Rocky Mountain Skies: A History of Air in the Modern US West

The American West calls to mind open space, reaffirmed by ubiquitous imagery of big skies throughout television shows, movies, and representations of the region. Yet, the story of mountain air is larger than its symbolic presence in frontier mythology. While humans have shaped representations of Western skies, the physical skies have shaped the historical development of the region. This paper argues that air has shaped the Intermountain West culturally, ecologically, and politically, focusing on the region from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries when the region was folded into the settler state.

The distinct topography where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains hosts a climate characterized by aridity and sudden temperature shifts caused by the Chinook winds. The climate has affected subsistence patterns, agricultural practices, and the material reality of daily life for both non-Native and Indigenous inhabitants alike.

In the nineteenth-century, Western skies terrified settlers into prairie madness and appealed to consumptives seeking healing. Settlers assessed new environments, concerned that their own bodily health depended upon their natural surroundings, as historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has shown. Indigenous residents of the Intermountain region documented changes in weather patterns and celestial events in winter counts, and many emphasize the sky in origin stories and vision traditions.

At the turn of the twentieth-century, processes of modernization altered the region. Territorial disputes were settled by forcing Native Americans onto reservations, mechanized agriculture altered the lives of farmers and the region’s agroecology, and particulate matter from industrialization entered the skies and lungs of residents at growing rates. Weather science expanded with the state, producing the concepts and maps that guide modern understandings of the atmosphere while electrification introduced light pollution to the sky. This paper consolidates these themes, showing how air in the Intermountain West transformed a frontier region into a modern state.