Hearts Dreaming in the West

    In honor of my excitement for once again being able to see the western skies I thought I would write a special post about what exactly the west is, or perhaps what it is I see in the west. Before starting, like any good academic drone, I must define my terminology. The West: a land both real and mythological, residing somewhere between the pacific ocean and the Appalachian Mountains; a land both alive and in throes of death. Above all, I feel that the idea of "The West" is a metaphor for adventure, freedom, and the unknown. I started my day off by Google-ing pictures "The American West" and I was greeted by beautifully rendered paintings of cowboys on cattle drives, plains natives in full regalia, a stop along the Oregon Trail and photographs of men and women of that misty age shrouded in a haze glorification and popular culture. The West is all of these things, but also none of them and more than them all at once. In the Golden Age of Western cinema, crowds were treated to larger than life characters portrayed by the likes of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. Here were heroes, good to the core, taming a savage land. Later, the revisionist western was born with Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, culminating in the epic Once Upon a Time in the West. These depicted a melodramatic, dark, and gritty west where there was no black or white. Later viewers would be treated to sympathetic westerns like Dances with Wolves, where the heroes we once cheered for were now the enemies and the Native Americans were the "Noble Savage". As much as I love all of these films, and the western genre as a whole, none of them are all that accurate. And so here it begins...the West.
     There is much more to this land than cowboys and Indians as any true historian will know. For eons, the North  and South American continents were separate from the rest of the world. Then, sometime before the end of the last great Ice Age, man found this undiscovered country, when to them it was the East. In waves people came in boats and on foot, across the land bridge and skirting the pacific coasts until eventually they would be driven inland by a want for more. These people would give rise to the Toltec  the Inca, Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Anasazi, Hohokam, the great states of the Mound Builders and all other peoples that we call native. Just the first set of immigrants to this wayward place. Natives are often portrayed as skin and feather clad nomads that roam the country on horse back and sleep in ti-pis. This vision most accurately depicts a variety of Plains peoples on middle America at about the time of the 1800's. In truth, the people that populated the Americas were diverse in many ways. Some built great cities of adobe or stone, some were farmers of cotton and the first to tame corn. Many of these cultures are long "vanished" and remain mysterious. Only small clues left in the dirt give us small hints of a greater history. The Maya were the first people to understand the concept of zero, and did so long before the Chinese, Muslim philosophers or Europeans. Many of these cultures had a firm grasp of high mathematics and astronomy, things that are still not fully understood today. The mysteries of these people are the first layer in the allure of the West
     The West was first conceived by Europeans as a place across the Atlantic Ocean, for where did Columbus sail but West? What they found there was not the Kingdom of Prester John, or the Garden of Eden but a place where those things, and much more COULD be. Here was the first glimmer of that mythic place I call the West. Upon their return they told stories of a land untouched and ripe for the taking as so came more. The conquerors, the Conquistadores, the explorers, the pirates and colonists, all searching for something more. Orellana search the jungles of South America for El Dorado, Cortes destroyed the Aztecs and the Triple Alliance, Coronado pressed further into New Spain in search of The Seven Cities of Gold. What he found there were the Zuni and their pueblos; he was the first European to see the Grand Canyon, the Rio Grande, The Great Plains, The Arkansas River. With all this discovery came death as well. These were the first step in the destruction of the first peoples. Eventually, European colonies would be established on the Eastern Seaboard and the the West would shrink. Now beyond the ancient Appalachians was this land undreamed.
     Mountain men and trappers would cross the vast expanses to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. People would slowly trickle west searching for fame and fortune and a freedom long unremembered. With each step the West grew smaller. Then came the great trails, the Oregon, the Santa Fe, the Mormon; mass migrations from the east to the west that brought men and women of all sorts. They would fill the valleys, farm the lands, and mine the mountains and destroy the world that was here before them in their wake. The natives and the Europeans would become enemies, one atrocity after another afflicted both sides of the battle. However, in the end the war was one by Europeans. I by no means am attempting to dismiss decades of brutality inflicted upon the natives, but there is much more to the story than that. What happened here was two, very different worlds meeting for the first time, two worlds that vastly misunderstood each other and what ensued was a long, bloody conflict fought by some of the dirtiest means possible and neither side was innocent. Unfortunately when someone wins a war, another side loses. That is part of the cycle of man's life interaction on Earth and so it will be till man is no more.
     What is left of this land called the West? Now we see movies and books that depict a glorified time where good was good and the bad were loathsome, a few were just ugly. We see mysteries of a time that we really know little about and think of what it would be like to ride across an untamed land on horseback eagerly anticipating what is just over the next ridge. There are stories of lost gold, badmen and gun fighters that give us a sort of half fantasy. The West has long departed from our world. Now cities spring up where once there was only desert; the tops of mountain peaks are adorned with crowns of cell phone towers. When I think of this time I think of the adventure, the excitement of seeing things for yourself for the first time, of treading a land untrod, of that freedom they must have felt. I know there are places out there still, silent and longing, where there is still a shade of that time, that place. I have a longing for such places, where the air still blows clean and fresh, where the spirits of the past still roam and where that freedom still waits for the one who has the drive to find it. It is a bitter sweet quest, for if it is found, it is simply another bastion destroyed. Whether we can find them or whether we ever do is not the point however, it is simply the knowing that someplace, somewhere, it is still out there in the West of every man's heart.

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old--

This knight so bold--

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow-

"Shadow," said he,

"Where can it be--

This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,"

The shade replied--

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

-Edgar Allan Poe