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Sadly, mountains, extensive federal ownership and—above all—a chronic lack of water make much of the land under starry skies uninhabitable. Census figures show that the West is the most rural part of the country, in terms of land use, but it is by far the most densely urban, in terms of where people live. Los Angeles is growing denser each year, as newly urbanized land is occupied by about nine people per acre, nearly four times the density of newly developed land in New York.
And so it goes across the entire West, with San Diego denser than Philadelphia, Las Vegas more tightly packed than Chicago, Denver more crowded than Detroit. Twelve of the country's 15 most densely populated urban areas are in the West. New residents move to land in these cities at triple the per-acre density of any other part of the country. In Charlotte or Atlanta or Nashville, high-end houses typically come with several acres; in San Francisco, Portland and Phoenix, expensive new houses tend to be built within feet of one another.
These facts have been widely studied, written about and discussed at conferences by federal and university demographers. But they have done little to rattle the mythology of the West. "There is no denying that these density patterns don't fit with common perception," says Marc Perry, chief of the population distribution branch at the Census.
The grand master of winning votes by milking the myth was Ronald Reagan. As a candidate for governor of California, he took Western images of rugged individualism and, as historian White has written, married them to "the resentment and feelings of victimization” that Western whites felt toward teeming cities full of blacks, Hispanics, gays, criminals and liberals. Reagan's mythmaking was so universally appealing (it is not just Westerners who are hoodwinked by myths) that it helped lift him to two terms as president.
Over time, of course, reality has a nasty way of asserting itself. Just as the starry-eyed sodbusters of my great-grandfather's generation were forced to give up on eastern Montana, so have voters in Western states been compelled by pollution, congestion and assorted urban ills to acknowledge a few facts of life. In California, Washington and Oregon they regularly elect politicians who promise to clean up the air, unclog the highways and regulate big business—and who don’t have to sit on a horse while doing so.
But in Montana and elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain West, mythology still calls a lot of shots.
Consider those federally protected grizzlies in the Flathead Valley, dying in a cultural warp zone, apparent victims of Montanans who cannot square the rise of a prosperous new economy with the fall of a lifestyle sanctified by stirring stories of self-reliance. Federal investigators told me that whoever has been killing the bears is probably known to his neighbors, probably even brags to his neighbors. But those neighbors, investigators say, are not talking. It is not the way of the West.
Blaine Harden, a Seattle-based reporter for the Washington Post, wrote A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.
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