and the love of wild country
meet in Colorado
I’m accustomed to assuming that the human appreciation of wild country is always slow to develop, usually emerging only after most of the wildness has already been eliminated. When Laurie and I moved to Colorado in 2007, I looked forward to learning the history of how that state’s mountains, plains, and plateaus evolved in people’s minds from something to be exploited for furs, minerals, and rangeland to something to be cherished for its beauty, spectacle, and wildness. Although I expected to uncover a typically prolonged and contentious process, I learned instead that, in the case of Colorado, exploitation and appreciation occurred at nearly the same time.
For one thing, exploitation came comparatively late to Colorado. “Ironically,” writes William Wyckoff in his geographical history of the state, “though Colorado sat near the physical center of the Transmississippi West, it sat on the periphery of European and Anglo-American development while neighboring regions saw more rapid exploration and settlement” [Wyckoff 1999: 28]. In the seventeenth century, “New Mexico’s Rio Grande and the great Missouri River corridor offered approaches from the south and east, but Colorado remained beyond the pale of permanent European settlement for more than a century longer” [28]. Elevations were high in Colorado, the landscape was rugged, and the state’s rivers—which included upper reaches of the Colorado, Missouri, and Rio Grande—were not navigable. Largely for those reasons, Colorado remained a region to avoid rather than exploit. In addition, Native Americans held out longer there than they did in other areas and continued to be a threat to European or Anglo-American intruders. The Rio Grande valley in New Mexico to the south was settled long before Colorado, and so was Wyoming to the north, where more receptive terrain provided the chosen route for the transcontinental railroad.
Serious exploitation and settlement in Colorado did not occur until 1858 when gold was discovered on Dry Creek in what’s now Denver. “Suddenly, in a span of a few decades, the Colorado Rockies were engulfed by this new, highly unpredictable world of commodity capitalism, of smelters and railroad investments, of boomtowns and sudden busts, of landscape changes so fundamental that they dwarfed the modest human impacts made over the prior ten centuries” [43]. Mining activity initially concentrated in areas directly west of Denver, including Central City and Idaho Springs. In 1878 and 1879, silver and lead production at Leadville resulted in “explosive growth … unequaled in the state’s raucous mining history” [48]. By the late 1880s Aspen joined Leadville to form “a silver mining heartland across what had been one of Colorado’s most isolated and inaccessible regions” [49-50]. Dramatic growth also occurred in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, with Lake City, Silverton, and Ouray becoming major retail and smelting centers. In the early 1890s, silver mining propelled Creede to prominence, and Cripple Creek, west of Colorado Springs, “became the site of the state’s last great mineral rush” [51].
Mining had a pronounced impact on the Colorado landscape. According to Wyckoff: “Vegetation was radically altered by mining activities. Every phase of nineteenth-century mining consumed wood in great quantities: placer-mining stripped riparian sites within days; hydraulic mining denuded slopes for decades; lode operations demanded wood for headframes, shaft houses, and tunnel supports; milling and smelting plants voraciously consumed whole hillslopes; and mining towns needed large amounts of sawtimber for building and waste wood for heating. In addition, frequent fires, the result of both accidental and purposeful burning, ravaged thousands of acres of high country forests in the last half of the nineteenth century.... [In] milling and smelting centers, ... vast quantities of black smoked filled the sky. Leadville, Durango, and Aspen all suffered, but the most famous vapors lurked above the belching ore-processing facilities at Black Hawk, where travelers reported the atmosphere dank with fumes and smoke” [69-72].
At the same time that all this was going on, appreciation of Colorado's wildness and natural beauty was also developing. In Wyckoff’s words:
Colorado’s mountain core was shaped by more than the miner’s pick and shovel in the last half of the nineteenth century. Even in the 1860s, an alternate vision of the high country appeared in the form of romanticized descriptions and paintings that extolled the health and sublimity of the territory’s rarefied mountainous landscapes. Tourists who wandered the hills in search of mountain pleasures were not disappointed, and soon, with the aid of vigorous promotions, Colorado acquired a national, even global, reputation for its alpine amenities [Wyckoff 1999: 78].
Journalists were prominent among the promoters. Newspaper editor William Byers “regularly entrusted the Rocky Mountain News to his assistants and joined [John Wesley] Powell’s and [Ferdinand V.] Hayden’s survey parties, climbing the same peaks, viewing the same scenery, and reporting his experiences in enthusiastic articles for the News. In August 1868, he accompanied Powell in the first recorded ascent of Longs Peak; a few years later he joined the Hayden party on the summit of Mount Lincoln” [Abbott et al. 1982: 212]. Byers served “as a sort of unofficial tour guide,” leading visitors on a circuit through the central Rockies that included Berthoud Pass, Middle Park, Hot Sulphur Springs, the valley of the Blue River, South Park, and the canyons of the South Platte. Results of those tour-guiding efforts included “a pair of immensely influential books: [Bayard] Taylor’s Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867) and [Samuel] Bowles’s The Switzerland of America (1869)” [212]. Taylor’s “enormously popular [book] attracted thousands to the mining regions, not to get rich but just to look around” [137].
Resorts were soon developed. In 1871, Colorado Springs was founded by railroad entrepreneur William J. Palmer as “the first genuine resort west of Chicago” [Sprague 1976: 137]. The town was designed “primarily as a place of residence for people of means who liked scenery, pleasant weather, and outdoor sports, or who thought that the climate would cure their consumption or asthma…” [138]. Elsewhere: “By the 1880s, Estes Park had become a popular summer resort, famed for its local hunting, fishing, horse trips, and mountain climbing” [Wyckoff 1999: 83]. “[A]nother cluster of guest ranches, camping spots, and summer resorts took shape in the vicinity of Grand Lake ...,” and, “[f]urther west, Glenwood Springs emerged as a far larger hot springs resort” [83].
By the end of the century, the Rockies were attracting not only the well-to-do, but also “families and common adventurers on shoestring budgets” [Ferguson 2004: 137]. Gary Ferguson quotes M. A. Cruikshank, who traveled in the northern Rockies in 1883: “We constantly met the most rustic of vehicles drawn by the roughest of farm animal, filled by the genuine sons and daughters of the soil. It was really strange to see how perfectly this class appreciates the wonders of the place and how glad they are to leave for a while their hard labor for the adventurous, the beautiful, and the sublime…” [138]. Ferguson adds: “A Park Service report issued in 1911 estimates that roughly 50 percent of Yellowstone’s visitors were local farmers and ranchers…” [138].
Considering the negative impact of mining on the landscape, I find it surprising that none of the overviews of Colorado history that I’ve consulted describe serious conflicts between scenery lovers and the mining industry. If, in fact, there was little or no controversy, the only explanation I can think of is that mining activity was sufficiently concentrated that travelers found adequate pleasure in the miles of unaffected terrain between the mining centers. Either that, or the mining activities themselves and their attendant roads and railroads were sufficiently fascinating in their own right as examples of the “technological sublime.” Wyckoff notes that the mining towns, and especially the railroads connecting them, were among the stimulants of tourism. “Colorado’s extensive network of narrow gauge lines, constructed to serve the mining industry, became essential corridors of movement for mountain-bound tourists…. [Travelers] could also marvel at the genius of human developments in such spectacular environments as they gazed upon mountains conquered by mines, smelters, and railroad grades” [81].
The comparative lateness of Colorado’s development meant that, by the time it occurred, an aesthetic of wildness and natural beauty was already established. The Romantic movement in Europe had changed the image of mountains and other wild landscapes from repulsive places to be avoided to places to be sought out and admired. In America, painters of the Hudson River School had persuaded many people that wildness itself, which the North American continent possessed in abundance, was an asset rather than a sign of inferiority to Europe.
Landscape painters had already been active in the Rocky Mountains. Although no artists accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, Samuel Seymour and Titian Peale were part of Major Stephen H. Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1820. Seymour’s painting, Distant View of the Rocky Mountains, “provided the earliest known depiction of the Colorado Rockies” [Trenton and Hassrick 1983: 22]. Subsequent government-sponsored explorations and surveys nearly always included one or more artists. Art historians regard many of those artists as “less than competent draftsmen” and point out that many of their works were seen only as reproductions in government publications [18]. John Mix Stanley was the “most celebrated” of eleven different artists associated with the Pacific railroad surveys in the 1850s [78]. Of artists accompanying four major geological and geographical surveys conducted between 1867 and 1879, the work of William Henry Holmes was “unique and seldom surpassed” [177]. Holmes created “extensive panoramic views” which “became his forte and gained him richly deserved recognition and fame” [171].
Interestingly, although several of the leading Hudson River School artists tried painting the western mountains, the results of their efforts “were never impressive or often repeated” [Flexner 1962: 294]. Worthington Whittredge preferred the plains to the mountains, and John Kensett “[sought] out the less sensational and dramatic subjects as the focus for his simple, gentle art” [Trenton and Hassrick 1983: 219]. John Casilear “was at his best when his canvases were small and his subjects the picturesque and homely landscapes of his native eastern haunts” [219]. Sanford Robinson Gifford found “the monotonous, drab coloring of the plains-and-mountain country … uninspiring, its vistas wanting in picturesque subjects” [225]. Art historian Thomas Flexner speculates that, whereas many of these same artists had painted successfully in Europe and South America, they “felt a greater responsibility towards variant nature within [their own country]. Believing, as they did, that style [should grow] from subject matter, they concluded that to depict the Rockies adequately, they would have to give them study as detailed as that they had given to the Catskills and the White Mountains. A tourist trip would not suffice...” [294].
The most renowned of the Rocky Mountain painters were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. “Albert Bierstadt’s grand and impressive interpretations of Rocky Mountain scenery, along with his other western scenes, were … the first paintings to capture successfully the wonder and excitement that the artist and other early trailblazers felt when they confronted the spectacular western scenery” [Trenton and Hassrick 1983: 116]. “Bierstadt’s treatment of light [was] uniquely his own” [117]. He
freely manipulated light effects in his pictures to increase dramatic impact ... [and] judiciously used back-, cross-, and sidelighting to create the highlights and shadows that resulted in a separation of planes and a three-dimensional effect…. Like the lens of a camera, Bierstadt’s eye selectively focused on small flowers, leaves, and grasses in the frontal plane of the picture, magnifying them a hundredfold to show details, shapes, and delicate textures…. Many of these pictorial effects, with their dramatic overtones, are fully realized in the sensational full-length landscapes—often described as his “Wagnerian exultations”—that became Bierstadt’s trademark from the 1860s [126]
Moran, “[f]rom his earliest days as an artist, … was interested in the minutiae of nature, carefully studying and sketching all its aspects. Despite the wildness and vastness of the western terrain … Moran nevertheless approached it with his eye for detailed accuracy” [181]. In paintings such as The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone [1871], “[i]t is obvious that Moran … altered some of the literal aspects of the scene to produce an idealized version…” [184]. “Many eminent critics have suggested that Moran’s finely orchestrated coloring, seen through floating vapors, mist, and foam, was inspired by [J. M. W.] Turner’s work. But the American artist’s colors were never to explode into Turner’s brilliant and often arbitrary hues—they remained subdued and naturalistic” [195]. “Obviously [he] had assimilated [John] Ruskin’s teachings, believing that, if an artist had an intimate working knowledge of ‘the rocks and trees, and the atmosphere, and the mountain torrents and the birds that fly in the blue ether above,’ he could take any liberties necessary in creating his pictorial composition, as long as the result was true to nature” [184].
Back east, there was great interest in reports from the West. People looked at the paintings and perused the published reports of government-sponsored expeditions and surveys. “Outside the eastern cities where major exhibitions of Rocky Mountain art took place—nearly always to overwhelming acclaim—much of the public [was] exposed to the mountains by way of the illustrations that accompanied … accounts by government explorers. Such efforts exposed a tremendous number of people to artistic glimpses of the Rockies” [Ferguson 2004: 155].
Regarding the message that these reports communicated, historian John L. Allen observes that the American exploration of the West began with scientific and commercial objectives, but quickly acquired romantic overtones. Although no artists accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, Lewis and Clark’s journals contained “descriptions of what Lewis referred to as ‘seens of visionary enchantment,’ descriptions which are well within the romantic tradition” [28]. Paintings of the Plains and Rockies by Samuel Seymour and Titian Peale—with the expedition of Captain Stephen Long in 1820—“although primarily reportorial, were the first on-the-spot artists’ renderings of the West” [28]. Alfred Jacob Miller, who traveled west with Scottish aristocrat Sir William Drummond Stewart in 1837, was “heavily influenced by his romantic prepossessions ... particularly ... in his presentations of the native peoples of the Plains and Rockies” [30]. Karl Bodmer's and George Catlin's “portrayals of the native inhabitants [combined] romantic visions of nature with a scientific and ethnological approach to subjects that were, for most Americans, highly exotic” [34].
“Such were the romantic images of the West in 1840—,” Allen concludes, “blends of the pastoral and dramatically exotic, sometimes comforting in their familiarity, yet, at the same time, full of splendid mystery” [38]. Moreover, by the mid-1800s, just before the Colorado gold rush, “the rapid, even overwhelming loss of wild lands in the East” had already induced many people to believe that “appreciating the American landscape through the beauty and mystery of the Rockies and Sierras was ... the last best chance for [the] nation to save the roots of its identity” [Ferguson 2004: 156]. Paintings and literature increasingly carried a warning that “Americans were ... placing themselves outside the sacred circle of nature” [157-58].
If that was the message, how was it received? How did the public interpret these paintings? Did they see “beauty” and “mystery” and worry about their disappearance? Or did they see mainly resources to be exploited? And, if they did see beauty, what did “beauty” mean? I think of beauty as sights and sounds that please the senses, but, in the nineteenth century, what seemed most beautiful might have been the chance to get rich. Or, if not to get rich, to be independent and free—to be able to do whatever they wanted—to live without constraints. In 1820, Edwin James, writing the report of Major Long’s expedition to the Rockies, tried to account for what he called “a manifest propensity, particularly in the males, to remove westward....” “There was,” according to James, “an apparently irresistible charm for the true Westerner in a mode of life ‘wherein the artificial wants and uneasy restraints inseparable from a crowded population are not known, wherein we feel ourselves dependent immediately and solely on the bounty of nature, and the strength of our own arm…’” [54-55]. Gary Ferguson points out that the economic panic of 1819 had raised “grave concerns about whether capitalism—in particular, the way it seemed to be leading to an unintended concentration of wealth—would one day swallow up the promise of equality” [84]. Consequently: “To dream of the Rockies was for many easterners not just a longing for peace and quiet (that would come later), but a dream of independence—one that showed itself first through images of trappers, then scouts, and finally cowboys” [85].
I like to think that wildness and natural beauty were also important on the frontier. Certainly, the quest for wealth—or independence, if that was more important—was not the only story. Ferguson notes that appreciation of the beauty and spectacle of the mountains spread beyond the well-to-do elite:
[P]ioneer diaries from the Rocky Mountain portions of the Oregon Trail are in most cases filled with awe and delight. Writing about the range in a letter to his wife in 1850, Pusey Graves tells of “a wildness, richness, and grandeur that seemed to clothe the whole landscape. The beautiful pine trees which filled the air with aromatic fragrance, and the ten thousand flowers that were blooming all about me filling the mountain air with their unfolded treasures, the chatter of the blackbird and the sweet singing of the meadow lark … all this was indescribably grand and magnificent.” Likewise Mrs. E. A. Hadley describes South Pass, at the very crest of the Rockies, as “the pleasantest place I have yet seen.” Velina Williams, scribbling in her diary in 1853, waxes poetic about “the main chain of the Rocky Mountains to the north [of South Pass], with their snow-clad tops towering to a great height … truly grand and worth a journey across the plains” [Ferguson 2004: 22].
Trapper Zenas Leonard wrote in 1839 that “[s]ome mountain men [wanted] to turn in with and live the life of the Indians” [80], and Ferguson adds: “This reluctance to leave the Rockies, sometimes after being out of touch with civilization for years, was from the very beginning a common theme” [80].
The tension between exploitation and appreciation characterized Colorado’s response to the setting aside of national forests and other public land. The cutting of timber for mining operations and increasing use of forest land for grazing were already sufficient concerns in 1876 that the first state constitution authorized the legislature to “enact laws in order to prevent the destruction of, and to keep in good preservation, the forests upon the lands of the state” [Wyckoff 1999: 92]. The Colorado Forestry Association and the office of the State Forest Commissioner—both created early in the state’s history—advocated regulation and called on the federal government for assistance. In 1891 and 1892, President Benjamin Harrison used a “little discussed provision in a congressional lands bill” to set up five forest reserves in Colorado [92]. In opposition, “A number of Colorado politicians around the turn of the century built their careers around the anticonservation sentiments of many citizens.... The ‘locking up’ of valuable resources, said many of the state’s leaders, impeded state growth. A policy of husbanding resources was said to strike a blow at every cattleman, lumberman, miner, and homesteader...” [Abbott et al. 1982: 128]. After Gifford Pinchot became chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry in 1898, his policy of “multiple use” softened some of the resistance. But, in 1905, Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt “created eleven new Colorado forest reserves, encompassing almost nine million acres of national forest lands” [Wyckoff 1999: 95]. Moreover, Pinchot “cracked down on illegal timber cutting,” “closed down many small-scale illegal sawmilling and railroad tie-cutting enterprises,” and imposed fees on cattle and sheep grazing on national forest lands [95].
Opposition crystallized in the first decade of the twentieth century, but, even then, Coloradans were not uniformly opposed to the forest reserves. “[S]maller ranchers led the opposition out of fear of losing access to public lands for their cattle and sheep.... Farming communities, in contrast, saw great benefits in the preservation of forests on the headwaters of Colorado rivers, to hold snow and rainwater and to maintain steady stream flow without erosion. Towns like Fort Collins, Pueblo, Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose, and Mancos were centers of support for Forest Reserves” [129]. After 1907, “Coloradans increasingly recognized the inevitability and even the value of working with the federal government in managing the forests. A growing number of urban residents also recognized the benefits of the national forests in providing protection of urban watersheds and offering a peaceful retreat from the chores of city life” [Wyckoff 1999: 96-97].
When the passing of the frontier is lamented, I’m not convinced that we know what we’re lamenting. Are we lamenting primarily an era of freedom and exploitation or a time when wild country still had significance in our culture? Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote the famous paper on the “closing” of the frontier in 1893, was not entirely clear on the matter, as Henry Nash Smith discusses in his book, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. The logic of Turner’s positive evaluation of the frontier was that it provided a safety valve for American society. Supposedly, a large measure of equality and democracy was assured by the fact that anyone who was unemployed, poorly paid, or badly treated could take up land of their own in the West. That was the mainspring of American democracy, according to Turner.
So far so good, in Smith’s estimation, but Turner then wrote: “Democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier” [253].
Perhaps I overemphasize the importance of wildness in the appeal of the frontier. But, if it was only the quest for independence that drew people there, then many of them were surely disappointed. On the trapping frontier, according to Bernard DeVoto, “The companies hired [the mountain men]—or traded with the highest order of them, the free trappers ...—on terms of the companies' making, paid them off in the companies' goods, valued at the companies' prices deep in the mountains. They worked in a peonage.... The companies outfitted them and sent them out to lose their traps, their horses, and frequently their scalps—to come back broke and go deeper into debt for next year's outfit” [quoted in Jones 1998: 30]. On the mining frontier, as soon as placer mining gave way to hydraulic and underground mining, “[p]ower shifted to companies and corporations with large labor forces,” leaving workers “with few illusions about their place in the hierarchy or their status as independent, autonomous fortune hunters” [Limerick 1987: 107]. On the agricultural frontier: “As the farmer took up the costs of starting his business, it was an act of optimism to go into debt in order to raise capital and finance a happier future. When those happy expectations proved misleading, the debt became a source of despair, a mechanism for entrapment” [128-29].
The most common image of the frontier, aside from lawlessness (in the movies), has been hard work (on the pages of history). Historian Mary Ellen Jones, for example, writes of the Rocky Mountain fur trade: “Constant danger and discomfort marked life in the field. There are frequent references to frostbite, frozen feet, and snowblindness, voracious mosquitoes and horseflies, and intermittent fever, probably malaria. Grizzly bears were a major threat ... there was often danger from the Indians ... [and] the mountain man was on his own to cure illness or heal wounds” [Jones 1998: 38]. In regard to the mining frontier, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes: “Even when things went well, placer mining was hard and wearing work.... The conditions were particularly frustrating as crowds made it difficult to find unclaimed locations" [Limerick 1987: 102]. As for farming: “In early Plains farming, hardship was extreme. The grasshoppers would have been nightmare enough.... Hailstones, drought, prairie fires, and failed adaptations to the semi-arid West brought periodic disaster” [126]. A “constant worry over having enough money” was kept alive “by the uncertainties of crops and prices” [128].
Despite the hardships, I like to think that some of those people also saw beauty in their surroundings. It may have not been many who saw it, or much beauty that they saw, but we’re already acquainted with trappers “wanting to turn in with and live the life of the Indians,” local farmers and ranchers sightseeing at Yellowstone, and emigrants on the Oregon Trail describing the Rocky Mountains as “truly grand and worth a journey across the plains.” In books about the frontier, the topic of wildness turns up fairly seldom—and usually in the role of providing the bounty that the frontiersman exploits. But I continue to believe that some number of trappers, miners, cowboys, and farmers found something of value in their natural surroundings besides the material means of a livelihood. Surely there were farmers, or their wives, who noticed the prairie wildflowers or heard the songs of meadowlarks. There must have been trappers and miners who appreciated the loveliness of fresh snow on the peaks, enjoyed the background music of cascades and waterfalls, or marveled at distant views on days when the mountain air was so clear it seemed they could see forever.
Smith points out that most novelists writing about frontier people dwelt on their quaintness and backwardness. They missed the more tender aspects of frontier people’s lives, including the warmth and kindness they shared with one another and whatever beauty they may have found in wild nature. Frontier people themselves may have been inarticulate about such matters, but a knowledgeable novelist could have brought them out, and might also have made a persuasive case that such qualities on the frontier were superior to civilized life back east. Little glimmers of the possibilities turn up in Smith’s discussion of the literature about the farming frontier. He mentions, for example, Caroline Kirkland, a native of New York who spent five years on the Michigan frontier. Kirkland “respond[ed] almost in spite of herself to the generosity and kindness of the pioneer farmers. She [said] she always return[ed] from her little excursions about the countryside with an increased liking for the people…. ‘There is after all [she explained] so much kindness, simplicity, and trustfulness … that much that is uncouth is forgotten’” [Smith 1957: 225]. In another example, Metta Victor wrote a dime novel, Alice Wilde, the Raftsman’s Daughter, in which an “elegant and cultivated” New Yorker on the frontier falls in love with the daughter of a raftsman. The young woman later exclaims to the New Yorker: “… you had pride, prejudice, rank, fashion, everything to struggle against in choosing me” [227]. The triumph of love over such obstacles must have been widely approved, says Smith, since the novel enjoyed enormous sales in the U.S. and England [227-28].
Although I’m sure that many people on the frontier interpreted freedom as the freedom to do whatever they wanted, it seems clear to me that genuine freedom is something different from that. At a minimum, the exercise of that type of freedom interferes with the freedom of others. Although I don’t have good stories to illustrate my argument, it’s obvious that you can jeopardize my freedom if you’re not attentive and responsible, and I can jeopardize yours if I’m not. Carried to extremes, the freedom to do whatever you want can lead to the overexploitation of resources. If people are free to cut down all the trees, they will do it. If they’re free to plow up all the tallgrass prairie, they will do it. If they’re free to trap all the beaver or shoot all the bison, they will do it. Freedom of that sort is self-defeating and temporary, particularly as the practice of moving on to another frontier as soon as resources are exhausted takes on worldwide dimensions.
For too many people, wildness suggests the Wild Bunch riding into town, whooping and shouting and firing six-guns into the air. Although that’s what our literature and the entertainment industry have taught us, and children who behave that way are said to be “behaving wildly,” none of that is the true meaning of wildness. The truth is that wild things are free (“self-willed”), but everything in their environment is also free. Regardless of whether they’re predator or prey, they need to be quiet, attentive, and ready to adjust to whatever happens. By necessity, they become knowledgeable about their environment, and they learn to live with it. I suspect that successful frontier heroes possessed exactly those qualities. Such are the themes that I wish more novelists had explored.
For Smith, an even bigger problem than Turner’s metaphorical references to nature was his theory of civilization. Turner shared with his contemporaries “the theory that all societies ... develop through the same series of progressively higher stages [from barbarism to civilization]..... [T]he theory of social stages was basically at odds with the conception of the Western farmer as a yeoman surrounded by utopian splendor. Instead, it implied that the Western farmer was a coarse and unrefined representative of a primitive stage of social evolution” [255]. According to Smith, Turner’s “basic conviction was that the highest social values were to be found in the relatively primitive society just within the agricultural frontier. But the theory of social stages placed the highest values at the other end of the process, in urban industrial society...” [256].
Long-standing suspicion of the city notwithstanding, assumptions about progress toward higher levels of civilization made it seem desirable to replace the frontier condition with civilization as rapidly as possible. Thus was the presence of wildness on the frontier in most cases ephemeral. William Wyckoff writes: “Certainly some people experienced ‘a clean page to begin anew’ as they arrived on the western scene, but collectively the communities and the cultural landscapes these immigrants created were cultural transfers from east of the Missouri” [Wyckoff 1999: 60]. Similarly: “By the early years of the twentieth century, [Denver businessmen] ... very likely took a secret amusement in business visitors who expected a rough week in the ‘Wild West’ and could find nothing to complain about. Civic architecture [in Denver] incorporated the classical revival styles prevalent in the East” [Abbott et al. 1982: 241].
I believe that many of the people living and working on the frontier would have preferred something different. Many of them had left the East at least in part because they were unhappy with it, making it reasonable to think they might not want to see it replicated in their new surroundings. The relentless replacement of wild country by city, farmland, or mines might also not be what they wanted. To my way of thinking, a visitor from the East should have found something different in Denver. The frontier was generally viewed in a positive light in the nineteenth century, and I remain convinced that the mix of wildness and civilization was among the positives. Instead of re-creating Saint Louis or Boston, the people of Denver should have been creating something new. Whatever it was that people on the frontier liked about the wilder country that surrounded their towns and cities (good hunting must have been high on the list), they should have been looking for ways to ensure its survival in conjunction with whatever they valued of civilization.
Too little has been written about the positive aspects of life on the frontier. Of the trappers, miners, cowboys, and farmers themselves, few were writers (and, even if they were, fewer still were captivating and persuasive writers). That left the image of the frontier to be created mainly by writers from the East, in whose hands the frontiers of the fur trapper and the cowboy were romanticized beyond any semblance of reality, while the agricultural frontier failed to capture the imagination of the best writers. Smith: “The Wild West [of the mountain man and the cowboy] lent itself readily to interpretation in a literature developing the themes of natural nobility and physical adventure, but the agricultural West ... proved quite intractable as literary material ” [Smith 1957: 211]. The farmer’s “sedentary and laborious calling stripped him of the exotic glamour that could be exploited in hunters and scouts of the Wild West. At the same time his low social status made it impossible to elaborate his gentility” [215].
If people living on the frontier had wanted to preserve some of its wildness, a further and bigger problem was that they were not the ones who controlled the way the frontier developed. Development required outside capital. Sometimes the necessary investments were made from Denver, but, often, the capital came from the East or even from Europe. It was outsiders who created the towns, financed the mines, and built railroads, smelters, and processing plants for agricultural products. From their point of view, the West was mainly resources. Having no experience of living there, they had no basis for a conception of development different from what they already knew in the East or in Europe. Even Thomas Hart Benton, the leading advocate of western development in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years, never saw the West [Smith 1957: 32]. Those who actually lived and worked on the frontier might have imagined different possibilities, but they were not the driving forces.
In the middle third of Colorado’s history, the image of the frontier as a place of freedom and independence retained its hold. At the same time, the economy (in Colorado and elsewhere) became increasingly corporate, and the American legal system instituted a precedent of treating corporations the same as individuals, subject to the same laws and enjoying the same rights. In that context, the presumed frontier values of freedom and independence were (and continue to be) ballyhooed as vital to individual citizens, but it’s corporations that enjoy the greatest benefits.
In the mining communities of Colorado, according to Carl Abbott and his colleagues in their history of the state, “Union leaders of the 1880s decried the concentration of capital among a few large corporations and the disappearance of the independent prospector and skilled journeyman” [Abbott et al. 1982: 141]. Subsequent union activity culminated in a wave of strikes in 1903 and 1904, with Colorado City, Cripple Creek, Telluride, and Trinidad among the affected communities. However: “By 1905 and 1906, it was clear that organized business had won an important war against Colorado’s workers. In scarcely a single mining camp … did a strong miners’ union remain in a position to fight the large companies. Indeed, another wave of industrial violence in the 1910s was little more than a measure of the failure of radical unionism in the previous decade” [149].
In the wake of World War I, the “Red Scare” took hold in Colorado, as it did in many other states [264]. Citizens and state leaders interpreted industrial violence as a sign of lawlessness and the work of radicals. Newspapers agitated for control of “Bolshevism,” and state and local laws were passed forbidding “anarchy and sedition,” display of the red flag, and the inciting of rebellion. When the fear of Bolsheviks receded in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan rose to a position of influence in Denver and other cities. Reflecting anger over strikes and violence in Colorado’s mining communities, the Klan’s chief targets were Catholics and the foreign-born. A mayoral candidate in Denver promising to “give the Klan the kind of administration it wants” won seventy percent of the votes in 1924 [270], and Klan candidates also won the governorship and both U.S. Senate seats. The Klan was influential even in Grand Junction, despite the fact that only small numbers of Catholics, Jews, blacks, and foreigners lived there [272].
The Klan’s “Invisible Empire” collapsed by 1926, but “more progressive leadership” was not among the results [272]. During the Great Depression, “Colorado politicians were not only concerned to limit state aid to the indigent. They also accepted federal grants, the only source of significant relief funds, with extreme reluctance” [273]. Like other western politicians, they were “[u]nwilling to amend time-honored values of self-help and individualism” and “failed to recognize the passing of the era of frontier booms when natural resources could be skimmed off without thought” [277]. Coloradans “voted for Coolidge, joined the Klan, damned Roosevelt’s socialist meddling, and continued to believe that government’s only function was to provide the individual with the opportunity to strike it rich” [277].
The most recent third of Colorado history suggests that Coloradans are still seeking the frontier mix of civilization and wildness and still failing to find it. World War II brought economic and population growth to Denver and Colorado Springs, and “[p]rosperity continued in the two decades after 1945...” [280]. As Abbott and his colleagues point out: “The economic transformation was the result of a revaluation of the amenities of the Colorado environment.... ‘[T]he very factors which were formerly inhibitors of economic activity—climate, vast spaces, mountains, government administered reserves of forest and wilderness areas—have become major stimulants of the new kind of economy’” [281, quoting a University of Colorado economist]. But, despite the appeal of those factors, the desired mix of civilization and wildness has remained elusive.
Out on the Western Slope, where Laurie and I chose Grand Junction as a place to live precisely for its mix of civilization and wildness, we can still spend a day hiking in the canyons, mesas, or deserts and relax over pizza and microbrewed beer on our way home. We can photograph wildflowers or bighorn sheep in the morning and spend the afternoon at an art museum. But long-term success in preserving the mix of civilization and wildness seems no more likely here than it does anywhere else. The frontier mentality is alive and well, but it’s the wrong frontier. The Western Slope has a history of oil and gas companies creating booms, damaging the environment, and then pulling out to leave a devastated economy. Yet bumper stickers still plead: “DRILL HERE / DRILL NOW / PAY LESS.” Environmentalists demand regulations, but the response of the companies seems not to have matured beyond a pattern of pulling out as soon as regulations are threatened. And a common local sentiment is to oppose the regulations rather than blame the companies for failing to figure out ways to comply with them.
The frontier mentality that persists is the one of freedom and independence rather than one where the lessons of wildness have a chance of being learned. Another bumper sticker (post–Obama inauguration) says: “I’LL KEEP MY GUNS, MY MONEY, AND MY FREEDOM, YOU KEEP THE ‘CHANGE.’” The idolizing of guns, money, and freedom reflects the tired old image of a frontier where it’s assumed that everyone cares only about “life’s main chance” and government’s only purpose is to provide “the opportunity to strike it rich.” It’s not a frontier where lessons are likely to be learned that we’re in this together (along with other people and the rest of nature) and can get along all right, not just by conquering and controlling, but by staying attentive and learning to fit in.
PHOTOGRAPH
Fort Uncompahgre, Delta, CO, 4/09. A 1990 reconstruction of a fur trading fort established by Antoine Robidoux in 1828.
SOURCES
Abbott, Carl, Stephen J. Leonard, and David McComb. Colorado: A History of the Centennial State. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1982.
Allen, John L. “Horizons of the Sublime: The Invention of the Romantic West.” Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1992), pp. 27-40.
Ferguson, Gary. The Great Divide. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2004.
Flexner, James Thomas. That Wilder Image. New York: Bonanza Books, 1962.
Jones, Mary Ellen. Daily Life on the 19th-Century American Frontier. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.
Sprague, Marshall. Colorado: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
Trenton, Patricia, and Peter H. Hassrick. The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.
Wyckoff, William. Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western Landscape, 1860-1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
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