As we prepare to salute the 4th of July and celebrate Colorado becoming a state in the great 250/150 dual commemoration, it becomes an easy opportunity to romanticize the Great American West.
Historical celebrations like this create a landscape to stop and look around and see how time has shaped it and where we fit into the picture. The paved streets and bustling downtown of Durango today were once as rough and tumble as the dirt and gravel they used to be made of. Perhaps that’s the problem with the West today: We have lost some of our grit. It may be easier to walk down the street on a smooth surface, but the unevenness required us to really look where we were stepping.
I wonder if this dual celebration today met the Colorado of yesterday, what they would think of one another. If somewhere on a dusty Main Street, the Old American West and the New American West sauntered into a saloon and bellied up to the bar, the Old West wouldn’t order a straight shot of whiskey and the New West, a Ranch Water Seltzer.
Two unlikely characters, sitting at a bar sharing drinks, that the past would throw back, wipe his mustache on the back of his weathered hand and then chase it with the present’s fancy can of hard seltzer. It has been a chase of one sort or another for more than a century. Progress and preservation, neck in neck, one hoping to make the other more palatable.
I wonder if, after they shared a drink, they wouldn’t make their way to the street for a duel of a different sort and if on the way, the past wouldn’t let the swinging saloon doors hit the present right smack dab on the butt on the way out.
Would they count out 10 paces and turn to take each other in with a hard glare in a sundown showdown, waiting for the twitch of a finger before taking aim, or just shoot from the hip and see who is left standing? Would the Old West holler as he snatched his revolver and twirled it around his finger, “I’m gonna send you back to where you came from, partner, so you can remember who you are.”
Or would the New West pull his side pieces, double-fisted, from the hip and remind the Old, “I just learned who I can become.” Does the past make the present more pertinent or does the present make the past more relevant?
Like the Duel itself, the West has become paces in polarizing directions of remembering and forgetting. For any of us to win the battle, there needs to be a balance between preserving and adapting.
The Old West and the new West may be better served to tip their hats and holster their opposition. The frontier has attracted people from the beginning who came to build something new on the cornerstones of their personal histories. If the Great American West has a future worth fighting for, it won’t be won in a duel. It will be won by mending fences and building on the foundations of the weathered homesteads still standing in our hearts and our land.
We live in a dichotomy of sorts where centuries-old barns cling to the landscape in the shadow of modern mountain mansions, and we are left to decide which is more priceless. The one that is unaffordable or the one that is unforgettable?
Thinking about the last 150 years, six-shooters have been replaced with smartphones, and we are armed and still dangerous. Technology has overshadowed tradition, and it’s up to all of us, old and new, to find ways to weave the two together in a tapestry that both blankets and showcases the brilliant colors of the West for future generations to keep their stories warm.
In 150 more years, will people romanticize the West we live in today? Will they know about the West that we remember today? We may be celebrating a dual celebration, but it’s another duel we are best served to remember.
The battle of the past and present will continue, and their paces become further and further apart until the time they turn to fire; they can’t even see one another, and that is where we all lose. When we lose sight of where we are, when we can no longer see where we came from, and the paces in-between just become distance instead of dictation.
Write down your family histories, pass them on, celebrate Colorado for what it is and for what it has been, and that will make our state and our country better for what it will be. My dream is that the Western way of life will expand and blow across the landscape like a tumbleweed of hope, not because it refuses to change, but because it remembers the reasons why it shouldn’t.
Jenny Johnston is a fourth-generation Durango local, part-time rodeo announcer and full-time wrangler to two lil’ buckaroos. She is also extremely grateful to the firefighters for keeping our community and state safe and especially to the Phantom Canyon Wildland Fire Fighters for coming to her and her daughters’ aid to change a tire on a loaded-down horse trailer headed for a 4H gymkhana. You saved the day, and the cowgirl took first place in barrels.