Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies

by Thomas G. Andrews

Overview

What can we learn from a high-country valley tucked into an isolated corner of Rocky Mountain National Park? In this pathbreaking book, Thomas Andrews offers a meditation on the environmental and historical pressures that have shaped and reshaped one small stretch of North America, from the last ice age to the advent of the Anthropocene and the latest controversies over climate change.

Large-scale historical approaches continue to make monumental contributions to our understanding of the past, Andrews writes. But they are incapable of revealing everything we need to know about the interconnected workings of nature and human history. Alongside native peoples, miners, homesteaders, tourists, and conservationists, Andrews considers elk, willows, gold, mountain pine beetles, and the Colorado River as vital historical subjects. Integrating evidence from several historical fields with insights from ecology, archaeology, geology, and wildlife biology, this work simultaneously invites scientists to take history seriously and prevails upon historians to give other ways of knowing the past the attention they deserve.

From the emergence and dispossession of the Nuche—“the People”—who for centuries adapted to a stubborn environment, to settlers intent on exploiting the land, to forest-destroying insect invasions and a warming climate that is pushing entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, Coyote Valley underscores the value of deep drilling into local history for core relationships—to the land, climate, and other species—that complement broader truths. This book brings to the surface the critical lessons that only small and seemingly unimportant places on Earth can teach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674495357
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/05/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	345
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Thomas G. Andrews is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Figures Maps Map: Rocky Mountain National Park and the North American West Introduction: Coyote Creek Part One: Native Peoples Chapter 1. Emergence Raising the Rockies, Carving the Kawuneeche First Peoples and the Kawuneeche Environment Chapter 2. Endurance The People Winds of Change Fur Trades What Wolf Decreed A Peopled Wilderness Chapter 3. Dispossession Gold! Unaccompanied by Cruelty Enmity and Opportunity The People’s Game Federal Frustrations “The Utes Must Go!” The End of the End Widowed Land Part Two: Settlers Chapter 4. Miners The Rush Begins Turning the Valley to Account Nature Strikes Back Ghost Town Stories Chapter 5. Farmers Imagining and Building the Grand Ditch Behind the Ideal Homesteading a Hard Land Improving the Valley The Art of Shifting Chapter 6. Conservationists Federal Forestry The Campaign Begins Coalitions and Compromises Mixed Mandates Part Three: Feds Chapter 7. Common Ground The Genius of Squeaky Bob National Park Nature Roads to Paradise The Dudes Abide The Never Summer Boundary Extension Chapter 8. Restoring the Valley Primeval Scar to Wound, and Wound to Parasite The Culture and Nature of Dude Ranching Federalizing Settlement Landscapes Living History—and Erasing It Making Wilderness Troubled Waters Chapter 9. The Tragedy of the Willows Riparian Ecologies From Indigenous Ecologies to American Conservation Return of the Natives Lethal Control Toward Natural Regulation Making Moose The Plight of Beaver-Willow Mutualism Culling Redux Conclusion: Seeing the Forest and the Trees Tree Killers Doom, Resilience, and the Road Ahead Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

Those interested to learn how historians now write about the ever-changing dynamics among people, nature, and culture need look no further than this book. Coyote Valley defines the cutting edge of environmental history.

Pekka Hämäläinen

Andrews has both the broad vision and the penetrating focus that major historians need… Overall a compelling [book].

Times Literary Supplement - Mark Abley

Andrews has followed up his Bancroft Prize–winning Killing for Coal with an exquisitely wrought portrait of an out-of-the-way place that must be central to our understanding of the American West’s past, present, and future: the headwaters of the Colorado River in what today is Rocky Mountain National Park. Coyote Valley is brilliant and beautiful, a must-read for anyone interested in the complex history of the nation’s iconic landscapes.

Ari Kelman

In this smart and ambitious book, Thomas G. Andrews tries to reconcile large and small by focusing on the Kawuneeche Valley of Colorado (Coyote Valley, as translated from Arapaho), a part of Rocky Mountain National Park… The many successes and occasional shortcomings of Andrews’s efforts underscore the challenges of mastering space and scale. More important, this book is a model for breaking down needless barriers between public history and academic history.

Journal of American History - Matthew Klingle

Andrews covers much ground—eons of time, too—from the prehistoric era to the present to offer a ‘deep history’ of a small patch of ground in the Rockies… Those with environmental concerns and others with interests in Native history will derive much from Andrews’ fine book.

Choice - P. D. Travis

In this gracefully written, insightful, deeply researched history of an under-studied part of North America, Andrews tells a story of the fracturing of an environmental order. The chronological scope and interdisciplinary breadth of the work are impressive. This is environmental history at its best.

Andrew Isenberg

Andrews’s Coyote Valley is a marvelous example of the intersection not only of agricultural and environmental history but also of public and academic history… Andrews also makes a strong case for a deep-history approach to landscape history.

Agricultural History - Joseph E. Taylor III

Those interested to learn how historians now write about the ever-changing dynamics among people, nature, and culture need look no further than this book. Coyote Valley defines the cutting edge of environmental history.

Pekka Hämäläinen