AAMR 320-01 Howard Horowitz

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN WEST

A field-based exploration of the varied physical, cultural, and regional landscapes of western North America. The focus includes scenic public lands, geologic features, American Indian cultures, urban landscapes, and resource extraction areas. The course is taken only by participants in the American West summer program, a 5-6 week field trip offered by Ramapo College under the auspices of the Study Abroad program. Visits to a broad range of locations will be supplemented by lectures, discussions, and required readings about each of those places.

The itinerary is never exactly the same twice, although many natioanl parks and national forests in the Rockies and the Cascades are always included, along with a sampling of big cities and college towns. We always explore industrial landscapes (mining, logging, grazing, farming, and dams), and we always have opportunities to hike into wilderness areas. We always take a rafting trip down a whitewater river, and visit plenty of museums.

Among the major cities we visit (not each every year) are San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver (BC), Denver, and Salt Lake City. Small cities may include Boulder, Laramie, Missoula, Bozeman, Jackson, Boise, Eugene, Bend, Eureka, Ogden, and others.

Industrial sites include the world's largest open-pit copper mine (Bingham, in Utah), hydroelectric generating facilities, fish hatcheries, and drowned sacred sites on the Columbia River, lumbermills and clearcut logging sites in the Cascade Range, and many others. We meet with rangers at fire lookouts and wildlife biologists restoring wolves into Yellowstone.

American Indian cultures are encountered through reservation visits, powwows, historical sites, museums, trading posts, country stores and restaurants. In various years, we have stayed at a hogan on Big Mountain in the Navajo Reservation (and shared in a traditional sweatlodge), camped at a pow-wow on the Rosebud Reservation, and visited historical sites such as Chief Joseph Pass in the Bitteroots, the Wounded Knee massacre site on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and Sacagawea's grave on the Wind River Reservation. We travel to archaeological sites ranging from Anasazi cliff dwellings on the Colorado Plateau to petroglyphs on caves and rock faces in the Great Basin. We visit landmark Pacific lighthouses, aquariums, museums, historical districts, hot springs, and small towns.

Readings: Students in this course read selected portions of a variety of books, journals, and articles about issues and places in the American West. Some are historical documents; others are literary accounts, including both fiction and non-fiction. Some material is drawn from travel books, and some is drawn from poetry collections. Articles from High Country News focus on Western land issues; it is published out of Paonia, Colorado. (In some years we visit the publishers of High Country News; Ed Marston was a Ramapo professor before heading west in 1974.)

The Mythic West. Robert Athearn.

Trails: Towards a New Western History. Patricia Limerick,

Clyde Milner, & Charles Rankin.

Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons. John

Wesley Powell.

Beyond the 100th Meridian. Wallace Stegner.

The Cadillac Desert. Marc Reisner.

The Organic Machine. Richard White.

Kill the Cowboy. Sharman Apt Russell.

Eagle Bird. Charles Wilkerson.

Turtle Island. Gary Snyder.

Cowboy Poetry - A Gathering. Hal Cannon, ed.

Idaho for the Curious. Cort Conley.

The Donner Party. George Keithley.

"Gulping the West". Thomas Wolfe.

"The Mormon Culture Region". Donald Meinig

Various articles from the High Country News.

Some of these readings are assigned during the orientation sessions. There are three of these meetings, prior to the beginning of the field trip. Other texts, including the poetry, will be read at meetings around the campfire after dinner, or around the kitchen table at hostels and lodges.

Requirements: Participants are required to write a journal. The journal will include a section devoted to analysis of, and response to, the readings. The journal will also include a trip log, a summary of the activities of each day, and discussions of each place. Photographs, sketches, and maps are suggested to illustrate the journal.

Note: The field trip occurs in July and August, and the journal is due by mid-October. This allows 6-8 weeks for the sorting out of impressions and the developing of photographs. Because this timing does not fit well into the college's schedule dates for grades, students automatically receive an "incomplete" at the end of the summer term, except for graduating seniors. These incompletes are changed into letter grades after the third week in October. Graduating seniors are encouraged to take the courses on a "Pass/No Pass" basis.