"Western growth has a low ceiling, a fact that neither boosters nor hopeful in-migrants like to admit. ... Ordinary people, making it by guess and by God, or not quite making it, are just as susceptible to dreams as the ambitious and greedy, and respond as excitedly to the adventure, the freedom, the apparently inexhaustible richness of the West. And the boosters have been there from the beginning to oversell the West as the Garden of the World, the flowing well of opportunity, the stamping ground of the self-reliant.

"Sometimes it is hard to tell the boosters from the suckers." (p. xix)

Wallace Stegner. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: living and writing in the West. New York: Random House. 1992.

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"Especially in the West what we have instead of place is space.

"The principal invention of western American culture  is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. A principal western industry is tourism, which exploits the mobile and the seasonal. Whatever it might want to be, the West is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else." (p. 72)

image © D. Wall