American Diversity and the Wild West

Peggy Noonan:

Tenderfoot is in big sky country. On the drive from the airport to the ranch, the Tetons, a range of great splendor and dignity that Tenderfoot had thought were two mountains called Grand, are spread before her. It is dusk. To the left the Snake River curls softly against the road. To the right, open fields, working ranches, herds of buffalo. In the air the scent of sage. The sky is huge, a dome of softening blue. All this is expected—this is how the West looks—yet the real thing startles and overwhelms. You stare dumbly at the wonder of it.

“God’s country,” her host says, not as a brag but with awe still in his voice after more than 20 years here.

Tenderfoot’s host, a friend of many years, a substantial and numeric man, tells her Wyoming facts. There are fewer people in this state than any other. (“They must be lonely,” she thinks.)

Tenderfoot doesn’t really like to be in a place where there aren’t a lot of . . . witnesses. She’s from the city and knows the canyons of downtown, the watering holes of the theater district. She knows her Brooklyn, her Long Island, her Jersey, is a walker in the city and a lost rube in the country. She is here because she loves her friends and will go far to see them. She does have a relationship with the American West and does in fact love it, but it is the West as mediated by John Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. She doesn’t really know the real one.