http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whq/35.2/taylor.html
From The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 35, Issue 2.

References to a "New West" have grown in recent years, but it is unclear what is new or western about the changes attributed to the region. Moreover, the "New West" has a long and troubling history, and scholars should carefully consider the term's masking and isolating tendencies before invoking it.


"There is no institutional memory in the West, only dawn."¹

Lately a lot of people have been treating the American West, a region that has been conquered and colonized repeatedly over half a millennium, like a bright, shiny dime. The West, so the story goes, became a brave new world some twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Writer Raye Ringholz, journalists Timothy Egan and David Olinger, geographers William Riebsame and Peter Walker, historians Patricia Limerick and William Wyckoff, economists Ed Whitelaw and Thomas Power, and law professor Charles Wilkinson cite changes in the region's economic, social, and cultural face as the dawning of a New West, and all attribute these transformations to capital and technology.² The declining importance of resource extraction and rise of the Internet, light industry, and tourism has indeed altered the West. Shifts in economic and cultural power have been dramatic, yet arguments about an intrinsically new or different West stumble on many counts. Most developments are national in scope, many of the propelling forces are far from new or revolutionary, and few effects are universal. This New West is ultimately both less and more than it seems: at once a marketing tool for a classist, urban fantasy about the pastoral countryside and a romantic elision of the dark side of gentrification.

The shortcomings of New West declarations carry us only so far. In this strange era of the post-industrial, post-modern, post-dot.com, and post-9/11, it is easy to pick the bones of last year's prophesies. Rents in chic San Francisco fell by a third in 2001, and Oregon suffered the distinction of having the nation's highest unemployment rate through 2002, all because the digital bubble burst. This was the same economy that prophets said would permanently relieve western hinterlands of their dependence on extractive industry. If western history teaches that booms have busts, and newspapers show that New West themes engulf the nation, then rather than dwell on the historical and geographical myopia of boosters, let us instead focus on the long, rich history of the New West trope and place its latest incarnation in social and environmental context. I may be wrong; I might have to live this down the rest of my career, but I want to explain why scholars should eschew New West in favor of other categories of analysis.³

Beyond the analytical failings of newness and westerness lay more disturbing issues. Although smart people hail the New West as a place where people and nature will thrive like never before, most changes reveal persisting weaknesses in environmental and social justice. Gentrification and recreational tourism, forces that are as fractured and diffuse as they are powerfully transformative, tear the social and cultural fabric of rural communities, and the pain is felt primarily by minority and blue-collar residents.⁴ The emphasis on New West environmental amenities also fueled a rush of exurban settlement that accelerated consumption of natural resources and fragmentation of ecosystems. In so many ways the New West, with its ongoing marginalization of labor, degradation of nature, and implementation of homogeneity, seems a helluva lot like the Old West. From missionaries to Mormons and '49ers to equity refugees, westerners have been trying to simplify the West into monochromatic societies; and from Chinatown to the Barrio and Albina to the Res, the West has been America's most effectively segregated region for a very long time.⁵ Drive through Park City, Sunriver, or Mendocino, and it is hard to see this latest New West as a break with that past.

Arguments for a New West ultimately turn circular. The real and perceived separations that accompany New West imagery—of nature from people and people from people—have become powerful rationales for further segregations to save fragile nature and playground refuges. Yet the more the West seems New and discrete, the more it relies on its figurative and literal ties to the Old. Take for example fly fishing. Elite angling has long been a badge of environmental sensitivity, but in recent decades it has erupted as a prototype of New West play because of strong marketing and a lyrical movie by Robert Redford, yet cowboy aesthetics are central to its modern appeal.⁶ Similarly, desires to protect nature have fueled intense battles over access to public lands, but resource extraction still thrives because Americans, in general, and exurban residents, in particular, are energetic consumers. Big-Box stores and metastasizing subdivisions testify to a lively demand for western lumber and water.⁷ Fewer people work state and federal lands, but many simply moved to private holdings. The result has been more-apparent-than-real environmental reform. Efficiencies, rather than less consumption, drove most workers from theranges and woods, and wherever jobs vanished, gentrification seemed to accelerate.⁸ This has been a complex process, however, because it was not just the very rich who propelled change.⁹ Rural patterns have been displaced by the demands of a broad, transnational class of amenity-seeking, franchise-patronizing consumers. Aspenization and McDonaldization have merged, and the result is a mess.¹⁰

Despite these wrenching developments, the Old West, often now caricatured as a cowboy state, did not go gentle into that good night, and its resilience has exposed a huge irony surrounding the latest New West. Although some rural residents did cash in, many others resisted gentrification. The media fixates on the violence of Nye County and Klamath Lakes, but more representative, if less conspicuous, are those seeking accommodation. Some are landowners negotiating compacts with government agencies and non-governmental organizations to solve environmental and economic concerns, others are neighbors discussing contentious issues outside courtrooms and councils addressing complex water and wildlife issues.¹¹ The goal everywhere has been to ameliorate environmental problems without shredding the material and cultural fabric of communities. Put bluntly, these community focused efforts are an attempt to stem gentrification. The emergence of accommodation seems the most interesting, significant, and hopeful development in recent years, yet it is also at considerable odds with the core values of this latest New West.

Charles Wilkinson has been as perceptive as any New West writer, so we should heed his caution that the New West is "hard terrain to read" and "use the term gingerly." Before going further, then, we should specify which New West we are discussing.¹² A review of Library of Congress titles that use the phrase "New West" reveals at least four distinct epochs in the last 135 years: the first was a transcontinental revision of western possibilities, the second a nostalgic longing for the frontier period, the third an ambivalent assessment of mid-twentieth-century modernity, and the latest a fest of social and ecological diversity. Although the content of each New West has varied, all have stressed how technology, markets, and nature have radically changed this region we call the West.

Appropriately enough, the first New West began as the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Point. At the very moment that the state and capital were creating a new, continental and transnational space, Samuel Bowles's Our New West and Charles Brace's The New West, followed in 1879 by Robert Strahorn's To the Rockies and Beyond, unleashed a literary cliché with all the qualities of a horror movie villain. From the beginning, New West authors stressed how technology was transforming western opportunities and experiences.¹³ In the post-Civil War era the technology was railroads, the opportunities seemed unlimited, and the experiences were settlement and tourism. Although Strahorn's subtitle (Saunterings in the Popular Health, Pleasure, and Hunting Resorts) flagged a class bias in New West literature, Bowles seemed to offer a more democratic spin by assuring readers that the railroad would open "a new world of wealth, and a new world of natural beauty, to the working and the wonder of the old."¹⁴

Every author of the era emphasized the economic opportunities of the Transcontinental New West. Rails and telegraph lines had created what Richard White calls the "first information age," and all echoed Bowles's conclusion that railroads were "the key to all our New West."¹⁵ Promoters integrated innovation into their tales of western progress. Boosters in Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Tacoma, and other towns— communities of which many foundered—argued that new technologies made their places logical sites of investment, and railroads fueled such hopes with promises of trunk or spur lines. The Kansas City Board of Trade's promotional broadside The New West boasted of its links to the Pacific Ocean, while Charles Bliss's The New West: New Mexico and Edward Tenney's Colorado: And Homes in the New West served as primers on settlement opportunities near railroads. Of course, the railroads subsidized many of these tracts. Strahorn at one time or another worked with the Denver & Rio Grande, the Colorado Central, and the Union Pacific, the latter of which published To the Rockies and Beyond through New West Publishing in Omaha.¹⁶

Seen one way, the Kansas City Board of Trade simply emulated what John Smith, William Cooper, and Chicago's founders had done in the ages of sails, wagons, and steam, but the 1870s were not like any previous era.¹⁷ As Karl Marx noted, new technology had annihilated old geography when locomotion reworked spatial logic. A Board of Trade could argue that the Pacific Ocean reached all the way to Kansas; Henry Villard could extend Russian Germans' westward exodus to Nebraska and Dakota; Portland businessmen could scheme to corner the world salmon market.¹⁸ The first New West was far more globalized than any previous West, yet despite the changes of industrial capitalism, or maybe because of them, the period's market rhetoric was mostly a conservative adaptation of old speculative interests to evolving technologies.

Far more novel was how the Transcontinental New West had reconceptualized nature for both profit and play. As a number of scholars argue, an eastern literati was reimagining western nature through distinctly classist, racial, and gendered lenses. The result was a romanticized western landscape, emptied of humans and crowned sublime.¹⁹ Here was an early articulation of the modern wilderness aesthetic, and Bowles, Brace, and Strahorn were among the first to sell environmental amenities. For those who could afford the ticket, railroads helped create and serve an emerging demand for wildness. Bowles called the New West an "originally, freshly, uniquely, majestically" natural geography: "Nowhere are broader and higher mountains; nowhere, climates more propitious; nowhere broods an atmosphere so pure and exhilarating."²⁰ Brace prophesied: "When our pleasure-seekers on the Eastern coast can reach in a week such objects of wonderful grandeur and beauty as the Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and the high Sierras, there will be crowds taking their summer trip hither. This region will become our American Switzerland."²¹ By 1887, William Thayer's Marvels of the New West could only reinforce a well-established link between industrial transportation, mass media, and western nature. Its first chapter, a 133-page dissertation of the West's "Marvels of Nature," took readers on a rail journey from Colorado's Arkansas CaZon to Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge, the Petrified Forest in Arizona, and the Old Woman of the Mountain in Montana.²²

Ironically, historians are most familiar with the next New West, yet we least associate it with this phenomenon. During the 1890s, mass media continued to disseminate the market rhetoric of the New West. In 1890, Portland's Immigration Board published The New Empire to boost their city as the dominant Northwest entrepôt; Spokane merchants responded in 1897 with the New West Trade.²³ Like their predecessors, both cities heralded the opportunities presented by new railroads, but the continuity of entrepreneurial rhetoric did not extend to other uses of New West. Sociocultural forces in the East were inspiring a basic reworking of the West's historic and mythic significance, and Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" highlighted these anxieties by warning that the United States was entering an ominous age because its frontier had closed.²⁴ In an age when many influential Americans worried that they were being overrun by Europe, and that a plague of neurasthenia was crippling middle-class men, Turner offered a nativist theory of American culture that was rooted in the masculine frontier. Although his arguments about American democratic development fared tlinepoorly, his essay is still useful for illuminating the cultural concerns that were driving both eastern anti-modernism and the next New West.²⁵

Thus, although many westerners were desperate to modernize, eastern writers desired a very different West. From 1890 to 1930, their New West was essentially nostalgic. Threatened by polyglot eastern cities, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, and other writers crafted antimodern fantasies of a pastoral past ruled by guns, horses, and chivalrous men. The result was the apotheosis of the cowboy as an American knight.²⁶ The plot of William Raine's Gunsight Pass; How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought the New West was typical in depicting white heroes struggling against a dark-skinned villain (in this case Mexican), but the subtitle revealed an atypical consideration for how technology had changed the West after 1890.²⁷ A potboiler about cowhands turned derrick workers and then capitalists was a departure from the genre's clichés, yet other New West writers broke with convention even further. The Nostalgic New West often featured women and youths civilizing wild places in less violent, yet equally mythic, stories. Among these were Amy Blanchard's Gentle Pioneer, Being the Story of the Early Days in the New West, Alfred Rice's An Oregon Girl: A Tale of American Life in the New West, Edwin Sabin's Boy Settler; or, Terry in the New West, and Frederick Niven's Lady of the Crossing; A Novel of the New West. Seattle publisher L. B. Mock captured the sentiment of these works in its dedication to Lucy Byrd Mack's Maid of Pend d'Oreille, an Indian Idyl: "to those daring souls who made the New West positive."²⁸

To the extent that they considered the subject, Progressive historians paralleled novelists' treatment of the New West. Both groups linked the trope with the past. Like the domesticated New West novels, John Eaton's Sheldon Jackson, A Pioneer in the New West highlighted the role of the eastern-based Woman's Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in taming the West as a Christian society. Frederick Jackson Turner's Rise of the New West echoed Raine in emphasizing technology's civilizing impact. Like most other novelists, though, Turner focused on the romantic past of canals and steam rather than a bustling present. Linking New West with the trans-Appalachian era also seems to have created retroactively a fifth New West before 1840.²⁹ All the Nostalgic New West works also shared three familiar traits: they expressed a fascination—sometimes horrid—with modernity and a yearning for a romanticized moral order; they combined supposedly dispassionate description with boosterish prescription; and the imagined and real Wests continued to harmonize fact with fiction.

In contrast, the third New West bared growing contradictions between popular culture and the social and cultural conditions of the times. By the late 1930s, urbanization and the New Deal had laid the foundation for rapid industrialization.³⁰ A few writers again argued that such changes signaled another New West. Ronald Russell's 1938 A New West to Explore portrayed the Portland Junior Symphony as "pioneers of a great artistic and cultural future for America."³¹ The appropriation of frontier imagery for an urban, highbrow future foreshadowed the rhetoric of John F. Kennedy, but this was neither the only nor the dominant reworking of frontier at the time. Like the earliest works on the New West, Bruce Grant's The Cowboy Encyclopedia: The Old and the New West from the Open Range to the Dude Ranch traced how urbanization and transportation (in this case the automobile) had gentrified the rural West for play. Grant and others also noted that, despite dramatic change in the West, most Americans were still obsessed with the frontier of cowboys, trappers, and missions, and that popular culture had essentially frozen the West in 1880.³²\fs24fs24 Eastern climbers gloried in conquering untrammeled peaks in Colorado's Needles Mountains, while Jack Kerouac noticed how "the energetic Chamber of Commerce types of the New West decided to revive the ghost town of Central City, Colorado" as a tourist trap, complete with a Victorian opera and Old Western saloons.³³ Here was an Ambivalent New West, both peering ahead and wistfully gazing over its shoulder.

The way professional historians employed the New West reveals the roots of the New Western History backlash. At a time when the West was the country's most rapidly growing, culturally potent region, every historian who invoked New West from 1937 to 1970 focused on the distant past, never allowing it even to cross the hundredth meridian. Bernard Mayo's Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West (1937), William Chambers's Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West (1956), Roscoe Buley's The Romantic Appeal of the New West, 1815–1840 (1961), and Randolph Randall's James Hall: Spokesman of the New West (1964) all equated New West with Trans-Appalachia. As if to underscore this trend, Ray Allen Billington republished Turner's Rise of the New West in 1962.³⁴ Here was an example of consensus history, of the past pared down to stories of stalwart men upholding principles of democracy and industry. The historians were reinforced by the romantic literature of Irene Grissom's Verse of the New West and Emmie Mygatt's Rim-Rocked, A Story of the New West.