“Welcome to the New Old West”
reads the sign outside Pahrump, Nev., as you drive from Death
Valley Junction along the California border.
Given the
meaning of these two terms, it’s a funny juxtaposition. The Old
West has always meant open spaces, riding the range, cowboys and
gunfire, freedom in the early 20th century sense of the word
— to do what you want, where and when you want —
without pesky regulations. This is the West of an untapped world of
promise.
The New West means something different. Service
and leisure have mostly replaced extraction and herds, cities
dominate, and people wearing cowboy hats sit in traffic in SUVs,
with glorious sunsets behind the nearby mountains that most never
visit. This West builds four things: casinos, subdivisions, theme
parks and prisons. It has glitter and glitz, leisure and at least a
measure of security. Yet we pine for the old West as we live in the
new.
This is the terrible paradox of the West today. Our
collective desire has created a split between where people tend to
settle and the land that surrounds them. The West is the most
densely urban part of the country; it is also home to the most
glorious and spectacular open spaces available in the Lower 48. The
two abut one another, but they rarely intersect.
Every
state in the West has a spine along which most of its population
lives. In Utah, it’s the Wasatch Front; in Colorado, the Front
Range. In Arizona, the Tucson-Phoenix-Flagstaff corridor contains
75 percent of the state7;s non-Indian population. In Nevada, Clark
County, where Las Vegas is located, makes up more than 75 percent
of the state. If you add the Washoe Front of Reno and Carson City,
the two together top 90 percent. In Idaho, it’s the highway
corridor that connects Boise, Twin Falls, Pocatello and, with a
little jog to the north, Idaho Falls.
All that density
means that cities swing a lot of weight in the West. We make our
money in cities, increasingly in tourism and services. The cities
generate sales tax, property tax, cultural life, medical care and
just about everything else that makes us modern. Cities even use
water efficiently, yet in every Western state, 80 percent of the
water goes to inefficient agricultural uses. It is the cities where
economic action hums, and in almost every Western state, urban
economic endeavor subsidizes rural counties. The dollars made and
the taxes paid in urban areas build schools and roads in rural
areas, staff essential services and shoulder the increasing
public-assistance burden as most rural economies continue their
decline.
As amenity-based communities creep out into open
space and wildland, they create what historian Lincoln Bramwell
calls “wilderburbs.” There, residents want roads and police and
fire protection, but they also want the vistas and advantages of
open spaces. Many find that you can’t have both.
We love
the open spaces, or more correctly, the idea of open spaces. We
dream of that geography, the American dreamscape, the landscape in
which the nation was reinvented in the aftermath of the Civil War.
It frees us from the historical burden of being Americans. It lets
us see reinvention of the self in the Western landscape.
In our minds, the real American nation was born out here, free of
the taint of slavery and sectional conflict. The first American
Republic, the one that lasted from 1776 until 1861, had a crack in
its structure, just like the one in the Liberty Bell itself. Called
slavery, this fissure severed that first republic, crushed it, and
necessitated a rebirth of the American nation.
The West
became the location of that new conception of American nationhood.
When we see cowboys and open spaces, we don’t think of federal
subsidies for ranching and agriculture; we think of the ideals that
make the nation great. In the United States, the geography of the
West is at the heart of the nation, of the way we craft our
identity for better and worse. The result of this paradox traps us.
Demography, the study of populations, spells out the reality of who
we are and how we live. Geography is what we aspire to in our
dreams and what makes us psychically whole. The New Old West is a
meaningful idea, because it’s somehow where we all live, trapped
between demography and geography.
Hal Rothman
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is a professor
of history at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas.
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