The Backbone of the World:
A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide
By Frank Clifford
Broadway, 274 pages, $24.95
Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America’s Vanishing West
By William Celis
PublicAffairs, 233 pages, $25
If you were looking for recent examples of economic and social change in the West, you could start with the opening of Denver’s National Western Stock Show and Rodeo.
Rodeo queens still smile and do the beauty-queen wave from horseback at 30 miles an hour. But a show of pyrotechnics, laser lights and rock music has replaced the traditional Grand Entry Parade of mounted horsemen. The sound you hear in the background may be Buffalo Bill Cody chuckling in his grave up on Lookout Mountain 12 miles to the west.
A few years ago, attendance at the 16-day stock show had leveled off at 250,000, and management knew it had to change to attract more urbanites. Along with rock ‘n’ roll rodeo, it added a night of horses dancing to music ranging from jazz to Broadway show tunes, a Mexican rodeo, a Western art exhibit and the revival of Buffalo Bill’s successful urban-rural interface, the Wild West show.
The change worked. Commerce is healthy on the grounds of the stock show. Attendance has jumped to more than 600,000. Urbanites mix easily with folks from rural areas. In the barns and arenas of the stock show, all seems well.
And yet, out in the mountains, canyons and plains of the West, economic well-being is patchy and precarious. If you ask people in the rural West how they are doing, many would be like the patient who puts on a brave face and says, “Fine, just fine.”
But if you ask more questions, have a few tests run and examine the results, you will notice several areas of concern. We’re in a severe drought. The year 2002 was the driest on record. Agricultural and tourism losses are in the billions of dollars. If we don’t get rain this summer, we’re in for a repeat of last year’s enormous wildfires.
Like the bull riders in the stock show’s rodeo, a lot of people in the rural West live life on the edge. So they feel the effects of a general economic downturn early and deeply.
Based on initial findings in your check-up of the West, you might decide to seek the opinion of consultants, and, after hearing what they had to say, your unease would be heightened. Two such consultants are Frank Clifford, author of “The Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide,” and William Celis, author of “Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America’s Vanishing West.” Both have spent time poking at and asking questions of the West.
Clifford, the environment editor for the Los Angeles Times (a Tribune Co. newspaper), has concentrated on the spine that runs through the West, following but also straying from the Continental Divide Trail, a public-private project to build a backcountry trail spanning more than 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada. He produces a richly detailed and nicely written examination of ranchers (at least one of whom uses a motorcycle, not a horse, to herd his cattle), backcountry guides, loggers, forest rangers, miners, Indians and visitors to the West–all of whom worry about changes they are seeing.
Celis, a former journalist who teaches communications at the University of Southern California, lived for a year in the town of Cortez, in the Four Corners area of southwestern Colorado. He describes the issues and events focused on the operations of a one-room schoolhouse in McElmo Canyon, just east of Cortez.
The school occupies a symbolic ground between the families who have lived for generations in the canyon and recent newcomers from urban areas. The conflict between parents represents deeper frictions of the West. The single teacher, Stephen Hanson, finds himself a lightning rod, attracting criticism from locals and newcomers.
Clifford and Celis correctly see a West that is so vast and open and unregulated that a family outside of Cortez can bury their son on their own land rather than in a cemetery, and another man can spend three years searching the Wyoming forests for a crashed airplane and his son’s body. Both authors pay attention to changes in the environment, wilderness and wildlife of the West, but both are most concerned about human beings.
In contrast to the popular image of the West as a carefree place, the real West is full of gritty hard work and the constant challenges of interpersonal relationships. Celis and Clifford see conflict everywhere: between ranchers and newcomers, between teachers and school boards, between the mythic Old West and the realities of the new West. The West may not be “vanishing” (as the subtitle of Celis’ book has it), but the lives of Westerners are certainly changing, and many of the conflicts arise from this.
Change has exacerbated the dysfunction in the West’s familial relationship with its Uncle Sam. The West resents the intrusion of federal regulation. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president broad powers in designating national monuments. Its recent use to create such vast monuments as Staircase-Escalante National Monument, essentially with no opportunity for public comment, is seen by many locals as being uncaring to their opinions and to the impact on local economies. The continuing controversy over forest-road closures by the federal government is seen as yet another indication of Washington’s insensitivity to local need for land access. Clifford writes of forest rangers shunned as they walked into local cafes.
But Clifford also points out that government jobs have been supplementing the income of ranchers and farmers. Federally funded highways and airports make recreation and tourism possible. Federal tax write-offs support real-estate development. Westerners still try to maintain that the Western rangeland livestock industry is somehow sustainable without Uncle Sam’s assistance.
Change has also caused the West to have doubts about its own self-image. Ranching set the Western image, but now environmentalists and global economic forces are kicking ranchers around. Some environmental groups are trying to prevent their access to federal grazing lands. Sheep and cattle prices have plummeted because of foreign competition. The sheep industry has all but disappeared due to the loss of federal price supports and the release of massive Australian wool surpluses. Consequently, Meeker, Colo., is having problems scrounging up enough sheep for all the dogs to herd–and the tourists to watch–at this fall’s National Sheep Dog Trials.
In the locals, change triggers distrust, stubbornness, fragile emotions and easy anger. They send out a jumble of mixed messages. Celis found that while a town such as Cortez may advertise itself as “The Friendliest Town In the West,” urban transplants seeking safer schools and an idyllic landscape found themselves regarded as outsiders, snubbed by neighbors and struggling to find jobs. The picturesque environment, meanwhile, presents unanticipated challenges. Celis notes that your attitude about the land changes when you find yourself cutting firewood to heat your house, and your pleasure in the remote location diminishes as you try to find a doctor.
Part of the personality conflict results from general differences between locals and newcomers. Compared to locals, newcomers are often wealthier, better educated and have different attitudes about race, ethnicity and sexuality. They thicken the traffic and elevate the cost of real estate. And they can be obnoxious. They will sometimes tell locals what’s good for them, radiating a condescending air of superiority.
At the Battle Rock school, newcomers fought locals over issues ranging from the replacement of outdoor privies with indoor toilets to the teaching of art from books with classic female nudes, although the amount of flesh shown was considerably less than that seen on cable TV or in a PG-13 film. Clifford learns about the sensitivity of locals when he spends time with a likable New Mexico rancher, and an unintended affront involving the man’s wife demolishes their relationship. Physically very tough, the rancher bleeds over the slightest of perceived insults. No wonder he posts a sign at the entrance to his ranch that reads:
“Visitors Not Welcome. Trespassers Will Be Shot.”
Personality conflict also powers local reaction to tourists. Their dollars fuel what Clifford calls “the twin turbines of the Rocky Mountain economy,” recreation and real estate. Rather than being appreciated for the economic benefit they bring, tourists are regarded with particular suspicion and resentment. They represent a privileged people with discretionary time and disposable income, items in short supply for most locals.
Culture and class play a role in the West’s personality conflict. Clifford points out that the Continental Divide Trail project is not always welcome. The Jicarilla Apaches in northern New Mexico refuse to let the trail cross their reservation. Others see the trail as a commercial venture designed to sell high-tech camping and hiking gear to the wealthy. Clifford also writes of the bitter struggle between Hispanic loggers in New Mexico and environmentalists, whom the loggers see as preventing them from making a living. When the loggers win a dispute with environmentalists over claims to a remote area, the loggers make a statement of pure spite by cutting down trees, even though there is no way to transport them out of the forest.
It’s a time-honored practice in science and medicine to try to explain a phenomenon by using the principle known as Occam’s razor, which says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. At the risk of crawling too far out on a diagnostic limb, let me apply Occam’s razor and hypothesize that at the heart of the problem between locals and newcomers is a difference in attitude toward change.
Why the difference? It may be the nature of the locals to stay put. They say they stay because they are tied to the land, but another explanation may be that they have an innate fear of change. Tied to this intolerance for change may be a basic problem interacting with other people. So-called Western hospitality can boil down to, “Come on in, sit a spell, and then leave.” Locals use such phrases as “freedom to do what I want,” “be my own boss,” “live a healthy lifestyle” and “be a part of the land” to describe why they live in the rural West. What they really may be doing is using the code words of people who do not easily welcome the company of strangers.
The Westerners in Clifford’s book are happiest when they are alone. They find greater comfort in the presence of mules than men. The newcomers Celis writes of, in contrast, have moved because they seek and need change. They have chosen to leave their urban existence and find something different. They are cut from a different cloth.
Does the personality conflict between locals and newcomers, perhaps deeply imbedded in psychological as well as historical origins, mean that local Westerners must be casualties of change? Perhaps there is a hint of an answer in the changes Clifford and Celis see in themselves. For Clifford and Celis, the more time they spend with rural Westerners, the
more those people seduce them. As much as they disagree with rural Westerners’ worldview and politics, both authors enjoy their somewhat antisocial company.
Clifford regrets the negative impact of ranching on the environment, but he is particularly concerned about the subdividing of the West. When he hears about an 84-year-old ranch widow who was jailed for putting up a fence that blocked a road leading to a nearby subdivision (her cows were being run over, and she refused to take down the fence), he says: ” ‘Good for her.’ . . . I’ll take cows over cars any time.” Celis spends some of his time examining his life. He is deeply disturbed by the rancor and even acts of violence he sees in Cortez’s Montezuma County, and he believes the year he spends there makes him a better person. Both authors conclude that without its contentious residents, the West would be a lesser place.
So how are rural Westerners to survive? Must a sense of distrust fill in the valleys and canyons, like the air pollution that seeps out of the cities? Have things gotten to the point that environmentalists deny any value in understanding ranchers or loggers?
Clifford presents a possible, but challenging, prescription: Rural Westerners, he says, are going to have to operate in a framework that they inherently don’t trust and probably don’t understand: strategic politics and alliance building. In “Moby Dick,” Ishmael is terrified as he watches the tattooed Queequeg get undressed to get into his bed. But advice from the Spouter Inn landlord reassures him: “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Rural Westerners may need to learn to bunk with environmentalists lest they be swept under by developers building homes and subdividing ranchettes, millions of recreational visitors trekking through forests and their front yards, and outsiders who place financial opportunism over wilderness.
Just before the bull riding–the grand climax of this year’s National Western Stock Show and Rodeo–a clown delighted the traditional rural Western crowd and urbanites by jumping a pickup truck and horse trailer while riding a motorcycle, having swapped his horse for a Honda. Like the National Western, those wishing to protect the rural heritage will have to adapt to change and back off on denouncing and resisting it. If they relax a bit, they might learn to make a degree of peace with their new world. That master of entrepreneurial response to change, Buffalo Bill, would probably approve.
Better, after all, to change than to vanish.
