Visions of the American West (Part 3)

The Mountains

By James T. Carney

The third part of the West is the Mountains (Rockies) and the high plateau around them. Indeed, it is this area – the home of dude ranches and national parks – that most Americans now seem to identify as the West. The Rockies extend from Alaska south to the Mexican border. They encompass the western part of Washington, almost all of Idaho, the western parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, as well as a strip of New Mexico and the mountainous part of the Big Bend area of Texas. Although one thinks of ranching in terms of Texas and the Great Plains, the Mountains are the site of much modern-day American ranching, as it has been for a good century and a half. Unlike the Great Plains or the Southwest, the Mountains have much water and good land suitable for grazing, although generally not flat enough for farming. The Mountains are reasonably temperate in the summer but brutally cold in the winter. Even sections of interstate highways that go through mountain passes are often blocked by winter storms (which cause havoc in the Great Plains). Indeed some roads are not even maintained in the winter.

Visions of the American West (Part 2)

The Southwest

By James T. Carney

The second-largest part of the West is the Southwest – ironically the situs of most Hollywood movies about cowboys and Indians, although most of the cowboys who have roamed this territory came from Beverly Hills. The Southwest is the part of the West that I know best because of having made a great number of trips there. The Southwest is bordered on the south by Mexico, on the east by the Rockies, on the north by the end of the desert, and on the west by the California coastal plain, which is east of the Sierra Nevada. It consists of Southern California, Arizona, western New Mexico and Utah, Nevada, and Southwestern Oregon. Basically, it is the territory that the United States took from Mexico in the Mexican-American war. It is an extremely dry territory, full of canyons, mesas, and mountains, and in many ways inhospitable to man. Civilization’s existence in this area is precarious, since it depends on the resources of the Colorado River, which is fed by the snows of the Rockies. Natural aquifers are being depleted at an alarming rate, and if global warming decreases the snow in the Rockies, Phoenix will go the way of so many of the Southwestern mining towns that were abandoned after the ore gave out.

Visions of the American West (Part 1)

Introduction & the Great Plains

By James T. Carney

Some of us grew up in the era of Crockett mania, with the chorus of the frontiersman sounding in our ears:

He’s ahead of us all
meetin’ the test
Followin’ his legend
into the West.