Ed Quillen

My father, who turns 81 in about a week, has lived in the West all his life, and he swears we have no such season as spring, at least not in the sense of a gradual warming and greening as the climate makes a gentle transition from winter to summer. “One day you get a foot of snow,” he remarks, “and a week later, the trees are leafed out. There’s no season. It just happens all at once.”

That certainly seems to be true this year. The branches were bare just a week or so ago, and now the lilacs appear ready to bloom. Granted, I live at 7,000 feet above sea level, where the seasons can be expected to vary from the norm, but still, the whole concept of “spring,” as the textbook interval between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice, seems to fit us not at all. We pretty much jump from winter to summer without much in between.

But saying that we have but three seasons — winter, fall, and summer — seems much too simple. And the old joke that we have only two seasons — winter and visiting relatives — is even more an oversimplification, despite its ring of truth.

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Ed Quillen

Recently I had to drive across South Park, a vast valley rimmed by mountains in the middle of Colorado. Something stuck out that I hadn’t noticed on previous excursions: half-a-dozen new towers to provide service to cellular telephone users.

Or at least I think that’s what they were. For all I know, the towers could have been connected to some new top-secret Homeland Security intruder detection system, or maybe they were part of an array of antennas searching for intelligent life in the universe.

Most of South Park is in Park County. A few years ago, the county’s Board of Adjustment denied a request for a cell-phone tower because it would interfere with “key vistas” in an open-space zone.

The company offered to build a fake silo around the 90-foot tower, on the assumption that this would fit well in a rural area. The board countered that a silos might fit in dairy country, but not in grazing country like South Park.

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Ed Quillen

Art Goodtimes created quite a stir a few days ago when he announced that Club 20 should henceforth be known as Club 19. Art’s been a friend for years. He’s a poet and for the past decade or so, he has served as a San Miguel County commissioner. And as far as I know, he’s the only elected Green Party officeholder in Colorado.

He was also an officer in Club 20, which bills itself as “the voice of the Western Slope” in Colorado. Its membership ranges from individuals and corporations to counties and two Ute nations. That’s a diverse group; just the counties range from Democratic upscale resort zones like Pitkin County (its seat is Aspen) to Republican cattle-and-mining areas like Moffat County (Craig).

Basically, Art said the extractive energy industry had taken over Club 20, and it no longer represented the interests of places like Telluride and San Miguel County. The best account I’ve read is on Colorado Confidential, and there’s no point in repeating it here.

When Club 20 started in 1954, its main goal was better roads on the Western Slope of Colorado. There were actually 21 counties involved, but “Club 21 sounded too much like a night spot,” then executive director Greg Walcher told me once, “so they made it Club 20.”
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Evelyn Schlatter

I’m from rural Colorado, but I’ve lived in four urban areas, three of which are in the American West. I’ve traveled extensively as well, and something that always strikes me is the different “feel” of different places and how hard it can be to carve a place for yourself in an urban area, especially if you don’t know anybody. Or maybe you have cultural and ethnic roots that aren’t urban-based. It was hard for me–a white, middle-class woman–moving alone to cities where I didn’t know anyone. But what must that be like for people who come from, say, reservations, and from cultures that emphasize family ties that extend over generations?

The National Urban Indian Family Coalition just released a report titled “Urban Indian America: The Status of American and Alaska Native Children and Families Today.”

I’m particularly interested in how urbanization affects people whose historical and cultural roots may not be “cosmopolitan” and may not be “white.” As a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, I worked as an editor at the New Mexico Historical Review and one of my colleagues who worked there with me is Indian. She also worked at the Albuquerque Indian Center while she was going to school and raising a child.

Through her, I learned a bit about how cities can create a sense of isolation among Native peoples, and how indigenous history and culture is often rooted in landscape, rather than concrete. My colleague talked about how the Indian Center provided a focal point for Indian peoples in Albuquerque, and that it helped many retain a sense of identity in an often faceless urban environment. And she told me that the Center worked with other urban Indian centers, networking and trying to develop resources for a growing Native population in urban areas. So I read this recent study with interest, wanting to see what the NUIFC found and what it might propose to better connect urban to rural.

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Ed Quillen

About 15 years ago, High Country News published a long article of mine. Its working title was “Is Denver Necessary?”

Therein I argued that Denver had developed, then essentially gutted, a vast hinterland of about 300,000 square miles. The city had once seen the countryside as a source of raw materials for its industries and as a market for its products, and it invested in the hinterland. But since about 1970, the hinterland was basically a source of water for continued suburban development in the metro area.

There was more to it than that, though. The big picture was that the Mountain West had been developed as part of a Chicago empire after the Civil War. That is, the bucolic scene of steers in a mountain meadow was an extension of the packing plants of the Windy City, just as the rancher ordering from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue was part of the same extended urban system, all linked by railroads with names like “Chicago & Northwestern,” “Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific” and “Chicago, Burlington & Quincy.”

And in the 1990s, I argued, the West was coming under the dominance of a different city, Los Angeles. Instead of producing tangible products like timber, beef, and minerals, we were promoting intangibles like amenity lifestyles and quality recreational experiences.

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Evelyn Schlatter

This past Saturday, the Absolut vodka company issued a formal apology for an ad it ran geared toward its Mexican markets. Absolut is known for its often edgy and creative ads, but this one brought calls for boycotts from U.S. consumers.

So what’s the big stink?

Syndicated conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, a blogger who also writes for Fox News, dubbed the ad “Absolut Reconquista.” The ad shows an 1830s-era map of the United States with the American Southwest as part of Mexico, which is what the boundaries were prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which set the present-day border between the U.S. and Mexico in the wake of the U.S. and Mexican War (you’ll see it as “Mexican-American War” as well). The slogan across the map is “In An Absolut World.”

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Felice Pace

Few in the West are unaware that the federal crackdown on immigration has had an impact on western industries. The March 3rd edition of HCN, for example, included this comment on the situation from Bill Crooke’s essay for Writers on the Range:“There are upsides to the employment crunch (in Cody, Wyo.): It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate business community has to keep raising wages and incentives.”

Crooke may have been thinking more about the energy boom, but the loss of immigrant labor is affecting wages and employment not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Even Silicon Valley is feeling the pinch. But the largest impacts are on low wage service industries and agriculture. From California to Colorado and Arizona to Idaho growers are wondering who will pick the fruit, prune the vines and hoe the weeds while motel owners wonder who will clean the rooms and restaurateurs are in search of cooks and dish washers. .

Another western industry which has “suffered” as a result of the immigration crackdown is the ski industry.

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Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Northern New Mexico is rich with tradition and beauty — pinon nut gathering, pilgrimages to a church known for its healing powers, dramatic landscapes captured on canvas by Georgia O’Keeffe. But another, darker tradition scars the lives of its residents — heroin addiction, at a rate four times the national average.

The New York Times just ran a story examining this drug plague. The article quotes Angela Garcia, an anthropologist who in 2006 wrote a deeply personal story for HCN about the same topic (”Land of Disenchantment” won that year’s Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award for reporting on drug and alcohol use). Angela described the messy and painful lives of addicts and their needless deaths from overdoses, and traces the drug use to a profound sense of loss among the Hispanic people of the region, whose families were pushed off their historical land grant properties more than a century ago:
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Evelyn Schlatter

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign recently announced it was hiring a liaison either in or around Delta County to “get out the vote” in this “under-repped” and “under-served” part of Colorado.

“Dang right we want to tap every vote we possibly can on the West-Side Slope,” said Noah Waye, a spokesman for the Obama campaign. “We want to demonstrate that our guy is familiar with issues important to Colorado and Western voters and that’s why we’re looking for a super-rep to take the reins and lead us out of the corral.”

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Marty Durlin

Online Editor

There are more than 800 geographic landforms in the U.S. with the word “squaw” in them, according to a piece by Hadley Robinson for Gelf. Native Americans in 1999 asked the U.S. Board of Geographic Names (BGN) to change all of them. In 1963, the BGN changed all place names with “nigger” to “negro” (143 of them), and in 1974, all “Jap” names to “Japanese.” But in the case of squaw, although some say the term is a perversion of the French word for “vagina,” or a shortened form for the same term from the Mohawk word “ojiskwa” — others say it means simply “woman,” and there’s no consensus on what word to exchange.

Squaw Peak near Phoenix (2600 feet), once known as Squaw Tit Peak, was renamed after Lori Piestewa in 2003 by the Arizona Board of Geographic and Historic Names. The board waived its five-year waiting period at the request of Gov. Janet Napolitano to honor Piestewa, a Hopi who was the first woman in the U.S. armed forces killed in the Iraq war and the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving with the U.S. military.

With no national mandate from the BNG to change “squaw” names in a wholesale manner, local governments and state name boards have the decision-making responsibility. (In protest of state legislation in Minnesota to change all “squaw” names, officials of Lake County offered to change Squaw Creek to Politically Correct Creek.)

The BGN will decide April 10 whether to officially change Phoenix’s Squaw Peak to Piestewa Peak.

Ed Quillen

Arizona Sen. John McCain may have sewn up the Republican nomination, but he still has many critics in his own GOP who accuse him of infidelity to the party on issues that range from immigration to campaign finance reform. Further, they complain, he gets kid-glove treatment from the fawning Biased Liberal Media, because he is portrayed as a “maverick Republican” rather than, say, as a “renegade Republican.”

Both “maverick” and “renegade” denote someone who doesn’t go with the flow, but their connotations are certainly different. “Maverick” implies independence, whereas “renegade” suggests betrayal.

The words we choose do matter, especially in a political season. That’s why the campaigns employ “spin” specialists — to apply favorable phrasing to a given event. Thus the recent actions of the Federal Reserve can be described as either “a bailout for billionaires” or an effort “to maintain the viability of our capital markets.”

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Marty Durlin

Online Editor

A report by the National Association of County and City Health Officials on big cities in the U.S., published in November, shows that Las Vegas leads urban areas in suicides with 35 per 100,000, followed by Colorado Springs with 26. Tucson is third with 25 per 100,000.

The West as a region leads the nation in suicides. Only California has a rate less than the national average of 11 per 100,000. Montana is first with 22 per 100,000, followed by Nevada with 19.9, New Mexico and Wyoming with 17.7, Colorado with 17.1, Idaho with 16.0 and Arizona with 15.9. These statistics are from 2004, but the West has led in this sad race for years.

Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the U.S., at nearly twice the rate of homicide. It is the third leading cause for people younger than 24. White males are more likely to kill themselves than any other demographic, and firearms are the most common method.

The March 31 issue of High Country News features a story by award-winning writer Ray Ring on suicide in the West. An essay by Diane Sylvain on the same topic is online.

Felice Pace

Ed Quillen’s Writers on the Range essay in the March 3rd HCN - “We’re in the land of Lincoln” - is not only erudite and well written, it is also a public service.

Americans are notoriously ahistorical in outlook. Westerners are often even worse - many of us believe outrageous myths about our past which function to hide not only past injustices but also current inequities and the likely consequences of current decisions. So anyone who provides a truly historical perspective is worthy of praise. LET’S SEE MORE ESSAYS WHICH PROVIDE WESTERN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES!

There is one problem with Quillen’s essay, however. He fails to sufficiently identify one of Lincoln’s most questionable western legacies - the railroad grants. During the 1860s Lincoln and the Republicans provided the big railroad corporations with generous land grants. The seminal law was the Pacific Railway Act signed into law by Lincoln on July 1, 1862.

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