West, The. The American West is both a place and a state of mind, and the two are not easily disentangled, since no agreement exists about either its geographic boundaries or its cultural meaning. Perhaps no region of the United States has inspired so many novels,
films,
television programs, and
advertising images. Even the modern built environment is often tailored to fit popular stereotypes of the West as it “ought to be,” to evoke dramatic nineteenth‐century events rather than the more prosaic present, or to attract tourist dollars—a major source of income in many western states. Despite a prevailing association of the West with rugged
individualism, the region has long depended on the federal government for public‐land management,
railroad subsidies,
hydroelectric power projects, and billions in
Cold War defense appropriations.
Geographically, the West begins at the
Mississippi River—or perhaps at the ninety‐eighth meridian, which bisects Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Dakotas and marks the point at which the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches, the minimum necessary to sustain crop
agriculture. It ends at the Pacific coast—or perhaps it also encompasses
Alaska and
Hawai'i. Along with
California and the noncontinguous Alaska and Hawai'i, the land west of the ninety‐eighth meridian includes the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho); the
Rocky Mountains (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado); the Great Basin (Nevada, Utah); the
Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma); and the Great Plains (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas). Encompassing nearly 2.5 million square miles, this region in 1990 was home to some eighty million people, about a third of the total U.S. population.
A common attribute of much of the West is its aridity, and it is the arid West that figures most prominently in fictional descriptions. The sagebrush and imposing mesas and buttes of the Great Basin and the giant saguaro cacti of the Sonoran Desert define the West of countless Hollywood films and the novels of Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, and others. Most arid of all is California's bone‐dry Death Valley. Other parts of the West are wet and even lush, however. These include—in addition to Alaska and Hawai'i—Northern California, the western slopes of Oregon and Washington, and various high mountain ranges. Parts of Washington's soggy Olympia Peninsula sometimes receive in excess of 180 inches of rain annually.
Nor does uniform population density characterize the West. To be sure, the region includes sparsely populated Wyoming and Montana, which conform to popular frontier stereotypes, and some western counties still tally fewer than two persons per square mile. But the West also includes California and Texas, the nation's two most populous states, and some of America's largest cities, including
Los Angeles,
San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, and Houston.
Certainly this is a region of scenic beauty, including Oregon's Mount Hood; Washington's Mount Rainier and Puget Sound; and the stark beauty of New Mexico, a mecca for artists. Here is the world's oldest national park,
Yellowstone (mostly in Wyoming), as well as the
Grand Canyon (Arizona),
Yosemite (California), and Glacier (Montana).
Historically, the West has been a crossroads of cultures. Numerous Native American nations were already in place when Spanish explorers and settlers arrived from Mexico. From the east came peoples from the empires of England and France and, after the 1780s, from the new United States. From Asia arrived Chinese and later Japanese, eventually followed by Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese.
African Americans came as
cowboys and soldiers in the nineteenth century and as urban‐industrial workers in the twentieth. Heavy and sustained
immigration from Mexico and Central America made
Hispanic Americans a substantial component of the population in many parts of the West by the late twentieth century. The encounters of ethnic and racial groups were not always harmonious, as
Indian wars, racial violence, and Euro‐American hostility to Hispanics and Asians attest. But ethnic diversity has unquestionably shaped the region's distinctive social and cultural flavor.
The West and its peoples have frequently been transformed into commodities in films and as names of trucks, automobiles, and other products. The cigarette industry's “Marlboro Man” is a hard‐bitten Western cowboy. Commodities of a more traditional sort—grain, fruit, lumber, minerals, livestock, dairy products, fisheries, and wine—formed the backbone of the western economy for two centuries and remain important. The twentieth century brought a multibillion‐dollar film and entertainment industry in Southern California; giant aircraft and aerospace industries in California, Washington, and Texas; a
gambling empire in Nevada; oil and natural‐gas production in Oklahoma and Texas; and the electronics and computer giants of California's Silicon Valley as well as Washington, Colorado, and Texas. Higher education, including major research universities and networks of community colleges, characterizes the twentieth‐century West as well. Indeed, it is perhaps no single characteristic, but rather its startling divergences and juxtapositions—geographic, demographic, cultural, and economic—that best define the modern West.
See also
Agriculture;
Airplanes and Air Transport;
Asian Americans;
Computers;
Gold Rushes;
Incarceration of Japanese Americans;
Indian History and Culture;
Literature, Popular;
Lumbering;
Mining;
Petroleum Industry;
Spanish Settlements in North America;
Tourism.
Bibliography
Henry Nash Smith , Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 1940.
Michael P. Malone and and Richard W. Etulain , The American West: A Twentieth‐Century History, 1989.
Richard White , “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, 1991.
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West, 1994.
William E. Riebsame, ed., Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, 1997.
Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West, 1998.
Robert V. Hine and and John M. Faragher , The American West: A New Interpretive History, 2000.
Andrew Isenberg , The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920, 2000.
Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes
