Book Review: Imagining the Southwest

Review by Curtis Prendergast

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” target=”_blank”>”The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic”
By David W. Teague, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1997

The author takes the reader from the time when the Southwest was viewed as a barren wild to the present, in which the landscape of the Southwest is appreciated both for its economic benefits and for its sublime beauty.

In the words of its author, David W. Teague, this book “is a study of various imaginative representations of the desert in the United States.” It describes the evolution of the aesthetic relationship between humans and the desert of the Southwest, particularly in the context of the large-scale migration of Anglo-Americans to the Southwest in the late 19th century. For Teague the deserts of the Southwest, ”represent as much an ideological as a geographical construct.” These ideological constructs are the focus of his study.

At its core, this book investigates a period of American history in which a crisis of imagination in the face of an inhospitable and unfamiliar desert laid the foundations for the paradoxical relationship many Americans from the East still have with the Southwest. How do we appreciate the beauty of the desert while at the same time taking economic advantage of it? How can we appreciate something even as we change it?

As Anglo-Americans moved westward across the Great Plains, they encountered new landscapes that were radically different from those they were accustomed to in the East. In order to engage with these new landscapes, travelers had to develop a new vocabulary and aesthetic. In Teague’s estimation, this was a necessary precursor to large-scale migration from the East. In other words, the Southwest needed to make sense to people in the East before they would come.

Teague discusses this process through the work of writers and illustrators in influential magazines published in the East, such as Century Illustrated, Harper’s Monthly, and Atlantic Monthly. These articles were often based on the reports of official government surveyors, such as John C. Van Dyke, when they returned from the Southwest.

The author uses as examples the writings of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Josiah Gregg, Horace Greeley, Mary Austin, Nathaniel Shaler, John Wesley Powell, and John C. Van Dyke, among others, and the paintings and sculptures of Frederic Remington. These writings and artistic renderings of the desert are juxtaposed with stories from the Hopi, Pueblo, Paiute and Tohono O’odham oral traditions.

Teague underlines that the way in which authors described the desert was determined by their personal contact with it. Some authors, such as Mark Twain, viewed the desert from the safety of a stagecoach and were able to describe the desert in humorous or heroic terms. Authors who had to survive the desert, such as Horace Greeley, gave a much more pragmatic, and at times desperate, version of the desert.

Teague cites Washington Irving for developing this “desert appreciation formula” in which “the ability to enjoy the desert’s redeeming features is inversely proportional to the hazards it presents.” As anyone who has ever been the victim of a jumping cholla or gotten their car stuck in an overflowing wash understands, the desert has a way of changing from gorgeous to deadly whenever it wishes.

The writing is clear, but at times becomes academic. Nonetheless, Teague addresses complex issues and his analysis is always interesting. This is a fascinating read for anyone in the East who grew up reading about cowboys, railroads and cactus or for recent arrivals to the desert.