BOOK REVIEWS & NOTICES
Bridging the Distance: Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. xiv + 296 pp. Paper, $30.00
The history of the rural West remains distant and essentially unknown to most Americans, historians included. Generally, the term fosters thoughts of settlers, lumber camps, and mining towns. It is, of course, more than this both topically and analytically. David Danbom’s essay collection does much to enlighten scholars, students, and aficionados of western history about the rural West. The contributors have focused on the history of the latetwentieth and early-twenty-first century rural West regarding economic, social, political, and environmental developments. This is not an agricultural history although several essays deal with agriculture in several contexts. Danbom, the leading historian of rural American history, has edited a collection of papers derived from a conference held in 2012 at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. The participants were invited to identify the challenges of the rural West and to suggest ways to address them, the latter assignment taking some of the writers away from the domain of historians. Even so, the result is an impressive collection of ten essays that each merit individual comment. Danbom organizes this collection into four parts, the first defining the rural West. No one can definitely say where the West begins or where or what it is precisely, although many historians have tried. Jon Luck’s essay “Finding the Rural West” provides a good place to begin by noting a culture-based regionalism. Geoff
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The second section, which deals with the importance of community, opens with Judy Muller’s “Too Close for Comfort: When Big Stories Hit Small Towns.” Muller presents an assessment of legal, ethical, and moral authority in a small town, where human dignity and rights are ignored because it is easy to avoid confronting problems with friends and neighbors. If anything, small towns are neither simple nor benign, as anyone who has lived in one will easily recognize. J. Dwight Hines’s “On Water and Wolves: Toward an Integrative Political Ecology of the ‘New’ West” argues that the rural West, with southwestern Montana as an example, is being colonized and gentrified by urban, middle-class newcomers. These newcomers have far different views about resource management, in this case water, than the long-term residents who use it for other economic purposes, such as grazing cattle rather than fishing and boating. His discussion of the good intentions and results of the National Park Service’s introduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone shows the complexity of the management of the public domain and the use of the natural environment by various publics. Burke Griggs’s “Irrigation Communities, Political Cultures, and the Public in the Age of Depletion” provides an excellent discussion of surface water and groundwater as property. Western water law is complicated, and the nineteenth-century concept of firstin-time, first-in-right does not necessarily apply today, particularly for groundwater use. Politicians and attorneys usually try to avoid dealing with the issue of groundwater as a property right. For example, when the city of Wichita, Kansas, attempted to take more groundwater for municipal purposes, nearby farmers blocked those efforts to take their property. Water as property is a complex and volatile issue in the rural West. Marc Schenker’s
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McGhee’s “Conquering Distance? Broadband and the Rural West” also helps us understand the features that constitute the region by their presence and absence.
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