Introduction

The West as a region There are many wests inside the larger West regional western diversity. There are several Wests the Prairie states, the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Slope (the Pacific Northwest), and the Southwest. Regions can be defined through reference to culture, landscape, or economics. Regionalism is not a fixed concept. No region is culturally and even geographically stable. Geography did not determine the boundaries of the West; rather, history created them. The West that Americans recognize today is their own work. It is not a neat geographical package awaiting discovery. The land and plants that live on western land are not always natural, they are the result of past actions by human beings. The environment is not very malleable, it limits human action upon it; but it also creates human possibilities. Selecting some geographical criterion to define the West does not work well; it can actually distort the reality of the western environment, it makes static what is dynamic. For example, historians and geographers often use aridity to distinguish the West from other sections. Over most areas of the West there is insufficient rain to grow crops without irrigation. But western Oregon, Northern Washington and northern California, as well as parts of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and the Dakotas are not arid. So we could say that aridity separates vast sections of the West from the East and South, but it also divides the West itself. The geographical boundaries of the West were not naturally determined; they were politically determined. The American West is that contiguous section of the continent west of the Missouri River acquired by the United States, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; continuing with the acquisition of Texas, the Oregon Territories and the Mexican Cession of the 1840s. Accepting the political definition gives us a way to approach the perplexing question Where is the West? The second question to consider is When did the West begin? We could date the Wests beginnings from the moment particular sections of it became part of the United States. For logical consistency, this definition ignores everybody who was living in the places that would become the West until the moment that the territory actually became American. Although human history in America begins with the movement of Indian peoples onto this continent, the history of the American West begins much later. Map: American regions

Interior & external regionalism We might label the sense of place developed by people within a region interior regionalism, and use the phrase exterior regionalism for the efforts of those outside a particular region to characterize it. The interplay of interior regionalism and exterior regionalism determines how regional consciousness is formed. We could say that the development of regional consciousness in the South was mostly internal, the result of interior regionalism. But the regional consciousness of the American West was shaped primarily by exterior regionalism, by the way this region was seen by people who were attracted to it. (The West acted like a sort of Fata Morgana). California vs. the West Is California part of the West? Why / Why not? The West up to the Sierra Nevada Mountains or up to the Pacific? California typically regarded as heaven on earth the land of plenty, fruitful, full of orchards (actually, that is possible only with the help of irrigation water is brought over from the Colorado River, and this makes Orange County possible, as well as the existence of Los Angeles and San Diego.) New England values (modesty, frugality, hard work) transferred to the Midwest. Midwesterners traditionalism, conformism. Religious fundamentalism. A rather rural area. Country values, cultural isolationism combined with local exceptionalism. The Midwest produced the American Regionalism movement in painting around the Great Depression (Thomas Hart Benton, John Stewart Curry, Grant Wood). Midwesterners regard California as a place of excess, absolutely immoral. Discuss Grant Woods pictures American Gothic and Daughters of the Revolution, and his farm landscapes the ordered farm land, Jeffersons well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size. California is another story gold-panners, merchants, pimps. The Gold Rush. Get rich quickly! (Get rich, squander you money, have fun). Values such as high risk-taking. You try to make a massive fortune rather than just to be comfortable in life. Big urban areas appear overnight San Francisco. Cosmopolitism. California a place that encourages big risk-taking and big dreams. A dramatic success story, the richest state in the U.S., the 5th economy in the world. Different values than in the West. The hippy movement in the late 60s, early 70s, the Beats, gay pride marches, sexual tolerance. The best weather a Mediterranean feel. Life is easy. The good life ease and luxury, free thinking, glamour, stress on youth. California teaches the

world that people should be comfortable in their body the beach culture (surfers, the bikini). Famous universities Berkeley. Geographic determinism Scholars such as John Wesley Powell and Frederick Jackson Turner emphasized geographic characteristics as a major element in the creation of the West as a region (rather than cultural attributes, which will be stressed by post World War II historians). Powell did not draw precise boundaries of the West, but he suggested various geographic delineations. His work influenced many of his contemporaries, among them Frederick Jackson Turner.
(John Wesley Powell a geologist, director of the U.S. Geological Survey between 1881 and 1894. He is famous for the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers that included the first passage through the Grand Canyon.)

Sections Frederick Jackson Turner (in his essay, The Significance of the Section in American History, 1925) showed that The frontier and section lie at the foundation of what is distinctive in American history. The American experience can be understood only by studying sectional conflicts and their resolution through compromise and war. Turner: We in America are in reality a federation of sections rather than of states. The attitudes of residents in particular areas determined definitions of a region. A region was what masses of people perceived it to be. It was a mental image, a perception in the minds of millions of individuals inside or outside a particular area. Trends in scholarly interpretation While historians during the first half of the 20th century had largely viewed the West as a positive force in American life, those who wrote after World War II tended to lament its destructive influences. The writings on the American West between 1960 and 1990 were more attracted by the study of minority groups and women than by other major topics in the field. Although scholars had not totally ignored women before 1960, they had underemphasized their importance or treated them in stereotypical terms. Usually, they sketched them as gentle tamers, as the demure civilizers who brought social and cultural graces to the West, either as wives of pioneers or schoolteachers. Other types that appeared in the saga of the West included wild women occasional women outlaws or hell-raisers such as Calamity Jane, or the ubiquitous prostitutes and dance-hall women who frequented frontier communities. But after the rise of the womens rights movement after 1960, and particularly after Betty Friedan published

The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the advocates of womens importance demanded that their perceptions find a place in Western history. A drastic change of mood Whereas historians between 1890 and 1960 had viewed the West as a positive and constructive force in American civilization, the generation after 1960 reflected a profound negativism and disenchantment: in their view, the cultural values which Americans had used to develop the West had a destructive impact. Their task, as they saw it, was to chronicle this destruction. So they wrote at length about the destruction of earlier native cultures, of ethnic and racial conflicts, of white Anglo exploitation of blacks, Indians and Hispanics, of the suppression of Orientals and the subordination of women at the hands of men. Nor fid they ignore the wanton destruction of the Wests natural environment. The diversion of rivers, the mindless use of technology to change the natural ecology of the West, whether by water diversion or destruction of wildlife and their habitats, boded ill for the West. It would result in eventual exhaustion of scarce waters, the silting and salting of the soil, the destruction of valuable species of animals, and such a serious disruption of ecological balance that it might take centuries to repair, if ever. The federal presence in the West In the imagination of modern America, the West has come to stand for independence, selfreliance and individualism. Rhetorically, at least, modern westerners see themselves as part of a lineage that conquered a wilderness and transformed the land, they spring from a people who carved out their own destiny and remained beholden to no one. An absolute belief in individualism. This is an odd and interesting image, because more than any other section of the United States, the American West is a creation not so much of individual or local efforts, but of federal efforts. The government guided and molded settlement in the West. The armies of the federal government conquered the region, agents of the federal government explored it, federal officials administered it, and federal bureaucrats tried to supervise the division and development of its resources. All of the American West, outside of Texas and California, whose early statehood place them in a different category, was at some stage of its history a colony of the United States. The federal government controlled the governments of the territories and withheld from their citizens rights and privileges held by American citizens elsewhere. Federal power was able to expand so rapidly in the West because rival sources of political power in the West the only existing local communities were Indian and Hispanic, and they were conquered peoples. Anglo Americans thought of the federal government as a necessary agency of order in the West that did not seem necessary in the East. The government had to control and administer the land and Indian affairs. It had to supervise the creation of governments.

In a way, federal government created itself in the West. The West provided an arena for the expansion of federal powers that was initially available nowhere else in the country. By exercising power, the government developed its power. In the East and the South, state militias represented the armed power of the American people. In the West, federal troops represented that power. The West of Imagination The West the most strongly imagined section of the United States. A state of mind rather than a region, something rather difficult to map. Anyone who seeks to understand the United States has first to understand the story of the West, for the West was the place where Americans became mythic in their own minds. The mythic West of the imagination is not constructed through any conception of western regional diversity; instead, it is derived from the application of near-intangible generalities to the West, such as striking, colorful vistas, romantic yet challenging landscapes; breathtaking frontier dramas. The West in this context becomes a state of mind something rather difficult to map. The mythical West provided the perfect symbol for Americans to rally around when confronted by national threat: the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War. The mythic West demonstrated that Americans could succeed if they remained true to the spirit of the Old West. Like mythic westerners, Americans had to retain their self-reliance, independence and sense of mission and adhere to the morality inherent in the code of the West. The Western provided the unifying myth in an era when national crises demanded consensus. How the imaginative process works The discovery of the West depended on the cultural baggage of the beholder. Few came to discover what there was to see in the real West. Rather they came with ideas about what they hoped to find. The mythic West imagined by Americans has shaped the West of history just as the West of history has helped create the West Americans imagined. The two cannot be neatly severed. Peoples intentions and actions are often shaped by cultural myths. The western reflects the American experience not so much as it really was but as how Americans would like it to be. It speaks directly to American ideals, values, needs and goals. It combines other American beliefs involving national purpose, individual freedom, success and the superiority of common people. It is nothing less than the American Dream set against the quintessential American backdrop. The West became the center for the medias imaginative attentions in part because Americans had already assigned significant symbolic meaning to westering. When Thoreau wrote,

Eastward I go by force but westward I go free, or when Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territory to escape the constraints of sivilization, both spoke to an audience for whom westering and thus the trans-Missouri West had already taken on an identification with freedom and independence in a country that regarded freedom and independence as its peculiar hallmark. Americans significantly associated freedom and independence with the borders of their own society, and they attached these values most fully to single males without permanent connections with family or society. Western heroes are loose, luminal and wild. Domesticating this natural male violence became part of the mythic agenda of westering. Myth an encoded set of metaphors with a central function central in the societies that produced them. Myths give meaning to the world. In this sense a myth about the West is a story that explains who westerners (and Americans) are helps establish their identity. The Western a form of mythic narrative dramatizing themes of national identity. Cultural images Myths speak through images rather than words. Words classify and separate, while images synthesize meaning in a way that interrelates and unifies. When the images of myth acquire special cultural significance and general recognition, they become cultural icons. When these images reveal the way of seeing and the basic attitude of a nation, they become emblems of national experience and help us understand the nature of that nations sensibility. The Western, with its cultural icons, explains America to us and help us understand it. Cultural images are symbols which every member of society, regardless of education or social level, recognizes at once; they suggest to the members of a social group a special conception of themselves, and tend to impose on them definite notions of what is good and what is desirable in social policy. Cultural images define the sense of the past which is common to the members of a culture. They are the principal form in which knowledge of the past operates in society. The experience of sharing these images is one of the major forces of social cohesion, because the images express value judgments that everyone is expected to endorse. Cultural images evolve in step with the ideology that supports them. They are reshaped by the evolution of ideology and taste. They can be revised and updated to reflect the evolutionary trends of cultural development. From the beginning of its history, the United States has been a powerful creator of national icons. With the appearance of cinematography, it has become an enormous exporter of popular culture. Hollywood transmits American culture and values around the globe. Many countries have adopted a globalized American popular culture, and American icons have become transnational figures.
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Cultural icons. Discuss some representative American icons (the West in potent images) The cowboy, John Wayne. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Monument Valley iconic American places. The relationship of National Parks to American cultural nationalism and the forging of an American identity. Natural monuments proof of American exceptionalism. Geographical manifest destiny. A national landscape which created a national aesthetic. American Bigness Americans love boasting, and they admit it. They delight in telling foreigners that this or that is the biggest, tallest, longest or broadest in the world. They are also proud of their natural wonders. They have the largest, the tallest and the oldest trees in the world. The most massive tree is one of the Californian big trees, a sequoia called General Sherman. It is the largest living thing on earth, and has enough timber to make 5 billion match sticks. Americans also have the mightiest canyon on Earth, the Grand Canyon, which is a mile deep, and they share with Canada the worlds greatest freshwater lake, Lake Superior, and the worlds mightiest waterfall, Niagara. And they themselves have become one of the mightiest nations of the world, stretching over a continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have a tendency to think big. Cinemascope (Cinerama,IMAX), the final sequence from How the West Was Made. Crazy Horse Memorial, Mount Rushmore. Premier myth-makers William Goetzmann emphasizes that the visual image-makers were among the most important shapers of the West as myth. Artists (painters, photographers, movie-makers). Painters and photographers became Americas premier myth-makers. And the more we look at the way in which these artists pictured the Western experience and brought it to life the more we realize that history, or myth, is in the eye of the beholder. Other myth-makers: John Winthrop, the American Founding Fathers Jefferson, Franklin. Politicians, philosophers. The Western a form of mythic narrative dramatizing themes of national identity. The Western genre as myth-maker Television. Since the 1950s, television has become a major source of Western adventure. All around the globe, people have adopted American values through visual icons transmitted by

cinematography. The artists who have made the West known to the world have been Americas myth makers. The West as seen through the eyes of artists is the root of the American dream, where honor, courage and personal fortitude are celebrated, rather than a world of brutality and prejudice. American values live on in the form of painting and sculpture, literature and motion pictures, and iconic images immortalize the splendor, excitement and energy of the West and make it known to the world. Westerns appeal both to national and to individual American heritage (the journey to a new homeland was part of Americas ancestral experience). Hollywood westerns furnished respite from the complexities of the twentieth century, simultaneously soothing and feeding romantic frustrations. Moreover, if life in America failed to match its promise, Westerns implied past and often future greatness. The West of the imagination reflected the tensions within American culture between civilization and wilderness, the past and progress, realism and nostalgia, and ultimately between good and evil. White America The Hollywood western codified American identity as mainly white and male, largely accepting racial supremacy as a given, romanticizing aggressive masculinity and, ultimately eulogized resistance to regulated society as the truest mark of manhood. Westerns typically enforce white centrality. Various westerns may have a civil rights agenda, but the genre traditionally and customarily posited narratives as problems to solve for white America. European reception Andr Bazin: American popular culture has a propensity for national narcissism, that is why it is ironic that the first major critical appreciation of the Hollywood western should come from Europe (Andre Bazin). Bazin focused on the genres global appeal and delineated correlations between narrative components of the western and both ancient myth and medieval legend. Such comparisons recast a quintessentially American phenomenon in European terms, adding an aura of artistic respectability to the western. However a Eurocentric interpretation of the western is inevitably a limited one. The western is above all an American product, dealing with American themes, ideas, and attitudes. The Western a form of mythic narrative dramatizing themes of national identity. Consider what happened to the spaghetti western when the western genre was transplanted to Europe it lost most of the American content and changed into a formal, empty artifact, a wasteland of meaning.