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Book Review
| Uniting Mountain & Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range. By Kathleen A. Brosnan. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. xii + 276 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $29.95.
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| Recent environmental histories of cities—many of which pay homage to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (W.W. Norton, 1992)—have successfully broadened the parameters of the field by assimilating conceptual tools from different disciplines, including law, geography, and economics. Kathleen Brosnan's Uniting Mountain & Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range, is a fine example of this development. While Denver occupies the center of the narrative, Brosnan adeptly moves outward to examine a hierarchical network of Colorado cities as well as the legal, financial, and ecological transformations that entangled "mountain" and "plain" in the late nineteenth century. |
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Denver's rise as the primary western metropolis between Chicago and San Francisco owed more to timing and less to location or providence; it emerged first, and local entrepreneurs quickly captured vital transportation, communication, and financial resources. Brosnan recounts how Denverites led the violent charge against Indians of the plains and Front Range, effectively clearing the way for regional economic diversification. By the 1880s, Front Range communities were hierarchically arranged by specialization and capitalist relations. Colorado Springs refashioned and marketed sublime scenery to wealthy eastern tourists, Pueblo and Leadville extracted and processed ore for western markets, and Denver's entrepreneurial elite continue to extend their control over regional markets and natural resources. |
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These urban developments toward a "modern capitalist order" did not go uncontested, Brosnan contends. While "market values" prevailed—to the extent that eastern capital ultimately undercut Denver's home-grown industry—expressions of localism by hinterland residents often shaped the urban political economy. And here may lie Brosnan's strongest message: Local interests continually challenged the dominant legal and business interests through innovations in water law, mining claims, forest protection, and other regulatory areas. Distinct social groups rather than cities themselves expressed and contended for power. Furthermore, the Front Range's environmentally destructive industries and competitive communities were always dependent upon one another. As entrepreneurs integrated hinterlands and localities, "[c]hanges in one sphere signaled modifications of others" (p. 146). |
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One under-explored concept in Brosnan's otherwise well-argued study is the repeated reference to Front Range urbs as "cities of nature." Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs certainly depended on the extraction and processing of natural resources as well as the packaging of sublime landscapes for tourist dollars. Yet the "cities of nature" concept requires further interrogation, given the way it questions the supposed divisions between human and non-human systems. Would any urban communities with nice scenery and plentiful resources qualify as a "city of nature?" Beyond boosters' pronouncements, did legal or other institutions debate or codify the "nature" of these cities? |
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Uniting Mountain & Plain displays superb archival research and well-crafted prose. Brosnan's narrative and analysis is enlivened by a diverse cast of characters, from the booster William Gilpin to Denver's leading industrialist William Palmer and the natural preservationist Helen Hunt Jackson. This book should appeal to all students of urban environmental history; as a cautionary tale, all residents of Colorado's over-developed Front Range should read it. |
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David Igler is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920, and currently is researching the environmental history of the Pacific Basin. |
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