April 25 – May 1, 2024

My grandfather was born and reared in the east, and went west as a young man, where he stayed and started a family. I was born and reared mostly in the west, and came east after college, where I stayed and raised a family. It has always intrigued me when someone here in Virginia would ask “where my people came from.” The west didn’t have Ivy League colleges, or fight the Civil War, and everyone came from somewhere else, so the history is much less fraught with concerns about status. When my grandfather went west, it was the early 1900s, and the west still was considered the frontier. Stories of miners and loggers filled my grandfather’s letters to his mother, with an occasional reference to the “Wobblies” (Industrial Workers of the World) and impending violence in the forests of North Idaho. Later, he drove horse teams in Yellowstone, and eventually moved farther west to Oregon. I was reminded of his experiences as I read “True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America” by historian Betsy Gaines Quammen (Torrey House Press, 295 pages). The book explores old and new misperceptions about the American West, with a special focus on how faith and political ideology continue to affect not just the western states, but the entire nation.

Ms. Quammen, now a Montana resident, also went west and, coincidentally, from Ohio, the same as my grandfather. Separated by nearly a century in their experiences, a lot has changed, but in some ways, it really hasn’t. In my grandfather’s day, people went west in search of the wide-open spaces, a chance to get away from farm drudgery and seek new adventure. Some wanted to “tame the land;” others were drawn by dime-store novels about cowboys, gunfights, and the romance of independence. All found it more difficult than expected. The beauty of vast landscapes belies harsh weather, rocky soil, and infrequent rain. The bison were mostly gone by the time my grandfather worked in Yellowstone, but a few decades later, his sister, my great-aunt, refused to consider visiting because she feared Indian attacks.

What frequently was missing then was acknowledgement that lands in the west had been utilized by Native Americans for centuries before the “settlers” arrived in their covered wagons. Shoshone, Paiute, Navaho, Nez Perce, Northern Cheyenne, Chippewa, and many other tribal nations moved from place to place, following game and the seasons, with their unique and amazing culture and practices. They did not own their homeland; they shared it.

Today, attachment to the land still is a significant factor in the west, only this time that attachment seems to be more about ownership and control, isolating from the broad spectrum of thought that has defined American excellence since the nation’s founding. Author Quammen describes conversations with an Idaho rancher who supports restoring wolves to the wild, a preacher whose Montana dinosaur museum posits that humans and dinosaurs co-existed 6,000 years ago when the earth was created (she terms it “biblical literalism”), and a gun dealer who originally sold historic weapons to collectors but has come to hate his job because he now is “selling mountains of guns to people who have no business having them.” Some hopeful discussions were with folks who told her “I was afraid of you before we talked,” and “I didn’t think I would like you” but found things they could agree on or, at least, were interesting to them. One indigenous friend, remembering a neighbor with Trump stickers and guns who joined others to help a woman whose electricity was shut off as the weekend approached, noted that “I think we all have looney tunes, but for the most part, I think we all have way more in common than we don’t.” Quammen urges dialogue to sort out the “confusions, the facts, the manipulations, and the nuances.” Harkening back to the little Montana museum, she concludes “In the midst of innumerable concerns, we have no choice but to face them together. No, we didn’t step aboard Noah’s Ark 6,000 years ago. But, nonetheless, here we all are, stuck in the same boat. To keep afloat, we’re going to need one another.” Amen!