Where is the West?

For years the concept of the West, as a physical frontier, had been poorly defined. . . . Those who searched for the West during the early years of the twentieth century shared an old disillusionment. Travelers long had found fascination in looking for what they conceived to be the West—a land of cowboys, gunslingers, and “red'' Indians—only to be disappointed when they found black broadcloth suits, real estate agents, tramways, and gaslit streets. . . . [B]ut still they clung to the dream that there must be a virgin country yet to conquer somewhere in the vast distance that stretched toward the Pacific. . . .

It became increasingly popular, particularly among academics, to say that the West began somewhere in the vicinity of the ninety-eighth to the hundredth meridian, where annual rainfall diminished to about twenty inches a year, a figure below which scientists and others defined the countryside as arid or at least semiarid. Because the lack of moisture determined the economy that could be pursued—stockraising, or such frontier crops as wheat—and because those who engaged in these followings looked and acted in the manner that easterners thought westerners should, it was concluded that such a place must be the West. . . .

But equally open to question was the matter of where the West ended. The Pacific Ocean certainly ought to have supplied a definitive stopping point, but here again the West as a state of mind intervened. The Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades curtained off a West Coast people who had developed an economic and cultural empire of their own. They enjoyed greater rainfall, raised different crops than did those who farmed farther east, looked seaward in their thinking, and came to constitute a separate if somewhat provincial society that was more eastern than western, if one accepts the “frontier'' as a way of life. . . . In the words of Wallace Stegner, when one drives eastward from Oregon or Washington, “you . . . drive into the West.”

Exclusion of the Pacific [coast] made things easier for those who demanded a geographic definition of the West. It has been argued that the vast stretch of America extending from Canada to Mexico and from the high plains to the coast ranges constitutes an entity of a kind. While there are sharp differences of temperature, terrain, and local custom within it, there are some threads that draw these states together, the principal one being the lack of rainfall.

Beyond aridity, it has been said that the area’s economy is more directly influenced by environment than is that of any other American area. The shape of the land determines the location of agriculture, of irrigation possibilities, of timber resources, of mining locations, of transportation routes, of recreational feasibility and its commercialization. . . .

^{Source: Athearn, Robert G. The Mythic West. University Press of Kansas, 1986. 16-20.}