Tourism, Myth and Scripted Spaces in the American West

by Amy Evans

Tourism is one of the largest industries worldwide that links economic, social, and cultural networks. While it has far-reaching effects on the communities that embrace tourism or, in some cases, those that have tourism thrust upon them, historians have only critically examined the impacts of the industry in the American West since the mid-twentieth century. One of the early commentators in the field, Dean MacCannell, wrote in 1973 about staged authenticity in tourist settings. According to MacCannell, “tourists enter tourist areas precisely because their experiences there will not, for them, be routine,” but in many cases those experiences are also inauthentic. [1] This inauthenticity, particularly in tourist destinations in the American West, often camouflages more complicated undercurrents of identity, expansionism, and colonialism as well as the commodification of culture through scripted interactions. Comfortable experiences that dilute and sanitize the original settings become valued over opportunities to engage in authentic cultural exchanges. In each of the three books reviewed here, Hal Rothman, Marguerite Shaffer, and Chris Wilson analyze the topic of tourism in the American West through the lens of a critical, postmodern worldview. Following Jane Caplan’s definitions as quoted in The Houses of History: A critical reader in history and theory, I use “postmodern as a ‘historical description…of an age’.”[2]  While all three books represent environmental histories that, to varying degrees, delve into the impacts of tourism from a top-down approach, they also each deconstruct how rhetoric has shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of and interaction with tourist spaces in the American West. Rather than merely addressing the history of tourism, each author establishes the how the intentional, rhetorical scripting of tourist spaces helped to solidify various myths of the American West in the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of a nation.

Using case studies to demonstrate his point, Hal Rothman in Devils Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West provides a broad overview of tourism in the American West and posits that tourism comes with a cost, particularly for those areas that see tourism as a panacea to their economic woes. He notes that while some communities benefitted, many others did not, and local concerns were frequently cast aside as the power shifted to outsiders. Rothman lays a contextual framework for his discussion by defining three types of tourism: heritage tourism, occurring before the turn of the century; nationally-marketed tourism; and entertainment tourism that complemented the post-World War II economic growth.

After providing an overview of the early days of tourism in the American West, Rothman points out that tourism changed after the Civil War. People traveled to the real and mythical West because railroads promised passengers an easy escape from their own realities and because people believed they could reinvent themselves in this land of possibilities. By the turn of the century, Americans were certain that their “geography equaled Europe’s cultural past” and what had been a disjointed tourism effort transformed into organized activities that changed from elitist holidays to rites of passage that became part of the American ethos.[3]

Beginning with railroads and continuing with the introduction of the automobile, Rothman argues that tourism became more hegemonic with the power to shape and script experiences concentrated in the hands of a few. Not only were these experiences manufactured to appeal to tourists, but the images presented often came at the expense of the local inhabitants of the area. Using the Grand Canyon as the backdrop, Rothman points out how the separate treatment of the Havasupai and Hopi were used by the railroad, the Park Service, and Fred Harvey Company to create a mythic, southwestern commodity.

Rothman vividly helps the reader understand the juxtaposition of real versus myth in western tourist destinations as he describes changes in post-war tourism and presents a clear illustration of how it often resembled colonialism. Using Aspen as an example, the author demonstrates how Chicago industrialist, Walter P. Paepcke reimagined and engineered a town to his liking. Between 1945 and his death in 1960, Paepcke’s vision for Aspen resulted in two different ethics: one took place in winter and appealed to the outdoor recreationists while the other took place in summer and appealed to elitist intellectuals. His Aspen not only solved the seasonal conundrum of tourism, particularly as it related to skiing, but also served as a “bridge between a more elitist past and a future of mass culture” of tourism in the twentieth century.[4] Like Edgar Hewett’s Santa Fe and Averell Harriman’s Sun Valley, takeovers by outsiders changed the balance of power in the regions. Locals were often alienated while neonatives and corporations exerted a greater amount of influence over the direction of the towns.

Rothman argues that in the post-war era, the three forms of tourism converged and tours were packaged and experienced in scripted ways that farther removed the authenticity from the experience. While the devil’s bargain of this entertainment-based approach to tourism often frayed the bonds of community, some places yielded completely, embraced style over substance, and thrived. Rothman uses the example of how Las Vegas became the “prototype for entertainment tourism” and cashed in on its inauthenticity.[5] It offered to fulfill everyone’s dreams and was unapologetically malleable. Rothman discusses the development of Las Vegas’s myth, beginning with its liberal policies in the 1930s and further explores how the mob and finally national corporations continued to transform and remake the city. Rothman concludes that tourism changed the boundaries of the human experience by becoming commodified, packaged, and sold, in many cases, to the highest bidder. It served as a replacement economy that capitalized on postwar prosperity and offered a diversion to everyday life where the places and people that embraced tourism became a “caricature of their original identities.”[6] Throughout his book and in various ways, Rothman argues that tourism is the most colonial economy and “belongs to modern and postindustrial, postmodern worlds; its social structures and cultural ways are those of an extractive industry.”[7] Like mining, tourism removes something from the nature of a place and turns it into something that can be consumed separately from the nature in which it occurred. However, his focus on case studies limits his ability to extend his argument to several regions in the American West, including California and the Pacific Northwest, and his prose is at time redundant.

In Marguerite Shaffer’s See America First: Tourism and National Identity, she argues that both the creation of a tourist landscape as well as the consumption of tourism helped create a national culture in the United States. She specifically focuses on tourism between 1880 and 1940, to illustrate how marketing efforts, particularly those employing the “See American First” tagline, and similar rhetorical frameworks contributed to an idealized notion of nationalism. Shaffer points out that the earliest leisure trips were in the Northeast, including places like the Catskills and Niagara Falls, and reiterating Rothman’s point, mentions that prior to the Civil War, vacationing was primarily relegated to regional resorts and cultural pursuits. She notes that with the outbreak of WWI, Europe was effectively closed to tourism, and “in 1915 promoters for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition seized the See America First idea to promote the exposition,” which marked a turning point in national tourism.[8] Promoters contrasted Old World provincialism with the hope and magnificence of western scenery and branded it as a place where democracy and opportunity lived. It is this image that would continue to define western tourism for years to come.

Shaffer points out how the national parks took shape and became nationalized tourist attractions and assets that were promoted by the government as a kind of “virtuous consumption.”[9] While the promotional efforts for Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon relied on the allure of the exotic, Glacier took its scripting a step further and also invoked ideals of patriotism, masculinity, and Manifest Destiny. The railroads behind the campaigns sought to not only attract a national clientele, but also to boost their images as nation builders. Of the three, Great Northern was the most successful in capitalizing on the image of the experience and mythos of the West. Through the widespread use of its See America First campaign, the company ushered in a reimagining of a constructed western wilderness that lay in the juxtaposition of civilization and the wild frontier and harnessed the American imagination.

The author discusses how national tourism evolved, coinciding with mass automobile production and romanticized ideals of scripted nationalism that linked the “the nation to land and soil, history and tradition, as well as the people and their customs.”[10] She notes that the burgeoning network of good roads enabled individuals to see and appreciate America as a connected, united nation. Additionally, throughout the book Shaffer also points out numerous guidebooks that often evoked the image of God as artist and helped shape public perception and opinion. In particular, she notes the See America First series launched in 1914 that included twenty-one volumes, serving as the first to “attempt a comprehensive overview of the tourist opportunities throughout North America.”[11] In the last two chapters, Shaffer examines travel diaries, journals, scrapbooks, and souvenirs to demonstrate various ways that tourism transitioned into a consumptive process and addresses how elitist travelers began to question excessive marketing, lack of exclusivity, and the seemingly ordinariness of landscapes they visited in comparisons to the visions they had imagined.

While Shaffer has clearly done her research and provides readers with a thorough accounting of the campaigns and ideologies that helped revolutionize the tourism industry, her narrative could have benefitted by expanding some key ideas. Her nod to the impacts of tourism on marginalized groups caught in the crossfire of “virtuous consumption” feels perfunctory.[12] Although she mentions it, she does not thoroughly address the consequences and negative outcomes of tourism and the displacement it caused to indigenous and marginalized people, and the voices of those who were displaced by national tourism are largely absent. Including oral histories of those who were displaced or their descendants would have enriched and humanized the discourse. Additionally, she could have expanded her discussion of national tourism within the frameworks of nationalism and post-colonialism to provide additional context and discussion. 

Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe argues that the myth of Santa Fe was constructed and intentionally formed in the late 1800s through architecture, art, historic preservation, and pageantry to promote tourism and that the myth persists to this day. In the book, he presents a cultural history of the city and attempts to examine the active construction of the myths of Santa Fe while simultaneously unraveling those myths, showing how the “patterns of emphasis and omission reflect prevailing cultural, political, and economic forces.”[13]

The book is organized in two parts that are interrupted by two interludes. Part one begins with an overview of local history before 1912, starting in the seventeenth century. This historical context provides the background for understanding the subsequent manipulation of that history. Additionally, the author immediately attempts to correct the record by noting that the Santa Fe style of architecture did not derive from the Pueblo Indians but was imported from the Mediterranean by the Spanish. The arrival of Anglo-Americans after the opening of the Santa Fe trail in 1821 and the occupation of 1846 initiated a new era. Wilson details how individuals were racially characterized and how the architecture of Santa Fe became more Americanized as the region sought to become a state. He discusses how the coming of the railroad in 1880 continued to change the character of Santa Fe, particularly noting that there were changes in property ownership, the division of labor, the influx of new ideas, and new building materials. He notes that these changes produced a shift from the local vernacular tradition of modest adobe buildings to an era of more elaborately built and more Americanized environments.

Wilson points out that after the railroad, New Mexico functioned as an internal colony, but it needed to be more appealing. The image was intentionally “rehabilitated from the foreign and derogatory Mexican to the romantic and ennobling Spanish,” and the proportion of mixed marriages decreased giving way to the more socially acceptable New Mexican triculturalism—the notion that New Mexico is made of three distinctly separate cultures living in harmony: Hispanics, Native Americans and Anglos.[14]

In the second part of the book, Wilson illustrates how Santa Fe’s cultural spheres contributed to the myth, starting with the Santa Fe City Planning Board after New Mexico became a state in 1912. Led by Edgar Lee Hewett, who started the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Archaeology in Santa Fe, the board was charged with finding a way to address economic decline in the city, and they landed on tourism as the answer. The resulting plan combined a standard of “architectural homogeneity with a local revival style based on a study of the city’s old architecture.”[15] The plan, which was the first attempt to define a city-wide style, was set into motion and not only sought to reverse the Americanization of architecture of the previous decades, but also require new construction to conform as well.

Central to the acceptance of this Pueblo-Revival style was the attention the New Mexico Building received at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. The building was duplicated in Santa Fe to become the Fine Arts Museum, and the style of architecture was quickly replicated throughout the city to solidify the myth. After an extensive promotional campaign highlighting Santa Fe as exotic and antimodern, the plan began showing results in the 1920s as hotel rooms increased and the city attracted the attention of artists and intellectuals.

Wilson continues by clarifying how cultural notions of identities were constructed through various festivals and events and discusses preservation efforts that essentially seek to freeze time in Santa Fe and erase signs of Americanization in the built environment. For example, Wilson argues that the modern version of the Santa Fe Fiesta as it is experienced today was actually established in 1919 under the direction of Anglo museum staff. However, by mid-century, the Hispanic community assumed control and reshaped it into a historical allegory that smoothed out the bumps in the historical record, according to their perspective, which served to marginalize others. Essentially, Wilson’s book emphasizes how Santa Fe is an “instructive example of the invention of tradition and the on-going interaction of ethnic identity with tourist image making” that illustrates how the mixing of cultures was never as seamless as the regionalist architecture and pageantry suggests.[16] While the book benefits from the inclusion of photographs and illustrations, the organizational structure seems somewhat disjointed, which perhaps is a reflection of the author’s poststructuralist approach to history. “History is not written for those who lived it and are now gone but is constantly reshaped in terms meaningful to the living, unavoidably reflecting the concerns of the era in which it is written.”[17] Although Wilson attempts to weave multiple narratives, he omits several important considerations, particularly those pertaining to power.

In the three books reviewed here, each author offers a different lens through which they address the progression of this staged authenticity and discuss how it often provides a shared rhetorical framework through which visitors contextualize their experiences, and in many ways, how the script continues to define tourism in the American West today. Through her references to and inclusion of guidebooks and promotional materials, Shaffer strikingly illustrates how tourist spaces were scripted to promote a national identity. Rothman’s thorough recounting of the development of cumulative types of tourism, particularly ski resorts, not only shows how mythologizing scripts were written and constructed, but also how those scripts evolved with changes in the market and expectations of consumers. Wilson uses the lens of architecture to frame how the scripting and control of built environments in Santa Fe has been used to fabricate a staged authenticity.

Not only did these scripts solidify myths in the American West, but they often reinforced other ideas including the acceptance of the disenfranchisement and displacement of locals in preference to the needs and wants of visitors. Rothman points out numerous instances of displacements throughout his book. To offer one example, during his recounting of the creation of the Grand Canyon, he explains how the Harvey Company constructed a mythic southwestern culture to appease visitors that elevated the Hopi above Havasupai as the dominant people in the canyon. “The power of the Hopi presence at the Grand Canyon emanated from the widespread exposure to their art.”[18] The Hopi, while having little claim to the area, were promoted as being pure and mystical, and the Havasupai became incidental to the mythologizing of the canyon. Likewise, in Wilson’s book, he notes how the imposition of the architectural requirements that helped create the desired myth of Santa Fe, worked too well. As property values increased in later years, young Anglo and Hispanic professionals displaced Westside locals. And while Shaffer did not elaborate on the issue in depth, she acknowledges the displacement of Native Americans in her discussion of tourism spanning the continent and notes that the Great Northern railroad purchased 160 acres of land from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation to construct the Glacier Park Hotel that would serve as the gateway to the park. 

Another key element in these collective works demonstrates how the narratives commodified culture in tourist destinations. Shaffer points out that tourists through their purchases of mementos helped to solidify tourism as a consumer experience by objectifying and transforming the experience into something material that “show the consciously constructed visual, verbal, and physical narrative of the actual and imaginative journey.”[19] Wilson elucidates on the how the vogue of Santa Fe style epitomized the consumption of the 1980s and further explains how that style itself was commodified and exported to places like Hotel Santa Fe in Euro Disneyland. Because the scope of Rothman’s discussion is broader, he covers this theme in the most detail. Through his detailed accounts of the rise of national parks, dude ranching, ski resorts and Las Vegas, he articulates the progression of consumption in tourism, noting that in “post-Watergate, postmodern America, image was paramount” to selling the destination.[20]

Lastly, the authors show how notions of Manifest Destiny, imperialism, and expansionism often permeated scripted tourist experiences. Shaffer demonstrates how the constructed narratives of guidebooks during the time period promoted a white, imperialist vision of the United States. In one example, she explains how Great Northern used the Blackfeet Indians as the mascots of Glacier National Park in articles and promotional materials, encouraging people to see: “the home of the Blackfeet Indians conquered and befriended by brave westerners, the sight of unequaled sublime scenery, the physical promise of Manifest Destiny.”[21] Likewise, Wilson notes that at key dates in Santa Fe’s history, expansionist policies were implemented through architectural choices and constructs of cultural identities, particularly after the arrival of the railroad and during the New Mexico campaign for statehood. In response to those reinventions, he contends that Santa Feans pushed back on the Americanization of their places and took steps to reverse overt signs of occupation in their built environments, thus changing the script again. However, as highlighted by Rothman, some tourist attractions blatantly and unapologetically embodied the ideals of expansionism. This notion is particularly obvious as he recounts the development of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, stating that it became the “figurative connection between the Civil War and the Oregon Trail, between the Big Horn Battlefield and Bunker Hill…and became the emblem of Manifest Destiny in a time when the optimism of that idea shored up a failing national spirit.”[22]

Viewed collectively, Rothman, Shaffer, and Wilson demonstrate how tourism in the American West offered travelers a constructed notion of experience. Through various lenses and examples, they show how the scripting of tourist spaces provided a common rhetorical framework for visitors to contextualize their encounters. However, as all three authors demonstrate, these narratives were often inauthentic and complicated notions of heritage and history while also reinforcing a vision of white America that excluded, displaced, and marginalized others.

[1] Dean MacCannell, “Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings,” American Journal of Sociology, 79(3), (1973), 589–603.

[2] Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History: A critical reader in history and theory, second edition (Manchester University Press, 2016), 290.

[3] Hal Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 40.

[4] Ibid., 226.

[5] Ibid., 228.

[6] Ibid., 370.

[7] Ibid., 13.

[8] Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 33.

[9] Ibid., 94.

[10] Ibid., 168.

[11] Ibid., 181.

[12] Ibid., 7.

[13] Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a modern regional tradition (University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 10.

[14] Ibid., 72-74.

[15] Ibid., 122.

[16] Ibid., 7.

[17] Ibid., 10-11.

[18] Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 71.

[19] Shaffer, America First, 265.

[20] Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 340.

[21] Shaffer, America First, 76.

[22] Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 156.