The pelts of beaver, the dust of placer gold, the tongues and hides of buffalo, the proteinaceous feed of native grass, the smeltings of precious and commercial minerals, the viscous gush of oil: these have been the elementals of the American West shipped eastward to enrich the nation while the West historically went begging, went bankrupt, struggled to recover before being exploited anew. Bernard DeVoto defined the cycle of mercantilism and misuse in a celebrated essay in Harper’s in 1934. “The Plundered Province,” he titled it, coining a bitterly resented phrase. Today the cycle repeats again, at greater scale and perhaps for the last time, and now its justification is energy and the name of the plunder is coal.
Not all the West was colonized. The Far West eventually found its own resources and developed them, and the money stayed at home. Rather, it was the continental West, the West that lay between the Mississippi and the Sierra Nevada, the West of mountains and basins and mesas, and finally the West of too little water and too few trees, the Great American Desert of honest maps: the West of the Great Plains, and particularly today of the northern Great Plains—Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas—where unitized two-hundred-car coal trains shuttle tirelessly from monstrous channels ripped into the earth, where mine-mouth power plants spread palls of ash and sulfur across the Big Sky. Where the profit, electrified, flashes eastward and westward on the wires.
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