The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies - drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.
The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.
During 1866 and 1922, Native Americans and black soldiers often intermingled in the American west, on the frontier.
I don't even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.
There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do. Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American west, which is why (President Abraham Lincoln) passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy.
The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.
I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.
What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.
The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.
