A Letter from Patty

Faculty Director and Chair of the Board

For decades, the West has been a very urbanized region, with its population concentrated in cities and suburbs. And yet its image in popular thinking - and certainly in Western movies, paintings, novels, and memoirs - remains very, very rural. Really, ultra-rural.

One might call this a contradiction, a paradox, or a mystery. Whatever you call it, this curious pattern of thought has big consequences.

So a talented University of Colorado undergraduate, Josh Reznick, and I are going to figure this out. We will do our best to give this contradiction its clearest definition, to trace the origins of this paradox, and to reduce this mystery by vigorously applying our collective wits to the project of finding meaning in a thought-provoking set of case studies.

And of all interesting and unexpected allies in wrestling with this puzzle, we have enlisted as our teammates a select group of faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This remarkable opportunity comes to the Center of the American West through an invitation to speak in the distinguished seminar series in the MIT History Department on "Environmental and Agricultural History." A tolerant group of wide-ranging curiosity, the organizers of the series accepted the title I proposed for my presentation: "How the Real West Became - and Stayed - the Rural West: Literature, Open Spaces, and the Eclipse of the City."

Ordinarily, giving a research-oriented lecture at another university takes a professor away from his or her students. Thanks to the generosity of Linda and Clancy Herbst, and the Elizabeth Hoffman Scholars Program that they created, the process takes a different course for us at the Center. Rather than separating undergraduates from the Center's projects in research and outreach, we can give them a place right at the heart of those projects.

As Hoffman Scholars, students affiliated with the Center of the American West accompany me on a variety of outings. I have taken students with me to the Powder River Basin, to tour sites of natural gas development and to help me mediate a discussion among ranchers, federal officials, and fossil fuel producers; I have profited from the good company and thoughtful comments of two very bright, very observant students who joined me at a recent conference in Salt Lake City on the current workings of the Colorado River Compact of 1922. On all these occasions, the students get to see firsthand what they have been reading and talking about in classrooms, and I get to benefit from fresh and innovative perspectives.

And so Josh Reznick and I needed case studies to allow us to examine the persistence of the rural image of the West. How, we found ourselves wondering, do the Western senators and representatives of the early twenty-first century portray their origins and relationships to their homes? A week later, Josh was back with his most interesting findings. Many of the West's senators had, presented themselves as ranchers and farmers taken away from their treasured homelands to serve in a distant metropolis. It is 2007, and the West's highest elected representatives still cultivate images as plucky Jeffersonian yeomen or (probably somewhat more effective in campaign literature) as hardy cowboys.

At MIT, as I do my best to explore the reasons why it is so hard for those who love the West to think realistically about the relationship between rural and urban communities, I will yield the floor and Josh will take a few moments to present his illuminating Congressional case studies of how the Rural West remains the Real West. Through this collaboration, Josh's education will be advanced.

And so will mine.

Yours,

Patty Limerick