Of chiles, cacti, and fighting cocks

The legendary Wild West has long exerted a powerful influence in our national imagination. In this collection of colorful essays, Frederick Turner--historian, biographer, and naturalist--looks at the ways in which the legend and reality coexist, not always peaceably, in the modern American West. Here are the wild horses competing with cattle for forage on the semi-arid range, fervently protected from extinction by people like "Wild Horse Annie," a Nevada woman who fought for twenty years to "save a memory." Another Western icon, the saguaro cactus, stands as sentinel and symbol against a backdrop of ever encroaching land development. Other essays describe the strange, hostile world of cockfighting (legal in four states), selling the Old West in art and literature, the cultural importance of traditional Western foods, and the sturdy Basque community in the Southwest. The final essay, "Visions of the Pacific," examines the idea of the frontier and the often inglorious history of exploration. In certain ways, the reality of the contemporary West seems utterly divorced from its myth : the problems of urbanization and acculturation have scant connection to Billy the Kid, Custer, and wild horses. Yet the West continues to be what it is, partly because we have imagined it so. Our notions of history itself, Turner suggests, are less often formed by what actually happened than by what people thought and said about it.The fascinating combination of oral history, careful observation, and finely drawn personal reflection gives us the echoes of cowboys and Indians, vast open spaces, the big sky, and a zeal for freedom--in total, the essence of life beyond the Mississippi -- Book jacket.