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The Magic of the Oldest Pueblo
Northwestern University LibraryEdward S. Curtis: Feast Day at Acoma, 1904 About a hundred years ago, footloose men and women of a certain romantic disposition discovered the American Southwest and were...
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A Vast and Terrifying Saga
John HardingAnnie Proulx near Sheridan, Wyoming, 1996 I wonder what old-time tellers of stories about the American West would make of Annie Proulx. If you told writers like Owen Wister (The Virginian)...
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Texas Chronicles
Everett CollectionCybill Shepherd in Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show, 1971 Larry McMurtry wrote his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, in 1958, when he...
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Rough Riders
Josh Haner/The New York Times/ReduxRyder Wright on a bucking horse at his family’s ranch, Milford, Utah, 2014 Joseph Brodsky wrote, “Should the world be designated a genre, its main stylistic device...
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Staying Native
Matt Black/Magnum PhotosA commemoration of the Wounded Knee massacre, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 2016 In 1881 Helen Hunt Jackson, a member of that era’s East Coast liberal elite, shook up her world with...
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Never Before Seen in the West
Téa Obreht; drawing by Joanna Neborsky A reviewer should know better than to give away the ending of a book, but what about the beginning? In Téa Obreht’s Western-themed novel, Inland, the beginning...
View ArticleRural America Could Stand Remembering
In 2017 I went to Washington to see the inauguration. I wandered around with no purpose and did not get very close to the Capitol steps, where the swearing-in ceremony appeared as a tiny cluster of...
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The Plushbottoms of Teton County
Per Breiehagen/Getty Images Snowmobilers on Angle Mountain with the Teton Range in the background, Togwotee, Wyoming, 2014 Every year around the holidays my wife and I used to watch a feature-length...
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‘Part of Why We Survived’
Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images Charlie Hill performing on The Tonight Show, June 1991 When Barack Obama was campaigning for Joe Biden in 2020, he spoke at an event in a gymnasium...
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Grim Reapers
Farmers waiting for federal grants at a Resettlement Administration office, North Dakota, July 1936 We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers...
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