American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation

Abstract

Geographers might make a very significant contribution to the interpretation of the American West and of the American nation by a systematic investigation of the West as a set of dynamic regions. The outline offered suggests a focus upon four categories of regional features (population, circulation, political areas, and culture) to be examined as complexes changing through four recognizable stages ( nuclear, regional, regional-national, nietropolitan-national ) from initial European colonization to the present with projections into the future.

Modelling land use change with generalized linear models—a multi-model analysis of change between 1860 and 2000 in Gallatin Valley, Montana

“…These links an isolated area with outside economic, political, and cultural influences (Meinig, 1972), demonstrate unequal power relationships between isolated landscapes and institutional forces (Limerick, 1987), and interpret environmental history (Worster, 1987). The conceptual and theoretical understanding of the general model provide an opportunity to generate hypotheses about the operation of constraints and proximate causes of land use change.…”

The geography of Buddhism in the Four Corners states

“…Geographer Donald Meinig considered Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico "Major Regions" with urban cores at Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque, surrounded by a domain of, respectively, White secular, White Mormon, and Hispanic cultural character (Meinig 1972). At that time, Meinig considered Arizona only a "Major Nuclei" centered on Phoenix, because it lacked sufficient demographic size or cultural coherence to be a full-fledged "region."…”

City Systems and Industrial Market Structure

“…The constraints on settlement imposed by topography, coupled with the lack of accessibility, fueled the growth of large nodal cities in the west at the expense of more evenly distributed city systems. Meinig (1972) champions a third and less obvious explanation for the patterns of lagging development in the west, drawing on historical precedence to demonstrate how two culture groups, the Mormons and the Hispanos, prevented more traditional urbanization processes from taking hold in the west. In the first instance, the Mormons settled in the Wasatch region of Utah during the mid-nineteenth century and, over time, extended throughout Utah, northward into Idaho and Montana, west and east into Nevada and Colorado respectively, and southward into Arizona (for an in-depth discussion of the Mormon culture region, see Jackson and Hudman 1987).…”

“…During the early and mid-nineteenth century, these physical attributes attracted settlement to select resource-rich areas, especially mountainous regions where mining and forestry flourished, but repelled it from the vast open spaces where eking a livelihood from the land was extremely difficult or impossible. Indeed, only with government-supported irrigation projects, which came in the early decades of the twentieth century, was agriculture viable in many regions of the west (Meinig 1972). The vastness of the country, absence of navigable waterways and, later, rail, limited accessibility within the region and with other regions of the country.…”