:Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840–1935

Abstract

In this book, Martin Padget analyzes the writings and artwork of several prominent nineteenth-century sojourners in the West, including John Wesley Powell, Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and Elbridge Ayer Burbank. Padget argues that as these writers popularized the image of the Southwest as a land of “unspoiled” natural beauty and “primitive” Native American and Hispanic cultures, they set in place forces that would incorporate the area into the modern world. The popularity of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination led to the intrusion of railway lines across the desert regions and, by the twentieth century, the proliferation of paved roads and interstate highways. Padget concludes that the invasion of visitors into the Southwest also dramatically influenced the Native American cultures present in the area. Tourists were fascinated by the unique art, architecture, music, dance, and dress of the Pueblo peoples. The sojourners to the West sought refuge from the growing urban industrial sprawl that was occurring in the cities of the Eastern seaboard. They romanticized preindustrial Native American cultures as representing a more harmonious, communal orientation than the cut-throat competitive nature of mainstream American society. Yet, as Padget points out, modernization was dramatically influencing Native American lives. Railway lines, paved roads, and particularly the construction of large dams bisected Native hunting lands and destroyed irrigation canals, making traditional methods of subsistence very precarious. Padget argues that many tribes of the Southwest believed that their economic survival dictated that they take advantage of the growing tourist industry. By charging people money to take pictures of adobe buildings and tribal members in “traditional” dress, they allowed tourists to become consumers of Native American societies. For Padget, the rise of tourism in the Southwest is the story not only of white appropriation of Native American culture, but also of the acumen of tribal peoples in adjusting to severe economic dislocation brought on by the forces of modernization.