In an attempt to lure immigrants to Arizona in 1881, Patrick Hamilton wrote, “Irrigation is the life of agriculture in the Territory. Without it scarcely anything can be raised; with it the soil is the most prolific in the west. Water, therefore, is the most precious element for the farmer in Arizona.” The same was—and...
There was a time when Texas stood for more than can be expressed in words. It was a symbol of everything that was good about the American West and perhaps even of the United States itself. Texas was a state of mind, a place where men stood on their own two feet without whining to...
Thomas Jefferson believed that virtue was to be found in the Spartan simplicity of ancient Greece rather than in the decadent cities of Caesar’s Rome. Agriculture, Jefferson wrote, was what developed moral and political virtue. Big cities corrupted people, he thought, and neither city men of commerce and capital nor city men who labored could...
The Arkansas River is born from melting snow on Mt. Arkansas at 13,795 feet above sea level in the state of Colorado. Rushing down through cataracts and gorges, it gathers strength from a multitude of rivulets and creeks to burst free from the mountains laden with silt. Across the Great Plains of eastern Colorado and...
Commencement has come and gone, and with it another crop of eager graduates. Yet given far more of the spotlight at any of these commencements than bachelors’, masters’, and doctoral candidates were those being awarded honorific degrees and certificates. The practice of universities bestowing honorary degrees originated as a way to give public recognition to...
Edward Lawrence Schieffelin’s story seems like something made up by a Hollywood writer long on cliche and short on imagination, for his silver strike epitomized the hopes and dreams of every sourdough prospector who ever wandered the lonely mountains, valleys, and streams of the American West. For years he searched in vain, living on the...
In the September 1987 issue of Chronicles, Jacob Neusner wrote, “To state matters bluntly, if you have to teach in a college in order to pursue the research you wish to undertake, then go, teach.” In his “Acknowledgments,” Professor Langum admitted doing just that: “I wrote this book over many years and at three different...
What now are called “the Indian wars” ended about a century ago, and the participants in those battles are dead without exception. After 1886, when Geronimo and his band surrendered, there were no more off-reservation wild Indians. Native Americans had become an administrative, not a military problem. The reservations would become a policing system where...
Every day we hear references to North, South, East, and West, to Midwest and Southwest, to Pacific Northwest and, lo, even to Ozarkia, Cascadia, and Siskiyou. All of us speak or write of these geographical areas as if they had narrowly prescribed boundaries readily meaningful to everyone. Yet in reality these designations, as Humpty Dumpty...
” . . . As honest men it behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.” —John Tyndall Much in the news recently, especially in the Southwest, is the problem of illegal immigration from south of the border....
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” —1 Peter, V, 8 The scene is so identifiable that any American—in fact, almost anyone anywhere in the world—immediately recognizes it: a dun-baked, dusty street between rows of ramshackle, weather-beaten, false-fronted buildings. To the pounding...
Academe, n. An Ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. (from academe). A modern school where football is taught. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) In the spring a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love. What happens in the rest of the year is uncertain, but in the southwestern...
In 1973, at the tag end of the riots and disruptions of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, he ventured into print with a small volume entitled This Beats Working for a Living: The Dark Secrets of a College Professor. He did this under the pseudonym “Professor X” not to hide his identity (this he...
The recent drop in the price of oil has been welcome indeed to most Americans, for it portends a boost of epic proportions for the economy. However, the blessings of cheap petroleum do not fall evenly across the land. In Texas and Oklahoma, as in other oil-producing states, the drop from $40 to $15 a...
“Let sixteen cowboys come sing me a song. . . . For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.” —Anonymous, “The Cowboy’s Lament” The American West has become a place of simultaneous myth and reality. There is a West where zesty young men mounted on noble steeds occasionally rounded up some cattle...
A few years ago Oral Roberts made national headlines when he confessed to having seen a 900-foot-tall Jesus in the heavens urging the faithful to donate to the “City of Faith,” as he called the medical school he was building at his university. Those who believed him, his “partners,” were asked to send monthly donations...
Giving, helping, caring—these are words frequently mentioned in the writings and orations of most religious and social philosophers. Giving and helping and caring are concepts that touch something deep in the breast of civilized mankind and call forth the kind of responses that distinguish him from the baser animals: compassion, kindness, generosity, concern for the...