Over the Edge: Remapping the American West
411
Over the Edge: Remapping the American West
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Overview
Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays in Over the Edge confront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West through Ben-Hur and the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520920118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 411 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Over the Edge
Remapping the American WestBy Valerie J. Matsumoto
University of California Press
Copyright © 1999 Valerie J. MatsumotoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520211490
1—
Seeing and Being Seen:
Tourism in the American West
Patricia Nelson Limerick
In the summer of 1970, I undertook unintended field work in the subject of western tourism. I was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that fact set certain limits on summer employment. Before Santa Cruz was a university town, it was a tourist town. Bordering on the beach and boardwalk was a jumble of motels. In the summer of 1970, I worked as a maid at the St. Charles Motel. This was pretty hard work, really an indoor version of stoop labor: stooping to strip beds, stooping to make beds, stooping to vacuum, stooping to clean toilets and scrub tubs. I was only nineteen, but every evening, my back hurt and I felt like a zombie. At the end of the day, the one point of clarity in my head was my feeling toward tourists. When the motel guests had eaten potato chips in their rooms, and ground some of those potato chips into the rug, I had particularly clear—really quite radiantly clear—feelings about tourists. When it comes to understanding the feelings of local residents about tourists, and when it comes to understanding the frustrations of the service jobs attached totourist economies, the summer of 1970 gave me a certain intellectual and psychological advantage.
My employer at the St. Charles Motel made me wear a white uniform, with white stockings, and white shoes, and a white kerchief. With that costume, in a blizzard in Colorado, I would have been invisible. In the summer in Santa Cruz, far from blizzard conditions, I was very visible indeed; I was virtually Central Casting's archetype of The Maid. This visibility gave me one of my few occupational satisfactions. Every day at noon, I would take my sack lunch down to the Boardwalk along the beach. Then I would sit on a bench and eat my lunch, among the swirl of tourists lining up for the roller coaster and the carousel. As I sat there, I would say, nonverbally but (thanks to my uniform) still very clearly, "You are having fun, but I am theMaid. In other words, the fact that you are having fun correlates directly to the fact that I am leading such a dreary life."
Even as I did my best to advertise my resentment of the people who made my employment possible, I believe I knew that the situation was more complicated than my emotions. I knew that when I sat, in a manner a little reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's reproachful raven (though opposite in color), on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, I was not really confronting a privileged class. Santa Cruz was not Newport or Aspen; Santa Cruz was a working-class tourist town. Most of the people who were at the Santa Cruz beach would return to put on their own working-class uniforms at the end of that vacation.
I open with this story because I believe that scholars writing about western tourism can be tempted to adopt the point of view of the locals, to see the tourist from the outside, to cast the tourist as an alien, even contemptible other. In thinking about tourism one runs a constant risk of casting the tourists themselves as boorish, invasive, repellent, and insensitive. This casting of the tourist as unappealing other is, of course, exactly the skill I had mastered in 1970, when I ate my lunch at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and, as we would say now, "performed" my victimization.
My lunches on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk call our attention to another risk in the scholarship on tourism: the risk of missing the class differences within the unit we call tourists. There have been very rich people with second homes in Aspen, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming. There have been much-less-rich people who have pulled their resources together for a week of vacationing in budget motels near beaches and boardwalks. Unless we watch ourselves, we fall into the habit of clumping all these people together, simply, as tourists. That clumping permits a not very accurate drawing of class lines: the outsider-tourists become the privileged middle or upper class; the insider-providers of tourist services become the working class. With that formulation, we miss the many and consequential occasions in which working-class people have been themselves tourists, a situation which fit, I think, most of the people I glowered at along the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
In fact, if one thought of the categories, tourist versus tourist industry worker, as separate and exclusive, my own background would be an anomalous one. My heritage is very much mixed, with a line of descent on both sides. Tourism was a big element in my hometown, Banning, California. The resort town of Palm Springs was just down the road, and many people who worked there—as maids, gardeners, bellmen, waitresses—lived in Banning because they could not afford to live in Palm Springs. Travelers driving through Banning on their way to Palm Springs were also a source of income, and no one knows this better than I. My father owned and operated a date shop—a roadside store selling chocolate-covered dates and walnut-stuffeddates, date malts, and date shakes. My mother worked full-time as a legal secretary, and so my family's California Date Shop proved to be my day care center.
When I was still a toddler, my parents bought me some cowgirl clothes—a fringed vest and skirt, and the proper boots. With this purchase, we might now say, my parents took the first step in my commodification. Before I was three years old, I had been added to the resources, amenities, and attractions of the California Date Shop. Quite a number of my father's customers made regular stops at the store, and they soon took up a custom of inquiring after the "cowgirl." "How's the cowgirl?" they would say. If I now have considerable empathy for the residents of tourist towns who live in a constant muddle of authenticity and constructed identity, then early days at the California Date Shop provided my first round of experiential learning and field work in the subject of western tourism.
But my parents were also tireless tourists themselves, packing us off for an extended car trip at least once a year, with the forests of the Sierras, the beach, and the Grand Canyon as our most frequent destinations. Thus I was in childhood both the touring and the toured upon, both the subject doing the seeing and the object being seen. If we take tourism to be an example of the sin of snoopishness, as it appears in some of the critical literature, then I was indeed both sinned against and sinning. And I suspect that that mixed experience is the bedrock reason why I cannot muster the purity of outlook that other writers can bring to the subject of tourism. I do not know if I was, in the usual equation, subject or other, other or subject, or some unholy combination of the two. My vivid memories of how a motel maid's back feels at the end of the day prevent me from celebrating the fine economic opportunities of a regional shift to tourism. On the other side, I remember too clearly my pleasure in watching Indian dances in northern Arizona, or in watching waves crash on southern California beaches, to damn tourists as a kind of invasive infection, spreading the viruses and microbes of inauthenticity and commodification. Forty years ago, when I put on the uniform of the cowgirl, I gave up my claim to purity and authenticity. After spending one's formative years in the California Date Shop, one can never claim to be untainted by contact with the coins, dollars, traveler's checks, and credit cards of the tourist.
We form a larger subculture than we realize, those of us who were raised, supported, formed, and informed by western tourism. If there is accuracy in the predictions that tourism will prove to be the principal industry in many areas of the West, this is a subculture that is going to grow and grow. But where did we come from, or, more precisely, where did western tourism come from? When did western tourism begin?
North America was full of paths and trails that served the purposes ofhunting, gathering, seasonal migration, and trade. One stimulant for Indian mobility was, however, curiosity: too many Indian stories tell of travels undertaken for the purposes of inquiry and adventure to suggest that Indian people traveled only for economic purposes. Every seashell, from the Atlantic or the Pacific, that ended up in the interior was its own testimony that travel has a long history on this continent. But should we call this tourism? The very question raises the matter of how much purity we are inclined to hold out for in defining what tourism is. To be a true tourist, must an individual be embedded in the emotions and economies of modern industrial, capitalistic society? Or did true tourism come to this planet before the cash economy? Here we confront an oddly inverted and yet very high standard of purity. To be a true tourist, one must meet high standards for impurity, for holding motives considerably more tangled and corrupted than pure curiosity, and for engaging in transactions mediated much more by paper and plastic currency than by direct human contact. In truth, the standards for impurity are set too high here. There are good reasons to look for behavior that bears some resemblance to tourism before the arrival of the cash economy, and there are also good reasons to look for motives that are not always tainted and exploitative in post-lapsarian, conventional, modern tourism. So however you think of early Indian travel, one has to recognize it as curious, active travel, and recognize in it at least a small degree of kinship with the tourism of the last century and a half. Part of that more recent travel is, after all, Indian travel to Europe and to the eastern United States, a revealing counterpoint to the travel, in the opposite direction, of Europeans and Euro-Americans visiting Indian territory.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-American explorers-writers introduced a practice more directly connected, and, indeed, precedent-setting for what we now think of as tourism. To William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, to Zebulon Pike, to Stephen Long, toJohn C. Fremont, the West was the exotic place of their adventuring and self-testing. They treated their western experiences in a manner very similar to the way later Anglo-Americans would treat beaver pelts, buffalo hides, minerals, trees, grasses, and soil. The explorers extracted western experience and packed it out of the West. They then processed and refined it into the form of reports. When explorers wrote their reports, their literary activity was directly parallel to the activities of the felters and hatters who made western beaver pelts into hats, parallel to the activities of the men who refined western minerals in mills and smelters.
The explorers supplied these refined and processed parcels of experience to readers eager to learn about the Far West. These were writers of remarkable intellectual confidence. In their travels, they traced only a narrow line across the West, and yet they wrote confidently of the character of the whole region. If, over the centuries, we have taken a long time to reckonwith the reality of the American West, this surely is one of the reasons: many of our ideas about the West originated in the minds of people who were just passing through, people who saw only a little and who still wrote as if they knew the whole. For these travelers, their relationship to their audience made it necessary to cast the West as that exotic place "out there." To dramatize their own daring and mark their own achievement, these explorers had to dramatize the West's strangeness, novelty, unpredictability, and general wildness. The explorers of the first half of the nineteenth century thus built the foundation for later tourism. Offering an image of the West defined by its separateness from the familiar, the explorers' reports provided a portrait of a place that was, if dangerous and threatening, also very interesting. It is important to note that none of these explorers traveled through empty or "virgin" space. All of them made frequent references to inhabitants, particularly Indians, Mexicans, and the mixed-blood families of fur traders.
Explorers may have been laying the foundation for tourism, but they were government men, federal agents, people on official business, and not exactly tourists. Sometimes accompanying them were people closer to the model of tourism: gentlemen, sometimes European aristocrats, sometimes artists or naturalists, out to see the sights in the West. Some of these fellows do give the impression of taking part in a mid-nineteenth-century anticipation of Outward Bound. My own favorite for this category has been Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish nobleman who took the artist Alfred Jacob Miller along on his outing to the Rockies in the 1830s. In an archetypal moment of early tourism, Miller told the story of the party's approach to a fiercely overflowing river, with tree trunks and branches bobbing wildly in the flood. They reached the river, and Stewart plunged in. Miller plunged in after him, and, miraculously, made it to the far shore. As he fought his way up on the bank, Miller said to Stewart, "You know, sir, I do not know how to swim." "Neither do I," replied Stewart. "You know not what you can do until you have tried."1
I am surprised that Outward Bound has not taken this as its founding moment, surprised that Stewart's words are not the celebrated slogan for adventure tourism all around the planet. But as advertising slogans go, "You know not what you can do until you have tried," has its weaknesses. One does not have to contemplate Miller's story very long (or especially to contemplate his drawing of the fiercely flooding river) to realize that this story could easily have delivered up the opposite ending, with Miller and Stewart both drifting downstream and off the pages of history. "You know not what you cannot do until you have tried" is as good a moral to this story, but not a particularly affirmative way to advertise adventure tourism.
An enthusiasm for tourism on Stewart's scale of strenuosity was slow to develop. Indeed, to see the emergence of tourism on a sizable scale, one has tolook to a more "facilitated" form of travel. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the expansion of luxury travel by palace cars and Pullman cars unleashed a tourism boom on the West. This was, of course, insulated travel, insulated both from nature and from natives. These tourists were people of means, people who wanted comfort and service, people for whom the era of conquest was a little too recent and raw. Predictably, much of the effort of recruiting these tourists rested on reassurance, repeating the promise that the West was safe now, with tame hotels, parlors, and verandas from which the wild scenery could be calmly viewed. This enterprise in promotion also played on the nineteenth-century American inferiority complex. By one common perception among intellectuals and the upper and middle classes, the United States, in comparison to Europe, was simply too new, too young, too short on history; by the same pattern of thinking, western scenery was too different, too big, too stark, too dry. Thus tourist promotion in the late nineteenth century sought legitimacy through European analogies: California was the Mediterranean, a transplanted Italy; Colorado was Switzerland, with replicas of the Alps. Western resort hotels had, by the same token, to match European luxury; for this elite and well-financed type of tourist, European-like scenery had to be accompanied by European-like buildings and services.
These mid- and late-nineteenth-century tourists had an influence and impact far beyond their numbers. Quite a number of these people had contacts and ties with publishers and editors, and thus they found a direct channel to influencing public opinion. These were journal-keepers, diarists, impression-recorders, and word-mongers, and many of them could not look out a train window at a wide open western horizon without reaching for their pens. The result of their compulsive literacy was, by 1900, a western landscape blanketed by words, covered two or three inches deep with the littered vocabulary of romantic scenery appreciation. By 1900, a place like Yellowstone had already been the scene of so much published scribbling and emotion that it was extremely difficult for anyone to have an immediate, direct response to the landscape, without a chorus of quotations going off in the head. Before the eye could take in the walls of Yosemite, the mind had already provided the caption: soaring, sublime, uplifting; grandeur, glory, and spirit. With the script of response already written, one's only remaining task was to try to feel what one already knew one was supposed to feel.
My own favorite example of this pattern has long been the southern Californian George Wharton James, former minister, reborn promotional writer who, at the turn of the century, unleashed a flood of words promoting everything possible in the Southwest. As a literary hired hand of the railroads and resorts, George Wharton James said, in pages of text one could measure by the pound, that everything—deserts, mountains, oases, Indians, Mexican American villagers, irrigated farms, growing towns and cities—was colorfuland fun . . . and totally risk-free. No threats here, every page of James's slick and slippery prose said; the threats are all gone; it's your playground now.2
This enterprise was, of course, a little more complicated than it seemed at first. It was not easy to hit the balance in this constant effort of packaging and manipulating the image of the West. The West had to be cast as tame and safe, with no features that would seriously scare tourists. At the same time, it could not be so tame and safe that it went over the edge and became dull and familiar. This pressure, by the turn of the century, brought a withdrawal of many of the European analogies and a move toward a greater accent on more interesting and distinctive elements of westernness. This shift in accent appeared in the proliferation of dude ranches, and the recognition that one could sometimes make more money by herding tourists down a trail than by herding cattle. One could see the shift, as well, in the rise of rodeos as tourist entertainment, where skills once used for work now became skills used for show.
As both these examples indicate, the accenting of western distinctiveness was a very selective matter. The process worked by freezing a moment in an imagined past, disconnecting cattle-working techniques from their reallife context, and locating them instead in a timeless moment when real westerners were cowboys, when the mark of real westernness hinged, by everyone's understanding, on a certain close, cooperative, and even affectionate relationship with a horse. In much more recent times, the movie City Slickers reinvigorated the appeal of dude ranches. Dude ranching bookings accelerated; and the old formula—by which one is repaired from the injuries of urban, industrial civilization with an interlude of simple, rural western life—gained new force. As historian Earl Pomeroy has observed, this had long been a very illuminating choice: developers marketing western rural authenticity to urbanites chose to sell them the experience of simulated work on a cattle ranch, and not simulated work in a copper mine or on a sugar beet farm.3
The rise of this kind of western tourism, at the turn of the century, might well strike some historians as a watershed moment in western history, perhaps the best indicator of the end of the frontier. When places and people who were once frightening and threatening turned quaint and fun, when Indians did war dances for tourists at train stations (and skipped the attack on the invaders that might logically follow a war dance), when visitors flocked to the stores and restaurants of San Francisco's Chinatown, when painters set themselves to extracting the charm from the Indian and Hispano people of Taos, when deserts, which had terrified overland travelers, turned pretty and appealing in their colors and clear lines, then it might well seem that the frontier was over and the distribution of power clearly settled in the American West. Here, one could think, the violent history of conquest ended, and a new, tame history of buying souvenirs and taking photographs began.
To my mind, the unsettled issues of conquest did not disappear, even if tourists could not see them. But I can get a glimpse of why other historians might think that the flood of tourists into the West provided the clearest and most dramatic statement: the war was over; white people had won; the West was subdued; the West was an occupied terrain, and the tourists were the army of occupation.
With the gradual shift away from the railroad and toward the automobile as the vehicle of tourism, the flood of tourists only broadened and deepened. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, the automobile remained primarily an additional toy for the vacationing rich. But by the 1920s, the automobile was serving as the agent for the democratization of tourism, for the redefinition of western tourism as a mass experience. There were still a lot of poor people left out of this mobile festival, since one still needed the resources to afford a car, leisure, gasoline, shelter, and food. But the group on the road, from the 1920s on, was much broader in its origins and occupations than the nineteenth-century tourists had been. With auto camps, motels, gas stations, roadside restaurants, and commercial strips, as J. B. Jackson has argued, a new kind of landscape came to exist in support of automotive tourism.4 Following the well-set patterns of western economic development, the federal government's role was crucial, with federal money and direction playing an important part in the construction of highways. Western tourism has been in a long phase of expansion, pressed by the power of the word "more"—more motels, more gas stations, more attractions, more communities trying to figure out how to get in on this action.
More confusion and more discontent have also been a part of this expansion. A coherent history of the resistance to and rejection of the tourist industry is a hard thing to come by, but it is an enormously rich topic. The signs of rejection are fairly widespread today. In November of 1993, the voters of the state of Colorado rejected a tax, in existence for ten years, that supported a state tourism board and a range of promotional activities. In the Northwest, the permanent residents of La Conner, Washington, recently began a campaign to institute a "tourist-free zone" in the center of their town, with a La Conner resident, the novelist Tom Robbins, also proposing that developers wear identifying tags so that they might be properly shunned. One suspects that quite a number of residents of western tourist towns understand the appeal of this idea. As a number of them have said, living in these towns is like always having houseguests, guests who may rotate but who never go away.5
Certainly, Edward Abbey was industrial tourism's most persistent and audible critic. Tourism, Abbey wrote in one essay, "is always and everywhere a dubious, fraudulent, distasteful, and in the long run, degrading business, enriching a few, doing the rest more harm than good," and this is one of hismore moderate statements. And yet Abbey, in his vigorous and appealing writing about the southwestern deserts and especially about the Colorado Plateau's canyonlands, had a significant impact in increasing tourism in the area, putting a little-known area squarely at the center of the reading public's attention. Abbey was equally important for denouncing tourism and for recruiting more tourists, and that is only one of the many paradoxes that run through western tourism.6
The national parks have long represented the best documented case of the puzzles and paradoxes of tourism. From the beginnings of the National Park Service in 1916, its officials knew that they had to sell the parks. Unless they could get significant numbers of Americans to visit the parks, the parks would be without a political constituency. And so the Park Service was placed, from the beginning, at the sharp edge of the divide between the goals of "providing for the enjoyment" of the parks, and preserving the parks, in some more or less intact form, for "future generations."7
The sharpness of that edge has not been blunted over time, as the Park Service hops between increasing tourist access with more roads and more facilities, and regulating and restraining crowds and traffic. A 1990 survey asked national park visitors what factors governed their choice of which parks to visit. First on the list of the public's criteria was natural beauty. Second was the factor, "how crowded the park is," and there is some kind of deep and puzzling irony in the workings of this factor that I cannot begin to untangle. Spend a few hours behind a parade of Winnebagoes heading in to Yellowstone, and you might begin to think that this criterion of "crowdedness" functions in the opposite way one might expect: the more crowded the park, the more people want to go there. But third on the list of decision-making factors was the availability of restrooms, and fourth was the availability of parking.8
When one first contemplates it, this survey provides one of the occasions for a "Hmph!" response to western tourism. Is this the best that members of the American public can do? They are presented with the opportunity for moving and instructive encounters with nature, and their attention stays fixed on the prospect of restrooms and convenient parking spaces? But this survey also presents an opportunity to go beyond the "Hmph!" response—to recognize that a preference for comfort and convenience is, in truth, a hallmark of current times, and, further, it is an enthusiasm often shared by scholars and historians. Who, among us, has not felt some desperation in midtown Manhattan, confronting an urban wilderness with neither restrooms nor parking spaces? Just how high is the ground we can occupy in judging the crassness and baseness of the tourist mind? Should there not be a little more in the way of solidarity among philistines?
There may be nothing inherently disillusioning or disheartening aboutpeople's concern for porta-potties, but one might be more actively disheartened by the ranking, in that survey, awarded to the very last item on the list of criteria. In last place, as a reason to visit a park, came "educational program."
A few years ago, I learned an important lesson about the word "educational," thanks to Kevin Costner and Dances with Wolves. When Dances with Wolves looked like it might win some Oscars, the Today Show sent a camera crew out to talk to a western historian about the film. The cameraman and the reporter set up their equipment in my office, and then we started in on the interview. The two men looked increasingly cheery; this was a pretty lively professor, and their gloomy expectations of grim, tiresome, and pedantic mini-lectures were not being fulfilled. But then my moment of learning came. It was wonderful, I said, that public audiences were so interested in western history, but was it completely beyond imagination to think that a popular feature film might also be educational?
There was nothing particularly striking or insightful about what I said, but what was remarkable was the look on the faces of these two men, a look of disappointment and almost repulsion when they heard the word "educational." "Up until this moment," you could see them thinking, "we thought we had a pretty lively interview, and now she is going to start talking about 'education.' This interview is now plummeting down toward dreariness and we may as well shut off the camera."
But does it have to be this way? Does the word "educational" have to provoke such a powerful impulse to despair, or flight? Could not education, reconceived and redirected, make for more vigorous tourism, with more productive social consequences? I think of my childhood visits to the California missions, which were pretty, but finally quite dull. In truth, the story of the California missions, as places of forced labor and considerable human suffering, was anything but dull. I do not know what the guides are doing at the California missions today, but one hopes they are using the complexity and tragedy of the missions' history to increase the interest in—and even the education provided by—the tours.
And, as a part of the agenda of tourism, could we not widen the concept of sites worth seeing? I think here, especially, of the photographer Richard Misrach's work on a northern Nevada naval bombing range. This piece of the Great Basin absorbed bomb after bomb, with quite a number of them still lying unexploded on the site, and with shells and devastated bombing targets all over the place. Misrach has photographed the bombing range extensively, but his book Bravo 20 goes beyond collecting images to suggest the creation of a Bravo 20 National Park. This would be a "unique and powerful addition to our current park system," Misrach says. "In these times of extraordinary environmental concern, it would serve as a permanent reminder of how military, government, corporate, and individual practices can harm the earth. In the spirit of Bull Run and the Vietnam Memorial, it would be a national acknowledgment of a complex and disturbing period in our history."9
Working with landscape architects, Misrach has drawn up the plans for this park. Like most parks, this one would have a loop road, this time called Devastation Drive; to view the somewhat risky terrain of unexploded bombs, the tourists would walk along a boardwalk, very much like the boardwalk leading through the geysers of Yellowstone, but called the Boardwalk of the Bombs. Misrach has even made plans for the gift shop, with books and videos on military and environmental issues, as well as "imprinted clothing such as camouflage-style caps, t-shirts, pants; 'Nevada Is Not a Wasteland' and 'Bombs Away' mugs, tote bags, and bumper stickers; and for the kids, Mattel models based on the most advanced, top-secret military designs—up-to-date delivery systems and Stealth bombers."10
It is impossible to look at Misrach's proposal without thinking that we have, as a society, been very limited and unimaginative in our thinking about the possibilities of tourism. I myself never took a more interesting tour than the one we had a few years ago, of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington. Begun in 1943 to produce the plutonium for the Manhattan Project's bombs, Hanford now has eight retired nuclear reactors, a number of retired production facilities, and a lot of radioactive and chemical waste. The day at Hanford was the most memorable and unsettling day of my life as a tourist. The impact of that visit tells me that western tourism will have arrived, become mature, gained its full meaning, realized its deeper possibilities, when Hanford, the Nevada Test Site, and the northern Nevada Bravo 20 pull in as many visitors as Disneyland or Las Vegas. But, for now, we remain stuck in a mode in which a visit to an important site in western history is still supposed to mean escape from the world's problems, and not a way of reckoning with them.
The history of western tourism does provide the material for explaining one of the most complicated issues of historical thought today. For one example, consider the experience of the wildlife at the base of Pike's Peak. In the 1880s, in Colorado Springs, the local coyotes got the jump on postmodernist theory. General W. A. J. Palmer of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had planned the town of Colorado Springs as an upper-class resort, and participants at an upper-class resort had to have proper entertainment. So they had dinners and dances, and they played polo, and they rode to hounds. But if the tourists at Colorado Springs were going to play the part of British aristocrats, who would play the part of the fox? This is where the Colorado coyotes stole the march on postmodernism; in the absence of proper foxes, coyotes had to fill in.11 And so the Colorado Springs coyoteshad their chance to learn, early on, what it meant to be a part of a constructed experience, to be conscripted into someone else's act of representation, to carry the burdens of an imagined and inauthentic identity, and to suffer all the real-life, down-to-earth consequences and injuries of that burdensome construction.
This is one element that all theoretically inclined historians can celebrate in the topic of western tourism: this is the subject that makes all the abstractions of cultural theory—construction, authenticity, appropriation, identity, representation, performance—concrete and clear. Nearly everyone associated with the subject of western tourism has had moments where they looked like, acted like, talked like case studies designed for the express purpose of illustrating postmodernist theory.
As one of the best possible examples of what I mean here, consider the interesting recent mobility of the Grand Tetons. The Tetons are, usually, located right next to the site of Jackson, Wyoming. They have been in that neighborhood for some millennia. But, in the late 1980s, they hit a phase of remarkable mobility. A handsome photograph of the Tetons appeared in a brochure advertising Amtrak, which does not run through Wyoming. The Tetons appeared, as well, in an ad for a resort in Montana. And, in what seems to have irritated Wyomingites the most, the Tetons then moved south, to lend their authority and appeal to a condominium project in the Colorado Rockies. "We are more than a little miffed that our competitors continue to use our assets to promote their areas," said a spokesman for the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, who went on to remark that Jackson was "seriously considering trademarking the Tetons." The ad agency that put together the brochure for the Colorado condominiums denied culpability: "It was just a case of mistaken identity," this group said. The manager of the Montana resort was more willing to admit errors of judgment: "I was totally against using the Tetons, but we had to get something out on the market immediately."12
"Wyoming Insists that Tetons Must Stay," said one headline in the New York Times. 13 In this whole episode, as in many others, western tourism delivers on its full, instructional promise. If you have a student or colleague who does not understand the meaning of appropriation of identity or the politics of representation, then let that individual contemplate the restlessness of the Tetons, and contemplate the jealous possessiveness of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, tugging away for commercial and emotional control of an image.
Or consider my neighboring city of Denver. Every year or so, Denver collapses into a fit of anxious self-consciousness and worries about its image. Should it surrender the fight for sophistication and package itself as a cow town? While the smell of a feedlot is not a much-sought-after experience, tourists love many of the associations of cow towns: handsome men on horseback, rugged outdoor life, the heritage of the Wild West, the contact with lives more grounded, authentic, and real than lives in cities, offices, and industries. But just as a wave of enthusiasm for embracing the role of the cow town begins to build, then the anxieties break right behind. If Denver capitalizes on its frontier history and advertises itself as a cow town, will it not, by that act, move toward the past and away from the future, rendering itself into a backwater town, a town of the nineteenth century where no twenty-first-century high-tech company would want to locate? Every year or so, a group of consultants pitch into this problem. Poor Denver sits like a hopeful star, forgotten in the green room, overlooked and immobilized while the make-up and costume experts debate what look would best distract attention from the subject's many flaws.14
Or consider the example of Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1989, the mayor of Cheyenne tried to address the problem of tourist disappointment in the city. Cheyenne is a town heavily dependent on the federal government and defense spending, and it is a town that suffered from the slump in oil and energy production. Despite its modern complexities, Cheyenne has still chosen to dramatize its Wild West identity, adopting the slogan, "Live the Legend." Once a year, during Frontier Days, Cheyenne goes all-out for Wild West imagery, with plenty of cowboys, horses, bulls, and dust. But the rest of the year, tourists pulling off the interstate experience considerable disappointment. Live the Legend? What Legend? As one young visitor said, "There's got to be some cowboys around here somewhere"; instead, there were businesspeople and secretaries, service station attendants and waitresses.15
To ease this disappointment, the mayor in 1989 recommended that all residents offer their visitors various signifiers of westernness. They should wear western dress and say "howdy" instead of "hello." Moreover, a troop of real estate agents, carpenters, and servicemen responded to the mayor's initiative, and pitched in to stage periodic gunfights in the street. Once again, it would take only three or four "howdies" from real estate agents dressed, perhaps more authentically than the mayor intended, as bandits and outlaws for even a very prosaic student to begin to get a firm grasp on the notion of constructed and appropriated identity, and on the contested meanings of authenticity.16
In Kellogg, Idaho, the rush of towns capitalizing on westernness brought forth an even more remarkable demonstration in cultural theory. Kellogg had gone into a terrible, possibly terminal, slump from the recession in mining and logging. The landscape in large areas around Kellogg spoke of those earlier industries, with large sections "deforested from acid rain and pollution from a smelter that is no longer in use." In 1989, with the inspiration provided by a $6.5 million federal grant to engineer a ski slope, Kellogg considered its image. Would the town adopt a western theme to accompany its ski resort? Too many towns in the area had already made that choice. SoKellogg settled on "old Bavarian" as its image of choice. Not everyone was enthusiastic. "I have," said one resident in a wonderful and memorable line, "some real reservations about going Bavarian."17
"I have some real reservations about going Bavarian" is a sentiment to savor, but it is also a sentiment to challenge. "So you have some reservations about going Bavarian," one wants to say to the speaker from Kellogg. "Would you have any reservations about going back to mining? Isn't a bit of Alpine bric-a-brac a small price to pay compared to those earlier prices of acid rain, pollution, deforestation, and cyclical economic collapse?"
Here is the central question of western tourism, past and present. Given the instability and even decline of the conventional, rural western enterprises, given the economic troubles afflicting mining, logging, ranching, and farming, does not the lesson of history point in the direction of tourism? The lesson of western history is that extractive industries have provided a treacherous foundation for permanent and stable communities. If one looks for a different, and more reliable, kind of foundation, all roads seem to lead to tourism, to the preservation and publicizing of local natural and cultural resources, as a permanent attraction for visitors with deep pockets. Here, the theory goes, is the clean industry, the sustainable industry. By this thinking, the residents of Kellogg, Idaho, may feel a little goofy in their pinafores and lederhosen, but wearing silly clothes is a small price to pay for the escape from environmental injury and economic instability represented in the town's old smelter.
Whether one calls it the end of the frontier or not, some sort of major shift is indeed under way in the American West today. The rural extractive industries are undeniably on the ropes. The only question is whether they have one or two more rides left on the boom/bust roller coaster, or whether the whole ride is over. Under those circumstances, it is hard to find economic options other than tourism. In tourism's Third World labor arrangements, in its often terrible disparity between rich and poor in places like Aspen, in its various environmental impacts from sewage to air pollution, and in its ongoing vulnerability to the swings of the American economy, tourism may be an unappealing alternative to mining, logging, ranching, and farming. But what else is there?
At this point in my reflections, I come face to face with a powerful, if unexamined, urge among historians of my generation to steer their narratives toward some sort of happy or, at the least, promising ending. The lessons of western history, one feels certain in saying, tell us that the extractive uses of western resources come with a very definite limit in time and extent. On that count, one cannot fudge. But my own inclination to fudge evidently becomes more powerful when it comes to the appraisal of tourism as an alternative to these dead-end enterprises. I would like to believe that there are better ways to do tourism, ways that give greater respect to the dignity of thetoured upon—or, probably more important, that give greater wages to the toured upon. I would like to believe that at the heart of tourism is a very understandable human curiosity, a sympathetic impulse to go beyond the limits of one's own familiar world, and to see and to learn about new places and new people. I would like to believe that this curiosity is not intrinsically damaging and degrading.
Consider, for instance, the pattern adopted by visitors to Utah and Salt Lake City before 1890. The one feature of local society, on every non-Mormon visitor's mind, was polygamy. Visitors to Salt Lake were thus the living, walking embodiments of the component of snoopishness in tourism. If visitors walked past a Mormon house and the door happened to be open, they would peer in, hoping for a glimpse of polygamy in private life.
This was tourism at its peak of snoopishness, tourism as intrusion, tourism as psychological and domestic invasion. But this is also where a suspension of the casting of the tourist as contemptible, intrusive other seems in order. Is there anyone among us who does not find polygamy very interesting? Jessie Embry's fine book on Mormon polygamous families is a case in point.18 It is a well-done book in scholarly terms, but one reads it, eagerly, energetically, not simply out of admiration for its scholarship, but also for reasons not all that removed from the snoopishness of the gentile tourists of the late nineteenth century. One turns the pages of Embry's book in a spirit not entirely separate from the eagerness with which tourists hoped that a door would open and they could get a glimpse of a polygamous family at home. The curiosity that drives the historian and the curiosity that drives the tourist have a certain amount in common. The spirit of inquiry with which the historian pokes into the lives of people of the past bears a certain resemblance to the spirit of inquiry with which tourists have poked into the lives of their contemporaries. Historians had better put some effort into a sympathetic understanding of the interior world of tourists, because tourists are, in some not necessarily very agreeable way, our kinfolk.
But the relation of historians to tourists is even more tangled than this, because contemporary tourism relies heavily on the marketing of history. When you track the history of western American tourism, you arrive, ironically, at a branch of tourism that rests on the marketing of the romance, color, and interest of western American history. To use the term employed by professionals in this field, you confront heritage tourism, tourism that capitalizes on the attractions and interest of the past. This kind of tourism has a way of rendering western history in pastel colors, sketching a cheery and inconsequentially quaint past. And yet the messages of heritage tourism reach a much larger audience than writings of academic historians will ever reach; it does not seem entirely justifiable for historians to turn on our heels and retreat in contempt from the impurity of heritage tourism.
I am willing to go pretty far in asking for a reconsideration of tourism,and for a reconsideration of our usual portrait of the tourist as a bumbling, contemptible, invasive other. But I recognize that, even with this reconsideration, what tourists want from western history and what historians are willing to give them may be fundamentally at odds. This is a struggle not likely to dissolve in friendly, reciprocal empathy and understanding.
When art tourism hit Taos, New Mexico, early in the twentieth century, Anglo-American artists rushed in to paint Indians and Mexican Americans, producing appealing images that in turn inspired further waves of tourism. When I am starting to get too cheery and soft-headed in my appraisal of tourism, it helps to remember a story that anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez tells in an article on the Taos Art Colony. Joseph Sandoval was a child in Taos Pueblo when art tourism hit the area. Sandoval's father served as a model for the artists, and then, at age six, Joe himself began to pose. Years later, Joseph Sandoval described his start in modeling. "When sitting as a young child for [the painter Irving] Couse, Joe remembers that he became frightened at the idea of the artist's 'catching' his image in paint and ran out of the studio down the street. However, he was soon overtaken by Mrs. Couse who brought him back, chained him around the waist to a chair within easy reach of a great bowl of luscious fruit and a tempting mound of cookies. A blanket was draped over the chain, says Joe, and Couse, without further complications, completed the painting."19
I end with this story to counteract any tendency toward the suspension of critical judgment that I may have shown in this essay. This image of a chained child, with a blanket placed over the chain to make the picture pretty, is part of the heritage of western tourism. As we examine the rising influence of tourism in the western economy, we return to pay attention to that chain.
Continues...
Excerpted from Over the Edge by Valerie J. Matsumoto Copyright © 1999 by Valerie J. Matsumoto. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
CONTRIBUTORS:Blake Allmendinger
Karen Anderson
Miroslava Chavez
Mike Davis
Arleen de Vera
William Deverell
Douglas Flamming
Chris Friday
Anne E. Goldman
Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Louise V. Jeffredo-Warden
Susan Lee Johnson
Patricia Nelson Limerick
Jesús Martínez-Saldaña
Valerie J. Matsumoto
Mary Murphy
Melissa L. Meyer
Peggy Pascoe
Virginia Scharff
Jill Watts