My car shot down the road, gliding over cattle guard bars and ill-maintained, infrequently traveled asphalt. Nothing, for miles. Blessed nothing. If you encountered a patrolman or sheriff’s deputy in these parts they’d race you to the end of the valley for the fun of it. You can feel the roar of the engine as you push forward, the wind blowing against the body of your vehicle. Red and salmon-colored cliffs rise in the far distance, rays of sunshine burst through the clouds and strike the bluffs and the plains as if God Himself opened the gates of heaven especially for the few dozen souls residing in the vast expanse. In Paradox Valley, nestled along the border of Utah and Colorado, Lady Liberty makes her case. It’s a strong one.
Moab, Utah, was my destination, the final one of a planned holiday. Like many towns and cities in America’s Zion, Moab’s namesake is Old Testament in origin. I stayed the night in a hotel that reminded me of a college dorm, built with a tight budget but suitable enough for a good night’s sleep. Breakfast the next morning consisted of a rubbery omelette microwaved 15 seconds too little and five slices of greased-up bacon. Enough to get me on the road. I bought a cup of black coffee and finished a characteristically Western novel—Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men—at a cafe whose walls were covered in crude French art. Moab was cool and shaded that morning, the canyon walls delaying the desert sun’s slow rise. It would not remain pleasant for long.
Making my way out of town, my red Honda Accord navigated the dozens of miles of wandering desert road that lead to Canyonlands National Park. A jolly thirtysomething ranger with a well-trimmed reddish beard greeted me at the entrance, holed up in a tiny building made smaller by its sublime surroundings. I couldn’t help but think his exuberance was compensation for his isolation. Or perhaps he was one of those types whose heart is kindled by the silence of the desert. Such types exist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are legion among park rangers. He collected my payment and let me on my way.
Driving through Canyonlands, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the Grand Canyon. Indeed, the same Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon conspired with the Green River to form these gorges over the course of millions of years. These monuments to nature’s greatness are testaments to an oft-forgotten fact: Grand projects are rarely completed by grand gestures. They are the result of many small and often inconsequential actions that only add up to something after the passage of time. The persistence of river water, flowing down from the Rockies, pooling in lakes like La Poudre Pass—the source of the Colorado—each and every day, with some droughts in between, carved these canyons out of limestone and sandstone and shale. Out West, the tortoise beats the hare.
Driving south from Moab you find yourself in Indian country. I crossed through Navajo Nation, America’s largest reservation, spanning the “Four Corners”: Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Navajo land was acquired by the United States following the Mexican-American War, and its boundaries were first drawn in the late 1860s. Unlike most reservations, the Navajo—also known as the Diné—expanded their boundaries on multiple occasions. As of 2020, the reservation boasts a population of 165,000 and a landmass of 27,500 square miles. Still, despite their relative affluence and success vis-à-vis other tribes, they remain quite poor, and this vulnerability was on full display during the COVID pandemic. Lacking adequate health care infrastructure, the Nation became a national hotspot for the virus.
The Navajo would be the first to remind you that despite their setbacks they remain resilient. U.S. 89, the interstate that runs between southern Utah and Flagstaff, Arizona, has been dubbed the “Highway of Hope” by native locals. I drove down this highway, passing by hand-painted billboards. My spirits were lifted until, between these billboards, I saw other signs. They informed readers that the federal government was still committed to compensating Navajo uranium miners for any radiation-related illnesses they may have incurred on the job.
The story of the West cannot be told without telling the story of her original inhabitants, the whole lot of them, most of them lost in the echoes of oral tradition and their mistreatment by settlers. Their continued existence is a testament to their grit and a somber reminder of the completely unnecessary casualties of Western settlement. As Stewart Udall argues in his magisterial book, The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking The History Of The Old West, Indian subjugation was not the unavoidable outcome of American expansion: It was a conscious decision made by figures like President Andrew Jackson, who favored an “apartheid solution” to the so-called “Indian question.”
Jackson’s policies loom large over the history and present reality of the American West’s relationship with Indians: “They fostered the myth that Indians were savages who could not be civilized,” Udell writes. “They legitimized the concept that Indian treaties could – and should – be broken with impunity. And they implanted the idea in Washington that so-called Indian problems ultimately had to be resolved by military force.” We will never know how history would have changed if the approach of settlers such as Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island—who was known for fostering amicable relations with the Narragansett and treating them on equal terms, insisting that they be paid for any land they gave up—was adopted instead of Jackson’s. I do believe, however, that we’d all have been better off for it.
“The frontier has gone,” declared historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” In later years Turner amended his own thesis, recognizing that the story of the American West was only beginning. But this sentiment—that the inauguration of the 20th century marked a fundamental break from the past—remains with many of us today. It’s easy enough for most Westerners to believe. We live in air-conditioned homes, drive to work on well-maintained highways, and only interact with our past when visiting a Spanish mission or taking a detour through Indian country. The frontier thesis, and our contemporary comfort, obscure the very real continuities between this land’s past and present.
The West remains perhaps where man’s Promethean spirit most obviously wrestles nature’s constraints. We labor against water scarcity, drought, and overwhelming summer heat, innovating ways to conserve our water and resources. We’ve innovated various bureaucratic, technological, and legal solutions to better manage our water, such as Arizona’s Groundwater Management Act, which enabled Arizonans to use less water today than they did in 1950 despite a more than 500 percent increase in population. We continue to extract and refine our abundant natural resources, wresting tons of copper and iron and uranium ore from the earth for human development. Mining was what brought many families out West, and it remains an integral part of Western states’ economies. Corporations and governments continue to clash with Tribal authorities over everything from new mining projects to the distribution of pandemic relief. Boomtowns continue to be built seemingly overnight, accommodating giddy semiconductor engineers and miners alike. Many Western towns were first built to accommodate mining projects: Aspen, Leadville, Bisbee. While fewer new mining boomtowns are emerging today, new developments continue to sprout up to house the talent needed to enable ambitious investments such as semiconductor manufacturer TSMC’s Arizona plant to come to fruition.
For all of our development, for all of our laudable innovations, the fact remains that the spirit of the American West still pulses. The same old hopes that inspired our ancestors, and the same old challenges that sometimes brought them low, remain with us today.
Moreover, the frontier thesis denies contemporary Westerners the ability to develop an identity independent of the East. “Turner’s frontier thesis rested on a single point of view; it required that the observer stand in the East and look to the West,” wrote Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Indeed, driving through southern Colorado I saw a new sign every few miles marking a summit in the distance: Mount Harvard, Mount Princeton, Mount Yale, names bestowed by Eastern explorers. But the West is so much more than the East’s rambunctious younger brother.
Our ethnic and religious diversity makes all the ethnic and religious conflicts of the East, not to mention Old World Europe, look tame. As Limerick points out, “the American West was an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected. In race relations, the West could make the turn-of-the-century Northeastern urban confrontation between European immigrants and American nativists look like a family reunion.” The West’s present is arguably even more vibrant than its past. It is remarkably diverse, with over 30 percent of Arizona and New Mexico’s populations and around 25 percent of Nevada, Colorado, and Utah’s populations being Latino. Nearly half of Utah remains Mormon, and large Mormon communities have long thrived across the Mountain West. The region’s politics are anything but predictable, with Arizona and Colorado firmly in the “swing state” category. It remains a land of heterogeneity.
Phoenix, a city that did not exist until the mid-1870s (its existence was made possible by a couple dozen men’s efforts to irrigate the valley by expanding ancient Hohokam canals), is now within striking distance of becoming a great American city. Several years ago it surpassed Philadelphia to become the fifth most populous city in the United States. Five of 10 of the fastest-growing states by population are west of the 100th meridian. States like Arizona whose economies used to consist mostly of tourism and low-wage industries are now home to major advanced manufacturing projects and emerging tech sectors. And Utah is welcoming the permitting and construction of new power projects in the state, including nuclear power plants.
Western tenacity, it seems, remains intact. We retain our fathers’ faith in Progress, even if time and nature sometimes humble our ambitions.
The West is a land of hope. Yes, a land of hopes dashed, expectations exceeding reality, booms and busts, all of that. But a land of hope nonetheless. “Go West, young man,” Horace Greeley exhorted Easterners of the late 19th century, “and grow up with the country.” Around a century later, some say the country’s fully grown. The people out West have yet to hear the news. We never will.
There is surely hope in the East—in its crowded metropolises, its soaring skyscrapers—but it is a narrow hope. It is the hope that one day you, too, will climb the ladder and live in a penthouse overlooking Central Park (a beautiful greenspace nonetheless completely underwhelming to anyone who grew up west of the 100th meridian). Western hope is larger, more horizontal. It is a reaching out. The Western soul is too spacious to simply grow up. You see this in her cities: Western settlements grow outwards. Sprawl is their defining characteristic.
Because the West is a land of hope, it is also a land for those who dare. It is the land where brave bands of our distant ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge and trudged through Canadian tundra and the mighty Rockies to settle; the land where the Hohokam built a sprawling canal system half a millenium before Columbus landed in the New World; the land where adventurers of the Spanish Catholic, missionary Mormon, prospecting capitalist, and simple homesteader varieties proselytized and formed communities; the land where man split the atom and unleashed the boons and perils of the Atomic Age. Life does not come easy here; our droughts are enough to tell us that. But this danger—the risk of calamity—is precisely her appeal. Civilization was not built by those who cherished comfort or managed decline. Westerners know in our bones that stasis is death.
If any of this sounds naive, and I believe it does, Western naivete remains truer than any form of Eastern sophistication. In an era of existential despair, this naivete—and therefore this hope—may save us yet. “While the West is admitting its inadequacy,” wrote Wallace Stegner, “let it remember its strength: it is the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only American society still malleable enough to be formed.” Go West, my friend, and forget your learned despair.
