Quotessence
Home / Topics / American West Quotes

American West Quotes

Browse 43 quotes about American West.

American West Quotes

“The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place — a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense. And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves. In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.”

DeathSilenceProgressLonelinessForgottenWastelandAmerican WestNameless Graves
Book:The U. P. Trail
Create image

“While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.”

BeautifulNatureBeautyWestLandscapeWildernessSageAmerican West
Book:Riders of the Purple Sage
Create image

“In the largest sense, the preservation/sagebrush processes outlined in this story are driven by three basic components of American culture: land ownership, independence, and individualism.”

IndependenceIndividualismAmerican HistoryPreservationAmerican CultureAmerican WestEnvironmental HistoryLand OwnershipFrontier ThesisSagebrush Rebellions
Book:Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions
Create image

“Sitting Bull gave most of the money away to the band of ragged, hungry boys who seemed to surround him wherever he went. He once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. "The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.”

American HistoryAmerican WestAnnie OakleyChiefNative IndianSitting Bull
Book:Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Create image

“When the culture of the East, its chief characteristic, is added to the strength of body and the strength of mind of the agricultural center, its special contribution, and these two great characteristics are constantly imbued with the spirit of independence and love of liberty which lives in the hearts of the dwellers of the mountains, their main quality added to the national character, there is every reason to believe that we shall have a people and institutions such as will be permanent; with such wealth of resources, of such high education and intelligence, and of such vitality, of such longevity, of such devotion to freedom and hostility to centralization and tyranny as shall enable this Nation of ours to stand indefinitely; and to maintain in the future years its manifest destiny of leading the peoples and nations of earth in the principles of free government, constitutional security and individual liberty. Under these and under these alone, the faculties, the aspirations and inspirations of mankind may be unfolded into their full flowering to the fruition of an ever greater and more humane civilization.”

Us HistoryAmerican ExceptionalismManifest DestinyFrontierAmerican West
Book:Four Hundred Million Acres: The Public Lands and Resources
Create image

“As to the reserved and withdrawn areas, excluding and excepting only the national parks, it is manifest that justice, equality, and dignity for these States require that ultimately all should be ceded to the States wherein they lie. The theory that the Western States can not intelligently and wisely administer these areas, for example, the forest reserves, is based on the delinquencies and wastefulness of the States to the eastward which had their resources and their opportunity, and in some cases, as States, misused and abused their rights. This constitutes no reason as to why the same right which they enjoyed should be denied to the Western states.”

ConservationAmerican WestState Rights
Book:Four Hundred Million Acres: The Public Lands and Resources
Create image

“In 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. 'The time has come,' it said, 'when we shall have to supplement the supply from another source.' With that simple statement, William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.”

HistoryAmerican West
Book:Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Create image

“It is too often the case,' Crook said, "that border news-papers disseminate all sorts of exaggerations and falsehoods about the Indians, which are copied in papers of high character and wide circulation, in other parts of the country, while the Indians' side of the case is rarely ever heard. In this way the people at large get false ideas with reference to the matter. Then when the outbreak does come public attention is turned to the Indians, their crimes and atrocities are alone condemned, while the persons whose injustice has driven them to this course escape scot-free and are the loudest in their denunciations. No one knows this fact better than the Indian, therefore he is excusable in seeing no justice in a government which only punishes him, while it allows the white man to plunder him as he pleases.”

American HistoryAmerican WestNative IndianFalse Narratives
Book:Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Create image

“Joshua took a gulp of his own brew. “Need I have some other cause, when this plague could devastate so many of my patients and neighbors? When, if some of the reports prove true, we might see the town reduced painfully in size, as farmers abandon their holdings and flee to the East?” If the thought of one particular family leaving town, of Clara Brook’s tall figure climbing aboard a wagon and vanishing beyond the horizon, gave him a peculiar twinge, he was hardly obliged to say so.”

Historical RomanceNebraskaAmerican WestGrasshopper Plague
Book:What Heals the Heart
Create image

“Along the way, decisions about interpretation and presentation were made. Very clearly, it was decided the Osage viewpoint would prevail - it would hold the center stage. If I have erred I have tried to err on behalf of the Osages. Some will accuse me of being biased in favor of the Osages. My answer is, “it is time for some bias in favor of the Osages - there has been so much bias against them.” Another priority is to avoid the “Lo! The poor Indian,“ practice, which seeks to point to the great evils committed against Indians. If this were all it did, it would not be so repulsive, but it also points the accusing finger at all who have descended from those people who treated Indians so shabbily. It is an outright bid for sympathy and relieves one of the need to comprehend. The Osages do not need or want sympathy, but they desperately need understanding.”

HistoryNative AmericanAmerican IndianAmerican WestOsage
Book:A History of the Osage People
Create image

“To be attracted to another man in a violent place seems akin to a ticking bomb, logging, strip-mining, fracking. The American West is the playground for the country’s obsession with exploitation and destruction, with most extractive economies near Native American reservations. There are increased rates of birth defects. Higher rates of cancer. Violent people who mimic the violence done to the land. BOOM. And where there’s danger, there’s room for trespassing. And where there’s trespassing, there’s room for mischief.”

GayFrackingExtractionAmerican West
Book:Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
Create image

“With each surge of westward movement a new community came into being. These communities devoted themselves not to marching onward but to cultivating the earth. They plowed the virgin land and put in crops, and the great Interior Valley was transformed into a garden for the imagination, the Garden of the World. The vision of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society - a collective representation, a poetic idea (as [Alexis de] Tocqueville [1805-59] noted in the early 1830s) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase and blissful labor in the earth, all centring about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow.”

FrontierFarmerAmerican WestPlowAlexis De Tocqueville
Book:Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Create image

“...perhaps the Great American Desert's importance to the Western genre derives from the nineteenth-century view of the arid West as the natural refuge of Indians and, by extension, of all outlaws. The agrarian ideal, with its roots in Rousseau's thought, defined civilisation as arising from the agricultural life, so the migratory Indians - often compared in nineteent-century writings to Tartars and Bedouin - were, by reason of their socioeconomic organisation, outside the pale of civilised society and the area in which they moved was regarded as fit only for outlaws. It is as a milieu within which men outside civilised, agrarian society resolve their tensions, both personal and social, that the Western has used the myth of the Great American Desert, as in Riders of Death Valley (Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1941), The Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges, 1958) and the Boetticher cycle.”

Civilized SocietyNative AmericansAmerican WestOutlawsRousseauWesternsThe Desert
Book:Cinema, A Quarterly Magazine, No. 4, October 1969
Create image

“In the decade following the Civil War the impetus of the westward movement and the implied pledge of the victorious Republican Party to develop the West were uncontrollable forces urging the agricultural frontier forward. On the level of the imagination it was therefore necessary that the settlers' battle with drought and dust and wind and grasshoppers should be supported by the westward expansion of the myth of the garden. In order to establish itself in the vast new area of the plains, however, the myth of the garden had to confront and overcome another myth of exactly opposed meaning, although of inferior strength - the myth of the Great American Desert.”

Republican PartyAmerican WestPlainsAmerican FrontierThe Desert
Book:Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Create image

“Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.”

WellsHas BeensStatesGovernmentAmericaFormChurchUnitedUnited StatesDemocracyWestRaisedEdgesTraditionalLakesWhere You AreSaltUnited States Of AmericaAlways BelieveOrthodoxyResistingState GovernmentTokensUnited States GovernmentAmerican West
Author:Terry Tempest Williams
Create image

“I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsWritingI CanCountryCommunityCitiesStruggleMembersToolsWestLakesSaltUtahAmerican WestSalt Lake City
Author:Terry Tempest Williams
Create image

“I think we have powerful role-models among us in the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about that.”

ThinkingWorldFeelsMeanCertainNaturalPowerfulRolesCivilizationModelsHarmonyWestRole ModelsSustainabilityTimelessNatural WorldTandemAmerican West
Book:A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
Create image

“Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.”

ThinkingSaidFunTermNegativePrejudiceWestEastTalesGenreHaving FunFairyFairy TaleAccurateRepresentationCowboyExoticAmerican WestOrientalism
Author:Craig Thompson
Create image

“The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies - drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.”

WorldActionThreeWaterMillionsRecordsFireMountainDrinkingWestClimateRateStormExpectedRegionsFloodThreateningRefugeeMeltingSuppliesDroughtDrinking WaterGlaciersAmerican West
Author:Al Gore
Create image

“The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.”

IfsMayLongLightEarthFacesCertainSpaceDoubtFireHonestEqualJudgmentRainBreathsWestClarityBurningSmokeParadiseSmokingPerfumeFragranceSweetestEvokeStrangenessOdorPiercingsAmerican West
Book:Desert Solitaire
Create image

“There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do. Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American west, which is why President Abraham Lincoln passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy.”

GivingTogetherCertainPresidentCan DoEconomyGrowingLandUnionsWestSeekingPresidentialSettlingStakesAbrahamPioneersHarnessAmerican WestGrowing EconomyHomestead Act
Author:Barack Obama
Create image

“To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.”

PeopleWellsLightSpiritualSpaceViewsLandEffectsOffersSolitudeUnderstoodClaimsDistanceWestMoodPainterIndispensableAboriginalAmerican WestGreat Mood
Author:Thomas McGuane
Create image

“The preservation of parks, wilderness, and wildlife has also aided liberty by keeping alive the 19th century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West. Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destructive trespass of pollution. In our own time, the nearly universal appreciation of these preserved landscapes, restored waters, and cleaner air through outdoor recreation is a modern expression of our freedom and leisure to enjoy the wonderful life that generations past have built for us.”

PastLawEnjoyWaterQualityLibertyAliveWonderfulGenerationsAirModernCenturyAdventureExpressionBuiltUniversalPropertyWestEnvironmentalAppreciationLandscapeParksAweDestructiveWildernessLeisurePollutionPreservationWildlife19th CenturyRecreationCleanersForefathersWonderful LifeAmerican WestEnvironmental QualityOutdoor Recreation
Author:Ronald Reagan
Create image