Category: Thinking West
-
Thinking West: Mining Life in California (1857)
There seems scarcely a limit to the future production of gold in California. Despite the confident predictions of unsuccessful adventurers that the mines would soon be exhausted, the exact opposite seems to be the case; for deposits are now being reached by the new processes of exploration which stagger all calculations. There is no good…
-
Thinking West: Code of the West
The Code of the West was a gentleman’s agreement to certain rules of conduct. It was never written into the statutes, but it was respected everywhere on the range.” Ramon F. Adams (quoted in The Quotable Cowboy) A few guidelines from the Code of the West (taken from LegendsofAmerica.com): Don’t inquire into a person’s past.…
-
Thinking West: Llano Estacado
When we were upon the high tablelands, a view presented itself as boundless as the ocean. Not a tree, shrub, or any other object, either animate or inanimate, relieved the dreary monotony of the prospect; it was a vast illimitable expanse of desert prairie–the dreaded Llano Estacado of New Mexico; or, in other words, the…
-
Thinking West: The West’s Water Problem
“The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.” (Will Rogers) “Out West, God made plenty of whiskey to drink, but only enough water to fight over” (Wrongly attributed to Mark Twain)
-
Thinking West: Stephen King’s Gunslinger
They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when the gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was desert, and that only.”
-
Thinking West: Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
-
Thinking West: Dave Gorman’s America Unchained
Those roads provided breathtaking views. There’s something special about an empty road going on and on and on to the horizon where the sun burns the world away into a dancing, shimmering heat haze that reflects the crystal blue sky, literally blurring the line between heaven and earth.”
-
Thinking West: Tolkein’s The Return of the King
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house…
-
Thinking West: Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain
“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is…
-
Thinking West: Route 66
There are few highways that have the iconic, near mythic status that Route 66 holds in American culture. Route 66 stretched some 2,500 miles between Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California. Route 66 became a symbol of the open road. It was America’s Pilgrims’ Road, where folks in the East or Middle-West could escape to…
-
Thinking (or Going) West
[To] go west: 1) If something goes west, it is lost, damaged, destroyed, or spoiled in some way; and 2) (British & Australian, old-fashioned) if someone goes west, they die.* The West has become synonymous with ruggedness, adventure, desert climates, and shootouts amongst outlaws and lawmen. In American society, the West is where the nation…
-
Thinking West with Terry Pratchett
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving…
-
Thinking West with Edward Abbey
Finally, in this discussion of water in the desert, I should make note of a distinctive human contribution, one which has become part of the Southwestern landscape no less typical than the giant cactus, the juniper growing out of solid rock or the red walls of a Navajo canyon. I refer to the tiny oasis…
-
Thinking West with Marc Reisner
In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the…
El Portal Literary Journal 