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“The history of the West until recently has been a history...of the indulgence of an unprecedented personal liberty, an atomic individualism, in a country that experience says can only be successfully tamed and lived in by a high degree of cooperation.” ~Wallace Stegner, 1980
“The men who set out to get rich from western grasslands shared the psychology—and the ignorance of consequences—of the men who had cleaned out the beaver steams, the buffalo, and the precious metals.” 1/
“Who among the mountain men would have paused to consider, or would have cared, that beaver were a water resource, and that beaver engineering was of great importance in the maintenance of stream flow and the prevention of floods?” 2/
“Who among the miners worried about what happened to the watersheds when they logged their timbers or tore up streambeds with their dredges?” 3/
“Who among the cattlemen knew or cared that in a dry land grass, like minerals, might be non-renewable, that some of the best grasses were annuals that reproduced only from seed, that overgrazing both prevented reseeding and encouraged erosion?” 4/
“The cattleman like his predecessors lived a large, free life; he is even more deeply embedded in our folklore than mountain man or miner; in terms of the enduring capacity of the West to sustain a civilization, he did more harm than either.” 5// ~Wallace Stegner, 1980
“The history of the West is full of murderous quarrels over property that neither of the contestants owned, and over rights that no law had approved...[It] is an ugly story. But put in the terms Owen Wister gave it in ‘The Virginian,’ it takes on the quality of myth.” 1/
“The real people of the West are infrequently cowboys and never myths... But those who live by the myth, or pretend to, have never admitted that they live in a land of little rain and big consequences.” 2/
“They represent the survival of a gospel that left to its own devices would already have reduced the West to a desert as barren as Syria.” 3/
My last book of 2018, Wallace Stegner’s “The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West” amazon.com/Sound-Mountain… (Be sure to get the edition with his stunning Introduction from 1980.)
