I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

I posted comments to Audrey and Brian’s bloggs

Week 12 Devil’s Bargain

I promise, that I will never travel to any western state unless I plan on becoming a full-time life-long resident; I promise that I will never ski in Utah, trek to Brice canyon, the Black Hills, or the lights of Las Vegas…there! That should keep Hal K. Rothman satisfied. At least that’s what one must conclude after reading the pages of Devil’s Bargain, authored by the fore mentioned.

Speaking as a former member of the hospitality industry, I must categorize Rothman’s work as one of the harshest criticisms of modern tourism that has ever passed beneath my nose.

He begins with a solid premise: Tourism is a flawed concept. A community beckons other non-native people to come and experience a unique environment. This uniqueness is the selling point. The more non-natives who come to experience it the better. As time passes and more non-natives pass through the environment, a struggle develops to keep the environment unique, and diversify its attraction(s) so that more non-natives might be drawn in. And in the conduct of this struggle, the original community’s character is inevitably altered, thereby adulterating the environment’s original uniqueness.

It’s a very interesting concept, that got me to thinking of the frontier concept. Rothman talks about seasonal skiing resorts, and the construction of vacation home properties. In a typical seasonal tourism destination, there comes a time, when the non-natives go home, and the original community can restore itself with a period of normal life, until the next season begins. But as the lust for non-native dollars grows, this window is squeezed closed; ‘out of season’ events are developed, non-natives build germinate dwellings, and alternate attractions are hyped….thus the original natives find themselves facing a frontier associated with a moving frontier based on time, rather than place.

Mr. Rothman reminds me of a whimpering 5 year old standing ankle deep in a rising tide which has just swamped his sand-castle. Economic forces will shift only in ways that are compliant with the desires of community at large. While tourism in the west has unmade much, it has so because we wanted it to. We wanted ski resorts, and road side attractions, and a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoaning the fate of those crushed under the wheels of this progress is not an occupation with any great future.

Week 11 Cadillac Desert

Feeling way to sick to write intelligently folks, but here goes.

In Marc Reisner’s work Cadillac Desert, we find an interesting evaluation of how arid territory in the American West was set-up. In a nutshell, Reisner’s argument is that when confronted with a desert, America’s impulse was to change it. This was change was intended to make the desert productive. To do this, would require water, and lots of it. So the Colorado River was co-opted, as the most available source. This seemed to present no issues in the early 20th Century, but as demands for water increased, the bald spots of the arrangement became evident. The Colorado was a fixed resource for water and electricity, while the demands on it were open-ended. As this imbalance grew, so did environmental problems associated with it; not least of which was the river flowed in one part of the country while its water was consumed elsewhere. This pitted states and agendas at odds.

The need to make the desert bloom is part of a larger American imperative to reorder the land in ways and appearance that is consistent with traditional agricultural forms. The same drive to push aside the Native Americans also resulted in the Colorado being sucked dry. There is just a built-in revulsion to seeing land in fallow. Whether this stems from the capitalist need for profit, a European base reverence for the power of land, or some combination of the two isn’t nearly as important as recognition of its influence.

Week 10: Roy Baker Take 2

Spent most of last weekend and all of this one, trying to find some meaningful materials to contribute to the Baker Blog. There were a few interesting books at the Library of Congress, but they didn’t appear to have anything about the military-civilian relationship; which is the angle I wanted to play up. The local libraries seemed to have even less. I managed to find a few odds and ends on Jstore and the Center for Military History, but as a whole, I really struggled with this. I once considered myself to be a pretty fair researcher…but in the last two weeks have concluded otherwise.

I enrolled in 711 next semester, and thank goodness. This experience has taught me I need nuts and bolts instruction on how to survive in the world of 21st Century researching..and fast.

Week 10 Mexicans and Native Americans

One post for both books.

In Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, we find a number of interesting themes, the first of which deals with the ghost shirt rebellion. In this essay Deloria relates white reactions to this event as being centered on the term ‘outbreak’. As used by whites of that period, it has relation to the field of epidemiology than anything else, and tells us much about white attitudes towards Native Americans. The term outbreak describes an event wherein a disease is unleashed. A disease that nobody wants, and which must be stamped out before it can affect the whole. The conclusion here is that whites saw the ghost shirts as dissonant element on the reservation, which had to be silenced before their dogma could spread, and unsettle the whole of the Indian race, which had only recently been fully/formally separated from their traditional life.

When white society had been separated from its traditional life, by the closing of the frontier, the Chicago exposition had come in and pointed the way to a new direction: technology, progress, and imperialism. Native Americans had no such pointer. Their new life on the reservation had the look, feel, and reality, of a dead-end. With no apparent future, Indians accepted spiritual vision of returning past glories. The white nation, subject to generations of stereotyping, never quite grasped this and thus set the sage of the unhappy resolution of the doomed revolt.

The essays in this book, paint a picture of a race struggling between two extremes. At one end, the Native Americans had worked to shed the stereotypes that have trapped in the role of historical enactors for generations. Starting with Bill Cody’s Wild West shows and on through movies and television, Indians have been seen as primitive, violent, and obstructive. While their sovereignty has grown, this albatross has dogged every effort at progress into full membership of the 20th Century’s social/economic contract.

At the other extreme, we see Native Americans as adherents to the Luddite school of social philosophy. This view of the world, originated by Charles Ludd during an early 19th Century revolt in Britain, rejects modern technology for being a corrupting influence on human behavior. Native American Luddites see full membership of the 20th Century’s social/economic contract and the proliferation of their besieged culture as being mutually exclusive.

This struggle began when white men first appeared in North America…so it is nothing new, but the quickening pace of the 20th Century and the siren’s song of pop culture have deepened the divide, and left an Indian Nation at a crossroad.



In Becoming Mexican American, George Sanchez relates the experience of the Mexican Latino nation in terms of cultural adoption. For in his mind, the meat of the story is not to be found in community culture or in assimilation, but in the journey between the two, and the character of those who arrive at the destination.

Like Native Americans, Mexicans pre-dated the United States in many parts of the west, and also found it difficult to obtain a full membership in the social contract. Unlike the Native Americans, Mexicans continued to immigrate into the US despite this cultural bias. Unlike the Native Americans, Mexicans sought/were allowed to seek a greater degree of assimilation. The cost for residency and assimilation was a new identity…that of a Mexican-American.

As the name implies, the identity was divided; designed to function on both sides of the cultural divide. And with any divided entity, it functions with less than one dedicated wholly to one side or the other. That Mexicans were ready to assume this new identity with all its advantages and disadvantages tells us much of their motivation and determination to hold onto some of each.

I commented on Marty's Blog
Ben's post

Week 9: Print the Legend: Photography in the American West
By Martha A. Sandweiss


While belly-deep in his Gilded Age class, Dr Hawkes dropped a pearl in my lap. He said that changes in transportation and communication will translate to a much larger social impact. In Nineteenth-century American this was true for railroads, steamboats, and telegraph, it can also surely be said to have been true to the development and advancement of photography. For in these images, as never before, the viewer had the potential for a virtual presence at the scene.

For Americans, according to Martha Sandweiss, the societal impact of photography was the beginning of a long-term love-affair with the American west and the events and persons who populated it. It was not a relationship based on reality. The nation was looking for images of the west that confirmed their perceptions of what the land was. In panoramas, based on daguerreotypes taken by early explorers, artists wrought depictions that shared many characterizes with European landscape paintings of the Romanticism period. In these images nature and the land were a sprawling, untamed, powerful presence, and the white nation as the intrepid David, bending his sling with certain intent.

In the years that followed the civil war, western photographers began to assume a more proactive role. Funded by the federal government, or interested private concerns, these men were, due to technological advances in their craft, was now able to directly communicate with a much larger audience and sought to be more proactive in the composition of their subject matter. The effect of this new attitude varied with the desire of the photographer’s employers. The federal government was interested in cataloging resources, railroads were trying to inspire viewers to travel (via their rolling stock) and see what was in the pictures, land speculators were trying to entice settlers, and publishers were trying to sell books full of dreamy pictures of an idealized west.

And nor was it about landscapes only. It was also about the people who lived there. Images of cowboys, gunfighters, bandits, and especially Indians, were as much a part of the western photographic legend as any vista ever captured. Like the land, these men and women symbolized the character that easterners so cherished. To look into the eyes of a cowboy was to see the distillation of frontier trials. But it was in the images of Native Americans that photographers were to find their most compelling subject. By the 1880’s it was becoming very clear that the plains Indians were to be speedily converted from their traditional lifestyle to that of the reservation/civilized ilk. This made those still living some variation of the traditional lifestyle symbolic of a vanishing way of life, which aroused the sentimentality and interest of the white nation. Thus were the roots of the’Noble Savage’ laid, thus was the desire for photographs of this vanishing breed steeled. Ironically, this trend did nothing to stop whites from finishing what they had begun during the colonial period: The subjugation of the entire race.

Methinks there is scarcely a species more pleasing than that which affirms what we already hold. This attitude would have dominated the viewing public as it gazed upon images of the American West in 1870, 1970, and all the intervening years. An artistic element would find its way into the mix over time, but as a whole, once Americans could see the west, they began believe it; that the former was tailored to fit the latter was of little consequence or interest.