THE GREAT DIVIDE

Middling cultural history of the continent-shaping, and history-shaping, landform.

The two-mile-high Rocky Mountains, argues Montana natural-history writer Ferguson (Shouting at the Sky, 1999, etc.), are “as close as America has come to an archetypal landscape—a region that, although far removed from the core of society, reflected much about our most persistent longings.” Never mind that advocates of just about every other American region—the South, the Great Plains, California—have made similar claims for the archetypal supremacy of their chosen place; those great mountains incontestably figure in plenty of books, movies, musical compositions, paintings, and private dreams. Ferguson begins, unpromisingly, with a slide-viewer geographical tour of the region from Montana to northern New Mexico, which comprises very different cultures and histories; along the way, he offers a lackluster look at the place of mountains in the imagination. Happily, he also condenses into a few pages a complex geological history that would have taken John McPhee a volume or two to lay out. Ferguson has a fine appreciation for the feel of the Mountain West and the sometimes tetchy sensibilities of its inhabitants—case in point a Montana politico who, upset at Redbook magazine’s use of the phrase “Big Sky Country” for the whole of the region, wrote a letter to the editor reminding readers that “only four times has the American Army ever been truly licked, and all four times it was Montanans who administered that threshing.” Another high point is Ferguson’s look at how the 1960s counterculture came to see the Rockies as a haven, and, en masse, transformed dying old mining towns into oases of the hipster sensibility that even today seem a little different from the mainstream.

Still, Ferguson’s slender narrative just doesn’t add up to much, and is certainly not in a literature enriched by the likes of Wallace Stegner, Bernard De Voto, Ivan Doig, James Welch, and company.