Owns the West? By William

¶ … owns the West? By William Kittredge: Reflection

Who owns the West?" The simple answer is "all of us," writes author William Kittredge at the beginning of his historical and personal memoir Who Owns the West. But who is meant by 'us' -- all Americans, all human beings, all people who have roots in the region, or all species? Ownership of the American West is a complicated question, given the history of the relationship of settlers to Native Americans, the relationship of farmers to the land that they alternately try to master yet are dependant upon, and the self-concept of modern 'Westerners.' The West represents an infinite American landscape of progress and a great American tradition of absolute freedom from the law.

Although cinematic Westerns have declined in popularity, the mythology of the West lives on and inspires passionate debate. The book's provocative title is deliberately ambiguous and it suggests that Westerners like Kittredge are still striving to understand themselves and make peace with the land. Do they own the land or merely inhabit the land, renting it from nature? Within the cover of the text lies a series of tales that weave memoir and essay and remind the reader of the unique, yet quintessentially American nature of the West along with the fact that industrialized farming has not always served the soil or economy of Western America very well.

The book is structured along the lines of three essays, encompassing different views of the West, and different aspects of the author's relationship with the West. In "Heaven on Earth" Kittredge's only half-ironically titled story of his youth paints a picture of him bound to the land, loving it and hating it, remembering it as a paradise of freedom yet buying canned goods while disciplining the soil day and night, because his family had no time to grow crops they could eat. But although man's domination over nature is an important theme of the book so is the author's love for the image of the lonesome cowboy. He writes that the 19th century confidence in the power of the horse lasted until around "the spring of 1946" when his grandfather traded in some of his two hundred matched teams for John Deere tractors, the first sign in Kittredge's lifetime of the great changes he would witness in technological innovations in farming (19) Improved technology and progress was accepted if it furthered the goal of enhancing industrialized agriculture.

Seemingly on every page, Kittredge struggles with his conflicting feelings and memories. He acknowledges the West's dangers of a boom or bust economy, eroding mountains, dying farms, the false egalitarianism of 'good old boys racism,' the history of semi-genocidal racism against Native Americans, even though Westerners love to imagine the West is open to everyone. He still enjoys his memories -- such as that of seeing a young, beautiful girl he used to ride the school bus with, still living and working the land, fifty years later, after returning to the place where he was born (28; 34). In the section entitled "Lost Cowboys and Other Westerners" Kittredge writes of being taught to ride at age six by his father, and marvels at the empathy and compassion, freedom and discipline -- and hard drinking -- he sees in the local 'characters' of his boyhood and current home. Yet many of these same types of farmers rejected Kittredge as a traitor after he grew sickened by the colonization of the soil and eventually allowed the family farm to become a wildlife refuge. It sickens them to see "their homeland" turned "into a preserve for wild beasts; they are understandably angry and humiliated. They think the environmentalists value the goddamned buffalo more than they value the sacrifices of their people" (50).