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The Ups and Downs of Mountain Life: Historical Patterns of Adaptation in the Cascade Mountains
KEVIN R. MARSH
Assuming the central importance of mountains in the American West, this article suggests continuity in the history of indigenous communities and logging towns in the Cascade Range. Case studies emphasize the role of mobility and broad trade networks, and the results lead to new questions on the meaning of mobility in western history.
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WHEN WESTERN HISTORIANS SEARCH for a common characteristic that defines the West, they often point to patterns of aridity, which characterize the broad expanses of the region's plains and deserts. Certainly Wallace Stegner effectively urged scholars to concentrate on this climatic feature, even as he recognized the outspoken aberrations exclaimed by both the vital snowsheds of the mountain regions and the temperate rainforests of the Northwest Coast.1 An alternative feature that stands tall as more than an anomaly throughout the West, however, is mountains. With the notable exception of the Great Plains, most of the West's geography and climate are dominated by dozens of mountain ranges. Mountains provide most of the region's water supply; they shape the microclimates of the West, most notably by creating arid rain shadows; they are where the public lands of the West are most densely concentrated; and they are home to most of the parks and wilderness areas and thus the focal point for the burgeoning tourism industry of the New West.2 In addition, mountainous regions are central to the region's history. Perhaps because most people live in lowland and coastal regions of the West, common attitudes portray the mountain regions as backwater peripheries and weekend playgrounds. Yet throughout the human history of the West, people have called these regions home, and a significant minority continues to live there. It is valuable for historians to ask how people have adapted to the particular environmental and economic challenges of living in the mountains and to assess the failures and successes of those adaptations through time. When we place mountain regions at the center of our historical inquiry, we find patterns of social and environmental history that help illuminate the West as a whole, and comparisons arise to other mountainous regions throughout the world that help us further understand the international context of western history. |
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Thus, I propose here to look more carefully at mountains in the West and the patterns by which westerners have adapted to their mountain homes, placing them in the context of what is known about mountain regions elsewhere in the world and comparing patterns of land use and economic survival practiced in different time periods and by different cultures in the West. Using particular case studies of indigenous communities and logging towns in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, my intent is to suggest that common patterns of migration as a tool for survival and dependence on trade networks with lowland regions unite the histories of these different time periods and cultures with each other and with experiences of mountain people throughout the world. This is a suggestive rather than exhaustive study, yet from such an investigation of the role of migration in the Cascades, emerges a clearer understanding of the vitality of itinerancy in the West. And, understanding the importance of trade networks and out-migration from the Cascades shows that just as arid lowlands of the West rely on mountain ranges—as Dan Flores points out—it also seems clear that historically the opposite is true; trade networks and mobility to the lowlands are critical to the survival of mountain communities, whether ancient indigenous villages or modern resource-dependent towns.3 |
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