It was a symbolic as well as physical tying together of the bustling east and still-forboding west.  After all, what before had been defined as unknown and elusive, as uncharted territory, was now within reach of the “Iron Horse.”  The barrier between east and west was gone. You no longer had to change your boots, your attitude, and your whole outlook when you went west, because you no longer had to change trains.  The spine was in place, the flesh of settlement soon to follow.

Since then, various such skeletal systems have continued to tie the nation’s far reaches together.  The Interstate Highway System, prompted by President Eisenhower, snaked an entire stateside system of roads across the continent.  Phone lines uncoiled between coasts, followed by satellite signals and, most recently, the Internet.  By now connecting the dots not only is no big deal, it’s a way of life for businesses, travelers, and other citizens of the global village.  The unknown has disappeared, networks of transportation and communication draped over it.

Two phenomena in particular helped suck the soul out of the west, Timmerman says. One was the transition from family farms to corporate megafarms.  As corporations gradually annexed farms that had been settled and farmed by generations, the displaced families congealed in the west’s budding metropolises.  The distinct identity of the west followed them. 

As the cities grew, regionalization would also absorb the spirit of the west. The webs of highways, phone lines, and the Internet saw the west collapse into regions rather than retain a unified identity.  It was chopped up into areas and states, and each began to form a clearer picture of itself rather than bleeding seamlessly into its neighbor.  The Pacific would a distinct entity from the Southwest, Texas from the Rockies.  Now, says Timmerman, the cues come from the cities. “The generation coming of age at the turn of the century takes its identity from the great cities – from St. Louis to San Antonio, from Phoenix to Salt Lake City, from Kansas City to Denver, from the western coast in a line nearly unbroken from San Diego to Seattle.”

One man in search of the new western identity is Herb Drinkwater.  As Scottsdale mayor he was known for his cowboy boots, Stetson hat, and invariable greeting of “Howdy.”  His slogan for Scottsdale was “The West’s Most Western Town.” Drinkwater retired this year, and voters replaced him with a cell-phone-toting professional female Held says embodies “the newer, grown-up Scottsdale.”

Drinkwater says the western character must now be internalized as satellite dishes spring up across the west. “It’s not just what we are, it’s in our minds, in what we believe,” he says. “It’s how we treat people. I see a tremendous compassion for other people that I don’t see in other places.” 

Whereas the Western was predicated on the magic of a monolithic West, Timmerman says this regionalization and internalization has erased any singular idea of western literature.  He cites novelist Raymond Carver, who lives and sets his stories in the west but does not view the setting as integral or related to his works.  “I don’t see them having such a specific place. Most of the stories, it seems to me, could take place anywhere.  So I suppose it’s an emotional landscape I’m interested in.” 

Timmerman sums up the west in transition, citing “shrinking space”and the “diminishment of a sense of mystery in the west,” which leads to literature “marked less by any limits of western origins and more by a sense of global community; less by space and more often by regional identities; less by a traditional, white male domination and more often by the greater appearance of female and ethnic voices.”  The same holds true for the west as a whole.

The west at this turn of the century is profoundly different from the west at the last one.  After viewing these changes in the land, in treatment of Native Americans, in the frontier, and in the character of the west, one must resist the temptation to begin uninterrupted laments over all the change.  After all, one cannot summon nostalgia for the days when travel was dangerous and communication painstaking, when Native Americans were considered savages and women were laborers, when vigilante justice was not considered a contradiction in terms. 

But it would be foolish to ignore the place in our country’s history -- and the effect on our nation’s identity -- of the west’s metamorphosis from frontier to just a block in the global village.  What continues to dissolve isn’t just the distinction between east and west, but the soul of the land itself, the dignity of the Native American people, the enticing magic of the frontier, an identity rooted in the land.  The west remains.  The Wild West has been tamed, deflated, sliced, drowned out by cell phones, stuffed with rubber gloves, or has simply disappeared altogether.

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