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The question isn't really fair, since, as Thomson makes clear in a typically pithy chapter titled "Firings," the military stopped testing a-bombs in Nevada in the 1950s. And, as a result of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, atmospheric tests in Nevada with nuclear weapons were also brought to an end. But the underground tests that continued for years set casino mogul Howard Hughes on edge. "I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now," Thomson quotes Hughes as writing to the federal government, "and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear material, such as normally is carefully sealed up and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean."
There is much more that might be said about Nevada—the Burning Man Festival, northern Nevada's stunning geography, casino gambling, prostitution, urban sprawl, movie stars, long-time Nevadans' resentment against Las Vegas—and David Thomson covers much of it in these engaging pages. But we must now leave my family, chucking quarters into slot machines at the M-G-M casino (my brother-in-law thinks he has his ma chine "figured out"), and travel east, through Utah and into Colorado, where prairie mastodons, giant bison, mammoths, and camels once held sway.
In Creating Colorado, University of Montana professor William Wyckoff writes that creatures such as these "encouraged the development of a big-game harvesting technology" (e.g., stone-tipped spears). This informative, assertion is found in a subsection titled "Native American Geographies," and it is fairly typical of the sentences that make up this book: straightforward, learned, well if not elegantly written. Sometimes one's teeth crack, such as when one reads this sentence in chapter 3: "Geology mattered: the configuration of Colorado's human geography in the mountains is in no small way related to the intricacies of mountain tectonics as well as to the erosional processes at work to redistribute some of the metals once they were created." Most of the sentences in this book do not resemble this one, however, and as one works through Wyckoff's chapters—such as "Piedmont Heartland, 1860-1920," "Hinterlands: Eastern Plains, 1860-1920" and "Geographies in Transition: Colorado, 1920-1940"—one gains an appreciation for the way human culture shapes landscape.
Not that there are a great many surprises in Creating Colorado. "The public school was one essential initial commitment to community"; "Religion complemented education as a cornerstone of community in the mining town"; "Banks facilitated the economic maturation of the mining town by lending money, purchasing precious metals, and be coming involved with local stock and real estate transactions"—none of these observations is surprising. But taken together with the many other details Wyckoff provides, they tell an interesting story about town life in the mountains of Colorado.
Because Wyckoff brings his narrative to an end in 1940—what would come to called urban sprawl was al ready underway in Denver by that time—we do not learn what impact the transformation of Colorado Springs into what one friend lovingly calls "the evangelical Mecca" has had on the city. It would be interesting to know what geographical changes the Navigators, Compassion International, and Focus on the Family (to name just a few evangelical organizations) brought to Colorado Springs, formerly known mainly as a center for wealthy tourists.
David Thomson and William Wyckoff have written two very different books about very different states. What links these works is an interest in the way people interact with their environments. Insofar as I am aware, space aliens have never visited Colorado Springs (I recognize that some of the city's inhabitants may disagree), so no significant infra structure devoted to the study of extra-terrestrials exists there as it does in Rachel, Nevada. Conversely, Rachel's chances of transforming itself into an attraction center for rich tourists are pretty slim. (Colorado Springs had in its favor natural hot springs, formerly believed to possess medicinal qualities.) But this difference is fine. Colorado Springs can have its historic resorts; Rachel can have its aliens. And lucky America can have them both.
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