Essay by Ed Quillen
Western Life – December 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE CODE OF THE WEST is one of those phrases that has popped up frequently in recent years. In early November, it was the theme of the annual Headwaters Conference at Western State College in Gunnison. A couple of years ago, several Colorado counties adopted a statement of policy about rural life that they called “The Code of the West,” and we even published one that Montrose County didn’t adopt. At the moment, the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado in Boulder is collecting information for a handbook that might explain “The Code of the West” to new arrivals when it is published next year.
And I’ve probably just scratched the surface. This a hot topic right now.
This seems weird. Walt Disney once made an animated movie called Song of the South, but I’ve never heard of a Code of the South, even if that is a part of the nation with a distinctive culture, from music and food to a romantic pseudo-history featuring “the Lost Cause.”
Absent the movie, the same seems to hold for other American regions, distinctive as they may be. No Code of New England (be taciturn and speak only at the annual town meeting) has appeared on my radar, nor a Code of Texas (remember the Alamo!) or a Code of the Midwest (keep your lawn in pool-table condition).
Granted, it could be that I haven’t heard of these other regional codes because I live in the West and seldom leave. So I ran a few searches on the World Wide Web. I found dozens of mentions of Code of the West, and nothing for any other region.
If those regions can remain regions without help from written “codes,” why can’t the West?
Perhaps because Westerners feel threatened these days, being as the Interior West is the fastest-growing part of the country, and the current “culture and custom” of the West is so fragile that we’re afraid that it will shatter unless we put it down in writing.
For at least a decade, I’ve believed that in the American psyche, “the West” is a contrived and mythological landscape that just happens to sit atop a place where real people live and work. America needs a big empty place where you can go out and make your fortune or re-invent yourself, and the national culture will define one, even if the result doesn’t have much relationship to objective reality.
So if we look at the America of, say, 1870, there was “Go West, young man,” and the civilized parts of the country were awash in brochures about this vast empty land of opportunity.
Of course it wasn’t empty. It had Utes and Comanche and Kiowa, and vaqueros and pueblos and haciendas. But those inhabitants were invisible because American culture needed a big empty place.
And I think it still does. Examine any of scores of calendars that feature the West. You’ll see scenic landscapes, but you won’t see any people. Or you’ll see empty ghost towns, but no inhabited places. You’ll see fish and game animals, but no lumberjacks or miners. We’re often getting “discovered” by adventure and travel magazines, as though we didn’t exist until one of their writers stumbled upon us.
The West isn’t empty now, any more than it was in 1850 or 1650. But the American psyche needs a Big Empty, and so that need is projected onto the real landscape and reflected in the calendar imagery of an uninhabited territory.
As for what you actually find on the ground in the West, it’s often the “legacy of the pioneers.”
Many of the pioneers certainly displayed heroic qualities, but they didn’t move West to become Westerners. They wanted to build replicas of wherever they came from.
Salida is a good example, one I often cite. It’s laid out like a Midwestern T-town with the railroad depot (when it stood) dominating the end of the main commercial street. Its buildings are pretty much stock small-town American stuff, even though Salida sits only 100 miles from Taos, N.M., the adobe capital of the universe, and a place whose climate and resources are much more like Salida’s than, say, the Utica, Michigan, that Salida resembles.
Salida foliage isn’t local piñon and sagebrush. We’ve got elms and lilacs and bluegrass lawns, because the people who built the place thought that’s what should grow in yards. And if Mother Nature doesn’t provide enough water here, then build some dams and ditches.
The farmers didn’t move west to find uses for native plants like chamisa or yucca. They went west to grow familiar crops like maize and wheat, and they transformed the landscape to accommodate those crops. Ranchers didn’t raise native bison or elk; they brought in longhorns and Herefords.
THIS COULD CONTINUE indefinitely, but the point should be clear: the West didn’t make itself. The “Old West” is the result of what the invaders of 1870 wanted it to become. It is not the outcome of what the people who were already here then wanted — which was mostly to be left alone.
Suppose, for instance, that the Utes who often visited the sites of Saguache and Salida in the Shining Times observed a trickle of immigration in 1860 or so.
Then suppose they had issued a “Code of the Homeland” — that is, a guidebook that told newcomers how they were supposed to behave in Ute territory. It might have had advice like “don’t respond quickly when it’s your turn to talk, because that means you didn’t take time to think about what the previous speaker said, and that’s disrespectful.” Or “when you’re out hunting and the game is scarce, then start a forest fire and get downwind, so you can nail the critters as they run from the blaze.” Or “don’t even think about wintering hereabouts. Head for the Montrose area, where those months are usually tolerable.”
Useful advice, perhaps, but would the town promoters, railroad builders, mine developers, and the rest of the invasion have paid the slightest bit of attention? Wouldn’t they have just called for the cavalry if the Utes tried to impose their Code?
What makes us think that we’re so much smarter than the Utes that we can issue a Code of the West and assume that this era’s invaders will heed it? Wouldn’t they just call on some modern equivalent of the cavalry?
That’s one set of questions. There are others. Martha and I just had a lively discussion about one tenet which, I thought, should be in any Code of the West: Leave gates the way you found them.
That’s what I was taught by my parents, and my mom grew up on a homestead in Wyoming and she should know the etiquette of grazing country about as well as anybody does.
“But if you follow that gate rule,” Martha observed, “then the first person who doesn’t follow the rule is not only going to screw things up, but also insure that they stay screwed up, since everybody after him will leave the gate open when it should be closed, or vice-versa.”
GOOD POINT. Although, I should note that — since she’s lived in rural Colorado for most of her life — Martha automatically follows my nominated rule for the “Code of the West.” She just doesn’t think it works very well now that so many people are using backcountry roads.
So how’s a mere traveler to know whether the barbed-wire gate on some back road should be open or closed? I don’t even know how to acquire the knowledge of grazing patterns that might tell me that I should close a gate that I found open.
“You were with me when we saw a gate that had a sign,” Martha pointed out. “It said the gate should be closed from May through September, and left open the rest of the year. They could do that everywhere.”
They could. And ranchers would probably holler about how poor and oppressed they already are, and now there’s this unfunded federal mandate about putting signs on gates that sit on public roads through land, and sometime around the dawn of the 22nd century, perhaps, the signs might go up.
And I thought that “Leave gates the way you found them” was a slam-dunk component of a Code of the West.
While listening to various discussions about a Code of the West, another problem emerged. Most of the proposals concerned either rural life or small-town life — ways of life that exist in most other parts of the country.
As Martha once pointed out in a review of an anthology of writings of “Western women,” most of the accounts concerned rural life, not specifically Western life, and sounded like the stories she had heard from her grandmother who grew up in Ontario, and from various relatives who lived in Michigan.
I also hear the same things about small towns, whether they’re here in the West, or in New England or the South or the Midwest. A lot of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street still rings true, even if was written nearly 80 years ago and it was about a town in Minnesota rather than in the Rocky Mountains.
If the West were a rural place or a domain of small towns, this focus might be appropriate. But the Mountain West is one of the most urbanized parts of the United States. Arkansas and Vermont have rural populations in scattered small towns — four out of five Westerners live in Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
Does someone moving to Jefferson County, Colorado, from Arlington County, Virginia, really need to learn anything about life in the West? McDonald’s, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Denny’s, Village Inn, Super 8, Safeway, Barnes & Noble — it’s all in the West, and it runs about the same in the West as anywhere else.
I’d like to tell new arrivals to cherish our small-town enterprises where the decisions are made here, not on Wall Street. Indeed, this magazine is one such effort. But again, that’s small-town, rather than Western.
What’s distinctive about the West? Well, for one thing it’s the driest part of the country. That gives us some distinctive water law, but most newcomers are going to settle in suburbs where they have elected officials and attorneys to worry about the doctrine of prior appropriation.
THE OTHER DISTINCTIVE FEATURE of the West is public land. Our own visitors from other regions were often pleasantly surprised when we went for a ride, and then just got out and walked to look at something. “You can just do that?” they asked.
And we used to nod and say “of course we can. We can camp or hike or hunt or fish or collect rocks pretty much anywhere we want to, and if you walk more than about a hundred feet from the road, you’ll be alone.”
But it isn’t like that any more. Just to pull off the road in parts of Central Colorado, there’s a $3 parking fee. There are trail-user fees. There are restrictions on camping. You get charged to use a privy, and you can be charged if you don’t.
At the Kenosha Pass Campground these days, it says you can’t use the water pump unless you pay the campground fee. (Which gives me an idea on how Lynda La Rocca might solve her problems. Perhaps she should post a big sign in front of her house announcing that there’s a four dollar fee for parking, rest rooms, and/or water. If that doesn’t discourage unwelcome visitors, she might at least earn enough to finance a two week vacation at summer’s end.)
In short, I think a lot of our griping these days is because Colorado mountain towns were once unabashedly rural, and today they’re getting pretty suburban. Mounted deerheads and stuffed fish used to preside over our restaurant meals; the Cowbelles supplied our placemats; interior decoration in days gone by generally meant animal horns, old wagon wheels, and horse shoes; our visitors got to choose between a slightly worn, downtown hotel or a kitchy cabin court.
Now we’ve got fast food, subdivisions, and chain hotels. Some changes I like, and some changes I don’t.
And some changes I’m thoroughly ambivalent about. For example, I like the sound of a diet of eggs, hash browns, and country sausage with pancakes for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch, and steak for dinner, but I suspect it’s not a regimen suited for a computer jockey (and I find I greatly prefer indoor work with no heavy lifting). I loved the æsthetics of my battered old pickup, but the clutch in the SUV hasn’t worn out my knee, and the Blazer turns on a dime (rather than a football field). I really hate going to Wal-Mart, but I think it’s great that they sell floor mops, aspirin, and faucet fixings all in the same place; on some days, there’s nothing better than one-stop shopping.
IN SOME WAYS, I suspect that many of us are dubious about recent transitions in the West, not because of the changes without, but because of the changes within. Modern suburban life makes it all too easy to be lazy, sedentary, and auto-dependent.
But the West also used to be distinctive on account of its expanse of largely unregulated public land. And that distinction is vanishing, too. You can pay to camp and get a hiking permit on public land in Colorado, or you can pay to camp and hike on private land in Maine, which is about as far from the West as you can get on this continent.
So as far as I’m concerned, the main result of thinking about a Code of the West is depression. Whatever was distinctive about the West, and thus worth conveying to new arrivals, is vanishing.
And even if we could find matters worth conveying to immigrant Californians, why would these invaders pay any more attention to the resident population than our pioneer forebears did?
Perhaps the real Code of the West is a familiar saying: “What goes around, comes around.”
— Ed Quillen
