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Writing the western: new western history’s encounter with landscape

utte, Montana, wants to turn its western history into a new geography. Situated at the intersection of Interstates 15 and 90, Butte is known to travellers on their way to Glacier National Park or other attractions of the mountain West as a forlorn mining town, in quite severe economic distress since the closure of the massive Anaconda copper mines in the 1970s and early 1980s.1 Butte, as some travellers know, is now the home of the largest Superfund toxic waste site in the US. Part of that site is the awesome Berkeley pit mine, which has become the deepest lake in the state. A rich turquoise colour, the lake contains 17 billion gallons of something like water. Fewer of those racing past know of Butte’s just-as-spectacular labour and ethnic history. Butte was an important centre for the Western Federation of Miners at the turn of the century, and was the site of one of the most important martyrdoms in American labour history: it was in Butte that Industrial Workers of the World activist Frank Little was hanged from a railroad bridge by company thugs. Similarly, union struggles, hiring practices, and job insecurity all led to what one historian has called (without a great deal of hyperbole) all-out ethnic war.2 Butte’s landscape, we could say, embodies all those themes – ethnic difference and struggle, labour strife, the ravages of capital, the despoliation of landscape – that new western historians want to tell the public as they go about their work of dispelling the myths of the frontier, of brave men doing battle against wilderness and Indians. ‘New western history’ is a name given to, and to a degree adopted by, western historians working self-consciously against the grain of two traditions in western historiography: the Turnerian ‘frontier thesis’ school, and