The Unlikely Origin of Tourism’s Sense of Authenticity

Reaching back to a tent restaurant erected there in 1919, Lexington brands itself, at least in part, the “barbecue capital” of North Carolina, a state with considerable heritage in that regard.

But it was a tragic train accident eight years earlier that occurred between that would-be tent site and what is now High Rock Lake that is more symbolic for tourism historically across the nation.

My Tar Heel Roots go back to 1650 but because I am the last of a line of five generations of Idaho ranchers going back to the 1860s and didn’t make my way to North Carolina until 1989, I’m considered “adopted” by those who could be considered far more relative “newbies.”

But it seems that wherever I’ve lived, including my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, I’ve crossed paths with William F. Cody.  It was least expected here in North Carolina as I began what would be the last half of a four decade career in community destination marketing.

When a freight train tragically smashed into one of three trains near Lexington, Cody’s “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show”s (sometimes known by other names) was in the midst of 40 performances throughout North Carolina between 1878 and 1916, including two in Durham where we live.

Over 100 horses were killed in the accident, and the vitality of the show that had also performed hundreds of times throughout the country and throughout Europe would never really recover.

But it is easily arguable that no other person did more to instill a curiosity for transcontinental travel across the United States in both Americans and those overseas.

His attention to detail and authenticity informed expectations. 

Equally significant, Cody redefined and instilled a deep appreciation for history, culture and artifacts among those living in relatively newly settled lands east of the Hundredth Meridian.

He seemed to innately grasp what place branding expert Bill Baker tries to impart wherever he is invited to teach.

The brand of a particular place is, in essence, its innate personality.  It exists at the intersection of what internal audiences and external audiences perceive it to be.

Today, more than ever, it is not something you conjure up or create, it’s simple who and what you genuinely are, something Cody understood was far more appealing than fantasy.

In a moment I will share a story or two about how Cody’s influence has helped shape the negotiation of authenticity over the decades about what it is and isn’t western, a negotiation still underway.

But first, for anyone unfamiliar or in need of a very quick refresher:

Cody was born in Iowa in 1846; the year after my ancestors began fleeing across the southern half of that soon-to-be state toward sanctuary in the Rockies.

Then his family moved to eastern Kansas where he lost his father.

At age 11 he worked as a rider carrying messages between drivers and workers on wagon trains before becoming a bullwhacker, then a trapper, miner and briefly a Pony Express Rider.

He enlisted in the Union Cavalry and after the war worked as a buffalo hunter for the railroad.  Cody then became a Chief of Scouts for the 5th U.S. Cavalry, leading the rescue of Wild Bill Hickok.

Eventually, he earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars.

Cody became a public figure and the subject of dime novels as well as outspoken about the rights of Native Americans.  In addition, he became a performer and show producer.

As a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Cody was also instrumental in the nation’s first national forest and the national reclamation act.

The best way to get a sense of William F. Cody is to visit his namesake along the Absaroka Mountains in northern Wyoming as they give way to the Bighorn.

Cody, Wyoming is the eastern and to many the most scenic and least touristy gateway to Yellowstone Park.  It is also home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which is comprised of four museums including one devoted to Bill Cody’s story as well as a research library.

The little town is also home to the still operating Irma Hotel which Cody co-founded a year after that train wreck back in North Carolina. 

He began by acquiring and then expanding the T E Ranch up the more secluded South Fork from Cody in 1895 and then built a hunting lodge up on the North Fork where the road now leads to Yellowstone since the dam was built.

But Cody first saw the potential of this area in 1870 while leading a scientific expedition up the Bighorn.  It happened to be the same year an expedition was being led to examine the potential of Yellowstone.

Until then, exploration of river valleys along the Rockies such as the Henry’s Fork where my ancestors would settle were dismissive of any settlement potential.  But fresh eyes such as Cody’s changed all of that.

William F. Cody had a sense of authenticity that has inspired 150 years of nomenclature about the old West and is preserved today in details and artifacts such as clothing and dress and speech.

His shows inspired audiences to travel and to know what to expect.  They also helped negotiate what experts call the ongoing interplay and socially-agreed upon construct that we designate as authentic.

Tourism faces much courser fault lines than just authenticity today.  Take for instance, the one that exists between commercial hucksterism and genuine sense of place.

The West does too, and not just recently with standoffs by a few militants in Nevada and Oregon.

In 1939, a movement anchored in the Sheridan Rotary Club began with a threat to secede and break off northern Wyoming including Cody and Yellowstone into the State of Absoroka.

The frustration back then, as it had been during the “range wars” 50 years earlier was more about intrastate politics with the federal policies as a surrogate.

But as it does today, another fault line separated the views of preservationist northwestern and fossil-fuel driven northeastern Wyoming.

I thought of this on a cross country trip through my homeland a few years ago while listening to a story on the radio far more reflective of the West in which I grew up.

A rancher down on the South Fork, near Cody’s T E ranch, was out irrigating his hay fields in June of 2013 when he accidentally came between a Grizzly and her cubs.

Watch this very short video of this remarkable account and listen carefully to Nic Patrick’s remarks at the end.

If you are a regular reader, you may recall that my great-great-great grandfather, Thomas B. Graham, was killed in 1864 by a Grizzly in Cache Valley, Utah under similar circumstances, after having put his rifle down to help my great-great grandfather load some wood.

Like many ranchers, Patrick is a conservationist.  Also like many ranchers, he has another occupation.  For nearly forty years, he and his family have built authentic log homes, often for people who are drawn to live a version of the life Bill Cody depicted.

He understands something that William F. Cody came to understand during his lifetime.

Tourism can help preserve nature and the things it loves.  But unmanaged tourism can also often introduce changes that can kill the very the things it loves.

A lot is written today about gentrification of historic neighborhoods.  If well-managed so that socio-economic diversity is preserved, it isn’t a problem.  If not, the very soul of those neighborhoods and the reasons they became so popular is rapidly hollowed out.

However, gentrification can also occur in areas of the West around public lands.   Studies show that for both kinds of gentrification, tourism popularity can provide warning signals to policy makers that they need to instill protections.

Unfortunately, tourism circles today have far too few Buffalo Bill Cody’s.  Instead of being willing to debate the broader issues society faces, they are prone instead to circle the wagons.

Our Hubris As Relative Newcomers

It always seems a bit odd to hear some Americans berate immigrants who are struggling to learn English as a second language.

After all, English isn’t the first language of Americans.

As the grandfather of two 8th generation westerners and 18th generation Americans, I found a chart on page 5 of the current issue of High Country News fascinating.

It maps 60 American languages that long preceded English and are still in use in the contiguous West along with the number of speakers remaining for each.

Three of my great-great grandparents learned two or more of these languages enough to be interpreters including Shoshone, Northern and Southern Paiute, Navaho, Zuni and Hopi.

The latter three are still fairly widely spoken but the number speaking Shoshone has dipped near 2,500 and there are only 12 people remaining who speak Northern Paiute.

There are only 20 people remain who speak Spokane, the language of the Indian nation for whom the city along the Northern Rockies is named.

This is also where I started my now concluded career in community destination marketing and where my only child was born.

There are only 174 who speak Coeur d’Alene, the nation for whom the famous lake in the north of my native Idaho is named more than four decades ago.

The article by journalist Jeremy Miller that accompanies the chart in High Country News notes that one of the world’s 7,000 distinct languages vanishes every 14 days, meaning “between half and 90 percent” will disappear by the end of this century.

“Of the 176 known languages once spoken in the U.S., 52 are thought to be dormant or extinct.”

A January article in National Geographic provided updated archeological and genome research on The First American that reminds us that even those of us who go back 16 generations here are relatively new arrivals.

The first Americans crossed over into what is now Alaska 15,500 years ago.  Genetically, they were two-thirds East Asian and one-third Eurasian.  There, their DNA mutated into unique markers found today in Native Americans but not Asians.

Deglaciation permitted these first Americans to migrate over the next two thousand years into what is now the continental United States and clear to the tip of South America.

To put this time period in perspective, though, fossils show that the pine trees they passed were 130 million years old.  Pines are the ecologically the most important trees in the world making human inhabitation of northern climates bearable.

Spear points found southeast of Salmon just below the ridgeline of the Continental Divide in my native Idaho date the earliest humans in that state to 11,000 years ago.

My ancestors who are credited with helping to establish the first permanent settlement in that state and served as interpreters with Shoshone Native Americans were under no illusion that they were first.

They accepted as Christian scripture, along with the the Bible, The Book of Mormon which chronicles the writings of ancient prophets on this continent beginning more than 4,000 years ago.

Maybe we should all just lighten up on those learning English.

The Native Home of Hope

Authenticity is not a fad when it comes to sense of place,  but use - or should I say misuse – of the word has become one.

This will pass, and when it does the attributes of authenticity of place will remain by definition nearly temporal.

My personal story begins as the only son of an only son, born at the tail end of five generations of Rocky Mountain ranchers who gradually migrated during the hundred years before I was born from the Central to the Northern Rockies.

Our ancestral ranch is where I learned sense of place, e.g. the smell of sage brush, new mown hay, and rain on a dirt road, as well as the sound of a Meadowlark and the colors of Yellowstone Cutthroat in the Henry’s Fork.

But it is also where I first learned about myths: including myths about rugged individualists, the cowboy errant Knight and other stereotypes of the West that I see fleeting across the eyes of people who want to hear my story.

I didn’t read Wallace Stegner until I came across his incredible essay in my early 30s entitled, Sense of Place.  This is where he coined that term and I still recommend to anyone seeking an understanding of authenticity.

It was my daughter, then in her third year of college, who brought me to Stegner in more depth.  Having heard my story, she knew that the breadth and depth of his writings would resonate.  It is such a gift to be understood.

One of my favorites is a book of essays written over a span that covered my first two decades entitled, The Sound of Mountain Water.  The first was published the year before I was born, the last in the collection as I turned 21.

The namesake essay in the book is a lyrical description about my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho and its famed Henry’s Fork including this resonate memoir from his first visit there in 1920:

“I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river…”

It is a myth though that the west was settled by rugged individualists.

While that characteristic was prevalent, in several of his books, Stegner supports, as he does in one of the essays in The Sound of Mountain Water, that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves” the American West.

When all but two lines of my ancestors crossed the Rockies, to be followed by the remaining two within a decade, there were fewer than 90,000 people inhabiting 750,000 square miles (twice the area of Western Europe.)

There were fewer than 70,000 along the Rockies, nearly all living in what are now New Mexico and Arizona.

Even after the Gold Rush and the arrival of 11,000 Mormons by 1850, the entire West when my ancestors settled there was less than 1% of the US population at the time.

Ranches required an average of four square miles or 2,500 acres, so to avoid isolation and provide safety and shared resources, much of the West was settled on what is called a “village and square model.”

It’s also why early jurisdictions for governance there relied more on river basins and watersheds for boundaries.

Predominately, during the fifty years prior to 1890 as the West was won ranchers lived in settlements near craftsmen, artisans, granaries and supply depots and commuted out to their land and livestock.

Sometimes historians also refer to this as a “village-farm system.”

Much of what is depicted in novels and movies about the West as well as that depicted by many of those who profess to be westerners today is synthetic.

Pure and simple, the West evolved to what it is today through a sense of commons that revolutionized the sense of land and water ownership.

The myth of rugged self-reliance became evident during the 1930’s Great Depression.

Groups such as Mormon leaders felt their recently evolved welfare program would be sufficient and pressed by partisans expressed that somehow the new federal program which emulated it would create sloth and dependency.

But the Mountain states where Mormons were then centered became the largest per capita users of the federal aid program.  Mormon leaders marveled at the public works projects completed by those receiving it as a condition.

Given their history, they shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Apparently, they had forgotten that it is trust that led to economic development of the West, just as a new study has found in a study of survivors of Atomic bombs that trust enabled them to rebuild from that trauma.

Today, a small group of regressives in the West are pushing to let special interests get their hands on public lands for mining and drilling, backed quietly by Wall Street interests who have over the decades, raped the West in similar fashion.

They are dismissing economic analysis, which I have written about previously, showing that rural counties adjacent to public lands have outperformed others and that counties where resource exploitation occurs ultimately fall much lower.

But it was not the various gold, silver and copper strikes in the early west that provided sustainable growth.

It was grass.

In part, it was this unique, resilient, drought tolerant wild grass that led my ancestors who had settled in 1860 along each side of the Utah-Idaho border to relocate to the northern extreme of the Upper Snake River plain to create new homesteads along the Henry’s Fork.

Famously framed by the Continental Divide, Yellowstone and the Tetons, this area of my origin is the culmination of a hundred mile stretch that is no more than 70 miles wide at its widest narrowing to 20 or 30 miles where I was born.

The sides of this valley range to 10,000’ framed by the Lost River and Lemhi ranges stretching down from the Sawtooths and on the east by the Caribou, Snake River and Teton ranges.

My ancestors were following an old stagecoach supply route between Utah and the mines in Montana which, beginning in the late 1870s, was becoming the path of a slowly emerging railroad eventually to supply tourists to Yellowstone.

But above where the Henry’s Fork joined the South Fork to form the Snake River, settlers such as my ancestors were surprised to find the landscape covered not by sage brush, but waist high, wild bluegrass from the river to the Tetons and north to forests of the Centennial range.

The area had already been transited by trappers and then a cattle company but it was still available to homestead.  But they still followed the modified “village-farm and ranch” model adapted from when their parents cross the Rockies in the mid-1840s.

My ancestors found that the western side of the Henry’s Fork was even better adapted to ranching.  They had modified the village-ranch model but settled this new area as they had others in the West through cooperation.

Together, they marked off land, built bridges and roads, created reservoirs and irrigation canals, established granaries for the poor, created cemeteries and erected school houses.

Tough, independent and self-reliant – certainly – but with an even greater commitment to cooperation, the commons, public education and the welfare of those less fortunate.

By the time I was born in 1948, a hundred years after ancestors began settling the Rocky Mountain west,  rich potato farms had replaced the bluegrass in our nook of Idaho, as they have the ranchland on the west side now thanks to pivot irrigation systems.

The West is always changing.  Although I haven’t lived there since the 1970s, I travel along the Rockies each summer on road trips with my grandsons and daughter. 

Much more dramatic than the subtle land use changes since my youth are the demographic and psychographic changes.  Much of Idaho has been inhabited by in migration that seemingly seeks to replace the real Idaho by making it a refuge for the synthetic West.

I don’t mean the Aryan Nation which was expelled fifteen years ago.  Places in Idaho are exurbs such as Coeur d’Alene.  While whites represent only 8% of the population growth in the past decade, they represent 73% of the flight to exurbs.

Most seem to be chasing myths created when misinformation is re-harmonized to fit worldview.

It is complicated but emblematic.  The best way to understand why my homeland now seems foreign, click to watch an episode of the phenomenal PBS America By The Numbers program entitled Our Private Idaho.

As a fellow North Carolinian once wrote, “You Can Never Go Home Again,” and that is sad.  But the West will keep changing.

But as Stegner wrote, the West is also “the native home of Hope.”  My hope is that it will once again claim its authentic roots.

Prosperity Linked to Proximity to Protected Lands

News headlines about my native Intermountain West always seem limited to a few angry white extremists with guns or elected officials pandering to campaign contributors eager to exploit its natural resources.

Rarely, by the time news gets back to Durham, North Carolina where I live, does it provide more nuanced coverage of this complicated region including news of studies that run counter to those narratives.

Studies I’ve been reading, including one that analyzes the 284 non-metro counties in the west as a whole where there are substantial amounts of protected federal lands, are fascinating.

One study zeroed in on those with lands protected for conservation and analyzes non-metro, county-level economic performance in these places from the present to, in some cases, back as far as the 1970s.  Others analyze the performance of a all 413 counties in the 11 contiguous western states.

The current wave of anti-regulation rhetoric dates not to the 1960s regulations to protect water, air and the food supply or when the EPA was created as many assume or the anti-government rhetoric used by the Reagan administration but not shared by the American public in the 1980s.

The anti-regulation chant of today has its roots in 1947, when partisan post-WWII Republicans resumed the drumbeat of how regulations are a burden regulations are on business, while dismissing that without them an even greater burden is shouldered by individual Americans.

I was born and spent my early years during this period in a million acre- Idaho county wedged into that nook between Montana and Wyoming.  Only 31% of the land area was in private hands such as our ancestral ranch just west of the Henry’s Fork.

More than 58% of Fremont County is under federal protection on behalf of all Americans including a portion of Yellowstone National Park and the Targhee National Forest.

To put this in perspective, the amount of federal lands in my native Fremont County, Idaho is 3.6 times the land area of Durham County, North Carolina where I live but with only 3% of the population.

Only 67,642 acres of the more than of Fremont County is protected for conservation purposes and relevant to the study of all 284 non-metro counties in the west with such lands.

The studies were done by the independent, non-profit, non-partisan Headwaters Economics based in Bozeman, Montana, up and over the Continental Divide and 150 miles north of our ranch where my parents eloped as my dad headed off to WWII.

The study was conducted to determine if these projected lands were associated with decreased or increased economic performance.  The numbers show that performance is higher for every 10,000 acres of protected federal land a county has.

It turns out that the economic performance in non-metro western counties with protected federal lands is as much as 345% on average compared in some areas compared to 83% for non-metro lands in the west with no protected federal land.

Between my junior and senior years of high school, I read A Wilderness Bill of Rights by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who grew up along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State.

Appointed when he was just 40 years of age, his time on the highest court spanned from when my dad was in high school until my law school days.

His words transformed my spiritual and restorative feelings about nature into an entitlement for all Americans, as important as freedoms of speech and religion.

It had a profound impact.

Five years after Douglas retired from the high court, as President Ronald Reagan was elected, the news media, made the mistaken assumption that his popularity meant that his anti-government rhetoric must be widely shared, amplifying partisan news releases.

But both the news media and publicists were mistaken.  Polls following the election showed that only 21% of Americans shared that notion, about the same percentage as in 1976, possibly contributing to approval ratings for Reagan that several years later dipped into the 30% range.

It is the same today.  Americans don’t share anti-regulation rhetoric when the consequences become clear even though the term regulation has been sequestered and demonized my entire lifetime .

Campaign strategists then and now were brilliant, seeking not to sway public opinion but to make certain words radioactive such as environmentalist, federal government and taxes, creating a political correctness that distorted the self-perception of Americans.

It still gridlocks us today.

I much prefer to look at analysis of the actual numbers, not because they will change anyone’s mind but because they provide relief.

Oh, and by the way, studies show that non-rural counties in the west that are exploited for natural resources, actually in the long term suffer economically.

Just sayin’.  Too bad facts don’t have lobbyists.

A Spiritual and Economic Dividend

I was too distracted by the magnificence of the peaks towering ahead to pay much attention a few years ago when with Mugs, my English Bulldog and travel companion, we twice crossed the Two Medicine River.

So too, has most of the mainstream media, failed to notice two remarkable developments there recently.

That afternoon, Mugs and I were on one of our annual cross-country road trips to rendezvous with family lakeside in the Northern Rockies.  The 60-mile Two Medicine River spills out of mountain lakes on the east side of the Continental Divide in Glacier National Park.

But it quickly cuts a deep valley, creating cliffs as it goes through the southwest part of the Blackfeet Reservation, a tiny fragment of the ancestral lands for that people in Canada and the U.S.

Where the Two Medicine drops out of the mountains to create its valley is known as the Rocky Mountain Front, which marks the meeting of the Rockies and the Plains.

As an aside, had it not been for the influence of gold interests in Congress, the front was meant to be the border between northern Idaho and Montana, denying the latter its distinctive western Indian Chieftain-like face and making it more Dakota in shape.

I was born and spent my early years on an ancestral ranch about three hundred miles south just on the western side of the Divide in that Yellowstone nook where Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet.

This nook is also where several Indian cultures met long before Mountain Men would rendezvous there including the Blackfeet, Shoshone and Crow peoples.

These three groups from my youth really did fit the stereotypes applied to Native Americans in the late 1800s by Dime Westerns and Wild West shows including being great horsemen, living in teepees, and wearing deerskin, war bonnets and beads.

I was most familiar with Northern Shoshone, for whom one of my great-great grandfathers had been an interpreter in the early 1860s during a time of intense misunderstanding.  Tragically, he was unable to prevent a massacre by U.S. Cavalry a few miles from my grandparents place.

These ancestors lived in territorial days along the Cub River and an old Shoshone trail between winter and summer grounds, later also used by the Pony Express.  It was about 175 miles south of the ancestral ranch of my youth.

It has long been thought that around the mid-to-late 1700s while in meeting places such as where I grew up along the Tetons, that Shoshone introduced horses to bands of Blackfoot.

The Shoshone had been introduced to these transformative animals by Cheyenne coming up from what is now Kansas after having first adopted them in 1745.

Of course these are Anglicized names for these peoples.

Blackfoot is the name for the tribe in Canada, Blackfeet is the name given in the United States, which bothers many members.  I grew up taught to use “feet” for the group and “foot” for an individual member or band.

But the name comes from a loose translation in English describing the dark moccasins worn by this nation, a confederation of several groups connected by language.

The group along the Two Medicine would have called themselves Piikáni or Piegan, as they do today.

Until a few months before Mugs and I crossed the Two Medicine, prevailing theory was that individual families and bands organized into larger groups when they came into possession of the horse.

But when oil and gas leasing created an urgency about cultural sites long revered by the Blackfeet, archeologists from the University of Arizona were led to dig into a site along the cliffs above the Two Medicine.

They learned that organizational social changes began not with the horse, but as early as A.D. 900, when a dramatic increase in precipitation along the plains resulted in high grass and led to a dramatic increase in Buffalo populations.

Something remarkable occurred along the Two Medicine by around A.D 1500, still two hundred years before they had the horse, just after Europeans established permanent settlements along America’s eastern shores, and 300 years before the Blackfeet would encounter members of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

Ancestors of the Piegan Blackfoot developed a sophisticated system of coordination and planning needed to develop a series of cairns, which are stacks of stones creating chutes through which they would drive Buffalo over the cliffs as a means to harvest food and hides.

They devised not just one but nearly a dozen of these along a 20-mile stretch of the Two Medicine, roughly bookended by the two westerly routes we traversed across the Rocky Mountain front that day.

Except for those in my native Yellowstone nook, Buffalo were extinguished from Idaho by the 1840s when my ancestors began to settle in the Rockies.  They were gone from Blackfeet country by 1881.

But their preservation on tribal lands is as much spiritual as economic.  Along one of our crossings of the Two Medicine that summer was a tribal herd of 250 Buffalo, part of 20,000 on tribal lands in the U.S. today.

A few months ago, near that crossing, the Blackfeet were among many to sign the Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty, committing to the preservation and conservation of Buffalo.

A few miles south of my crossings of the Two Medicine, another significant development has escaped the mainstream media.  In December, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law, the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

It was the result of 37 years of passion and advocacy including a law that was passed in the early 1980s, after the Forest Service began leasing every acre of the Front for oil and gas development, only to be vetoed by President Reagan.

Along a hundred miles of Front I drove that day, the new bipartisan legislation designates 67,000 acres of National Forest as part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Scapegoat Wilderness.   It protects another 208,000 acres in a conservation management area.

The conservation area prevents the expansion of motorized use, prohibits new roads and protects horse, foot and cycling trails as well as what biologists consider among the top 1% of wildlife habitat in America.

An average of nearly 70% of the private land use in the three counties most involved is still used for pasture, rangeland and cropland.  The legislation had the support of many ranchers including Dusty Crary near Choteau.

Tourism and recreation, along this stretch of Rocky Mountain Front, now generates 19% of employment and growing.

In the West overall, areas such as this along federally protected lands are associated with higher rates of job growth, 345% between 1970 and 2010, compared to 83% in non-metro counties with no protected federal lands.

There is definitely a dividend from conservation.

In Search of Boots

A quarter of a century ago, I was recruited from my native west to Durham, North Carolina, where I still live in retirement.  Unlike today, back then there wasn’t a place for a native westerner to provision cowboy boots or a good Stetson.

But a new acquaintance told me of a place thirty miles west which had been frequented a year or so earlier by actors and film-makers producing the movie Bull Durham here.

Off I went early one Saturday morning in a venerable Porsche 911 to find Tom Baily’s Pony Express.

The postal service, which long ago began to purposely ignore the importance of aligning delivery addresses with actual physical locations, took me the long way in the days before GPS.

The store isn’t in Graham, but I’ll bet that is where the carrier picks up the mail for delivery.

It is actually located on NC Route 87, a third of the way down to Pittsboro about a half mile above the Cedar Cliff cut-off and only three miles from Saxapahaw, which it seems would have been a more accurate postal designation.

Not even 50 years old when we met that day, Tom Bailey and I found a lot in common including his handcrafting of custom saddles and American Quarter Horses.  I became a frequent visitor.

A month or two before I retired five years ago, a friend and I stopped there to replace some boots and to show Tom, my new Harley Cross Bones and were stunned to learn he had passed away a few weeks earlier.

He was just the age I am now now.

The store is still there but it isn’t the only connection between the western wear of my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho where I ended four generations of ranchers going back to territorial days.

If you cut 38 miles southwest through Snow Camp and then up the highway to Greensboro, you arrive at VF Jeanswear, the headquarters of Wrangler jeans.

But it didn’t start out that way.

Wranglers came along the year before I was born but in 1904 the company started in Greensboro as Hudson Overall Company, about the time my great grandparents and post-frontier grandfather were homesteading ranches along the Henry’s Fork River.

Note their dress in the 1907 photograph shown in this essay.

Westerners didn't begin wearing jeans and cowboy hats until the 1870s and even later along the western slopes of the Rockies, shortly after after they adopted cowboy boots.

This was many decades after my ancestors began to settle the west and about the time westerners gradually began to dress like tourists from the east expected them to, based on Wild West shows and Dime Novels.

Before then, they wore wool pants in the winter and canvas pants in the summer with possibly a variation of wellingtons and bowler and/or slouch hats.

Western snap shirts didn’t come along until 1940 or so, a few years before bolo ties became common.

In my part of Idaho, bolo it is pronounced more like “BOWla.”

By the time I came along, my grandfather always dressed in a Stetson, khaki pants and khaki shirt buttoned to the top but like my dad had after returning from WWII, boots patterned more after those worn by GIs during the war.

My dad, by then, had also shifted to wearing ball caps, a habit picked up in the army and to my horror, overalls, like he had worn as a kid  such as the predecessors of Wranglers and sometimes overalls.

During my early years, 50s TV westerns such as Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Roy Rogers and Death Valley Days were the arbiters of what ranchers were meant to wear.

I still prefer Wranglers, slim fit boot cut.  Jeans aren’t what they used to be. Even Levis seem paper thin.  But looking back on western wear, it may be that it never was what it used to be.

One thing is for sure, just as it is today from Greensboro, near where I live, western wear originates as much from the south and east, while the west, as it has always been is exploited and despoiled by easterners and their enablers for natural resources.

But I miss Tom.

When For A Shining Moment Tourism Became Patriotic

Less than two months after the Civil War effectively came to an end in Durham, North Carolina, 150 years ago next April, a newspaper editor headed out west publishing later in 1865, that region’s first travel guidebook.

Long before that war began, every line of my ancestors back five generations, (except three who died along the way) some northerners, some southerners, along with two sets of newly arrived immigrants, (Scots and Brits) had settled in the western shadow of the Rockies, all but four a decade prior to that internal conflict.

Samuel Bowles was traveling by stagecoach with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and future Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, on a journey requested by President Abraham Lincoln the day he was assassinated.

Along the way they would pass some of the last two dozen wagon trains of Mormons still heading west.  The subsequent guidebook was entitled, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons, and the Pacific States.

The Civil War was over but the route Bowles and Colfax traveled was anything but peaceful.

A general uprising by thousands of Plains Indians, Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho had been brewing for several years due to abuses by immigrants seeking fortune rather than a homeland, but warriors sometimes failed to make a distinction.

Nor did Cavalry units protecting the Overland Route, which burst into open warfare after the tragic massacre of peaceful Native Americans a few months earlier at Sand Creek, mostly women and children.

All along the stage route ranches, wagons, stagecoaches, telegraph wires and feed had been burned across Kansas and along the front of the Rocky Mountains midway through Colorado and Wyoming.

Narratives about the transformative exodus of 80,000 Mormons between 1847 and 1868 in pursuit of religious freedom are obviously heavy on sacrifice, perseverance, suffering, faith and grit.

But ironically, a new study by researchers at Brigham Young University looking into insurance rates provides some new perspective.

The mortality rate for Mormon pioneers, while a point higher than the U.S. population in 1850 was only slightly higher for male pioneers and slightly lower for female pioneers overall.

Showing that it may have been safer out on the trail away from cities, the mortality rate for babies on Mormon wagon trains was 9% compared to the U.S. population overall at 15%.  Of course, only white mortality was measured at the time.

Soon after Bowles published his travelogue, visitors began arriving to see Mormons, much as they do the Amish today, perhaps ironic to my Bowman ancestors who arrived in America as the latter and migrated west as the former.

The first true “tourist’s guide” to the West was published as a resource five months after the first transcontinental railroad was opened in 1869, less than a decade after my ancestors settled the first permanent settlement in Idaho and forty years before they would prove up on their last homestead.

Until then, tourism in America had been regional in nature.  In the early 1800s coastal planters seeking the climate and scenery of North Carolina’s mountains were primarily motivated by fear of disease.

Organized tourism took root first in New England by the 1840s just as my ancestors headed across the Great Plains.  It was viewed as healthful scenic relief from industrial cities and factories.

By the time a modest hotel clerk in Salt Lake City, a transplanted Virginian, first coined the term See America First, as the name for a three-day conference focused on tourism promotion, the first handful of community-destination marketing organizations had already been formed beginning a decade earlier with Detroit in 1896.

Attending were 200 business leaders, governors, heads of commercial associations, agents for railroad and trails/good roads groups, including representatives from Spokane, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Victoria, Duluth, Denver, Vancouver, Colorado Springs and several towns in the Midwest.

The meeting venue, now on the National Historic Register (the historic Oregon Short Track Building on Pierpont behind Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and the Hilton, kitty corner from the Salt Lake Convention Center), at least deserves a plaque.

While the movement fizzled, the slogan was soon picked up by the Great Northern Railway to promote Glacier National Park and then to promote all national parks and monuments as national assets.

We are reminded by Dr. Marguerite S. Shaffer in her book by the same title, that this was the conference where speakers formalized the notion that had been emerging since the Civil War, that the West was emblematic of the “true” America, the ideal of America as “nature’s nation” and tourism as a “ritual of citizenship.”

Watch for her new book, a co-edited collection of essays entitled Entangled Environments: New Perspectives on Rendering Nature in American Culture, due out this year.

Scenic preservation and “nature” tourism took hold before, during and after WWI.  From 1897-1915, most tourism was in the form of conventions and expositions because the idea of leisure travel would not emerge as mainstream until the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Good road coalitions argued for a system of highway routes true to the historic pioneer routes such as those my ancestors blazed to honor them as emblematic of what it means to be American.

Unfortunately, some cities didn’t get the memo when the proportion related to conventions and meetings began to rapidly decline by the 1930s, even battling until the early 1970s to prevent “visitor” from being added to the name of community marketing agencies.

Some still obsess with conventions today when meetings of any type now represent only 7% of business and 4% of leisure visitor stays and 10% of travel overall about the same as attending performing arts, not insignificant but hardly worth the high risk of over building for.

Increasingly after WWII, cookie-cutter development, franchise architecture, formula businesses and facilities, desecration marketing such as billboards, facility envy and mainstream culture have combined to demean tourism appeal, destroy sense of place and enable blight across the country.

But as I was growing up in the 1950s, kids collected stickers about the destinations they visited and often displayed them on the rear corner window.

Many reflected the colorized photographs made famous beginning in 1901 by Fred Kiser who was during his lifetime, the premier scenic landscape photographer in his day.   He called them “artographs.”

Along with others commissioned from artists such as the postcards at this link by railroads, then road associations, and for a time by airlines, they were used to promote tourism destinations.

Little did I know in the 1970s as I backed my way into a life-long career in community-destination marketing in Spokane where businesses put on an exposition to celebrate nature that much of tourism across the nation had or was rapidly becoming anything but patriotic.

Contrasting Expressions Behind Two Views of Independence

A contrast caught my eye the morning I began to write this blog post.  I usually write essays several days or even a few weeks before they are posted.

One was this month’s cover story in High Country News, an excellent magazine about issues along the Rocky Mountains westward, where my family’s genes now go back eight generations.

Written by a progressive, it explores both sides of the great gun debate from the perspective of gun-lovers and gun-nuts on both sides. The author also provides industry statistics showing that the “gun culture is dying.”

I’m a political Independent.  I grew up with guns and I own a couple of old rifles and a German WWII pistol, all family heirlooms, but I fall on the “more sensible background check” side of that debate.

One disturbing quote attributed in the article is that “a liberal who happens to like guns is still an enemy.”  I assume that is meant to cover Independents too, but it provides insight into extremists.

Some of the best research on gun owners is found in surveys by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

It shows that “more and more guns [including assault weapons where are classified as “modern shooting rifles” or MSRs] are being purchased, but they’re being sold to the same shrinking group of middle-aged white men.”

As I was reading this, a Google Alert brought my attention to a letter apparently written by “Joe the Plumber” of the McCain-Palin campaign’s 15-minutes of fame.

Apparently, in light of one of the latest mass murders he gently warned the parents of those who died that “your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

You can’t hold him against westerners.  The closest he has come to being one is working in Ohio to build western-utility Jeep Wranglers like the one I drive and during an Air Force stint in Alaska near where I once lived.

As obnoxious as his statement is, it illustrates that a lack of empathy more than any level of gun control may be the problem behind mass killings, according to research cited by essayist Mark Manson.

It is only one way that gun extremists today are troubling. And part of it may be genetic.

High Country News was founded back in 1970 by Tom Bell, a Wyoming rancher and decorated WWII hero who turned 90 last month.

He was a contemporary rancher of my father, growing up across the Tetons from the one where he and I were born on a spread down the Wind River Range of the Rockies.

This is the setting for northern Wyoming transplant Craig Johnson’s series of “Longmire” mystery novels and the A&E TV series of the same name, although it uses northern New Mexico as a stand-in.

While flying bombers similar to the one in which my dad’s cousin and closest friend Edward was shot down and killed, Bell lost the sight in his right eye.

Coming home to Wyoming he earned a master’s degree in wildlife conservation and game management but always found solace in the wide open spaces his family settled there in 1878.

But by the mid 1960s as I was graduating from high school, Bell began to organize groups to counter the blight occurring throughout the Rocky Mountain West.

One Bell creation, High Country, is still well known today for investigative reporting on various issues.

I guess wannabes such as the Nevada cheapskates along with their assault rife toting posse (sorry, “modern shooting rifles”) would consider Tom an enemy based on that earlier quote.

The difference in these two kinds of westerners occurred to me recently as I read about a purposeful sequel contrived a few weeks later in San Juan County, Utah.

That’s the area that takes in the southeast corner of Utah below Moab and includes parts of Canyon Lands National Park. Think of country similar to the back drop for John Ford westerns or Easy Rider or Forrest Gump for that matter.

Toting those same “modern shooting rifles,” a group with a similar sense of entitlement deliberately drove ATVs down into a canyon where a federal agency ban was protecting fragile Native American archeology.

Not everyone seeking mechanized access across our “commons” is like that, though.

Up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, snowmobilers have been volunteering to carry GPS units as a way to better inform land closures to protect endangered species.

Recent studies find that the difference between Tom Bell and for that matter me, and those deliberately desecrating the public lands in the west, may come down to how we express a dopamine D4 receptor gene we all have, named DRD4.

In variations or mutations from individual to individual, this gene is linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dysfunctional “thrill seeking” such as unprotected sex and various addictions such as gambling and alcohol.

University of Michigan researchers from various disciplines including business have now found that people like Tom Bell see the world as interdependent because they have a variation or allele 6 times greater than those who see their independence as trumping any harm their actions bring to others.

In his fascinating new book entitled Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives – and Our Live Change Our Genes, neurogeneticist Dr. Sharon Moalem describes how our behavior, our experiences and even the food we eat can inform genes differently in people.

It is possible that Tom Bell’s service to his country during a time rampant with fascism, as well as the way he was raised, his field of study and witnessing a desecration by individuals and corporations, might inform his variation of that gene differently.

I share a similar background with the instigator of that recent Utah showdown.  Raised 600 miles apart in the Rocky Mountain west, we both graduated from BYU.

We both descend from the earliest Mormons who settled along the Rockies six or seven generations ago.  In the 1870s, one of my ancestors also created settlements along the Colorado Plateau shared with San Juan County.

A decade or so ago, we each served as presidents of Rotary Clubs in two different parts of the country.  Though we obviously have different interpretations of what’s racist, we both recite the Rotary 4-Way Test, an ethical guide.

The counties where we were raised in Utah and Idaho respectively, are set aside in “commons” for all Americans, his a fourth and mine a third.

We both enjoy the outdoors, mine from astride a Harley with views of the open road and scenic preservation, his tearing off road on an ATV.

So what makes me sign up with Robert Redford while he apparently fancies himself after the Edward Abbey character in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang?

Why do I see the federal government as stewards on behalf of the people rather than as a capricious and arbitrary enemy apart while he apparently agrees with the executive director of Gun Owners of America that:

 "The government's out of control, and all three branches are united against the people and the Constitution." 

The difference between us may very well come down to how our experiences have modified or expressed our DRD4 gene, an indicator of a sense of interdependence in some and extreme independence in others.

I’m as stubborn and independent and functionally narcissistic as they come, but in me that gene stops short of the point where my actions might harm other people, a conservative principle forgotten today.

I hate to think that one day some of us on the “interdependence” side will be forced to stand up shoulder to shoulder against those who disrespect public lands and agents just trying to do their job.

And just because I give a damn about others or trust in the law, don’t think for a minute I won’t.  As the article in High Country notes, there are “gun nuts” on both sides of this debate.

Okay, “stand down cowboy.”

Where did you stash the firing mechanism for that old Winchester .32 Saddle-Ring?  Like I said, “gun nuts” on both sides.

A Haunting Detour

Last year, after driving a spectacular 40-mile scenic byway on that leg of our road-trip out west, Mugs and I found ourselves on an unexpected detour as the sun began to set.

Apparently, a radical route revision for a restaurant we were headed to was so recent it had not yet made it to GPS.  When we finally found a place to turnaround, we lingered a bit to watch as the sun set on the the spectacular Kolob Canyons.

Where these unusual, almost crimson spires of Navaho Sandstone stretch along Ash Creek out of Zion National Park, I noticed a spot in our view where archeologists down from BYU had recently been busy excavating historic Fort Harmony.

Having turned 24 years of age a couple of months earlier, it had briefly been the home of one of my maternal great-great grandfathers, Marion Jackson Shelton, in 1857 after journey by horseback up the Old Spanish Trail.

Through the Kolobs on horseback, the fort was a few hours from where the horrific Meadow Mountain Massacre had taken place a few weeks before Shelton’s arrival after a five day siege.

Until his death two decades later from alcoholism, his brief stop along the trail at the site of the massacre would haunt him   For a few weeks, he found himself teaching the children of the only man who would eventually be executed for the murders.

Soon he was called 40 miles south back to Fort Clara and sent with other riders through the ancestral lands of Paiute, Hopi, Zuni and Navaho peoples in search for young children who may have survived the massacre.

His journey there began 4,000 miles away in west-central Illinois where he was born the year after his father’s service in the Black Hawk War after migrating there from a place in Virginia only a hour’s ride from my home in North Carolina today.

Marion Shelton’s mother died when he was two but during his early years he was given insight into Native American cultures by his grandmother’s story.

Mary Neely Spears was a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, who, as a young woman, had spent two years in captivity by a small band of Shawnee, a story that must have weighed heavily on my great-great grandfather’s mind as he rode in search of similar captives.

In the 1840s he and his father joined a new, restorationist Christian religion, and when Marion was just 13, to escape religious persecution, they all fled for protection toward a part of the Rocky Mountains that was then a part of Mexico.

By then, coupled with the traumatic experience of his grandmother and hearing stories from Mormons who had been threatened with cultural genocide in Missouri, and now Illinois, after the murder of Joseph Smith, teenage Marion Shelton already had a firm sense of how dangerous and unjust the world could be.

But at the Missouri River his father joined the Mormon Battalion and with Marion and his new family, set off on what what would be the longest march in the annals of the U.S. infantry to fight in the War with Mexico.  At Santa Fe, however, the Sheltons were sent north to Pueblo with a sick detachment.

The next spring they set off north to follow the California-Mormon trail west, arriving a week after three of my other ancestors had arrived in Salt Lake Valley ahead of the vanguard wagon train of Mormons.

The Sheltons wintered in Salt Lake and then migrated to a fort built prior to their arrival by “mountain man” Miles Goodyear, in what is today Ogden, Utah.

But in 1849 they hit the trail again just as an effort percolated among “true believers” in the 18 year-old Mormon Church to purge it of non-conformists.

Known now as the “Mormon Reformation” it included oratorical devices that, taken literally, may have culminated in the massacre less than a decade later.

But the Sheltons may have just been drawn across Nevada, up and over the Sierras and down the Middle Fork of the American River to pan for gold by stories filtering back from fellow Battalion members there when it was first discovered.

By 1852 the Sheltons had enough to buy squatter’s rights to a ranch lying a hundred miles further southwest near Stony Point in what had been a 66,000-acre land grant ranch between the Petaluma River and Sonoma Creek and surrendered by the 1848 ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Judging by the diaries of Mormon missionaries who often dropped into visit, the Sheltons maintained connection, though lapsed, especially Marion who was in his early 20s.  But two things changed his world in 1857.

His father died shortly after Marion’s 24th birthday and word came that fall that all 40,000 Mormons should return to Utah to defend against an invasion of U.S. Army Dragoons.

Church leaders were also contemplating a mass exodus to the Bitterroot Valley in the Pacific Northwest, a part of what is now western Montana a hundred miles over the Bitterroots from the Mormon Fort Lemhi in what is now Idaho.

Marion Shelton turned over the ranch to a step-sibling, saddled up with a former Mormon Battalion officer and headed on horseback down California past Yerba Buena, what had once been a largely Mormon settlement recently renamed San Francisco, to Los Angeles.

The small party grew as the trail flooded with returning Mormons at San Bernardino then up Old Spanish Trail past deserted Las Vegas Springs, another Mormon settlement into southern Utah, and past the recent killing ground where 120 people from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri were murdered on the route to California.

It will never be known what, if any, role was played by the paranoia of that time.  It could have been fueled by the cumulative effects of twenty years of persecution or the murder that spring near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border of Mormon Apostle, Fort Harmony founder Parley P. Pratt, or a literal interpretation of a oratorical device used by true believers.

In light of assassinations occurring today, we know the power that so-called oratorical devices have on people who take them literally, whether by radical clerics, or on talk radio, or by Tea Party partisans, or by leaders in hate groups.

There is never an excuse for this type of violence, even in war time, regardless of Old Testament lore.

And as evidenced by the memorial leaders encouraged the state to place at the site in 1990, Mormons today, some of whom who are descendants of those murdered, still mourn what happened at Meadow Mountain just as my great-grandfather must have done for the remainder of his life.

I sense his broken heart in the affidavits given to judges to things he heard subsequent to the massacre, precious because they give me a glimpse of his handwriting and the education he had gleaned during his witness of events during his ten year journey through history to that time.

He spent the next decade or more living with and teaching Hopi and Zuni people in their pueblos on the plateau of northeastern Arizona.  He worked hard, but in vain, to develop an alphabet for them.

He became fluent in Spanish as well as Hopílavayi and the Ute-Chemehuevi of the Southern Paiute people, just as two of my other great-great grandfathers did in the languages of the Shoshone and Bannock much further north. 

But the trails he blazed back and forth also in time became roads for settlers.  He eventually sought peace in the lush river bottomlands of plateaus further north in Castle Valley where my great-grandmother was born before Shelton died just six years later in Heber City, Utah, just as the Second Industrial Revolution began to take shape.

Marion Shelton was buried in Provo where I attended BYU, eight decades after his death, and where I first learned of and then visited Meadow Mountain on a cool haunting morning after spending a night with friends in the Kolobs in the late 1960s.

I hadn’t planned to return to Fort Harmony during last year’s road-trip, but I’m glad I did, if only to be reminded of Marion Shelton’s part of my heritage and to recall the remarkable history, places and events that shaped his life.

The Meridian of My DNA

My western heritage is sprinkled along settlements my ancestors created in the 1800s down the length of a route that would become the 1,100 mile U.S. 89, a “Blue Highway” stretching from Montana to Arizona.

The “Ponderosa belt,” as I call it for the dominant species of pine tree found along its length, stretches from the cusp of the Northern Rockies through Yellowstone and along my native Tetons.

It crisscrosses the Idaho-Wyoming border then drops down Bear Lake Valley and across the Utah line before jumping across into Cache Valley.  From there this ancestral spine tracks against the Wasatch Mountains as they split off from the southern Rockies.

Then it shoots straight down the high plateaus, alpine meadows, forests, and valleys of central Utah before jogging around the Grand Canyon and giving out on the last reaches of the Colorado Plateau as it spills across northern Arizona.

The roots of my longitudinal DNA never strayed more than a degree after 1847 along nearly the entire length of the 111th meridian west as it dissects the continental United States.

But Mugsy, my English bulldog and I, usually weave back and forth across this route using various scenic byways on the last leg of our annual cross-country-road-trips before collecting my daughter and two grandsons for a week of reunion along the shores of a lake in the northern Rockies.

These byways often take in one or two of the dozen or so settlements my ancestors created along the length of the meridian between 1847 and 1907.  Last year we took a scenic byway along state route 14 as it slices through alpine meadows between Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks.

This year, a different byway about an hour’s drive north will give us a glimpse of one of the world’s oldest and largest living organisms which was discovered when I was in college in the late 1960s by Dr. Burton Barnes, a forest ecologist at the University of Michigan.

Christened “The Trembling Giant” or Pando, this ancient 107-acre grove of approximately 47,000 quaking aspen trees near Fish Lake (8,800 foot above sea level) all share a singular root.  DNA tests by Utah State University geneticists confirm it is one huge clone weighing nearly 7000 tons.

Essentially all one tree, the 80,000-year-old grove is now in crisis.

In fact, USU scientists are rushing to find out why aspens are suddenly dying all over the west.  Aspens don’t grow from seeds.  The grove we’ll see in a few months are all stems off the same plant.

This is because as geneticists have learned, these trees now have three genes.  My uneducated hunch is the problem will have something to do with human activity over the last 250 years and the side-effects of both the first and the second Industrial Revolution which peaked in 2008.

The question is, “Will the far more environmentally friendly third Industrial Revolution now percolating ramp up quickly enough?”

From Fish Lake we return to U.S. 89 and drop 3,000 feet as we head up the San Pete Valley through two areas first settled among Native Americans by two of my paternal ancestors before they began to explore much further north along the route.

In fact, nearly all of my ancestors along this longitude of my DNA lived long enough to see the end of the first Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the second.

As we near the place where my grandsons live nestled on the slopes of the Wasatch, the haze of pollution often visible will be a reminder that 167 years of their ancestral DNA also lies along that same meridian.

They will be in or near their 30s when we reach the tipping point for the new Industrial Revolution now underway.  If too late for the aspens, will it be soon enough to save and restore our planet?

Organic Markers

Few things are as symbolic of the western part of the United States as “Mormon trees,”  a description given ubiquitous Lombardy poplars by the late Dr. Wallace Stegner.

On frequent cross-country road-trips, for me too, “Mormon trees” have begun to signal settlements created in the mid-1800s, many by my ancestors, in parts of what are now the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

Stegner, an Iowan and Presbyterian, founded the famed creative writing program at Stanford University around the time I was given birth in the Yellowstone nook of another “I” state, Idaho.

Also an ardent environmentalist, Stegner, as well as Frank Church and Robert Redford are more symbolic to me of my native region than the transplanted extremist ideologues who polarized it beginning in the mid-1960s as I was graduating from high school.

They are still holding it hostage today.

Stegner’s description of “Mormon trees” found across the “Great Basin” came to mind again this week, when a long-time fellow-citizen of my adopted home of Durham, North Carolina published a fascinating article on California salmon in the quarterly publication OnEarth.

Barry Yeoman is an award-winning journalist who, like Stegner did at Stanford, takes time to teach writing to young people at the Duke University Young Writers’ Camp held here each summer.

In his article, Yeoman quotes a scientist who explains that ocean-nutrients from California salmon, whose remains are redistributed at the end of their lifecycle, create a signature for wine made from grapes grown in the same watersheds, a marker as distinct and subtle I assume as “Mormon trees.”

Mormon settlers discovered gold where those salmon spawned in 1849, two years after they crossed the Rockies.  Other Mormons reached California by ship or at the conclusion of the march by the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican-American War.  The silt created the first threat to salmon there.

The late Dr. Eugene Campbell, a noted historian and my mentor at Brigham Young University, had written about the short-lived Mormon gold mining missions in 1849.  To me Campbell represented an era of historical analysis and inquiry there and in other areas of that church that seems to have been long-since purged.

When it was created in 1850, the Utah Territory covered nearly all of Nevada, part of Wyoming and a good chunk of Colorado.  This was just after one set of my great-great-great grandparents, the Shelton’s, continued across the Great Basin to ranch near the gold fields.

Much of the exploration of this region that was credited to John C. Fremont in pamphlets used by the Mormons on their trek was actually made by the educated “Mountain Man,” Jedediah Smith.

In 1861, when another mining boom took place in western Nevada a decade after the gold rush in California, the federal government began to gradually lop off parts of Utah to make the Nevada Territory.

As one of my great-great grandfathers, Thomas Messersmith, rode east across this stretch of newly created Nevada as a Union Cavalry trooper in 1862 to protect gold shipments to fund the Civil War, the terrain and “Mormon trees” were already familiar to him.

He and the writer who later became known as Mark Twain had previously taken the Overland Stage west from St. Joseph, Missouri during the summer of 1861.

The 1,700 mile, nearly twenty-day journey traced the former Pony Express route across Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming through Salt Lake City and Cedar Fort and across the Great Basin.  This was after Twain’s brother Orion was appointed secretary to the governor of the new Nevada territory.

Unsuccessful, after their arrival, as partners  in a mining venture on the Comstock Lode (but according to Twain’s letters, both excellent poker players,) Messersmith enlisted in the cavalry and Twain took a job with the newspaper in Virginia City, eventually moving to San Francisco a few years later.

My great-grandfather fought in cavalry skirmishes with bands of Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute Indians across a part of the Utah Territory that wouldn’t be lopped off into Nevada until 1866, shortly before the part of Arizona with the Mormon settlement of Las Vegas was made part of Nevada as well.

When his regiment stopped to build log structures for a fort at the end of the Ruby Valley, he was helping secure an area that would still be a part of Utah until 1866, and where three decades later my great-grandparents White would ranch, drive a stagecoach and operate a station.

In 1864, with areas still to be reassigned to it, Nevada leap-frogged other more established territories to statehood so as to aid President Lincoln’s re-election.

My great-great grandfather mustered out of the cavalry after the war and settled in Cedar Fort near another station along the Overland route he had safe guarded.

Here he became a Mormon and flirted with consecration, a short-lived church experiment where residents gave their private property to ownership in common, received back the yield they needed and gave the remainder to less fortunate.

All of this is hundreds of miles south from where I was born on a cattle and horse ranch laced with “Mormon trees” after it was homesteaded by another great-grandfather, Bowman, along the Henry’s Fork River, where the Great Basin drops out of the Targhee National Forest.

Along with other organic markers such as the smell of rain-dampened Sagebrush or the sound of a Western Meadowlark, “Mormon trees” signal my roots.

More Than Disappearing Mountains

Last August as Mugsy, my English bulldog, and I guided our Jeep on an ascent into the Rocky Mountains for an annual lake rendezvous with family.  I wasn’t the only traveler to remark that the mountains that usually form a backdrop to Denver were invisible and apparently had been for some time.

Those of us native to the Rocky Mountain west realize that Denver is more in the High Plains than the Rockies. The only difference between there and Kansas or Nebraska is that you can usually see them from there.

The view of the mountains from Denver last August was obscured by haze from one of the 3,527 weather records broken in the US alone last year, this one for heat.

The mountains were further obscured  with smoke from a nearby forest fire.  But the view isn’t the only thing disappearing from that part of the world.

Ground water is rapidly deleting.  That means it is being pumped out faster than it can recharge.  According to a study released last year, some parts of the High Plains will be unable to support crop irrigation within the next 30 years.

Many officials tragically make the mistake of believing that because their communities rely on surface water from streams, rivers and lakes, such as Durham, North Carolina where I live, that they are immune from issues surrounding ground water.

However, ground water and surface water are interdependent.  Streams and rivers are not only the beneficiaries of ground water but they also contribute to it.  It is a mistake to believe that a process such as fracking won’t be hazardous just because a community relies primarily on surface water.

Where I grew up in the nook of Idaho framed by the Tetons, Yellowstone Park and the Continental Divide, water that has percolated for thousands of years through volcanic rock spews back out of the ground at 120 million gallons per day from a place appropriately named Big Springs, fueling the 127-mile Henry’s Fork of the Snake River.

Half way across my native Fremont County, Idaho, the famed fly-fishing river spills over both the Upper Mesa and Lower Mesa Falls, out of the mountains and down across the Snake River plain to its rendezvous with the South Fork near Idaho Falls.

The Snake River arcs just under the southern edge of Idaho’s 80 recognized mountain ranges to its rendezvous with the Columbia River and then the Pacific Ocean.  But the 10,000-square-mile Idaho aquifer the huge river dissects -- the one “famous for potatoes” -- is imperiled.  

Holding as much water as Lake Erie, since the start of this century it has been in crisis with more water being pumped out than the system can replenish.  Idaho is nearly covered by mountains, huge rivers and glacial lakes, yet 96% of the population is dependent on ground water for domestic water needs.

Ground water isn’t just at issue in the western United States.  Across the nation, ground water accounts for 22% of fresh water withdrawals, 37% of agricultural use, 37% of public water supply withdrawals and 51% of all drinking water for the total population.

More and more ground water is being depleted for industrial purposes.  Fracking is not the only industrial risk from ground water mining.

Some states such as Oregon have began to create “water banks, much as we have a national petroleum reserve.  Other communities such as Pocatello, Idaho are preparing to inject treated wastewater back to help recharge aquifers.

Every community should be looking at dual-water distribution systems such as those pioneered by St. Petersburg, Florida in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Relying on simply discharging treated wastewater back into rivers and lakes fails to grasp the full hydrologic cycle.

It is estimated that failure to act on climate change is creating an annual drag of $1.2 trillion in forgone prosperity, 1.6% of all global GDP.  Yet, the issue of desertification is not limited to the American west nor is it all about the increasing heat.

A new breed of “green” cattle rancher is riding to the rescue, using technologies practiced by wild buffalo herds to preserve grassland and reclaim land and ground water as well as reduce greenhouse emissions by using techniques that were used by my great-grandparents from both sides of my lineage.

Other westerners such as those working in the Western Wastersheds Project are working to bring free-market, full-cost (triple-bottom-line) accounting to the use of public lands for grazing as a means to do the same.

It is much too early to wonder as author Mark Binelli did last month, after witnessing disappearance of the same mountain view, “Will the West Survive?”  But it may be time for another road trip!