Review by Ed Quillen
History – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Great Divide – A Biography of the Rocky Mountains
by Gary Ferguson
Hardback edition published in 2004 by W.W. Norton
Paperback edition published in 2006 by the Countryman Press
ISBN 0-88150-707-5
MOUNTAINS ARE PILES OF ROCK, not living organisms, so it seems odd to find a “biography” of a mountain range. But with his energetic yet clear writing, Gary Ferguson does bring our mountains to life, as a major player in American culture.
That’s the major difference between The Great Divide and another wonderful book which covers the same territory, The Rockies by David Lavender, first published in 1968 as part of The Regions of America series.
With graceful writing, Lavender writes a fairly traditional history, leavened with his own experience growing up in Telluride, where he mined and then moved farther west to herd livestock. His major focus is on mining, the industry that opened up the mountains.
Ferguson gives us more of a social history — how succeeding generations of Americans perceived our mountains, reacted to them, and tried to inhabit them. Mining gets a chapter, but there are many others, from religious pilgrims of the 19th century to the arrival of the counter-culture in the 1970s.
While most of us today see mountains as grand and beautiful, that was not always so: “As late as the seventeenth century leading poets, philosophers, and religious leaders of the Western world routinely described unkempt landscapes in degrading terms, referring to mountains as tumors, blisters, pimples, carbuncles, and warts.”
The first people of European extraction to spend much time in the Rockies were the mountain men, whose careers “suggest a kind of toughness for which today there are few equivalents. Thomas ‘Pegleg’ Smith … had his leg shattered by an Indian bullet. Using a butcher knife, he amputated his leg himself, then turned the blade on a pine log, carving a wooden leg that could be quickly removed for use as a club. Which was a good idea, given Smith’s fondness for brawling, stealing horses, and taking up with some spirited Indian women, at one point amassing five wives from various tribes of the central Rockies.”
But public perception included some nobility, because the mountain men became heroic literary characters who had been “delivered by nature” into a state of something like grace, to make them fit better with the religious revivals of the time.
“The lengths writers went to in order to sanitize [Kit] Carson were ludicrous. Forced to discuss a hell-raising spree the trapper had gone on in Santa Fé at the end of an expedition in 1831, biographer De Witt Peters nearly chokes on political correctness:
‘Young Kit, at this period of his life, imitated the example set by his elders, for he wished to be considered by them as an equal and a friend. He, however, passed through this terrible ordeal, which most frequently ruins its votary, and eventually came out brighter, clearer, and more noble for the conscience-polish which he received. And contracted no bad habits, but learned the usefulness and happiness of resisting temptation, and became so well-schooled that he was able, by the caution and advice of wisdom, founded on experience, to prevent many a promising and skillful hand from grasping ruin in the same vortex.'”
If I’m quoting a lot more than I usually do in a book review, it’s because Ferguson is such a fine writer that I want to use his words rather than my own.
After the mountain men there are “Lords, Farmers, and Other Tourists,” and he follows the 1843 excursion, perhaps the first real tourist trip, of Lord William Drummond Stewart from Missouri to Wyoming.
Tourism became more egalitarian. Ferguson points out that the letters and literature of the late 1800s “utterly refute the claims of authors who say nature preserves were in that era mostly playgrounds for the wealthy.” He quotes from an 1883 letter written by one of the wealthy: “We constantly met the most rustic of vehicles drawn by the roughest of farm animals, filled with genuine sons and daughters of the soil. It was really strange to see how perfectly this class appreciate 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.”
FERGUSON PUTS CONSIDERABLE EMPHASIS on dude ranches. There were never that many of them, but they had a big effect on how the West was perceived in the early 20th Century — as a place for an isolated simple vacation, putting the tourist in touch with the seasons as well as the fences and cattle.
He effectively contrasts that with the expectations of certain modern visitors to the Wild West. “… living in an increasingly virtual world has changed utterly our expectations of what the wild Rockies can provide. Rangers in the large wilderness parks of the range are ever more frustrated by visitors who have what some describe as ‘too much Disney in the blood….’
“The same illusions created for us at Disney World and Busch Gardens — nature fully child-proofed, sweetened by predictability — are increasingly being applied to the last of the Rocky Mountain wilderness. These are the days of seasoned guides and outdoor leaders quitting the business by the dozen, saying how over the past decade more of their clients have become insolent, angry in the face of nothing more than the day turning cold and the sky sending rain.”
And then there’s the montane invasion that I was part of — long-haired Baby Boomers in the 1970s. Ferguson suggests that many of us were fascinated by the West because we’d grown up on televised cowboy lore, and the mountains attracted us because many mountain towns then were fading backwaters where you could get away from the blandness of suburbia and the stresses of urban life.
“It wasn’t just that the Rockies attracted ruffians and various others slightly off the bubble — though without question they did — but that they continued to allow peculiarities of thought that in other rural parts of the country would have been scowled at, censured, denounced.” It was “a movement neither prompted nor encouraged by government or tourism boards. No travel commissions had mailed them pamphlets full of lies promising monster vegetables and a live-forever climate, bragging about gold mines, about grass so thick you could turn out your livestock and forget them.”
He focuses on Crested Butte to tell this story, quoting much from George Sibley, who once published its newspaper. Here George explains that “Nobody asked me what I was looking for when I showed up there in 1966. If I’d thought about it long enough I would’ve said I was looking for something different than what I’d known all my life. I was looking for community, and that’s what I found.”
THIS CHAPTER CONCLUDES with “The down-and-out old mining towns of the Rockies were in the 1960s raw canvas, as they’d been countless times before, destined to be splattered with quirky humor and political fervor, improvisation and arrogance, and every now and then with the kind of naïve, juvenile behavior that attends most bouts of cultural creativity. That was the gift of the region — to baby boomers, and to young people nearly a hundred years before, when various other black sheep found it a much needed antidote to mainstream culture.”
I love that phrase, “antidote to mainstream culture,” for it explains well why so many of us live in the mountains.
This is a fine book which can stand next to Lavender’s The Rockies. You ought to read them both, of course, but you’ll likely enjoy this one more.
