; as Old West symbol, 100, 143–­45, 146; romanticization of, 120, 143–­44, 157. See also Cody, William (Buffalo Bill); Remington, Frederic; Russell, Charles M. coyotes, 74, 283; extermination campaigns of, 87, 136–­37, 247; in Native culture, 25, 26, 27, 48 Cronon, William, 50, 63, 95, 107, 120 Crosby, Alfred, 19–­20, 23 Crows, 51, 58, 60 Cunfer, Geoff, 118, 119 Cunningham, Bill, 264 Custis, Peter, 73, 74 Dakotas, 23, 59, 99–­100, 120, 157; Dakota Territory, 74, 114; Native peoples of, 74, 148, 149; North, 284, 307; South, 121, 126, 148, 149, 284 dams, 86, 92, 138, 219, 228, 298; beaver, 78, 79; Bonneville, 192–­93, 194; Echo Park, 213–­15, 218; environmental cost of, 188, 189–­90, 214, 215, 216–­17; Frank Church and, 244–­45, 246,

248; Glen Canyon, 215, 227, 248, 277, 297; Grand Canyon proposal of, 168, 248–­49; Grand Coulee, 192–­94, 197, 213, 227; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; hydraulic society and, 165, 213, 218; in Native culture, 48, 56; Oxbow, 216, 217, 218; and salmon decline, 135, 192–­93, 194, 197, 216–­17. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Bureau of Reclamation; Colorado River Storage Project (crsp); reclamation; water projects Darwin, Charles, 9, 127; The Descent of Man, 323; On the Origin of Species, 102, 103 deBuys, William, 113, 316 deer, 17, 79, 131, 136, 300; Native hunting of, 25, 31, 148; place in food chain, 135–­36, 206, 283 deforestation, 91, 142, 156, 309, 315, 322; and erosion, 34, 103, 253. See also clear-­cutting; timber cutting Deloria, Vine, Jr., 17 democracy, 86, 155, 161, 164, 181; American ideal of, 75, 113, 165, 257, 272, 315; Jeffersonian, 71, 163; promotion of, 112, 128, 170 Democratic Party, 234, 235, 242, 244, 251, 262. See also Church, Frank Department of Interior, 163, 169, 170, 213, 217, 279–­80. See also Babbitt, Bruce; Church, Frank; Schurz, Carl; Udall, Stewart; Watt, James Deseret, 67, 73, 86–­88. See also Mormons deserts, 108, 146, 147, 218–­19; the Arid Region as, 101, 110–­13, 111; Cali-

338 Index

fornian, 296, 304; desertification, 141–­42, 167; Great American, 74, 83, 101, 198; made to bloom, 86, 163, 165, 189, 219, 294; and Mormon settlement, 67, 83–­86; and reclamation, 163, 165, 167; Sonoran, 27, 277; types, 27, 28, 55–­56, 277. See also aridity; Las Vegas; Phoenix development, 88, 127, 168, 213, 311; agricultural, 115, 139; of California, 165, 168; cars and, 219–­20; environmental cost of, 103, 215, 239, 248, 315; fossil fuels and, 180–­81, 276, 311, 313; James Watt and, 263–­64, 268; John Wesley Powell and, 101–­2, 111, 112; the Land and Water Conservation Fund and, 240, 242; and natural resources, 156, 174, 200, 227, 263–­64, 278; postwar, 206–­7, 213, 228; and progress, 71–­72, 74; railroads and, 105, 107, 115, 117, 246; reclamation and, 163–­65, 213, 216, 218; and recreation, 240, 242; unsustainable, 221, 313; Wise Use and, 270–­71, 272. See also dams; economic development; Leopold, Aldo; manifest destiny; settlement development, economic, 3, 103, 264, 276, 313; Frank Church and, 236–­37, 245, 248; and sustainability, 5, 248 development v. conservation, 3, 245–­46, 272, 277; and national parks, 168, 169, 214, 215, 263–­64. See also reclamation; Watt, James DeVoto, Bernard, 155, 164, 214 Diamond, Jared, 61 die-­off, Pleistocene, 18, 32, 56, 78, 200, 324 Diné. See Navajos (Diné)

Dinosaur National Monument, 213–­15, 248, 263; and Echo Park, 194, 213–­15, 218 Dirty Dozen, 250, 251 diseases, 21, 47, 223, 253; animal, 151, 218, 283, 307; cancer, 183, 210–­11, 212, 222; covid-­19, 46, 47, 285–­86, 322–­24; in Europe, 41, 44–­45; plague, 44–­45. See also Columbus, Christopher; epidemics; Great Dying; Great Filter; smallpox; viruses dogs, 18, 31, 32, 43, 47, 137 downwinders, 210, 210–­11 drought, 86, 87; climate change and, 30, 293, 300, 302, 309; and ecological imbalance, 299, 300, 302; erosion and, 190, 191; and groundwater, 196, 298; Native peoples and, 30, 56, 125, 149, 190, 191, 296; water projects and, 195–­97, 294, 296, 297–­98. See also Dust Bowl; wildfire ducks, 26, 79, 304 Dust Bowl, 114, 191, 197–­202, 199, 297, 306, 324 Earth Day, 233, 249–­51 Earth First!, 265, 269 Earth Overshoot Day, 308, 309–­10, 314, 322 East, 4, 106, 142, 165, 182, 238; characteristics of, 1–­2, 101, 108, 112, 146, 238; market for cattle in, 100, 105, 106–­7, 121. See also Homestead Act; settlement; West-­to-­East extraction Echo Park, 194, 213–­15, 218; and Dinosaur National Monument, 213–­15, 248, 263

Index  339

ecology, 2, 2, 87; and balance, 55, 299–­ 300, 302, 322; and conservation, 239, 241, 245, 274, 326; destruction/ change of, 4, 48, 140, 226, 239; and geography, 110, 111; health of, 5, 302; and imperialism, 59, 63; and mining, 91, 92; and pesticides, 246–­47; and public awareness, 239, 246; as science, 237, 241; and sustainability, 61, 314–­15; and timber cutting, 251, 254, 274, 275; Traditional Ecological Knowledge and, 304; transformation of, 16, 17, 34; trophic cascade and, 206, 218, 280–­81, 283; and wolves, 206, 280, 283. See also commons, tragedy of; Dust Bowl; ecosystems; fire; habitats; Leopold, Aldo; Liebig’s law; Marsh, George Perkins; reclamation ecology, plains, 60, 131, 202, 326; and bison, 59, 94, 129, 130, 131, 159–­60; collapse of, 92, 121, 129, 131 economic development, 3, 103, 264, 276, 313; Frank Church and, 236–­37, 245, 248; and sustainability, 5, 248 economic hardship, 71; economic depression, 182, 196, 200, 213; Native, 125, 149, 191, 192; and the Panic of 1857, 107; and shifting from fossil fuel, 313–­14; timber industry and, 117, 273–­ 74, 276. See also Great Depression economics: Native, 51, 55; and reclamation, 187–­88; and utility, 161, 168, 277 economics v. environment, 3, 94, 103, 138, 228, 272, 315; balancing of, 239, 245, 257, 278, 282, 286, 291, 322; land ethic and, 205, 248; mining and, 109, 183; national parks and, 169; and

sustainability, 9, 88, 322; timber cutting and, 252, 253, 254, 273–­74; water projects and, 193, 214, 216 ecosystems, 24, 145, 207, 264; beavers and, 78–­79; climate change and, 286, 293, 299, 303; farming and, 118, 119; fossil fuel extraction and, 186; grassland, 32, 118, 119, 201, 299; health indicator species of, 305–­6; invasive species and, 139–­40; mining and, 91, 95, 135, 145, 184; old-­growth forest, 273–­74; population pressure on, 34, 62; restoration of, 201, 326–­ 27; salmon and, 92, 132, 218, 305; subsistence and, 60, 62, 145; trophic cascades and, 206, 218, 280, 283; wolves and, 205–­6, 280–­81, 283. See also conservation; deserts; ecology; fire; habitats; Liebig’s law; prairies ecosystems, riparian, 59, 92, 139; destruction of, 116, 186, 197; invasive plants and, 139; water projects and, 138, 166, 189. See also Owens Valley; rivers; waterways ecosystem services, 79, 201, 305 Eden, 67, 146; Los Angeles as, 186–­87; and Mormon settlement, 68, 84, 87, 88; status as permitting use, 3, 67, 144, 324; as uninhabited, 24, 33. See also Zion Edenic myth, 3, 79, 95; as counterproductive, 6, 35, 324; and Native landscape modification, 3, 10, 23, 33, 34; v. sustainability, 35, 150 Eisenhower, Dwight, 219 elk, 17, 136, 300; conservation of, 157, 184, 201, 283; Native hunting of, 25,

340 Index

31, 148; place in food chain, 135–­36, 281, 283; population decline, 91–­92, 136, 281; settler hunting of, 91–­92 emissions, 225, 226, 324; carbon dioxide, 293, 314, 325; greenhouse gases, 309–­10, 313 Endangered American Wilderness Act, 255–­56 endangered species, 184, 248; of birds, 140, 158–­59, 202; of fishes, 190; gray wolves as, 281–­82; salmon as, 83, 217, 218, 254, 304–­5; trout as, 254, 304–­5. See also species depletion Endangered Species Act, 190, 235, 256, 264, 272–­73, 283–­84; northern spotted owls and, 272–­76; wolf protection and, 281–­82 energy. See power England. See Great Britain Enlarged Homestead Act, 198–­99 Environmental Action, 250, 251 environmentalism, 102, 241, 278; and court action, 280, 282; cultural cost of, 273–­74, 314; Earth Day and, 233, 249–­51; Earth First!, 265, 269; and extraction/attraction, 285, 286; “green pork” and, 236–­37, 240; northern spotted owl and, 274, 275; and protest, 148, 250; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266–­67, 268, 271; Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and, 268, 271, 278, 280; Wise Use and, 271–­72. See also Carson, Rachel; Church, Frank; public opinion environmental movement, 1, 160, 205, 206, 228, 236, 257, 323; and federal

protection, 237, 239–­40. See also Carson, Rachel; Church, Frank Environmental Protection Agency, 183–­ 84, 256, 265 epidemics, 41, 44–­47, 253, 323–­24; virgin-­soil, 45–­46, 323. See also diseases erosion, 3, 79, 309, 322; and conservation, 142, 201; deforestation and, 34, 103, 253; on the Great Plains, 114, 119, 121; and invasive species, 138, 139–­40, 202; mining and, 90, 90–­91, 140; and Native peoples, 56, 63, 179, 190–­91; overgrazing and, 88, 147, 190, 198; timber cutting and, 118, 253, 254; and water projects, 179, 191. See also Dust Bowl; Soil Conservation Service Etulain, Richard, 213, 226 eugenics, 171, 173, 174. See also racism Europe, 10–­11, 102–­3; agriculture in, 18, 19, 20, 21; climate action in, 309; diseases from, 44–­47, 52, 61, 63, 125, 310; economic structures of, 3, 40, 50, 55, 60, 62–­63; invasive plants from, 40, 44, 139; markets in, 78, 187; population in, 20, 44–­45, 47; in World War I, 181, 182. See also colonization: early European; fur trade Europeans, 21, 48–­49, 51, 127–­28; and America as Eden, 3, 10, 24, 33, 34–­35; livestock of, 43, 44, 47, 55, 56, 60, 139; and private property ownership, 49–­50, 51; technology of, 19, 20, 61; and wealth acquisition, 3, 41, 50–­51, 54, 55. See also Columbian Exchange; diseases; Great Dying; smallpox; Spain

Index  341

exceptionalism, American, 127, 128 exploitation, 5, 71, 77, 148; environmental cost of, 5, 311, 315; James Watt and, 261–­62, 263; of material resources, 3, 4, 101, 113, 128, 168, 242; Native strategies of, 10, 28, 48, 56, 92; v. protection, 4, 112, 142, 156, 157, 158, 235; and Spanish colonization, 42, 55–­56; of timber, 115, 141; of water resources, 59, 167; Wise Use and, 270–­71. See also extraction; natural resources; West, federal power/influence in; West-­to-­East extraction exploitation and federal policy, 261–­62; control of exploitation, 157, 174, 235; mining/drilling and, 109, 242; railroads and, 113, 115; timber cutting and, 115, 142 extermination campaigns, 44, 135–­38, 137, 160, 205–­6, 280, 282 extinction: animal, 136, 304, 315; bird, 26; human, 322; of Native groups, 46, 53; plant, 21, 138, 274; Pleistocene, 14, 17–­18, 44, 78, 85, 200, 324; sixth, 303. See also species depletion extinction, near: beaver, 79, 95; bird, 155; elk, 91–­92; Mexican gray wolf, 281, 324; pronghorn antelope, 136; salmon, 324. See also bison population decline extraction, 101, 208, 321–­22; and attraction, 284–­86; environmental cost of, 181, 189; federal promotion of, 101, 121; fossil fuels and, 277, 325; and land value, 236, 238, 263; mindset of, 68, 72; railroads and, 115, 284; and the western economy, 181–­82, 188,

189, 193, 202, 203, 284–­86. See also agriculture; exploitation; fur trade; mining; natural resources; oil; timber cutting; West-­to-­East extraction; Wise Use fallout, nuclear, 210, 210–­11 farms. See agriculture Faust, H. J., 116–­17 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, 264, 278 Feldman, David, 298 fences, 44, 50, 120, 199, 222, 308; barbed wire, 99, 114; wood, 83, 104, 115 Fermi, Enrico, 321 Fermi Paradox, 321, 322, 324, 327 Fiege, Mark, 139 fire, 10, 79, 85, 301, 301–­2; grasslands and, 31, 32, 33–­34, 40, 47, 85, 99; prairies and, 40, 99. See also wildfire fire, Native use of, 10, 85; in agriculture, 33–­34, 47, 48; in forest management, 33–­34, 83; in land management, 25, 31, 32, 47, 48, 79, 304 firs, 30, 83, 115, 141, 252 fish. See salmon Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S., 137, 160, 201, 304; and gray wolves, 281, 282–­ 83; and northern spotted owls, 273, 275–­76; and salmon, 216 fish hatcheries. See salmon flooding, 31, 79, 88; climate change and, 12, 20, 293; mining and, 91, 140; timber cutting and, 116, 142 flooding, water projects and: control of, 163, 165, 187, 188, 197, 213, 214; creating, 214, 215, 249

342 Index

Flores, Dan, 59, 118, 144, 292, 316 Florida, 42, 52, 68, 158 Folsom culture, 16, 28, 32–­33 Foote, Mary Hallock, 145–­46, 147 Ford, Henry, 183, 186 Forest Reserve Act, 142, 156 forestry, 116, 117–­18, 142, 253, 254 forests, 30, 31, 47, 162, 200, 201, 302; and climate change, 298, 299–­300; and fire, 33–­34, 83, 301, 301–­2; John Wesley Powell and, 112–­13; old-­growth, 80, 141, 272, 273–­75, 276; pests, pathogens, and invasives of, 139–­40, 253, 302–­3; and threatened species, 272, 272–­74, 275–­76, 281, 304; and the tragedy of the commons, 5, 160; and watersheds, 103, 104, 163, 253. See also clear-­cutting; deforestation; Forest Service, U.S.; timber; timber cutting; wildfire forests, national. See national forests forests, public land and, 174, 226, 240, 243, 251–­56, 277; Forest Reserve Act, 142, 156; Frank Church and, 235, 247; the Land and Water Conservation Fund and, 240, 243; the Progressive Era and, 103, 153–­55, 156, 160–­61, 239–­40; and states’ rights, 266, 271; and watershed protection, 116–­17, 141–­42. See also Forest Service, U.S.: and timber cutting; owls: northern spotted Forest Service, U.S., 137, 139, 252, 301; and the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, 269–­70; creation of, 160–­61; grassland management and, 201; multiple use and, 160–­61, 252, 256;

the National Wilderness Preservation System and, 255–­56; pesticide use by, 247; Primitive Areas, 238; rangers of, 118, 161, 205; and species decline, 273–­74, 303; and timber cutting, 160–­61, 184, 251–­55. See also Leopold, Aldo Forsman, Eric, 276 fossil fuels, 219, 225, 293, 313–­14, 324–­25; environmental cost of, 325. See also coal; natural gas; oil; pollution foxes, 25, 87, 137, 283, 294 France, 52, 71, 72, 76 Freeman, Thomas, 73, 74 Frémont, John C., 26, 73, 74–­75, 83, 307 frontier, 75, 120, 143–­45; and American uniqueness, 128, 129, 144; closing of, 127, 128, 131, 135, 143, 146, 147–­48; conservation and, 85, 141, 149–­50, 155, 157; domestication of, 146, 147; ecological destruction and, 131, 135–­ 38. See also Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr); Cody, William (Buffalo Bill); Muir, John; Turner, Frederick Jackson; West, Old frontier thesis, 127–­29, 136, 141, 150 fur trade: companies for, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79; environmental cost of, 76, 78, 79; maritime, 75–­76; and Native market participation, 76, 77; traders in, 67, 68, 75, 76, 78, 79–­80, 82. See also beavers; trappers Gadsden Purchase, 73, 82 Garretson, Martin, 131 Geological Survey, U.S., 111, 113, 195 Ghost Dance, 125, 126, 130, 148–­49

Index  343

Glacier National Park, 169, 171, 281, 326 glaciers, 11, 12, 13, 304; retreat of, 20, 26, 31–­32. See also ice ages Glen Canyon Dam, 194, 215, 227, 248, 277, 297 Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, 215, 277 global warming, 35, 297, 303, 304, 308–­ 9, 322; in the Arctic, 292, 310; and energy consumption, 313, 324. See also climate change goats: Europeans and, 43, 47; Native husbandry of, 43–­44, 190–­91 gold, 52, 69, 85, 105, 158, 182; mining, 89–­91, 90, 95, 140, 142, 184; rushes, 67, 88–­89, 92, 107, 109, 139, 140; West African trade in, 41, 54 Grand Canyon National Park, 110, 169, 227, 263, 276; water projects and, 168, 248–­49 Grand Coulee Dam, 192–­94, 197, 213, 227 Grand Staircase–­Escalante National Monument (gsenm), 276–­78, 279–­80 Gran Quivira, 56, 171 Grant, Madison, 171, 173 Grant, Ulysses S., 110, 130 grass, 19, 21, 125; competition for, 59, 94, 131, 136, 190. See also Great Plains; prairies grasses, native, 56, 114, 198; and invasive species, 83, 88, 107, 138–­39, 167. See also Great Plains; prairies grasslands, 18, 24, 30–­32, 199, 201, 299; agricultural destruction of, 114, 118, 198; fire and, 31, 32, 33–­34, 40, 47, 85, 99; livestock and, 86, 120; overgraz-

ing of, 88, 99, 107, 120, 147, 200. See also Great Plains; national grasslands; prairies Great American Desert, 74, 83, 101, 198 Great Barbecue, 100–­101, 121 Great Basin, 2, 67, 84, 207; as geographic/climatic region, 23, 24, 26–­ 27, 30; Native Peoples of, 27–­30 Great Britain, 68, 71, 80, 81, 181; Canada as part of, 68, 76; and the fur trade, 78, 80. See also American Revolution Great Depression, 181, 185, 187, 200, 223; federal programs during, 185, 223; reclamation during, 179, 188, 192, 213, 284; water projects and, 179, 188–­89, 192, 213, 284. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Dust Bowl; economic hardship Great Die-­Up, 99–­100, 119, 120, 157 Great Dying, 45–­48, 52–­53, 310 Great Filter, 321–­22, 324, 327 Great Lakes, 58, 141, 143, 156 Great Plains, 2, 24, 54, 68, 74, 202, 203, 285; bison and, 32, 58–­59, 92–­93, 130, 173; conservation in, 325; the Enlarged Homestead Act and, 198–­ 99; as geographic/climatic region, 23, 30, 31, 119; and post–­Civil War extraction, 100, 182; railroads and, 106, 113–­14; tragedy of the commons and, 94; wheat and, 106, 202. See also cattle; Dust Bowl; Homestead Act; Plains Indians; prairies; ranching Great Salt Lake, 67, 83, 184 Great War. See World War I (Great War) Greenberg, Steve, 262 greenhouse gases, 293, 309, 310, 313

344 Index

“green pork,” 236, 240 Green River, 30, 75, 214, 218 Grinnell, George Bird, 159 Gross, Bill, 314 groundwater, 79, 167; contamination of, 184, 221; water projects and, 167, 197, 202, 218, 294–­95, 298; water tables as, 79, 167 Guthrie, Woody, 193–­94, 202 Gwich’ins, 292, 305 habitats, 18, 34, 92, 121, 217; conservation and, 157, 158–­59, 160, 239, 281; health of, 1, 201, 273; loss of, 133, 193, 218, 275–­76, 281, 304, 307; restoration of, 201, 315. See also ecosystems Hämäläinen, Pekka, 58, 59 Hammond, A. B., 141 Hardin, Garrett, 4–­5, 94. See also commons, tragedy of Hatch, Orrin, 266–­67, 276. See also Utah hats, 79, 143, 158; beaver felt, 76, 78, 158. See also fur trade Hayhoe, Katharine, 311 Hays, Samuel, 228, 285 Heliogen, 314 Hetch Hetchy Valley, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214 Hidatsas, 21, 58, 138 Hine, Thomas, 226 Hohokams, 28, 29 Homestead Act, 114, 115, 164, 182, 240; farming problems and, 108–­9, 125, 162, 198; and private land ownership, 162, 173, 182, 278. See also Enlarged Homestead Act homesteading, 100, 109, 112, 114–­15, 138, 146; busted, 114–­15, 149, 197–­200;

land sale for, 118; Native displacement and, 121, 130 Homo americanus, 127, 144. See also Turner, Frederick Jackson Homo sapiens, 10, 11–­12, 227 Hoover Dam. See Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam) Hopis, 15, 51 Hornaday, William Temple, 129–­30, 157–­58, 159, 171, 173 horses: ancient North American, 17–­18, 28, 56; competition with livestock, 59, 131; environmental cost of, 59, 60, 79, 118–­19, 121, 129, 131; European reintroduction of, 43, 53–­54, 55, 56, 57; European use of, 104, 119, 143, 144, 145; feral, 57, 118, 121; Plains Indian life before, 32. See also Native peoples: horse culture of; Native peoples: horse culture of and bison Hudson’s Bay Company. See fur trade Hulahula River, 291, 294, 295, 297, 299, 307, 316. See also Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr) hunting, 145, 304; of birds, 158; of bison, 93–­94, 118, 129–­31, 136, 144; of elk, 91–­92; market, 59, 77, 93, 94, 118, 129–­ 31; of pronghorn antelope, 92; for sport, 130, 157, 170, 206, 237, 262, 281; of wolves, 87, 137, 137, 205–­6, 282. See also fur trade; trappers hunting, Native, 50, 51; Archaic, 16, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31–­32; fire and, 85; Neolithic move from, 19, 20, 21, 23, 28; Paleoindian, 12, 14, 16, 17–­18, 28, 85; Plains Indian, 31–­33, 58, 59–­60, 62, 79, 93, 121; subsistence, 20, 34, 59, 125

Index  345

hunting and gathering, 21, 32, 34, 171; Archaic, 28; and the Neolithic Revolution, 20, 21, 23, 28, 85; Pacific Northwest, 25, 26; Paleolithic, 12, 16, 19; Plains Indian, 60 hydraulic society, 165, 195, 213, 218. See also reclamation; Worster, Donald ice ages, 11, 12–­13, 293; last Ice Age, 12, 16, 17, 20, 26, 44; Little Ice Age, 48. See also glaciers Idaho, 233–­35, 236; bees in, 307; conservative trend in, 239, 257; invasive plants in, 139; Mary Hallock Foote in, 145, 146; mining in, 107; Native peoples of, 28, 30, 53, 133; power companies in, 216–­17, 245; salmon in, 216–­17, 245; timber cutting in, 116, 238; wolves in, 281–­82. See also Church, Frank Idaho Power Company, 216–­17 Illinois, 67, 83, 107, 110, 127, 144 imperialism, 59, 63, 82, 173 Incas, 46, 52 Indians. See Native peoples Indian wars, 100, 120–­21, 133, 149 Indigenous peoples. See Native peoples individualism, 84, 113, 128, 148–­49, 327 industrialization, 71, 219, 228, 237; environmental cost of, 237, 313; of hunting, 118, 129; and urbanization, 127, 155 Industrial Revolution, 5, 48, 71, 100, 105, 183, 293 industry, 207, 220, 225, 236; agricultural, 83, 298, 306; automotive, 186, 223–­24, 226, 309; and conservation, 253,

273–­75, 285; and economy, 138, 189, 238; fishing and canning, 133–­35, 134; fuel consumption by, 142, 313, 314; livestock, 106–­7, 121, 185, 200; service, 284, 285, 286; timber, 238, 251–­52, 254–­55, 271, 273–­75; timber consumption by, 142–­43, 251; wartime, 181–­82, 185, 213; water use and, 187, 188, 193, 296. See also extraction; mining; oil; raw materials; timber cutting interconnectedness, 20, 219; biophilia hypothesis, 9–­10, 35; environment-­ human, 84–­85, 205, 299, 307, 323; environment-­human, Native, 25, 48, 148 interstate highway system, 219–­20, 224, 226, 242. See also cars irrigation, 19, 139, 322; acequias, 85–­86; in California, 166, 196–­97; as civilization, 19, 146; the Colorado River Compact and, 194, 195–­96, 213, 294; the Colorado River Storage Project and, 213, 215, 218; dam projects and, 188, 189, 192, 193, 196–­97, 213; impact on fish populations, 135, 138, 192–­93, 197; lands needing, 101, 108–­9, 111, 112, 113; Mormon, 84, 86, 118; park formation and, 116–­17, 174. See also Bureau of Reclamation; canals; groundwater; reclamation; water projects irrigation, Native, 10; Chacoan, 29; Hohokam, 29; Pima, 28; Southwestern, 34, 56, 85 Jackling, Daniel, 183 Jackson, Andrew, 81, 120

346 Index

James, Sarah, 292, 305, 311 Japan, 41, 208, 309 Jefferson, Thomas, 71–­72, 74, 75, 128, 132; farming ideal, 72, 108, 163, 164 John, Elizabeth, 55 Johnson, Lyndon, 235, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 249 junipers, 27, 30, 277, 299 Kalapuyas, 48, 79 Kansas, 115, 198, 201, 284 Kennedy, John, 235, 241 Kiowas, 31, 39–­40, 58, 140, 159 Kremen, Claire, 306 Lake Mead, 189–­90, 295–­96. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam) Lake Powell, 215, 296, 297, 298. See also Glen Canyon Dam Lakotas: and the Ghost Dance, 126, 148–­49; and horse culture, 58–­59, 60; Wounded Knee massacre of, 121, 149 land acquisitions. See territorial acquisitions Land and Water Conservation Fund (lwcf), 239, 240–­45, 243 Land Ordinance, 69, 70, 108, 112, 118. See also Public Land Survey System Land Utilization Projects. See national grasslands Lane, Franklin, 170 LaPier, Rosalyn, 77 La Sonorita, 219–­20 Las Vegas, 221, 225; atomic testing and, 209, 210, 284; dam projects and, 188, 189, 284, 296; expansion, 188, 221,

284–­85; water use, 218, 296. See also Nevada lds. See Mormons lead, 183, 187, 212 League of Conservation Voters, 251 Leopold, Aldo, 160, 221, 225, 227–­28, 283; and the cost of development/ progress, 205–­6, 207, 228; land ethic and, 205–­6, 227, 237, 248, 280–­81; “Thinking Like a Mountain,” 205–­6; and wolves, 205–­6, 280–­81 Lewis, Meriwether, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 132 Liebig’s law, 27, 30, 51, 61–­62, 94 Limerick, Patricia, 129 lions, 17; mountain lions (cougars), 18, 44, 119, 136–­37 livestock, 19, 34, 82, 93, 131, 135, 300; competition for grass, 94, 107, 136; of European settlers, 43, 44, 47, 55, 56, 60, 139; the Great Die-­Up and, 99–­100, 119, 120, 157; Navajo, 179, 190–­ 92; and public lands, 120, 200, 238; railroads and, 99, 105, 107; vegetation needs, 70, 86, 112, 113, 298; and wolves, 87, 281, 282. See also cattle; goats; horses; overgrazing; ranching; sheep logging. See timber cutting Long, Stephen, 73, 74, 198 Los Angeles: car culture and, 186–­87, 225; housing boom, 156; pollution and, 223, 225; suburbanization and, 221, 223; water projects and, 165–­67, 166, 188, 298. See also California Louisiana Purchase, 71–­72, 73, 74 Mack, Richard, 138, 139 Malone, Michael, 213, 226

Index  347

mammoths, 17, 18, 28, 31, 56, 85 Man and Nature (Marsh), 102–­3, 121 Mandans, 21, 31, 58, 74 manifest destiny, 81–­82, 94, 110, 113, 307 Marean, Curtis, 322 Margolis, Jon, 257 markets, 82, 95, 324–­25, 327; eastern, 104, 119, 121, 138, 141, 155, 156; farming/ranching and, 106, 107, 120, 136, 198; fishing and, 135, 217; global, 40, 62, 131, 133, 135; and hunting, 59, 94, 119, 129, 130, 131, 158; land and, 70, 240; potential for, 71, 72, 75; railroads and, 104–­5, 107, 115, 121; timber, 143, 156, 161, 275. See also capitalism; commodification; commodities, merchantable; extraction; fur trade; Sahlins, Marshall; timber; timber cutting; trappers markets, Native peoples and, 76, 94, 135, 191–­92; dependency and, 60–­61, 62, 63, 79, 94, 192; elimination of Native subsistence, 130, 190–­92; horse-­ bison economy, 60–­61, 62, 92–­93, 129; and the move from subsistence, 55, 60–­63, 93, 135 markets v. subsistence, 40, 59, 85–­86, 88, 126, 145; elimination of Native subsistence, 130, 190–­92; Native move from subsistence, 55, 60–­63, 93, 135. See also commons, tragedy of Marriott, Alice, 39–­40 Marsh, George Perkins, 102–­4, 115, 118, 141–­42, 150, 161; Man and Nature, 102–­3, 121. See also ecology; environmentalism Marshall, James, 66, 88, 89

Martin, Paul, 17 mastodons, 17, 18 Mather, Stephen, 170 McCarthy, Tom, 186, 223–­24, 225 McDermott, Kevin “Thirsty,” 311, 316 McDonals, Tom, 304 Mead, Elwood, 163 megafauna, 12, 14, 16, 17–­18, 28, 200; charismatic, 157, 304; conservation of, 157, 281; mammoths, 17, 18, 28, 31, 56, 85; mastodons, 17, 18; Pleistocene die-­off of, 18, 32, 56, 78, 200, 324; settler hunting of, 87, 91. See also bison merchantable commodities, 52, 60, 61, 75–­76, 79 mercury, 115, 140 Mesa Verde, 30, 171, 172, 296 Mexico, 68, 78, 84, 296, 302; and the Colorado River Compact, 195, 213; conflict with the U.S., 80–­82, 89; and cowboy culture, 107, 144–­45; Native peoples of, 20, 28, 30, 34, 46, 52, 60; Spanish colonization of, 51–­52, 60, 80, 85; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and, 73, 82, 269 Michigan, 69, 142, 220, 281 Milankovitch cycles, 11, 293 Miller, Joaquin, 140 mining, 68, 121, 146, 148, 269, 284; and the automotive industry, 224–­25; in Bingham Canyon, 183–­84, 194; of copper, 105, 109, 182, 183, 184; hydraulic, 90, 90–­91, 92, 102, 135, 140; and multiple use, 245, 256; and the New West, 226, 284, 285, 286; open-­ pit, 140, 182–­83, 184, 226; public land and, 263, 265, 271, 276, 277–­78;

348 Index

regulation of, 160, 267; and timber cutting, 91, 117, 117–­18; of uranium, 192, 211–­12; and wartime, 182–­83, 192, 211–­12. See also coal; gold; silver mining, environmental cost of, 95, 183–­84, 212, 225; hydraulic mining, 89–­90, 91, 135 Mining Law, 109, 173 Mission 66, 227 Mississippi River, 52, 68, 69, 72, 100, 107, 207 Missouri River, 30, 58, 74, 325, 326 Montana, 30, 78, 107, 144, 243, 285, 286; bison in, 304, 326, 326; invasive plants in, 139; James Watt and, 263–­ 64; Native peoples of, 58, 77, 133, 159; timber cutting in, 116, 252, 252; wolves in, 137, 281 Mormons, 67, 73, 83–­85, 86–­89, 101, 112, 118; Deseret and, 67, 73, 86–­88; and farming, 85, 86, 87; interactions with Native peoples, 85, 86–­87; and irrigation, 84, 86, 118; land ethic of, 84–­85, 87–­88; trade with west-­bound migrants, 88–­89 mountain lions (cougars), 18, 44, 119, 136–­37 Mount Olympus National Monument (Olympic National Park), 169, 184–­85 Muir, John, 149–­50, 154, 161–­62, 272; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 155, 167–­ 68, 214; and preservation, 154, 161, 162, 174; and Theodore Roosevelt, 153–­55, 162–­63, 167–­68. See also Sierra Club Mulholland, William, 165–­66, 166

national forests, 137, 159, 174, 252, 256, 270, 301; Bitterroot National Forest, 252–­53; and Chicano land use, 269–­ 70, 270; as commons, 142, 174; Gila, 301; the Organic Act and, 142, 247; Theodore Roosevelt and, 152–­54, 159, 160–­61, 184, 247; timber cutting and, 160–­61, 184, 251–­54, 252, 271; Wise Use and, 271. See also Church, Frank; Forest Service, U.S. national grasslands, 199, 201 national monuments, 155, 171, 215, 226, 239, 327; Dinosaur, 213–­15, 248, 263; Grand Staircase–­Escalante, 276–­78, 279–­80; National Park Service and, 185; Theodore Roosevelt and, 153, 169. See also Church, Frank national parks, 5, 327; Chaco Culture, 29, 169, 171, 263; James Watt and, 263–­64, 265; the Land and Water Conservation Fund and, 240, 243; Mesa Verde, 30, 171, 172, 296; Native removal from, 171; Olympic, 169, 184–­85; Progressivism and, 169, 170; reclamation and, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; resource extraction and, 207, 263, 265; Sequoia, 169, 170, 300; system of, 169, 170, 214, 226–­27; timber cutting and, 174, 184; tourism and, 170–­71, 214–­15, 226–­27, 241; water projects and, 214, 215; western development and, 169, 238, 271; White Sands, 14. See also Antiquities Act; Grand Canyon National Park; Mission 66; Muir, John; Roosevelt, Theodore; Yellowstone National Park

Index  349

national parks, preservation and, 214–­15, 239, 241, 263, 277, 326–­27; Progressive Era, 103, 153–­54, 155, 167–­ 69, 170 National Park Service, 170, 214; national monument jurisdiction and, 185, 277; and park maintenance, 170, 227, 263–­64 National Wilderness Preservation System, 238, 255–­56 Native peoples, 40, 95, 102, 128; ancient history in the West, 3, 10, 34–­35, 82, 197; Archaic, 28, 30, 32, 34; Archaic v. Neolithic, 18, 20, 23, 25; and atomic testing, 210, 211–­12; the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, 179, 190–­92; community mindset of, 50–­51, 85–­90; and conservation, 131, 159, 303–­4, 326; displacement of, 83, 95, 140, 145; dispossession of, 55–­56, 95, 170–­71, 179–­80, 191–­92, 212; fire use by, agriculture, 33–­34, 47, 48; fire use by, forest management, 33–­34, 83; fire use by, land management, 25, 31, 32, 47, 48, 79, 304; fire use by, other, 10, 85; and the fur trade, 76–­77, 80; genetic ancestry of, 12, 13, 14–­16; the Ghost Dance and, 125, 126, 130, 148–­ 49; of the Great Basin, 27–­30; the Great Dying of, 45–­48, 310; horse culture of, 56–­60, 57, 62, 92, 94, 145; horse culture of and bison, 58–­60, 79, 92–­93, 129, 131; Indian wars and, 100, 120–­21, 133, 149; late-­nineteenth-­ century crises of, 125, 129, 130, 131, 140–­41; massacres of, 120–­21, 149; nomadism of, 16, 19, 21, 31, 55, 58,

84; and Old West symbolism, 144–­45, 147, 171; origins of, 12–­16, 13; origin stories of, 15, 25, 26, 27, 31; Pacific Coastal, 23–­24, 24, 25–­26, 77; Paleoindians, 10, 12–­14, 15–­16, 17–­18, 20, 28; pre-­contact populations of, 23–­24, 24, 33; and property/territory, 49–­50, 58, 68; raiding by, 55, 58, 59; relocations of, 74, 120, 129; removals of, 103, 120, 129, 130, 131, 171; research partnerships by, 14, 15; and salmon, 25, 50, 132–­33, 147; Traditional Ecological Knowledge of, 304; traditional stories of, 39–­40, 48, 77; treaties with U.S. government, 24, 132–­33, 148, 149; the U.S. Forest Service and, 270. See also agriculture, Native; bison; Clovis culture; diseases; Folsom culture; irrigation, Native; markets, Native peoples and; markets v. subsistence; smallpox; and specific tribes and groups Native religious practices, 49, 92; and bison, 33; Blackfeet, 77; Coast Salish, 132; Ghost Dance, 125, 126, 130, 148–­ 49; Pueblo, 49, 54, 56 Native reservations, 94, 100, 121, 129, 130, 149, 210, 278; Flathead, 159; Kiowa-­ Comanche, 159; Lakota, 148–­49; Navajo, 179–­80, 190–­92, 211–­12 natural gas, 186, 223, 276, 314; in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 305, 311; offshore drilling for, 242, 263, 265. See also oil natural resources, 26, 68, 72, 80, 174, 181; consumption of, 101, 115–­16, 150, 205, 324; federal regulation and, 5,

350 Index

109, 261; and Mormon settlement, 67, 85, 88, 101; and national power, 94–­95; Native management of, 34–­ 35, 54–­55; New West importance of, 284, 285; Pacific Northwestern, 78, 80; Southwestern, 80, 81, 82; Spanish colonialism and, 52, 54–­55. See also bison; Church, Frank; exploitation; extraction; fur trade; gold; Marsh, George Perkins; mining; oil; Sagebrush Rebellion; salmon; silver; Soil Conservation Service; timber; timber cutting; Watt, James; West-­ to-­East extraction; Wise Use natural resources, commodification of, 63, 138, 155, 207; land as resource, 70–­71; reclamation and, 189; salmon and, 133, 138, 217; timber and, 115–­16; wolves and, 136–­37. See also commodities, merchantable; fur trade natural resources, conservation of, 142, 200, 236–­37, 256; Progressive Era, 155–­56, 157, 158. See also conservation Navajos (Diné), 62, 210; animal husbandry and, 43–­44, 63, 179–­80, 190–­ 92, 269; Navajo Project and, 179–­80, 190–­92, 212; and uranium mining, 192, 211–­12; and water projects, 179–­ 80, 191–­92 Neanderthals, 10–­11, 12 Nebraska, 63, 105 Nelson, Gaylord. See Earth Day Neolithic Revolution, 16, 18–­23, 22, 28, 34, 51 Nevada, 105, 107, 139, 266–­69, 271; atomic testing in, 209, 209–­11, 210; and the Colorado River Compact,

195; dam projects in, 179, 180; and Lake Mead, 296–­97; Native peoples of, 15, 28, 140. See also Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Las Vegas; Sagebrush Rebellion; Wise Use New Conservation, 233, 247–­48, 251, 254, 257, 325–­27, 326. See also Church, Frank Newlands Reclamation Act, 162, 163–­65, 187. See also Bureau of Reclamation; reclamation New Mexico, 198, 205, 222, 224, 301; and the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, 269–­70, 270; atomic testing in, 208, 321; Bisti Badlands Wilderness Area, 263, 264; Chaco Canyon, 28–­29, 169, 171, 296; Chaco Culture National Historical Park, 29, 263; and the Colorado River Compact, 195; and cooperative irrigation, 112; the fur trade in, 75, 76; Gadsden Purchase, 73, 82; geology of, 30, 208; horse populations in, 56–­57, 58; loss of species in, 136, 304; Native peoples of, 14, 28, 58, 59; Spanish conquest of, 54–­56; tree loss in, 116, 299, 301, 301–­2; wolves in, 281. See also Ancestral Puebloans; Clovis culture; Pueblo Indians New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo), 157–­58 Nez Perces, 58, 135 Nixon, Richard, 235 Nordhaus, Hannah, 306 North Dakota, 284, 307 nuts, piñon, 28, 125 Obama, Barack, 264 Ogallala Aquifer, 199, 202

Index  351

Ogden, Peter Skene, 78 Ohio, 69, 70, 110 oil, 180, 208, 284, 286, 313, 325; Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and, 291, 294, 295, 305, 308, 311–­13, 312; in California, 140, 185, 224; environmental consequences of, 140, 185–­86, 223, 226; and federal lands, 242, 243, 263, 276, 291, 294, 295, 305; the Mining Law and, 109; offshore drilling of, 242, 243, 263, 265; in Oklahoma, 140, 185, 224; in Texas, 140, 185, 224; wartime production of, 182, 185. See also fossil fuels; natural gas Oklahoma, 74, 159, 198; Native peoples of, 140–­41, 159; oil in, 140–­41, 185, 224 Olympic National Park (Mount Olympus National Monument), 169, 184–­85 Oñate, Juan de, 54, 55, 56 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 102, 103 Oregon, 139, 200, 211, 224, 268, 302; bees in, 306–­7; Country, 53, 78, 80; The Dalles, 25, 132, 217; endangered species in, 272–­73, 274; European plants in, 82–­83, 139; Native peoples of, 25, 53, 79, 132, 133, 140; salmon in, 132, 133–­35, 134, 216; settler movement to, 68, 74–­75, 92, 93, 100; Territory, 73, 80, 81; timber cutting in, 143, 272–­73, 274–­75; U.S. acquisition of, 73, 80, 81; water projects in, 192, 216. See also fur trade; Pacific Coast; Pacific Northwest Oregon Trail, 73, 80, 82, 88 Organic Act, 142, 156, 170 outdoor recreation. See recreation, outdoor

overgrazing, 5, 99, 107, 120, 147; and erosion, 88, 190; and Native land use, 59, 190, 191; Taylor Grazing Service and, 200–­201. See also cattle; livestock; ranching Overpeck, Jonathan, 293 Owens Valley, 166, 166–­67 owls, 87; barred, 275–­76; burrowing, 119, 201; northern spotted, 272, 272–­ 76, 284, 314 Oxbow Dam, 216, 217, 218 Pacific Coast, 30, 52, 75, 141; ecology of, 131–­32, 254; as geographic/climatic region, 23, 24, 26, 162; Native peoples of, 14, 24, 25, 77, 132 Pacific Northwest, 79, 135, 211; conservation/protection in, 272, 273–­74, 275, 285, 314; fur trade in, 78, 80; Native peoples of, 25, 26, 51, 77, 129, 132–­33; salmon in, 17, 131, 132–­33, 135; timber cutting in, 115, 141–­43, 273–­74, 275, 276, 314; water projects in, 188, 192. See also Salish Paiutes, 27, 85, 125, 210, 277–­78 Paiute-­Shoshones, 15–­16 paleoarcheology, 12, 13, 13–­14, 16, 18 Paleoindians, 10, 12–­14, 15–­16, 17–­18, 20, 28 Pando, 299–­300 Paris Agreement, 308–­9 Parrington, Vernon, 100–­101 Pawnees, 31, 39–­40, 58, 62, 63 Peña, Devon, 56, 85–­86 pesticides, 233, 246–­47, 248, 256; bees and, 306, 307, 315; environmental cost of, 246–­47, 248

352 Index

petroleum. See oil Phoenix, 28, 167, 220, 225; expansion, 188, 221; water projects and, 188, 218–­ 19, 297. See also Arizona Pike, Zebulon, 73, 74 Pinchot, Gifford, 156–­57, 168, 171, 184, 262; as a Progressive, 160, 171; as U.S. Forest Service head, 160–­61, 162, 163 pines, 30, 69, 302–­3 piñon pines, 27, 30, 277, 299, 304; nuts of, 28, 125 plague, 44–­45 Plains Indians, 24, 24, 31–­33, 58–­60, 92–­93; and bison, 31, 32, 33, 60, 92, 130, 144; horse culture and, 59, 60, 129; switch to market economy, 60; warfare with and removal, 120–­21, 144, 149. See also specific tribes and groups plants, invasive, 88, 107, 138–­39, 189, 202. See also Russian thistles (tumbleweeds) plants, non-­native, 40, 43, 83, 95, 138–­39, 190; Mormon settlement and, 86, 88. See also Russian thistles (tumbleweeds); wheat Pleistocene epoch, 10–­18, 35; die-­off of, 18, 32, 56, 78, 200, 324 plume trade, 157, 158–­59 political polarization, 262, 266–­67, 274, 277, 280, 284, 324; states’ rights issues and, 262–­63, 268, 281. See also Sagebrush Rebellion; Watt, James; Wise Use pollinators, 304, 306–­7, 315 pollution, 228, 233, 309; carbon, 325; climate change and, 225; from fossil

fuel extraction, 140, 185–­86, 223; lead, 183, 187, 212; mercury, 115, 140; from mining, 140, 183–­84; noise, 248, 311; protection from, 246, 256; radioactive, 210, 210–­11, 212, 228; salmon populations and, 91, 92, 95, 135; septic, 221–­22; from wildfires, 302. See also air pollution; emissions; greenhouse gases; water pollution Pony Express, 104, 144 Portugal, 41, 42 Powell, John Wesley, 102, 109–­10, 111, 164; and bioregionalism, 110–­13; climate predictions, 114, 115; and ethnology, 102, 110; and land use, 101, 103, 108, 112–­13, 121; Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 101–­2, 107–­ 8, 110, 112; watershed commonwealth concept, 112–­14, 118, 139, 162–­63, 187 power, 207, 271, 312, 313; clean, 314, 324, 325; environmental cost of, 237, 325; nuclear, 212, 237, 256–­57, 324; renewable, 309, 313, 314, 325; solar, 314, 325; steam, 121, 127, 129, 142–­43; wind, 314 power, electric, 189, 220, 223–­24, 236, 314, 325; coal-­fired, 277, 313; early implementation, 127, 183 power, hydroelectric, 163, 213, 245, 246, 296, 297; dead pool condition and, 296–­97; as public project, 168, 214; salmon and, 192, 193, 197, 216–­17. See also dams; reclamation prairie dogs, 118, 119, 201 prairies, 30, 92, 199; American Prairie, 325–­26, 326; cattle grazing and, 107, 118–­19, 119, 131, 136; conservation of, 201, 326, 326–­27; farming on, 114–­15,

Index  353

prairies (cont.) 118, 147, 182, 198, 202; fire and, 40, 99; native grass loss by, 83, 107, 114, 118, 198, 202; tragedy of the commons and, 94, 107. See also bison; grasslands; Great Plains; livestock preservation, 4, 270, 315; definition of, 156, 161, 235; and elitism, 170, 173; and forests, 160, 162, 252; of game, 153, 157, 159; George Perkins Marsh and, 103, 150; and Hetch Hetchy Valley, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; legislation, 233, 235, 236, 238, 245–­46, 247, 255–­56; and mining, 183, 184; and the National Park Service, 168–­69, 170, 185; Native peoples and, 132, 172, 270, 303–­4; and public land, 103, 153; public support of, 1950s–­1960s, 207, 228, 235, 237, 239, 246; public support of, 1960s–­1970s, 247, 251; and reclamation, 245, 246, 247; scientific, 103, 156, 158–­59; of water, 201, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 297; wise use and, 142, 156, 181, 201; Wise Use and, 272–­73, 283. See also Church, Frank; conservation; Endangered Species Act; environmental movement; Forest Service, U.S.; Grant, Madison; Hornaday, William Temple; Johnson, Lyndon; Land and Water Conservation Fund (lwcf); Leopold, Aldo; Muir, John; New Conservation; Pinchot, Gifford; Roosevelt, Theodore; Sierra Club; Soil Conservation Service; Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance; Wilderness Society

preservation, national parks/monuments and, 214–­15, 239, 241, 263, 277, 326–­27; Progressive Era, 103, 153–­54, 155, 168–­69, 170 preservation and Progressivism, 157, 161–­62, 169, 170, 239; twinned with conservation, 156, 171, 173–­74 preservation v. conservation, 50, 153, 156, 160, 252, 257; compromise and, 162, 169, 170, 236–­37, 241, 243; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; in James Watt’s tenure, 262–­63; Wise Use and, 262, 270–­72, 276, 279, 281, 283–­84 prior appropriation, 84, 86 private property, 49–­50, 109, 261; American valuing of, 239, 240; boundaries and, 69, 112; environmental protection and, 173, 238, 239–­40, 273; Wise Use and, 262, 270–­71. See also Homestead Act; Land Ordinance; Sagebrush Rebellion progress, 4, 208; and civilization, 83, 95, 103, 115, 125; cultural cost of, 174, 206–­7; through development, 71, 83, 94, 114, 206–­7, 219–­20; environmental, 247; environmental cost of, 83, 103, 174, 197, 219, 228; and the market economy, 95, 135, 187, 206–­7, 228; and Native peoples, 120–­21, 125, 143 Progressive Era, 103, 153–­74, 187, 239–­ 40; national parks and preservation during, 103, 153–­54, 155, 168–­69, 170; natural resource conservation, 155–­56, 157, 158; public land, 103, 153–­55, 156, 160–­61, 239–­40. See also conservation in Progressivism;

354 Index

Marsh, George Perkins; Muir, John; Pinchot, Gifford; preservation and Progressivism; Roosevelt, Theodore; Sierra Club Progressivism, 155–­56; and eugenics, 173, 174; faith in federal stewardship, 157, 158–­59, 161–­62, 163, 169, 239; and protection of natural resources, 155, 156; and reclamation, 162; and science, 155, 158, 160. See also conservation in Progressivism; Marsh, George Perkins; Muir, John; Pinchot, Gifford; preservation and Progressivism; Roosevelt, Theodore; Sierra Club pronghorn antelope, 17, 28, 74, 131, 201; population decline, 92, 99, 118, 136 public domain, 69, 109, 173, 198, 200, 266, 269 public good, 213, 240, 241 public lands, 4, 5, 201, 228, 239–­40, 262; the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes and, 269–­70; American Prairie, 326, 326–­27; the BlueRibbon Coalition and, 271–­72, 280; Bureau of Land Management and, 264, 267; cattle grazing on, 120, 198, 200, 269–­70; the Endangered American Wilderness Act and, 255–­56; the Land Ordinance and, 69, 70, 108, 112, 118; mining on, 109, 263; the National Wilderness Preservation System and, 238, 255–­ 56; preservation of, 103, 142, 169, 173, 201; the Public Lands Reclamation Act and, 267, 268; the Public Land Survey System and, 69–­71, 70; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266–­69,

270, 277, 279, 283–­84; the Timber and Stone Act and, 108–­9, 141; tourism and, 171, 214–­15, 227, 256, 285; transfer to private ownership, 101, 109, 113, 141, 173, 278; and western identity, 5, 155, 285; western proportion of, 4, 169, 238; western state control of, 267; Wise Use and, 271, 283. See also Bureau of Land Management (blm); Church, Frank; commons, public land as; forests, public land and; Forest Service, U.S.; Homestead Act; Mining Law; national parks; National Park Service; Progressive Era: public land; Progressivism: faith in federal stewardship; Roosevelt, Theodore; Sagebrush Rebellion; states’ rights; Watt, James; Wise Use Public Lands Reclamation Act, 267, 268 Public Land Survey System, 69–­71, 70. See also Land Ordinance public opinion, 155, 286, 324; and bison, 137, 173; and dams, 192, 213, 215, 216, 218, 249, 277; and development, 206, 239; and environmental degradation, 237, 239, 255, 258; and Native peoples, 149; and preservation, 247, 258, 273; and voting, 250, 251. See also Carson, Rachel; environmental movement public transportation, 223–­24, 314 Pueblo Indians, 15, 52–­58, 57, 61–­62, 190 Pueblo Revolt, 56–­57, 58 Quammen, David, 323, 324 rabbits, 15, 26, 28, 43 Rachlin, Carol K., 39–­40

Index  355

racism, 129, 171, 173, 223. See also eugenics Raff, Jennifer, 15 railroads, 4, 121, 139, 184, 212, 246; and bison, 118, 130; v. cars and trucks, 220, 224; Central Pacific, 105, 113; and East-­to-­West movement, 106, 107, 121; and farms, 105, 114, 115; Great Plains and, 113–­14; land sales by, 113–­14, 118; livestock and, 99, 105, 107, 121, 136; refrigerated cars, 107, 121, 136, 196; timber cutting and, 104, 105, 114, 115–­18, 117, 141, 184, 225; Union Pacific, 105, 113; and West-­to-­ East extraction, 104–­5, 107–­8, 115, 118, 121, 141, 196, 284; and wheat, 105, 106 railroads, transcontinental, 104–­5, 106, 115, 118, 130, 136, 196; federal subsidy of, 100, 105, 113; Pacific Railway Act, 105, 108 rain: above average, 182, 199; climate change and, 30, 35, 114–­15, 283, 293, 299; lack of, 2, 26, 167, 202, 297; and nonirrigated agriculture, 31, 114, 198; overabundance of, 103, 190, 293; water projects and, 197, 202, 295. See also drought ranching, 74, 81, 114, 136, 167, 326; of bison, 131; Chicano, 269–­70; Cliven and Ammon Bundy and, 268–­69; competition with Native land use, 121, 125, 190, 191; erosion and, 138, 200; the Great Die-­Up and, 99–­100, 119, 120, 157; the Homestead Act and, 100, 108, 109, 115; as Old West symbol, 143, 144, 284, 286; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266–­68, 277, 283–­84; of sheep, 118, 136; Theodore

Roosevelt and, 99–­100, 157; in Utah, 266–­68, 276, 277, 279; and wolves, 136–­37, 137, 281–­82 rats, 44, 46, 47 raw materials, 181–­82, 224, 285; railroads and, 104, 115; West-­to-­East extraction of, 4, 95, 105, 115, 180, 284 Reagan, Ronald, 258, 261–­62, 264–­65, 280, 284, 286; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266, 268. See also Watt, James reclamation, 174, 181, 198, 202, 213, 245; and the Central Valley Project, 196–­97, 297–­98; and the Colorado River Storage Project, 215; and elite control of water, 165, 166, 167, 188; environmental cost of, 164, 167, 193, 197, 215, 228; Hetch Hetchy Valley and, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; Los Angeles and, 165–­67; and the Newlands Reclamation Act, 162, 163–­65, 187; and western settlement, 162–­63, 164–­ 65, 187. See also aridity; Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam); Bureau of Reclamation; dams; hydraulic society recreation, outdoor, 163, 236, 278, 285; and conservation, 160, 171, 228, 254; Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, 215, 277–­78; and habitat preservation, 201, 245–­46; infrastructure for, 207, 227; mechanized, 256, 267, 271, 277, 279, 285; postwar boom in, 219, 226–­28, 237, 248, 253; waterways and, 245–­46, 249. See also Land and Water Conservation Fund (lwcf); Wise Use recycling, 298, 314, 315 redlining, 223

356 Index

Reisner, Marc, 219 Remington, Frederic, 126, 143–­44, 145, 146 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (Powell), 101–­2, 107–­8, 110, 111, 112 Republican Party, 121, 242, 244, 251, 258, 262, 266 reservations. See Native reservations Revised Statute 2477, 278–­80, 279 Rio Grande, 30, 53, 56, 82 riparian zones. See ecosystems, riparian rivers, 19, 48, 69, 239, 285; Arctic, 294, 297, 303, 307, 310, 311, 316; erosion and, 91, 119; exploration and, 101, 110; gold mining and, 89, 140; as plains corridors, 31, 68, 94; pollution of, 140, 186, 221, 226; rarity of, 86, 141, 187; spring runoff and, 99, 297, 305; timber cutting and, 116, 118; as wilderness, 174, 214, 235, 236, 245–­46, 327. See also Bureau of Reclamation; dams; ecosystems, riparian; reclamation; salmon; water projects; watersheds; and specific river names Robinson, Gordon, 253, 254 Robinson, Michael, 136, 137 Rocky Mountain Fur Company. See fur trade; Rocky Mountains Rocky Mountains, 2, 74, 91, 116, 188, 207, 302; bison in, 159, 173; as boundary, 26, 30, 31, 201; climate change in, 299, 302; fur trapping in, 75, 76–­77, 78; Native peoples of, 30–­31, 58, 129, 143; wolves in, 137 Rogers, Jedediah, 267, 269 Rome, Adam, 180

Roosevelt, Franklin, 179, 185, 188, 189 Roosevelt, Theodore, 143, 154, 157, 160, 247; Dawes Act and, 159; and eugenics, 171, 173; and Gifford Pinchot, 160, 163; and Hetch Hetchy Valley, 155, 167–­68; and John Muir, 153–­55, 162–­63, 167; and multi-­use conservation, 156, 157, 160, 162, 173, 184, 262; national forest creation by, 160–­61; national monument creation by, 153, 169, 184; national park creation by, 153, 169, 172; as Progressive, 156, 157, 162, 171; public land creation by, 153–­54, 157, 169, 276; as rancher, 99–­ 100, 120, 157; and reclamation, 163, 166–­67, 168, 245; U.S. Forest Service creation by, 160; wildlife refuge creation by, 158–­59, 173; and William Temple Hornaday, 157–­58 Rothman, Hal, 286 runoff, 30, 79, 254, 296, 297, 300; and erosion, 56, 119, 138, 253; and pollution, 138 Russell, Charles M., 119, 120, 143–­44, 145, 146 Russia, 52, 72, 75–­76, 182 Russian thistles (tumbleweeds), 88, 139, 167, 202 saber-­toothed cats, 17, 18, 56 sagebrush, 27, 34, 88, 139, 266 Sagebrush Rebellion, 266–­69, 270, 277, 279, 283–­84 Sahlins, Marshall, 61, 62 salinization, 138, 140, 189, 322 Salish, 26; Coast Salish, 25, 51, 132; Confederated Salish and Kootenai, 304

Index  357

salmon, 80, 136, 211, 245, 284; ecological importance of, 92, 131–­32, 305; fish ladders and, 192–­93; hatcheries for, 217–­18; in Pacific Northwest Native culture, 25, 50, 132–­33, 147; prehistoric, 12, 17 salmon, Chinook, 131, 133; dams and, 193, 216–­17, 245, 305; population decline, 135, 216–­17, 218 salmon population decline, 83, 131, 140, 305, 324; and damming, 135, 192–­93, 194, 197, 216–­17; and fishwheels/ overfishing, 133–­35, 134; and pollution/erosion, 91, 92, 135, 138, 254 Salmon River, 30, 245, 246, 247 Schurz, Carl, 155, 156 Secretary of Interior, 213. See also Andrus, Cecil; Babbitt, Bruce; Lane, Franklin; Schurz, Carl; Udall, Stewart; Watt, James Sequoia National Park, 169, 170, 300 Serengeti, American, 16, 202, 326 settlement, 94, 126, 127, 147; and bison, 93, 119, 131; dummy claim fraud and, 109, 115, 141, 164; early European, 44–­45, 51–­55, 68, 85; effects on Native peoples, 67–­68, 120–­21, 125, 131, 140; environmental cost of, 71, 118, 119, 121, 125, 198–­99; environmental cost of, animal extirpation and, 135–­37, 137; environmental cost of, plants and, 83, 138–­39; federal policy of, 108–­9, 113, 121, 142, 212–­13, 278; gold rushes and, 88–­89; interstates and, 219; John Wesley Powell and, 100–­102, 109, 111, 112–­13, 187; the Land Ordinance and, 69, 70, 108, 112,

118; Mormon, 84–­85, 86–­89, 118; of the Pacific Coast, 75, 80, 81, 82–­83; Paleoindian, 15, 30; railroads and, 105, 107, 113–­15; reclamation and, 162–­63, 164–­65, 187; of Texas, 80–­82. See also Homestead Act; mining; territorial acquisitions settlement, Native, 23, 26, 34, 46, 47, 56, 68; Ancestral Puebloan, 28–­29, 29, 30, 169, 171, 172, 296 sheep, 43, 47, 108, 211; effect on native grasses, 139; Native hunting of wild species, 31; Native husbandry of, 43–­44, 63, 190–­91; in Utah, 67, 118. See also wolves: extermination campaigns against sheep, bighorn, 17, 31, 136, 140, 143 Sheridan, Philip, 120–­21 Shoshones, 27, 28, 31, 52–­53, 58 Sierra Club, 214, 237, 256; David Brower and, 215, 248–­49; and early preservation efforts, 162, 168; and elitism, 173; founding, 150, 162; Frank Church and, 235, 248, 251, 257; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 268. See also Muir, John Sierra Nevada, 91, 93, 162, 165, 300; as boundary, 24, 26–­27, 196 Silent Spring (Carson), 9, 222, 246–­47, 248, 304 silver, 69, 85, 116, 182, 184; railroads and, 105; rushes, 109; Spanish colonial, 52 Silver, Robin, 296 Sioux. See Lakotas Sitting Bull, 145, 149 slavery: of Africans, 41, 81, 100, 121; by Native peoples, 26; of Native peoples, 47, 54, 82

358 Index

smallpox, 44, 45, 46, 52–­53, 86–­87, 93; in Native lore, 39–­40 Smith, Joseph, 83, 84–­85. See also Mormons Snake River, 27, 30, 78, 216, 217, 244–­45 snakes, 42, 74 snow, 2, 93, 99, 114, 119, 285, 300; and climate change, 292, 297, 300, 304–­5; as water source, 27, 78, 99, 116, 297, 304–­5; and wildfire, 300, 301 snowpack, 297, 300, 304–­5 Soil Conservation Service, 181, 200–­202. See also national grasslands Sonoran Desert, 27, 277 Sorensen, Victor, 87 Souder, William, 247 South Dakota, 121, 126, 148, 149, 284 Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 268, 271, 278, 280 Spain, 74, 76, 269; colonization by, 42, 51–­57, 68, 80, 81, 85–­86; introduction of invasive species, 139; reintroduction of horses, 53–­54, 55, 60. See also Columbus, Christopher species depletion, 63, 147, 160, 228; of bees, 306–­7; introduced species and, 107, 131, 139–­40; market hunting and, 62, 79, 131, 138, 158; of northern spotted owls, 272, 272–­76, 284, 314; of plants, 304; of salmon, 193, 194; subsistence hunting and, 87; water projects and, 189–­90, 217. See also beavers; bison; endangered species; extermination campaigns; extinction; fur trade; plume trade; salmon; wolves spruces, 30, 115, 141, 184, 275 Squamish, 25, 26

squash, 20, 21–­23, 22, 28 states’ rights, 100, 244, 263, 268, 271, 281. See also private property; Sagebrush Rebellion; West, federal power/ influence in; Wise Use steelhead, 131, 140, 193, 216–­18, 245 Stegner, Wallace, 1, 5, 6, 112, 315, 327; This Is Dinosaur, 215; on water, 187, 215; on western aridity, 2–­3. See also Echo Park Stevens, Isaac, 133 Stuart, David, 29, 30 subsidies, federal, 100, 277; of agriculture, 164, 187, 197, 203, 270; of western development, 100–­101, 207, 212–­13 subsistence, 93, 126, 171, 223, 269; agriculture, 31, 60, 105, 198; economies, 61–­62, 126, 145, 190; Mormon, 87, 88; Spanish-­Mexican strategies of, 85 subsistence, Native, 93, 130; conflict with market economy, 40, 55, 60–­63, 125, 192; fishing, 131; horse culture and, 59; hunting, 16, 20, 31, 34, 59, 125; strategies of, 16, 28, 31, 55, 190–­91 suburbanization, 220–­23, 222, 225, 284 Supreme Courts: federal, 132, 280; state, 140 sustainability, 5, 6, 9, 35, 300; challenges to, 102; and early American colonialism, 68; and eastern resource extraction, 101; and fish populations, 133; the Great Plains and, 68, 119, 202; and irrigation, 86; John Wesley Powell and, 111, 112, 121; and the market economy, 60, 61–­62, 79, 88, 93, 107, 181; Native, 22, 23, 61–­62, 133, 148,

Index  359

sustainability (cont.) 191, 212; prehistoric, 14; the Sierra Club and, 150; timber cutting and, 118, 252–­53, 254; and urban expansion, 221, 294. See also commons, tragedy of; Liebig’s law; Powell, John Wesley; unsustainability sustainability, twenty-­first-­century, 293, 298, 308–­9, 314–­16, 322, 325; antecedents, 236, 248; cooperation and, 324, 327. See also commons, triumph of the; unsustainability Swagerty, William, 76 Taft, William Howard, 169 Tattersall, Ian, 11 Taylor Grazing Service, 200–­201. See also Bureau of Land Management (blm) temperate zones, 68–­69, 83 territorial acquisitions, 73, 80, 100, 104, 132. See also Gadsden Purchase; Louisiana Purchase; Oregon: U.S. acquisition of; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; warfare: Mexican-­American Texas, 52, 82, 107, 158, 163, 284; the Dust Bowl in, 198; and Mexico, 80–­82; Native peoples of, 32, 56–­57, 59; petroleum industry in, 140, 185–­86, 224 “Thinking Like a Mountain” (Leopold), 205–­6 This Is Dinosaur (Stegner), 215 Thoreau, Henry David, 33, 161–­62, 257–­58 “three sisters” farming, 21–­23, 22, 28, 31 Thunberg, Greta, 327 Thurow, Russ, 305

Tijerina, Reies López, 269–­70, 270 timber: as a commons, 142, 147, 160, 174, 226, 253; conservation and, 104–­5, 142, 174; consumption of, 104; as natural wealth, 80, 115–­16, 138, 180, 236; old-­growth, 80, 141, 272, 273–­75, 276; pine bark beetles and, 302–­3; timberlands, 101, 103, 104; West-­to-­East export of, 100, 105, 141, 156, 180; and wildfire, 302. See also forests; Forest Service, U.S.; timber cutting; trees Timber and Stone Act, 108–­9, 141 timber barons, 141, 184 timber cutting: clear-­cutting and, 117, 135, 141, 251–­55, 252, 275; conservation and, 156, 161, 171, 245, 256, 265, 314; conservation legislation and, 237–­38; and control of forest land, 104, 142, 237–­38, 268–­69; early settler, 83, 86, 88; Great Lakes and, 141, 143, 156; James Watt and, 261; mining and, 91, 116; northern spotted owl and, 273–­76; as Old West economy, 267, 284, 286; Pacific Northwestern, 115, 141–­43, 273–­74, 275, 276, 314; railroads and, 105, 114, 115–­18, 117, 141, 184, 225; technology of, 121; Timber and Stone Act and, 108–­9, 141; U.S. Forest Service and, 160–­61, 184, 252–­55; wartime, 182, 184; and watersheds, 103–­4, 116–­17; West-­to-­East export and, 100, 105, 141, 156, 180; Wise Use and, 271. See also Church, Frank; forests; Forest Service, U.S.; trees tourism: cars and, 186, 219, 226; and conservation, 169, 171; and economic

360 Index

benefits, 215, 226, 238, 241, 254, 286; environmental costs of, 214–­15, 225, 227; National Park Service and, 170, 171, 226–­27, 263; nuclear, 209–­10, 254; postwar boom in, 162, 219, 226–­ 27; and preservation, 168, 214, 249; and water, 215, 218, 249; zoos and, 173 trade: American foreign, 180–­81; in Eurasia and Africa, 20, 41, 45; and horse culture, 58, 59, 129; inter-­Native, 55, 58, 59, 132; market economies and, 61, 62, 79; Mexico and, 80; Mormon, 88; Native dependence on bison and, 93; Native with American, 74, 79; Native with European, 44, 55, 56, 60, 63, 191; in plumes, 157, 158; pre-­European Native, 10, 26, 30, 31, 34, 132; transoceanic, 4, 41, 50, 126. See also beavers; bison; fur trade; trappers Traditional Ecological Knowledge (tek), 304 tragedy of the commons. See commons, tragedy of trappers, 68, 75, 78, 79, 82, 136, 137; and Native and Hispanic women, 76–­77. See also fur trade Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 73, 82, 269 trees, 12, 74, 85, 283, 305, 315; aspens, 283, 299–­300; cedars, 25, 115, 139, 141, 202, 275; climate stress and, 299–­300; coniferous, 275, 277, 299, 302; as a crop, 160, 251; death of, 299, 300, 303; the Dust Bowl and, 201, 202; environmental activists and, 265, 268, 274; European, 82, 202; fire and, 33–­34, 83, 299, 300; firs, 30, 83, 115, 252, 315; Great Plains lack of, 68,

100, 114; junipers, 27, 30, 277, 299; in Native beliefs, 49, 148, 149; pests and pathogens, 253, 299, 302–­3; pines, 30, 69, 299, 302–­3; redwoods, 69, 115, 138, 141; shelterbelt, 139–­40, 201, 202; spruces, 30, 115, 141, 184, 275; willows, 283, 299. See also forests; timber; timber cutting triumph of the commons. See commons, triumph of trout, 74, 125, 216, 254, 285, 304 trucking, 216, 220, 274, 277 Truett, Joe, 119 Trump, Donald, 264, 282, 309, 312 tumbleweeds (Russian thistles), 88, 139, 167, 202 tundra, 12, 30, 291–­92, 297, 305 turkeys, wild, 43, 304 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 143, 146–­47, 148, 149–­50, 155, 157; frontier thesis, 127–­29, 136, 141, 150; Homo americanus concept, 127, 144 Udall, Stewart, 238, 249 United Nations, 303, 308–­9, 313, 314 unsustainability: and carbon dioxide, 293; and drought, 298; of fossil fuels, 313; and government policy, 101; and horse-­bison culture, 60, 93; and livestock drives, 107, 300; and market economies, 62, 88; and timber cutting, 118, 252–­53; of urban sprawl, 221, 294. See also sustainability uranium, 192, 211–­12 urbanization: eastern, 107, 119, 121; environmental cost of, 219–­20; interface with wild lands, 285, 302; and

Index  361

urbanization (cont.) marginalized communities, 220, 223; and the market economy, 120, 121; Native, 34; planning of, 298; public transportation and, 223–­24; and recreation, 201, 237, 240, 243, 255; and sanitation, 156; and species decline, 304; as trend, 127, 128, 155 urban sprawl, 187, 220–­21, 222, 228, 240, 242, 313 urban v. rural conflict, 271, 284, 285 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. See Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. U.S. Forest Service. See Forest Service, U.S. U.S. Geological Survey, 111, 113, 195 usufruct rights, 49, 85, 86 Utah, 28, 30, 75, 105, 271, 285; atomic testing and, 210, 210–­11; the BlueRibbon Coalition and, 271–­72, 280; and the Colorado River Compact, 195, 213, 218; Dinosaur National Monument, 213–­15, 248, 263; Echo Park, 213–­15, 218; as fastest-­growing state, 284; Grand Staircase–­Escalante National Monument, 276–­78, 279–­80; invasive species in, 139; mining in, 116, 183–­84, 208, 285; Moab, 267, 285; Mormon settlement of, 86–­88, 112; Native peoples of, 14, 15, 27, 58, 85, 190; public transportation in, 224; and the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266–­68, 279; Salt Lake City, 183, 225, 255, 266, 298; Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and, 268, 271, 278, 280; timber cutting in, 116–­18; water projects in, 218, 296; Wise Use in, 271, 276–­80, 279

Utes, 27, 58, 85 viruses, 46, 47, 322–­24 Walking Coyote, Samuel, 159 warfare, 146; Cold War, 207, 208; global, 324; inter-­Native, 26, 27, 46, 54–­55; Mexican-­American, 67–­68, 81–­82, 89; Native, 47, 51, 60, 93; nuclear, 208, 321; settler-­Native, 67–­68, 120; U.S.-­Native (Indian wars), 100, 120–­ 21, 133, 149. See also Civil War; World War I (Great War); World War II War Industries Board, 181–­82, 185 Washington (state), 139, 200, 211, 309; Native peoples of, 25, 133; salmon in, 133–­34, 192–­93; timber cutting in, 143, 184, 273–­76; water projects in, 192–­94, 197, 213, 227 water, 59, 68, 89, 139–­40; climate change and, 294–­95, 296–­98, 306, 322; commodification of, 86, 164, 189, 202, 245, 298; as a commons, 5, 85–­ 86, 196, 197; erosion and, 92, 95, 190; Great Plains lack of, 68, 100, 101, 103, 112, 146; headwaters, 30, 116, 141, 188, 294; hydraulic mining, 90, 90–­91, 92, 102, 135, 140; Mormon use of, 84, 85, 86; in Native lore, 25, 26, 31, 48, 77; public land conservation and, 142, 160, 163; rights to, 84, 85–­86, 113, 165, 166, 269, 271; Spanish-­Mexican use of, 85–­86. See also aridity; beavers; Colorado River Compact (crc); glaciers; groundwater; irrigation; power, hydroelectric; reclamation; runoff; water projects; watersheds

362 Index

water conservation, 23, 201, 240–­45, 314, 315; dams and, 163, 245, 297, 298. See also Land and Water Conservation Fund (lwcf) water pollution, 138, 139, 221–­22, 248, 256; from industry, 107, 186, 305; nuclear, 211, 212; prevention of, 246, 322, 327 water projects, 4, 163, 164, 165, 187, 218–­19, 298. See also canals; dams; irrigation; reclamation watersheds, 110, 163, 194, 196; commonwealths of, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 139, 162; democracy and, 86; plant species of, 140; protection of, 103, 104, 118, 246; timber cutting and, 116–­17, 117, 253. See also Colorado River Compact (crc) water tables, 79, 167. See also groundwater waterways, 59, 80, 92, 95, 111, 112. See also rivers Watkins, T. H., 101 Watt, James, 261–­65, 262, 286; and the Endangered Species Act, 264; and fossil fuel extraction, 263, 265; legacy of, 274, 277, 280, 283–­84, 285; support for the Sagebrush Rebellion, 266, 268 weeds. See plants, invasive Wellock, Thomas, 162 West, colonial status of, 4, 100, 136, 141, 146, 155, 207; definition, 1–­2, 2; modern, 266 West, federal power/influence in, 219, 242, 266; reclamation and, 180, 187, 189; during wartime, 181–­82, 207.

See also Bureau of Reclamation; reclamation; Sagebrush Rebellion; states’ rights; subsidies, federal; Watt, James West, New, 284–­85, 286 West, Old, 143–­44, 148, 267, 284–­85, 286 West, Wild, 68, 145, 284; Buffalo Bill’s, 144–­45, 146–­47, 148, 171 West-­to-­East extraction, 107, 119, 121, 138, 155; of natural resources, 100, 104, 105, 180–­81; railroads and, 104–­5, 106, 107–­8, 115, 118, 121, 141, 196, 284; of raw materials, 4, 95, 105, 115, 180, 284; of timber, 100, 105, 141, 156, 180 wetlands, 79, 118, 184, 237 wheat, 56, 74, 83, 85, 202; competition with native plants, 83, 114; as European, 19, 21, 44, 55; and railroads, 105, 106; and soil degradation, 114, 198; and World War I, 182, 198 White, Richard, 60–­61, 105, 115, 130, 192 Whyte, William, 221 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 236, 245–­ 46, 247 wilderness, 75, 145, 171, 284, 315, 327; as chaos, 70, 129; and the Endangered American Wilderness Act, 255–­56; James Watt and, 263–­64; John Muir on, 150, 153, 161–­62; and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, 239, 240–­45, 243; myth of the West as, 3, 24, 33–­34, 135; and the National Wilderness Preservation System, 238, 255, 256; private, 239, 240, 243; private use of, 277–­78; public, 103, 238, 240, 243; public concern for, 237, 253; public use of, 267; Southern

Index  363

wilderness (cont.) Utah Wilderness Alliance and, 268, 271, 278, 280; study areas of, 246, 264, 267–­68, 277, 279, 279; tourism and, 162, 241; U.S. Forest Service and, 160, 255–­ 56; and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 236, 245–­46, 247. See also Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr); Church, Frank; Grand Staircase–­ Escalante National Monument (gsenm); Roosevelt, Theodore; Sagebrush Rebellion; Wise Use Wilderness Act, 33, 215, 237–­39, 244, 245, 247, 279; consensus and, 235, 236. See also Endangered American Wilderness Act Wilderness Society, 214, 235, 251, 268 wildfire, 99, 114, 276, 301; climate change and, 79, 293, 299, 301–­2 Wilkinson, Charles, 115, 133, 194 Willerslev, Eske, 15–­16 Wilson, E. O., 9–­10, 35 Wilson, Jack. See Wovoka ( Jack Wilson) Wilson, Woodrow, 170, 181 Wise Use, 262, 270–­72, 276, 279, 281, 283–­84. See also Sagebrush Rebellion; states’ rights wolves, 17, 74; Arctic, 291, 294, 303; conservation of, 206, 280–­83, 324; extermination campaigns against, 44, 87, 119, 135–­38, 137, 205–­6, 282; Mexican gray, 281, 282; Native relationship with, 18; as Old West symbol, 143–­ 44, 284; opposition to, 281–­82

women, 75, 107, 128–­29, 156, 168; and conservation, 158–­59; European, 51; Hispanic, 76–­77; white American, 144–­46, 147, 158–­59 women, Native, 33, 54, 76, 132, 149, 212; and agriculture, 23, 50, 51, 60; cultural power of, 51, 60, 191; and non-­Native men, 52, 76–­77 Wootton, Richens, 68 World War I (Great War), 180, 181–­83, 184, 185, 186, 187–­88 World War II, 208, 213, 220, 228, 253; car culture boom after, 224, 226; environmental consciousness after, 237, 240; federal presence in the West after, 207; tourism boom after, 162, 219. See also power: nuclear; warfare: nuclear Worster, Donald, 154, 199, 202, 213; on Mormon history, 85, 86; on reclamation, 165, 167, 189, 197 Wounded Knee massacre, 121, 149 Wovoka ( Jack Wilson), 125, 127, 140, 148, 150 Wyoming, 30, 243–­44, 261, 284, 307; and the Colorado River Compact, 195; the fur trade in, 75; Native peoples of, 31, 58; railroads and, 105, 116, 118; timber and trees in, 116, 118, 252, 303; wolves in, 137, 281 Yazzie-­Lewis, Esther, 212 Yellowstone National Park, 130, 169, 227, 326; Native removal from, 171; wolf conservation in, 280–­83 Yellowstone region, 31, 58, 75

364 Index

Yosemite National Park, 153–­55, 154, 162, 169, 170, 214, 227; Hetch Hetchy Valley, 155, 167–­68, 170, 214; Native removal from, 171 Young, Brigham, 67, 83–­85, 86, 87, 88. See also Mormons Zion, 67, 86, 87. See also Eden zoos, 157, 159, 173, 315

Index  365

In the Environment and Region in the American West series: Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West, New Edition Sara Dant Foreword by Tom S. Udall To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit nebraskapress​.unl​.edu.