The Presence of Space in Richard Hugo's Montana Poems

D e fin in g “T h e W e st”—along with providing some occasional embellish­ m ent— has long preoccupied speculators, geographers, and artists. Its bound­ aries have proven to be im perm anent, its meteorology unpredictable, and its history imprecise. “Much energy has been spent in an effort to determ ine where the West begins,” once com m ented Bernard DeVoto.1 The m an whom DeVoto described as “the first American geopolitician,”2 William Gilpin, certainly expended considerable m ental energy in his work o f 1860, The Central Gold Region, when he declared the entire Mississippi Basin a pastoral Canaan.3 O f course the continental vision o f this pseudo-seer was as ambitious as it was inaccurate, but explorer-scientist John Wesley Powell was only partially successful in refuting the fatuous philosophy o f Gilpin. In his 1878 Report on the Arid Region he attem pted to inform the public o f what it did not want to hear: the land between the 100th m eridian and the Rocky M ountains—“the Plateau Province,” as he called it—was a desert.4 Inade­ quate rainfall notwithstanding, the hom esteaders and the cattlem en poured into the region as the rain seldom did, so that when artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell captured on canvas the lifestyles o f its inhabi­ tants a new elem ent was added to the definition: cowboy rom ance.5 This theme was perpetuated and strengthened in the Beadle Dime Novels o f the 1880s and ’90s,6 and still later in the works o f Zane Grey—so much so that “the W estern” has become a distinct, if no t highly regarded, literary genre. And though as early as 1917 Russell wrote, “The West is dead, my friend,” the West qua W estern—that is to say, the cowboy m yth—prevails today.7 The resource-rich, boom town West, complains Southwestern writer Edward Abbey, is still misperceived as “a vast, grand but em pty stage w hereon cavort, from time to time, the caricatures o f m yth and legend, noble cow­ boys and ecological Indians, sentim ental gunfighters and whores with vagin­ as o f pure gold.”8 The history o f defining “the W est,” in short, has been a history o f myth-making and myth-shattering. Its bare-bones definition, nowfamiliar, almost formulaic, and not quite satisfactory, is offered by William Least Heat Moon in Blue Highways: A Journey Into America: