4202

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 4202
• Author: Wilkinson, C. F.
• Title: Colorado Water and the Lords of Yesterday.
• USFW Year: 1987.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

The fifth influence on western life, Wallace Stegner, may
turn out to be the greatest of all. Stegner's commentary on
policy is necessarily diffuse, because, although he is a
Pullitzer Prize-winning historian (for Beyond the Hundredth
Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the
West), he is first and foremost a novelist. Great novels -- and
Bic Rock Candy Mountain, Wolf Willow, and Angle of Repose are
surely that -- work their magic through subtlety, through
indirection. But Stegner's wondrous life's work has laid out the
people and the places of the West for all of us to see as does no
other source. Stegner knows this land and its people and, in the
tradition of Muir, Leopold, DeVoto, and Carson, has spoken out
many times against the arrogance of trying to dominate nature.
He will say this in an upcoming piece that I have seen in
galleys: "Behind the pragmatic, manifest-destinarian purpose of
pushing western settlement through federal water management was
another motive: the hard determination to dominate nature. . . .
God and Manifest Desti
'conquer' or 'win' the
authority to remind us
that the manner of the
that the land will not
ny spoke with one voice urging us to
West; and there was no voice of comparable
of [the] . . . quiet but profound truth,
country makes the usage of life there and
be lived except in its own fashion."
The final writer who has helped create a new way of thinking
about the West is John McPhee. In a straight-forward, even-
handed, yet brightly-etched way, McPhee has challenged us to open
our minds to geologic time. In Basin and Range, McPhee taught us
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