by Kent Chadwick

Beating the Bastards

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West
Timothy Egan
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
Hard cover, $25, 266 pages

onald Reagan would be taking the oath of office for his first presidential term at twelve noon on January 20, 1981. His nominee for the Interior Department, James Watt, would then soon begin implementing a radical, anti-environmental agenda that broke faith with a Republican tradition of environmental protection that stretched from Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.

But the Carter Administration's outgoing Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, was refusing to behave like a lame duck. Some months earlier, his legal department had discovered a statute that allowed him to independently declare rivers wild and scenic, and he had done just that in order to protect five threatened rivers in Northern California.

However, Andrus's executive orders had been challenged in court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had not yet issued its ruling by the end of the Washington D.C. business day on January 19th, when all of Carter's cabinet officers were supposed to have submitted their letters of resignation. Andrus refused to resign, telling the White House personnel office, "I wasn't quitting unless the president of the United States instructed me to...." At Carter's White House farewell reception Andrus was the only cabinet secretary still legally in office, and that's where he received the extraordinary phone call that the Ninth Circuit had finally upheld his wild river designations. "I drove to the Interior Department building, on my last night as a federal official, and put my name to the papers that protected the American, Eel, Klamath, Smith, and Trinity Rivers. I stood around with senior staff and smiled. We had beaten the bastards at the eleventh hour."

Andrus had hornswoggled Watt, which is Andrus's favorite word for his favorite political tactic -- bamboozling opponents by focusing full legal and political power on issues that are lastingly important. President Carter and Andrus hornswoggled Senator Ted Stevens when Carter created fifty-six million acres worth of national monuments in Alaska, just as President Clinton more recently hornswoggled Senator Orrin Hatch and the Andalex Resources mining company in 1996 by creating the nearly two million acre Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah. Back in Idaho and in his third term as governor, Andrus hornswoggled the U.S. Department of Energy when he had state troopers block any new rail shipments of nuclear waste coming into Idaho from DOE's Rocky Flats, Colorado weapons factory.

Andrus's newly published memoirs, Cecil Andrus: Politics Western Style, is full of hornswoggling, storytelling, Idahoan apologetics, political wisdom, and passion for keeping "a chunk of the natural world intact." Co-author Joel Connelly, national affairs correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has helped shape Andrus's engrossing stories into a sustained argument for commonsense compromises in the battle over land-use and river protection in the West. Considering himself a conservationist, not an environmentalist, Andrus applied the same wily skills, which kept him, a moderate Democrat, in the state house of the heavily Republican Idaho, in order to achieve compromise environmental victories, such as the creation of the Birds of Prey Natural Area along the Snake River.

When environmentalists take uncompromising stands, Andrus argues, they lose their place at the political table completely. Andrus supports a push for environmental sustainability as long as it seeks to sustain the human environment of the West as well, preserving "small-town values, the ability to make a living from the land, civilized debate, and the ability to resolve problems at a local or regional level."

But which of the many different Western cultures should be sustained and preserved? That's the contentious question that the New YorkTimes's Pacific Northwest correspondent Timothy Egan pointedly asks again and again in his fascinating amalgam of reportage, history, opinion, and travelogue -- Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West. The saloon and prostitute culture of Las Vegas's Block 16 neighborhood? The cowboy culture running ruinously and unprofitably on thousands of acres of public land? The ersatz London Bridge oasis culture of Lake Havasu City, Arizona? Or the ancient pueblo culture of Acoma, New Mexico?

Free of the editorial restraint of newspaper reporting, Egan lets down his hair and tells readers exactly what he thinks of each of those cultures, and a dozen more. "Subduing the wild is the one sure way to kill the West," Egan concludes, noting that "a new Western ethic may be taking hold--the idea of letting this land be itself."

As he crafts his sharp portraits of fourteen different Western locations, Egan disabuses us of many of the lies still told about the West. "86% of all Westerners live in a city, the highest proportion of any region of the country." And "Utah is now more urban than New York state." This massive urbanization was accomplished in the last ninety years through the damming of "every major river in the West except for the Yellowstone.... It all came about because water was brought to a select group of landowners and speculators."

Egan quotes with glee how Charley Russell, the famous cowboy artist, didn't give the speech a Montanan booster club had expected at a 1923 luncheon. "In my book," Russell announced, "a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water, cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all."

Egan recounts how the founding father of Las Vegas, the Copper King William Clark was more corrupt than its first mobster, Bugsy Siegal. And he suggests that Las Vegas is the "living embodiment of Edward Abbey's memorable crack, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

When he turns to debunking the sanitized image of Mormon theocrat Brigham Young, Egan is especially vitriolic. He lays out the case for Young's complicity in the 1857 murder by the Mormon Iron County Militia of 120 wagon train immigrants passing through Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. "Vengeance is mine," Young is reported to have said at the massacre site, "And I have taken a little."

It is perplexing, though, how Egan never mentions Andrus's involvement in the recent political skirmishes over Western lands, and that raises questions about how many other environmental moderates Egan may have ignored in his reporting. Andrus, on the other hand, is quick to quote Egan as a perceptive writer, who perfectly defined the Northwest as "anywhere a salmon can get to."

Read in tandem, Lasso the Wind compellingly portrays what we've lost and what we have yet to lose in the West. Cecil Andrus: Politics Western Style describes a moderate's approach to saving what we love about this land.