Where Does The American West Begin Out?
Where the sky seems to get bigger and bigger, where the grass gets shorter and browner
, where the air gets drier until your skin begins to tighten and your eyes begin to squint from the flood of brilliant sunlight. Nature supplies the physical conditions that we call the West a dry, droughty place that we have tried to pack with too many people. And those people never have accepted their conditions but constantly demand, "Give us more rain, give us more water." Those conditions and MBT Chapa that incessant demand constitute the West as physical and political geography.But another 'point of beginning' lies far to the east and further back in time, back in the early days of the new American republic, long before any citizens crossed the prairies or saw any deserts. There begins the West of ideas ideas conceived without any experience on the ground. Chief among those ideas was the dream of an American empire expanding well beyond the Mississippi River and someday realizing itself on the western side of the continent. On the Fourth of July, 1778, just two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, David Ramsey, a member of the Continental Congress, offered this breathtaking vision: a free, independent nation growing westward as far as it could go. He foresaw a whole "independent continent," covering all of North America, so big and so good that it would awe and inspire the whole world (Ramsey 1965, p. 185). "The remotest depths of our national frontiers," Ramsey predicted, will be transformed into agricultural fields, fabulous mines, and cities (p. 188).
"Those very spots that are now howled over by savage beasts and more savage men" will furnish raw materials for MBT Lami the world's greatest empire (p. 190). As Ramsey dreamed of a West that he would never see, his heart swelled with pride and anticipation: "What a substratum for empire!" he wrote ", compared with which, the foundation of the Macedonian, the Roman, and the British, sink into insignificance". Pause for a moment on that phrase "substratum for empire." An empire, Ramsey was saying, in order to grow and survive needs a large base in nature - a substratum of abundant forests, soils, waters, and minerals. Such wealth of natural resources is necessary for commerce to flourish, populations to increase, and power to accumulate. The greatest empires have been well endowed with all the vital resources with water, for example. Without access to plentiful water, no empire could last for long.
That dream of an American empire knowing no environmental constraints, realizing itself in the West, was what the nineteenth century scientist-explorer-conservationist John Wesley Powell set out to challenge (Figure 1). He was a full-blown patriot in his confidence in American ideals and promise, but he was also the first prominent figure to think realistically about the nature of the West, to point to its essential aridity, and to ask what that scarcity of a vital resource might imply for settlement, progress, wealth, and power. For that reason he deserves to be remembered as our greatest prophet of environmental limits, which is to say, of the limits of empire.
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