Haibun: The West
I began Donald Worster’s book, Rivers of Empire, and I quickly started to see how the myth of the cowboy and the lone pioneer didn’t create the American West, but rather, large government infrastructure projects and the US Army removing the Indigenous peoples of these areas. It’s not that there weren’t cowboys here, but they weren’t laying the groundwork for this growth, the two Roosevelt presidents did.
It’s hard not to miss the water infrastructure projects: long concrete ditches in straight lines for miles, pumping water behind the fence. Straight, efficient, pumped water with the Colorado, Salt, or San Pedro Rivers hydraulically pushing each cubic foot, I can see a man in a pickup truck with his cowboy hat on.
It’s the story of the cowboy we can tell ourselves that has the ending or image we want. It is the identity of the the self-sufficient man that settled the American West that feels better then the story as the recipient of the largest human works projects the US government ever paid for. We don’t tell ourselves stories of being grateful for government help.
millions volleyed with each spring
