BLOG # 14: Devil's Bargains

WRAPPING IT ALL UP

It looks like another Blog Flog may be brewing. While I agree that Devil’s Bargains was often disorganized, wordy, repetitive, annoying, and frustrating (see especially Jim and Ray), I found many of Rothman’s ideas fascinating. His tourist differentiations (see Dave for a good synopsis) were probably apt; I think our class would most resemble fin de siecle hegemonic tourists. High-end travel companies are catering more and more to just this type of educated traveler who (ostensibly) seeks knowledge and understanding instead of “mere” experience, recreation, and padding a travel resume. Surprisingly, Rothman feels such educated people can feel “unique or at least part of a rare breed, intellectually and morally above other tourists. This conceit is common among elites—academic and environmentalists among them—who believe they are more knowledgeable than others” (p. 14). Ouch. (Rothman is negative a LOT--that usually sends up a little red flag to me. And I agree with Dan that Rothman makes far too many generalizations about tourists.)

Which do people want more, skiing in Aspen or Aspen’s chic cachet? Do people most want to ride a horse at a dude ranch or get back home and tell everybody? Is bagging a travel trophy to a status place its greatest travel incentive? Can we really know our OWN travel motives, much less those of others? People travel for many reasons, and Rothman explores them philosophically and psychologically. What travel does to/for a person and what a person WANTS travel to do to/for him are just as important to him as detailing what tourism DID to places like Santa Fe, Aspen, and Jackson Hole. It appears from blogs that most of us have visited many of his examined places; we are aware that tourism changes places and people, often to their detriment. This is old news. But to discount Rothman merely because his thesis seems self-evident and simplistic might block our reception to some less obvious but interesting ideas.

Western myth vs. reality has been a frequent topic in our class. Now we are going a step further: the myth of the myth--replicas of reality, constructed realities, a “manufactured authenticity” (p. 118). Resort locals are actors in the play. Even more surreal, they don’t even KNOW they are acting. Jim cited Rothman’s seemingly ridiculous statement that “outdoor experience, camping, fishing, skiing, and the like, offered real and unavoidable contact with nature” (p. 169). Rothman may be saying (tongue-in-cheek) that some tourists want to add those activities to their self-enhancing repertoire but don’t really WANT the accompanying bugs, cold, etc.; they want the Experience, not the experience. In addition, Rothman may be saying that “merely” BEING in a place as tourist does not really TAKE us there. (This reminds me of a philosophical dialogue about Reality between Jim and me when we blogged Print the Legend.) Are tourists really “seeing the West” when they are driving 65 MPH on an Interstate? What IS the West? (Remember our first class!) Or was there ONCE a West, but marketing its myth destroyed it?

Rothman’s asserts that many tourists actually prefer the inauthentic and no longer understand why the authentic deserves greater significance. How could tourists have come to prefer fake to real, to believe that “caverns similar to those at Carlsbad could be experienced in an IMAX theater from a better perspective at less expense in a shorter time” (p. 339)? Image has become everything—even more important than its real counterpart. The “ethos” of Las Vegas (an odd choice of words since it sounds so like “ethics”) allowed that the city could “transform itself to fit people’s desires on demand” (p. 341); as in Disneyland and theme parks, there was “packaged unreality” (p. 25).

Rothman frowns on change, but maybe the wisest person is the one who agrees with Heraclitus (“all is flux, nothing stays still”), expects change, and can adapt (see Ray). It is easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia. Would the ski towns we enjoy really be “better” if they had remained deteriorating mining towns? Who should judge what is good or bad in a place? Does a place have a “soul,” and what destroys it? What MAKES place? I highly recommend Robert R. Archibald’s A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community, a text I loved in Dr. Pitcaithley’s “Historic Preservation” class. Dr. Pitcaithley—who is mentioned in Rothman’s Acknowledgments--recently retired as chief historian of the National Park Service. He once lived in or near Santa Fe. I would love to hear him comment on Rothman’s negative takes on his former town.

Well, noble history cohorts, friends, and armchair travelers to the West, I have truly enjoyed the ride with you. This has been a great group, and I hope I will see you all again, whether in class or life…..or could the two be one?

ADDENDUM. My best friend Nancy lives in the Colorado Rockies and just read my blog. She sent me this song from a singer-songwriter we both like, Greg Brown. Nancy wrote: "When we attended his concert in Aspen a couple of years ago, he introduced it rather pointedly and sang with great relish."

"Boomtown"

Here come the artists with their intense faces,
with their need for money and quiet spaces.
They leave New York, they leave L.A..
Here they are - who knows how long they'll stay -

[chorus:]
It's a Boomtown
got another Boomtown
and it'll boom
just as long as boom has room.

Here come the tourists with their blank stares,
with their fanny packs - they are penny millionaires.
Something interesting happened here long time ago.
Now where people used to live their lives the restless
come and go.

[repeat chorus]

Nice to meet you, nice to see you
in a sheepskin coat made in Korea.
Welcome to the new age, the new century.
Welcome to a town with no real reason to be.

[repeat chorus]

The rich build sensitive houses and pass their staff around.
For the rest of us, it's trailers on the outskirts of town.
We carry them their coffee, wash their shiny cars,
hear all about how lucky we are
to be living in a ...

[repeat chorus]

The guy from California moves in and relaxes.
The natives have to move - they cannot pay the taxes.
Santa Fe has had it. Sedona has, too.
Maybe you'll be lucky - maybe your town will be the new...

[repeat chorus]

BLOG # 13: Cadillac Desert

I have commented on the blogs of RICK , DAN , JIM , BEN , RAY , JOHN , and DAVE . (Oh, heck, maybe I should just go ahead and comment on EVERYONE'S, for Pete's Sake!)

We have talked a lot this semester about the concept of agency. After thinking long and hard about this disconcerting book, I have decided that the thing that is upsetting me the most is the helpless feeling that the environment and I have had so little agency in the decisions that changed rivers forever, wasted taxpayer dollars, took away crucial wetlands and salmon breeding grounds, and created future nightmares with silt, salt, and water scarcity. Many of the people who have innocently (or naively) moved west to its sunny “Paradise” had agency, yes—but acted under the influence of misinformation and subterfuge.

The glib promises that there will always be plenty of water out West remind me of the promises of the transcontinental railroad to the future farmers who moved to the “Edenlike” Midwest. Our course has busted many myths this semester, but now I find the most frightening one busted: score after score of leaders, politicians, and government bureaucrats have sold out, pushed through detrimental public works, and hidden unpleasant truths. Land that should never have become cities has water expensively shipped in, and more people come; desert which was never meant to grow more than scrub grass is expensively irrigated, while lush Southern farms are paid NOT to grow things. The situation is like a house of cards, or a line of dominoes; but as we learned in The Way to the West, the environment will eventually have the last word.

The analogy that hit me the hardest is the statement that a dam will be there for centuries, like the pyramids--even if the water disappears. If the water doesn’t disappear, the dam will turn into a high waterfall. For some reason, that prognosis especially seemed bleak and depressing—mirroring the highlighted (opposite title page) English romantic poet Shelley's 1817 poem about Ozymandias's (Ramses II's) overweening pride and the foolishness of building monuments to oneself. That was one of the first poems I studied when I was learning what adult poetry was all about, and its concluding, haunting lines “round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away” have never found such apt comparison. At the exact halfway point of the book (p. 258), Reisner misspells damns for dams. Whether Freudian slip, purposeful pun, or accidental typo, it captures—in a black comedic way-- the essence of the book.

Although Cadillac Desert is more environmental expose than traditional history, the vignettes of leaders and politicians are extremely interesting to me as a history student. John Wesley Powell, Jedediah Smith, and Floyd Dominy are among the most fascinating and finely delineated. In addition, it is enlightening (and depressing) to see former leaders and politicians whom I had thought of as intelligent and foresighted so easily copping out on pushing through useless or wrong-headed water projects.

I have not had time to research Reisner and his sources, or the credibility of his evidence and conclusions. He obviously holds a personal antipathy to dam-obsessed engineers, politicians who are all too happy to dine at the pork barrel, and the agricultural giants who get water cheaply and at the same time deny it to those small farmers reclamation originally intended to help. In Dr. Schrag’s “Technology and American Identity,” we spent a lot of time on the electrification of America, and the changes it wrought. We cannot completely discount all attempts to harness power as misguided (Reisner does concede that dams in the Northwest and the hydroelectric power they generated helped win WWII).

I cannot remember when a book has so entranced and enraged me at the same time.

BLOG # 12: Progress on Roy Baker Research, etc.

(P.S. I have just written a comment and plaintive plea
to Dr. P. on RAY'S BLOG .)

First, progress on the Roy Baker Research Project. I e-mailed everybody 17 pages (Word document) of cut-and-pasted research found on the best fifteen websites from the first 20 pages of Google entries for Ft. Russell. I will also post a more user-friendly synopsis of the document on our new Roy Baker Archives blog. My main goal is to give a construct of “physicality” and general historical background so we can add more concrete descriptions of Ft. Russell in our papers as we do the build-out. In other words, the generalities and vague adjectives we may have used in paper # 1 can be replaced by more concrete evidence and description. Although Ft. Russell is not the crux of our paper--and I don’t want to imply it is, or suggest writing too much about the Post-- it’s still important to know more about it as we build out our papers. More general knowledge about Ft. Russell is basically a secondary construct that we can utilize to deepen and ground our papers in the build-out.

My major problem/worry is that so many of the sites are not of our usual academic historical calibre: many are descriptions of the history of the Post put out by military newcomer guides, magazines, military information services, etc. Obviously, the reliability of online information like this is harder to judge than in a book by a known historian with bibliography. Sometimes on what seems the best of the Fort Russell general history websites, it can be difficult to fathom the author at all. Since most of us only need a rudimentary outline of history and background for the Post to build out our papers, looking at a dozen of so of the better sites will probably give an adequate overview, with information outside a common denominator most suspect for possible error (most of the sites I am citing seem generally consistent in their information and probably accurate. As Dr. P. said, the military kept good records, and many of the better Ft. Russell history sites I'm citing are put out by military publications staff who had access to these records.)

Now for the more important part of my research. Dr. Petrik suggested that I do research on prostitutes in the West, especially (hopefully) those in Cheyenne. At first, I groaned, thinking that would add more to my workload; in later reflective contemplation, I decided researching this topic might be more important than digging into general info on Ft. Russell--especially since so many guys in class want to concentrate on military research. Ancestry.com has turned up just about nothing so far; I'm starting to wonder if prostitutes preferred to use assumed names.

I have ordered two books from Amazon: Anne Butler’s Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery (which Dr. P. mentioned last week) and Ann Seagraves’s Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West. I plan to compose a detailed “essay” or a compilation of ideas and evidence that could be used in connection with our Roy Baker papers. From the description on Amazon, it looks like the Butler book actually mentions Cheyenne, so I’m hoping something specific may arise. I look forward to sharing my findings with you, but they may be some of the last research submissions, depending on shipping speed (Thanksgiving intervenes) and my reading velocity. I’m madly reading the long Cadillac Desert every chance I get so I can shift gears and devote all my time to the Butler and Seagraves books when they arrive.

P.S. re Cadillac Desert… I was only halfway joking when I said in my presentation last week that I felt like cutting class so I wouldn't have to put down this book. Not only it is a page-turner from its subject, style, and fascinating (and often shocking) historical anecdotes, but the significance of Reisner’s thesis regarding the water-depleted and abused environmental future of much of the U.S. (and, through the web-of-life principle, us all) cannot be overemphasized. It has been a long time since I’ve been so disturbed by a book. As I’ve told you in a previous blog, I have been a naturalist docent in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania (with accompanying training in environmental science and the principles of ecology), so I’m particularly interested in these kinds of examinations. As soon as I finish Reisner’s book, I plan to read some other sources and reviews to see to what extent (if any) he may have exaggerated problems, or been scientifically off-base. I’m almost hoping that he has overstated his argument, because it's very scary in its implications.

Comments on My Cohorts' Blogs: Deloria/Sanchez

This week, I commented on RAY'S blog, with a reference to JOHN'S blog included within.

BLOG # 11: Indians in Unexpected Places

Philip Deloria must have listened to his history professors when they reminded him to have a central argument and thesis. His biggest shortcoming may well be excessive repetition of the word expectation. No one can mistake that he is going to look at and question white cultural expectations about Indians and discover how much of what whites have called anomaly is more accurately a typical human engagement in modernity and change. He is going to trace changes in expectation over time and share “a secret history of the unexpected” (p. 14). He is going to introduce us to Indians in places we never knew they were and help us overturn myth, stereotype, and assumption about expected Indian cultural behavior.

In the process, we will meet people, events, and works we have never heard of. Although we have looked at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in other texts, I continue to find it a fascinating phenomenon. Ironically, when Cody tried to move into film, he flopped because of the very authenticity he had successfully promoted in the live shows; audiences wanted a dramatic narrative and a good story line in the new medium of film. The surprise here was that Cody had done a movie at all; and that from 1910 to 1913, over one hundred films about Indians appeared each year (p. 74)—some, surprisingly, about cross-race romance, Indians going off to Harvard, etc. This was the narrow time window of opportunity that Deloria concentrated on in his book: the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the public was more receptive to a more complex look at the Indian’s place in culture and society—before the audience demanded the clichés of the whooping savage Indians surrounding the wagon trains. It was amazing to me that James Young Deer and Princess Red Wing could be Indians AND in charge of making films, even if for only a short time (see, I harbored expectations!). Their challenges to white’s familiar expectations unfortunately marginalized them and the studio system finished them off professionally.

Another subject I found interesting was the Indian boarding school system; other than reading about Carlisle Indian School in previous texts, I had not realized there was a general educational system like this. It seemed amazing that Carlisle could actually beat Harvard in 1907 and I had never heard about it. As a woman who seldom watches football or baseball, I appreciated Deloria’s observation of how “the unifying power of spectator sports offered a sense of community” (p. 118). I don’t think I had ever really considered watching sports en masse a potentially equalizing experience.

Although it seems logical and understandable that Indians could make particularly good use of automobiles on the wide plains and that they would enjoy mobility and freedom like any other human being, the pairing of an Indian with such a piece of technology seemed like an anomaly to most whites. They both criticized Indians for not being modern, then they criticized them for “squandering” their money on modern automobiles; Indians couldn’t win white approval either way. Expectation cut two ways, both of them unfair. The introduction of the automobile was a parallel to the introduction of the horse: Indians took to both immediately—in other words, adapted transportation “technology” to their needs (a very “modern” thing to do).

Probably the most fascinating chapter to me was the one on music. I consider myself knowledgeable on classical music, yet I have never heard of Cadman or Farwell, and I didn’t know there were Indian operas. Alice Fletcher’s admittance that she initially found Indian music “so much distressing noise” made me think of similar comments I have heard when eating in restaurants in the Far East. Native American music—and much music of countries outside the European/American musical tradition—can sound atonal, unmelodious, primitive, and chaotic to the unaccustomed or uneducated ear. Fletcher and Fillmore failed to understand the structure of Omaha melody, and the two wrongly introduced harmony into their transcriptions, which negated its accurate representation. It is a lesson to all those who expect certain things AND expect their way to be the “right” or only way. Do any of you remember the night Dan brought up the relatively unknown film "Songcatcher" and I agreed with him that it was an under-acclaimed gem? That movie reminded me very much of Deloria’s chapter on music and the difficulty in “transcribing” unusual music of the people, most often vocal, to the masses, with concomitant appreciation and understanding. (The one familiar composer mentioned by Deloria was Dvorak. Those of you who listen to FM103.5 know that Washington listeners perennially vote his “New World Symphony” in the top five of their favorites. Yet here was a non-American composer writing music that supposedly defined America, whereas music composed by a Native American could never be expected to do such a thing!)

If I might use a Giffordian analogy, I am NOT going to tip my cards tonight to show what I think of our second text, Becoming Mexican American. Since this blog is over 850 words already (groan, zzzzzz), I will delay any such revelations until I present tomorrow night. Hopefully I will follow in the unexpectedly vociferous Kent’s capable footsteps as Part Two of “Revenge of the Quiet People” possibly unfolds (but I’m not making any promises...)

Comments on My Cohorts' Blogs: Print the Legend

I have commented on the blogs of DAN , STEVE , JIM , and RAY (Ray's site is accessible by this revised blog link, NOT by the original class blog list).

P.S. Interesting to see the value of daguerreotypes in the marketplace today; check out this one on eBay. Notice the tiny size---no wonder these type of photos didn't take off in the marketplace (aside from being hard to reproduce). And here is an example of a contemporary artistic photographer who purposefully chose the technique of daguerreotypes for his portraits. Don't they have an interesting otherworldly quality? I find some of the older photos in our book similarly endowed with an almost metallic-like mysterious quality.

BLOG # 10: Print the Legend

I can only compare the subject of our text this week with a book choice in Dr. Censer’s summer 2002 French Revolution class. His “controversial” text was Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant. If I remember correctly, I was the greatest (and possibly only) supporter of this odd selection that was, admittedly, tangential to the main business of the French Revolution. Sandweiss’s book struck me similarly. I’m guessing it may have been the book Dr. P. could most easily have sliced from the syllabus; I’m so glad she didn’t.

As I near the end of the M.A. program, I find myself stewing more and more on ideas about the presentation of history. This book stirred up a lot and was a mental springboard for some new thinking about the meanings and implications of words like reality, truth, narrative, myth, authenticity, and accuracy. Is the visible the most or the least trustworthy? What does “true to nature” mean? How is meaning shaped? Is a completely unmediated photo an illusion? Can photos be “accurate”? How is information conveyed? What is the difference between describing and explaining? Can a photo be factually authentic, or factually authoritative? Think of all the ways history can be narrated—through words definitely, but how much can be translated through images? Then there are some interesting statements in Sandweiss that provoke reflection, e.g., “[Photography] makes most history seem personal” (p. 327). And--so obvious that it seems silly to mention it-- the photographs in the book were extraordinary, the slickness of the thick paper a sensual treat, and the plethora of photographs a welcome breath of fresh air in a sea of word-heavy history texts.

Now I am going to go a little personal to prove how Sandweiss is correct in her view that the photographs of the West influenced the perception of it and contributed to the myths so often surrounding it. My maternal grandfather was born in 1886 and had children (including my mother) late in life AND lived to almost 100, so I had the privilege of his superb company during many weekends of my childhood. Until his later years, he lived in a log cabin on 160 acres and rejected electricity, telephone, and indoor plumbing. Unbeknownst to me, I was experiencing the nineteenth century when I visited him. Nights in the cabin were illuminated by kerosene lamps, heat and cooking were by woodstove, drinking water was carried from a spring, and entertainment most often came from stories from my grandfather and the bringing out of the treasured stereoscope. The stereoscope cards—enough of them to fill a very large shoebox—concentrated on The West. The countless hours my beloved big sister and I spent scrutinizing the exotic and breathtaking (seeming)3-D photographs locked me early into a lifelong love affair with the West, including all it implied and represented in these cards. I knew better than most young children that photography had power; I am now learning how much power myth also has.

Enough effusion; needless to say, I loved the book. A few random and unrelated remarks…. *The technical evolution of photography was fascinating. *I can’t believe I had never heard of the popular panorama canvas rolls. *I can only compare the public’s resistance to photography’s realism (and lingering preference for more dramatic illustration) to the general public’s initial lukewarm and suspicious reception to computers. *Another busted myth added to our growing class list is the common belief that most 19th century photos of Native Americans were made under coercion; most often, they were taken willingly and there was some sort of exchange. *The otherwise careful Sandweiss surprised me by confusing Ken with Ric Burns. *I started listing limitations of the medium of photography, but decided not to reproduce it here---they will all no doubt come up in class discussion. I think their benefits far outweigh their limitations! ***Altogether a great and interesting read!