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More About This Textbook
Overview
Americans have had an enduring yet ambivalent obsession with the West as both a place and a state of mind. Now one of the most knowing observers of the Western scene offers a monumental cultural and historical analysis of how ideas of wildness have shaped the ways Euro-Americans have perceived, reacted to, and acted upon the West for nearly five hundred years. Bringing the sensibility of a poet to a sweeping discussion of place, Michael L. Johnson considers how that obsession originated, how it has determined attitudes toward and activities in the West, and how it has changed over the centuries.
Investigating views of Western wildness from pre-European times until the present, Johnson tells how explorers and settlers bent on exploiting the West brought with them Old World ideas, full of muddled and even bizarre contradictions, that have defined the region in its most fundamental aspects. And he shows how those contradictory ideas were woven into an ambivalent ideology of conquest that has given us today's degraded wilderness areas, overtaxed water supplies, and sprawling suburbs.
Brimming with word-play, personal anecdotes, and telling vignettes, Hunger for the Wild provocatively addresses a cornucopia of Western personalities, phenomena, and events. Invoking a vast array of writers and thinkers-from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Black Elk to Richard Etulain-Johnson casts his critical eye on conquistadors and cowboys and revisits myths of Noble Savage and "red devil" alike. His kaleidoscopic text examines Dust Bowl woes and Wild West shows, and whether contemplating the Disneyfied frontier or the Ralphlaurenized range, he takes readers on an intellectual romp through the wilds of the contemporary West, with its UFO fanatics and postregional cowgirls.
Emphasizing his call for seeing the West as "a place of roots as well as routes," Johnson's tour de force marks a major contribution to the deeper history of the region and points toward a more sustainable West for the future. It should interest not only Western historians but also art and film buffs, ecocritics, cross-cultural specialists, and rodeo fans-anyone fascinated by the wild, Western-style.
Product Details
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Preface: A Conference in Reno xiii
Introduction: A Wilde Wesste 1
A Brief History of Wild
The Prehuman West 13
Native Nature 16
From the 1530s to the 1840s: The West as Waste and Promised Land
Prelude and Overview 27
Conquistadors and Colonizers: The Spanish Encounter with Unbridled Wilderness 32
The Antipode of Paradise: William Bradford and the Hatred of Wilderness 42
Ravage through the Garden: The Wild according to Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Crockett 54
Mountain Men and Other Explorers: The Vanguard of Western Exploitation 75
Inventing the Indian: The Noble Savage 94
Trails and Trials: The Inroads of Commerce 100
From the 1840s to the 1890s: The West as Frontier
Prelude and Overview 111
Settlement and Its Discontents 117
To California Go: The Thar in Them Thar Hills 124
Reinventing the Indian: The Red Devil 135
An Animal Holocaust: Wildlife Management in the Old West 143
In without Knocking: The Cowboy as Wild Man 151
Romancing the Gun: Outlaws and Man-Killers in Helldorado 160
(En)closing the Frontier 173
From the 1890s to the1960s: The West as Region
Prelude and Overview 187
Ending the Indian: Civilization (f)or Extinction 192
Thou Art Lost and Gone Forever: Postfrontier Anxiety and the Recall of the Wild 204
Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet: Preserving the West 214
Wild West Shows, Rodeos, and Dude Ranches: Wildness as Specious Spectacle, Ritual Reenactment, and Tenderfoot Travesty 224
Dust Bowl: The Great American Desert with a Vengeance 237
Re-imagining the Wildness: Modern Mediations 244
Tripping the Light Dialectic: More Modern Mediations 258
Derricks, Dams, Bombs, and Such: A Walk on the Dark Side of the West 270
Sprawling into Western Emptiness: The Metropolitan Frontier, Suburban Borderlands, Misbegotten Middle Landscapes 279
From the 1960s to the Present: The West as Postregion
Prelude and Overview 289
A Sewer Runs through It 297
Where the Wild Things Aren't: The Last of the Breed 303
McWilderness: Disneyfying the Frontier 311
The Computer in the Cabin: Unsettling the Nouveau West 318
Wild(e) Style: Ralphlaurenizing the Range 323
Once in the Saddle I Used to Go Gay: Redoing Rodeo 327
Las Vegas: Ambiguous Oasis 333
Weird Weird West: Roswell and Other Landing Sites 337
The Last Best Craze: Madness in Montana 343
Little Hassle on the Prairie: The Issue of Wise (Non)use 347
Beyond John Wayne: Bewildering Westerns and Wild Wild Texts 352
Way Out Walden: Rewriting Western Nature 362
The Wild Woman in the Outback: Postregional Cowgirls 367
The Return of the Native: Reclaiming Identities 377
Break on Through to the Other Side: The Postmodern Frontier Imperative 385
Wildfire: A Taste of Authenticity 389
Hunger for the Wild: Finding a True Western Heritage 395
Fear and Loathing in Santa Fe: Meatspace or Virtual Reality? 398
Conclusion: Some New Vision: Resolving the Western Paradox 401
Notes 405
Index 499