Review by Wayne Sheldrake
The West – November 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Western Paradox: A Conservation Reader
by Bernard DeVoto
Edited by Douglas Brinkley & Patricia Nelson Limerick,
Published in 2001 by Yale University Press
ISBN 0300084234
Utah-born Bernard DeVoto died a “hard-nosed, full-bore conservationist” in 1955. Once a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, and still a nationally recognized and combative columnist (mostly for Harper’s), DeVoto first wanted to be a novelist, but then he got angry and turned muckraker around 1947 when Western cattle producers and legislators instigated a political shell game that almost convinced the 80th Congress to return National Forest and BLM lands to the states.
If successful, the move would have precipitated the piecemeal auction of public domain accumulated during the first 40 years of U.S. conservation policy. Or the land would have been given to grazing licensees at pennies on the dollar. The scam would have taken every jewel of the West: national monuments, parks and Forests alike. Yellowstone, Yosemite, gone. Grand Canyon, Bryce, Arches, White Sands, Great Sand Dunes, gone. What remained of the Ancient Cedars and the Redwoods, gone.
From the platform of his Harper’s column, DeVoto raged, creating the kind of media heat that melts a 60 Minutes victim today. The cattle producers and their store-bought politicians backed down — this time.
DeVoto’s ire became preeminent and permanent because he understood the piracy of western power as well as he understood the subtlety of watersheds. DeVoto was paying attention to the environment — even though few others were at mid-century.
He went on to expose Big Timber’s lustful lunge for Olympic National Park, and he led a public outcry over Echo Park Dam — which would have flooded the Colorado into Dinosaur National Monument. His son Mark DeVoto writes that his father was “for a long time … the only passionate voice raised in defense of America’s natural resources.”
It was DeVoto who coined the term “landgrab.” His pointed, in-depth articles, which are collected in the first part of The Western Paradox, are fortified with still-pertinent phraseology. He sneered at the “dynamic of boom,” and the “liquidation economy.” He railed at “the system of absentee exploitation,” and “economic cannibalism.”
The second part of the book, with six roiling chapters, was finally edited fifty years after his death. In it, DeVoto snickered at the machinations of every little town’s “Frontier Week,” and he pegged the modern West as “schizophrenic” and “strange.”
In his watershed essay, “The West Against Itself,” DeVoto said: “The West is its own worst enemy.” Indeed he felt he was witnessing: “The West committing suicide.”
DeVoto bemoaned the West’s long history of complaining about its colonial exploitation and about heavy handed regulations imposed by the federal government while it simultaneously pleaded with the Feds for more money and protection — and then treated itself as exploitatively as any outsider.
Westerners had failed to recognize that they lived in a desert, and even worse, they longed to live as if they didn’t.
But DeVoto seesawed on a knife edge of his own. At the same time that he railed about the political dangers of Dodge City or Denver believing in their own propaganda, he loved life beyond the 100th Meridian, effusively. As often as he was critical, feuding, and combative, DeVoto was breathless about the West. Of the same towns that put on their hokey Frontier Weeks, he wrote:
“These Western towns would be…excellent places for the children to grow up in. So much space, so much sparkling air, so much lawn and forest, so much sunlight, so much natural beauty, such easy access to wilderness and silence, such facilities for recreation. If the Westerners are not quite free they are at least free and easy.”
Readers will find a professor’s thoroughness and taxonomy, and a lecturer’s habit for outline throughout The Western Paradox. But rather than merely introducing another historical theory replete with statistics, DeVoto identifies behavior and reports the story.
One of his most interesting stories traces the genealogy of western “lawlessness.” It begins with the absurdities of imported institutions, policies and laws, which were heretofore adopted by self-reliant woodsmen. Such laws and institutions were incompatible to “arid lands.”
The ill-suited requirements of the Homestead Act quickly devastated most homesteads. The consequences of inappropriate regulations climaxed with the deputized violence of Wyoming’s Johnson County War, which dove-tailed into vigilante range wars and a legacy of stockman versus herdsman.
The denouement came in the form of the “unconstitutional” creation of forest reserves in 1891; and the unconstitutional assessment of grazing fees in 1905; and finally culminated in the unconstitutional Taylor Act in 1934, which provided a poor attempt to mend all of the earlier transgressions.
Even up to DeVoto’s death, the nation never established the proper guidelines to govern what was essentially a desert with “humid islands” (i.e. mountains). How were land-hungry, opportunity-grasping entrepreneurs with perverted preconceptions of the frontier supposed to act? From the get-go, it was nigh impossible to abide by the law and make a profit at the same time.
The first westerners came upon land that could never satisfy their ambitions. They embraced a fantasy, and ended up fighting deflation; the Big Freeze of 1886-87; drops in productivity due to obvious, unchecked, violently enforced overgrazing; and investor loses. Since there was never enough water to make the land what they wanted it to be, the Cattle Kingdom waged a fratricidal war against its maverick self when it couldn’t find a scapegoat — or a sheep.
Westerners never adjusted their customs to live in the arid West. They simply arrived too fast to unlearn what it had taken the forested frontier 200 years to teach. And the results were spectacularly harmful and irreparably heartbreaking for the land.
Instead of living in the “true West,” westerners and Americans embraced a fantasy: the 1880’s mythological hero, the terse, resilient, spit-and-whittle, justice-dispensing, bullet-dodging cowboy. In his last jabbing chapters, DeVoto argued that Wild West fantasies soothed our Manifest Destiny psyches, but they are pathetic when set against the grand lands that they have ruined.
The West, then as now, as ever, is about water. Although DeVoto believed that Nevada was a total wasteland that had reached its maximum population — and he seriously underestimated the possibilities of deep aquifer drilling, epic water diversion, and the power of the pump — in 2002 his fulminations once again seem prescient, pertinent and prophetic. Today, we still haven’t learned how to live in an arid landscape. In our decade, hydrology and technology shape the West, but drought may eclipse both.
