[  Previous  ||  Index  ||  Next ]

From the Editor

"The West is changing," said William Kittredge, author of "Who Owns the West?" during a recent interview on the KQED radio program, "Forum."

The Old West-the West of cowboys and conquest, of open range and easy money, of Native Americans and natural wilderness, Kittredge said, is gone.

"It ended I always say, in 1946." Before then, Kittredge said, the West was still the "horseback West," until, one day, "My grandfather traded off 200 teams of matched workhorses for a whole fleet of John Deere tractors- and that was the end of the 19th century."

After that, "We were essentially into another world."

That "other world" is one that finds itself increasingly distressed by exploding growth. Parking lots and shopping malls now stand where country stores served a rural trade in hard-tack and chicken feed. Interstate 80 has become the "I-80 Corridor", squeezed north and south by the outlet stores and auto strips that serve the wastefully built developments that seem to appear overnight.

But the West, for all its vastness, is not merely a place, but a system of myths upon which all America has come to depend, a place in the mind where dreams of endless horizons and quivering redwoods still linger.

The dream too, is changing. It is a dream that must change if what is left of the land is to survive for the generations that succeed our own.

"The West is a mythology of conquest and takeover and always was," said Kittredge. But now, "We find there's nothing really left to conquer or take over... The West is settled."

In order to save what's left, said Kittredge, we must stop inhabiting a dream of "taking over," and learn to inhabit a dream of "taking care."

April Prism explores the challenges facing this new West. From the shrinking shores of San Francisco Bay, to the cowboys who find poetry in every patch of sage brush; from the new homesteaders on California's north coast, to the Native Americans fighting to save what's left of their sacred homelands, Prism focuses on the myth, and reality, of the American West.

[ Prism Online April 1996 Article Index ]

[ Top of document ]