For many of us who have located for whatever reason to the hillsides and valleys of the Wasatch Range, the journey to acquire a sense of place has led us not only to a wondrous array of outdoor pursuits but also to a cultured interior life driven by the acquisition of Western literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
For some, this means a book or two in the backpack or on the bedside table. For others, however, especially for those with insatiable appetites for interpretive history distilled to art, this search for “place” becomes a lifelong passion, with books spilling off of end tables onto shelves and finally occupying any and all available space on the horizontal plane.
Obviously, the number of titles that play into such a lifelong literary vision quest is too numerous to count. Even a survey needs parameters and a chronology that would satisfy the truly obsessed would probably have to begin with Barrier Canyon Style Utah rock art that dates as far back as 6500-5500 B.C. “Sacred Images: A Vision of Native American Rock Art” is a great jumping off point.
Jumping closer to home, “Treasure Mountain Home: Park City Revisited,” is a somewhat folksy and very well-researched history of Park City from its beginnings as prime mountain pastureland through the mining years to its emergence as one of the world’s elite winter sports destinations. A collaborative effort by Western history author and native Parkite George Thompson and longtime resident and archivist Fraser Buck, its sense of place is unmistakable and immediate.
“West From Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of Immigrant Trails Across Utah, 1846-1850,” edited by J. Robert Korns & Dale L. Morgan, revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler, is a great follow-up and much less tedious than the title might indicate.
The fiction and essays of Wallace Stegner, of course, could be plugged in just about anywhere along this journey. If fiction, as noted by playwright Edward Albee, is “fact distorted into truth,” well, Stegner is its poster child. A great anthology is the recent “Wallace Stegner’s West.”
Further along on the essays-as-art front are “The Practice of the Wild” by Gary Snyder, “The Nearby Faraway” by David Peterson, and “Desert Notes/River Notes” by Barry Lopez. “The New Desert Reader,” edited by Peter Wild, is a wonderful anthology of Western writing that includes the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Aldo Leopold, and Ann Zwinger.
Rather than getting into each particular volume individually, it’s no secret that the complete works of Western writers such as Edward Abbey and Tony Hillerman demand close scrutiny. Thomas McGuane, William Kittredge, Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Terry Tempest Williams, N. Scott Momaday, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rudolfo Anaya, Doug Peacock, Mark Spragg, Marc Reisner, and W. L. “Bud” Rusho also know a thing or two about the West as “place.”
When, not if, one’s desert journey takes him or her down to the Native American reservation lands of Arizona and New Mexico, there await many volumes worthy of both the culture and the bookshelf. It bodes well for the wannabe “Rez Rat” to have at least a passing familiarity with both the human and physical landscapes in question.
“Book of the Hopi” by Frank Waters, “Diné Bahane'” by Paul G. Zolbrod, “The Book of the Navajo” by Raymond Friday Locke, “The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy” by John R. Farella, and “The Delight Makers” by Adolf F. Bandelier should fuel any interests one may have in this area.
For those with a need to dig even deeper into the Western heart, there’s always “The Dominguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition Through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776,” “The Journals of Lewis and Clark,” “The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons” by John Wesley Powell, and “William Henry Jackson: Framing the Frontier.”
A perfect volume with which to bring this literary journey all back home is Phillip L. Fradkin’s “Sagebrush Country: Land and the American West.” Utilizing his wanderings through our pristine neighbor, the High Uintas Wilderness, Fradkin takes on the larger questions confronting our Western soul.
To say the least, the journey covered through this specific group of titles and authors from the shelves of Western lore is a good start but, for the truly passionate, only a beginning. All it takes is a few moments with any one of them to kick-start a collection perfectly suited to the reader’s individual mission of acquiring a sense of personal “place.”
Happy trails!