The Real West: Wyoming at Century
A Personal View
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
We seemed to be existing in a permanently diffused light that made the peaks seem to be covered with a fine and lustrous silver dust so that they appeared both imperturbable and immutable. The wind sounded like a continual sighing from a doomed person, as though that person had been fated to carry without end a lasting but heroic burden. Around us there were great, billowing, white sails of snow, so that we probably appeared to be unattached to any firmament, as though we had entered some empyrean sphere. It appeared to us that we were being allowed to have glimpses of a possibly real and possibly endless insubstantiality. This is not an unusual situation in January on the southern slope of the Wind River Range, although a disappointing one, since we knew then that we were not going to spend any of the New Year week with our friends in Atlantic City. Later, my wife, Buellah, and I toasted ourselves and the New Year with a glass of Korbel brut, bid the New Year a laconic, "Hello," and went to bed. Living in the West and being in a winter storm is today as common as in past centuries. Today, as the old century ends and the new one begins, the glimpses of the future we have through the swirling currents are tenuous ones, shrouded in fugitive controversies, altering phantasmally the already insubstantial future of the West as forces and attitudes strive for control of the land and its resources. There are many aspects of the West as we have known it this past 20th Century that are going to be changed, and probably drastically, economically and culturally. Resource extractors, environmentalists, the tourism/outdoor recreation industry people and public land livestock grazers throughout the West are vying for the land. Those four great movements are colliding now in the West, and as much as all of them prattle about talking things over, it is much too obvious that their goals are different and that, in the end, probably money will make the difference as to who controls the both public land and private land in the West. Of course, the new people also could make a difference, and they are moving to the West from every other area of the United States, not necessarily to work but to retire and live, barely aware of the fact that they are changing not just the culture but also the country - the land - and actually destroying by their act of development what they have come here to live with. The end is obscure now at this changing of the century mark. The West is perched on its own slope, its cant hazardous, its tack hesitant in the changing temper. When this old 20th Century started in the West, the stagecoach ran from Laramie to Lander, and then a person either rode horseback or walked to Atlantic City. Today, the highway and the road from the highway are paved. I have a copy of a photograph of Atlantic City, Wyoming, that was taken in 1884 from the top of the small, rock outcrop that dominates our property. I took a photograph of the town from that rock in 1992, and just about the only difference between the two pictures is that in the recent one a car is sitting in the middle of the road, while in the 1884 photo there is a horse and wagon sitting in the road. The town (Sometimes when I use that term to describe the collection of buildings perched on the slope, people look at me as though they had heard only a part of a message, and it is obvious that their definition of a town is not necessarily equivalent with mine. This is not meant to reflect negatively upon either myself or them. It only means that my experiences probably have been different from theirs, or that I happen to be excessively territorial concerning my slope.) flows ominously downhill, as though the land were becoming tired beyond an ability, and some of the town appears as if a part of the land already had succumbed to gravity and already had carried some of the buildings down to Rock Creek, which flows quickly through the middle of the town. Sometimes Atlantic City looks like a town of toy structures carelessly scattered and forgotten, while other times it appears remotely serene, as though a sympathetic hand had tried to smooth it. Actually, The town was rolled like dice along Rock Creek, and, in that respect, mirrors the first miners who spread down stream panning and sluicing for the gold that still is rampant in the small stream. Only later when all the stream was claimed did the miners and buildings straggle up the draws and onto the benches.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Although most of the West is moving quietly into the 21st Century, writer Tom Bishop thinks that in many ways Wyoming hasn’t left the 19th Century. That can be good and that can be not so good. Bishop takes the reader along with him as he plans his new retirement house in a small, Wyoming, mountain town, and he also tells the reader why the Real West is the way it is, and why it is liable to remain the way it is, good or bad. He relates the struggle between the opposing forces for control of the land, and he writes about the wildlife becoming an economic pawn in the struggle for human livelihoods. He takes time to write about the social, cultural, and political changes that have and have not taken place in the past 20th Century. He also takes the reader with him into the Mercantile for a beer during Happy Hour and allows the reader to share in the conversations with the locals. The Real West is a personal diary of how people today live in the Equality State.
About the Author
Tom Bishop was born into a Western ranch family and grew up working for ranchers on the North Slope of Laramie Peak, but being a cowboy didn’t last. Bishop eventually became a public school teacher and coach, spending thirty years in education. In addition to teaching, he also spent thirty years as a national magazine and newspaper freelance outdoor writer. Today, Bishop makes his home in Atlantic City, Wyoming (pop. 57) because, "It looks and feels like so much of the West did when I was young, before it was discovered and became industrialized and populated following the Second World War." Retired, he now spends most of his time roving through the mountains, deserts, and plains looking for the next trout stream.