Zombies, Roy Rogers, and the Old West

I’ve been humbled since my last post. Dragged back from my nostalgia and reverie about “the West as I knew it” to the West of today. I was ushered back as Patty Limerick’s class discussed the reading I quoted last time. The one by Dick Lamm about the death of the West. Inviting us to think critically about that sort of nostalgia (“elegy,” she called it), Patty pointed out that the West has not, in fact, died. “Who are we,” she asked, “Zombies?” And as for White settlers being likened to latter-day Indians, she pointed out not only that genocide is not comparable to the loss of farmland (which, thankfully, I had also noted) but also that the Indians are not gone. How dare we, she implied, invisibilize them further by declaring them extinct? Ditto ranchers.

Thus was I reawakened to the world of revisionist history. I had succumbed to the romantic idealization of the “true West,” the “old West,” which is based on what Limerick is fond of calling “the myth of the West”—the great frontier and the grand adventure that ended … when? The story line centering on the “death of the West,” she noted, began back in the 1830s—almost 200 years ago—when the fur trappers declared that the West was lost, dead, because settlers were moving into the frontier. Then, it “died” again when cattle ranchers took over the West from the farmers. And again when industrialization took over the towns and turned them into cities, took over the wagon trails and replaced them with railroads and then highways. Again when the search for energy began to consume the desert canyons and mountaintops.

It’s all part of the so-called settler society. It’s always been layered, one group following upon another, each thinking that their experience was the true West and that it was lost to invasion by the next. My personal experience with this progression centers around Moab, Utah, in the 1970s and 80s, when you could hear the resentment of local “natives”—descendants of farmers and miners—as they railed against the hikers and environmentalists … and then more recently as those very hikers and environmentalists rail against the mountain bikers and t-shirt shops.

Well, unless we’re Zombies, this is the West. For now. Enter Patty Limerick’s Roy Rogers Hypothesis: “Western reality and the myth of the West are entirely intertwined. You cannot understand one without the other.”

Back to my comeuppance. The irony of my (uncritical) embrace of Lamm’s nostalgic, romantic, elegiac view of the West is not that it was “wrong.” It’s that I know better than to think that it’s right. The sort of “deconstruction” that this class encourages—the practice of looking for what’s missing, who’s telling the story, who benefits from this view over other views, what’s hidden behind the obvious story line—is exactly what I did in my own field before I retired. But lo and behold, when it came to a topic this close to my heart (and so distant, apparently, from my scholarly instincts), I forgot to do it.

The requirement that I find enough psychological distance from this topic to consider it more critically changed my whole relationship to this class. Now I’m really a student again.