For two years, the county commissioners in Chelan County, Wash., have led the state’s property-rights movement. They thumbed their noses at Washington’s Growth Management Act, challenged its planning requirements in court and even suffered economic sanctions for ignoring them (HCN, 6/10/96). But the county’s outlaw image changed dramatically when voters threw out one of the […]
Communities
INS raid leads to lawsuit
Three people who believe they were mistreated in an immigration raid in Jackson, Wyo., last summer have filed paperwork seeking more than $1.8 million in damages from three government agencies. The first is AgustÆn Perez, a legal alien from neighoring Driggs, Idaho, who alleges that two guns were held to his head during an Aug. […]
An 84-year-old postal veteran
The struggle by Red Lodge, Mont., that kept alive a downtown post office may be duplicated 150 miles away in Livingston, population 7,500. Recently, 1,500 Livingston residents signed a petition calling on Postal Service officials to forego a move to spacious new quarters and retain the 84-year-old post office in the heart of town. “It’s […]
El Nuevo West
The region’s new pioneers buoy the economy and live on the edge
‘The way they treated me, I don’t like it at all’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Thirty-one-year-old Agustin Perez of Driggs, Idaho, came to the United States in 1982 to make $4.50 an hour working for a potato farmer in nearby Ashton. He got his green card in 1990. When we interviewed him he was in the midst of remodeling […]
‘They’re good workers. And they’re all we’ve got’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kay Humann is the office manager at High Country Linen in Jackson, Wyo. Accustomed to running the computer and the phones in the front of the building, she worked in the hot, steamy laundry 16 hours a day for a week after the Aug. […]
‘I don’t want to live in a community of rich white people. It’s boring’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Filmmaker Shelley Weiss moved from Los Angeles to Oakley, Utah, nine years ago. An avid swimmer, she quickly became a regular at the Park City Racquet Club. Over the past few years, she has heard racist comments there about the growing number of Mexican […]
‘I have a 1996 Dodge Caravan … I’m a family guy’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Standing in the waiting room of the INS building in Denver, the federal official read the names of the newest citizens of the United States – Irene Lopez Fernandez, José Chavez Flores, Arturo Ramirez Mendoza. They were all pleased, but no one smiled wider […]
Amen!
La Iglesia in Emma offers Latinos a home in a foreign land
The shotgun wedding of tourism and public lands
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – They came from across the country and around the West to celebrate the shotgun wedding of tourism and the public lands. The potential Lords of the New West, the bosses of tourism agencies and industry lobbying groups, and the managers of federal lands and parks, arrived in limousines and chartered […]
Denying the warts on the West’s service economy
Once upon a time, in 18th-century France, the king and his court had pet economists known as “physiocrats.” The nobility liked their physiocrats very much. Not only did they bow and scrape in a very respectful way, but they told the king and counts and dukes that all wealth comes from the ground. The aristocracy […]
Keeping the heart in the center of town
The residents of very small Red Lodge, Mont., struck a blow, this month, for keeping their town a town. The forces for sprawling suburbanization are still all there: rising real estate prices, a major expansion at Red Lodge Mountain ski resort, and an influx of amenity-seeking newcomers attracted to the town’s setting, 60 twisting miles […]
Belonging to the West
-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.” * Eric Paddock I moved to the West because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the West – […]
Coyote Angels
Bart Koehler, director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and a co-founder of Earth First!, always took time out from fighting for environmental issues to sing about them. Now he and his Coyote Angels band have released a CD featuring songs about the wild life of the West. Some, dedicated to green greats such as […]
Even in Quiet Places
It is a secret still, but already your tree is chosen. It has entered a forest for miles and hides deep in a valley by a river. No one else finds it; the sun passes over not noticing. But even while you are reading you happen to think of that tree, no matter where sentences […]
No name for art
-The reason I draw the designs is to make the past and present come together. It’s like mixing colors.” * Jordan Harvier, age 13 Bruce Hucko’s new book, Where There is No Name for Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children, is like Harvier’s quote. It blends black-and-white photographs of young artists, interviews and colorful […]
Piling a new economy on the old
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For a century, mining and logging drove the economy of Coeur d’Alene. When those industries went bust in the early 1980s, a small group of city leaders began searching for a new engine. Among them was Duane Hagadone, a native son who owns most […]
Help find Pyramid Lake
Locals around Pyramid Lake, Nev., have wondered for years how explorer John C. Fremont first discovered this body of water in 1842. To test some hypotheses and to publicize the area, the nonprofit Friends of Pyramid Lake is sponsoring a two-part essay contest: Writers are invited to submit essays by Dec. 31 describing how Fremont […]
Californians stay home
After five years of stirring up the real estate pot, Californians have stopped moving east, and newcomers are moving to the coast again. That’s the conclusion of private researchers who studied surrendered drivers’ licenses in the Golden State. It marks the first time in six years that more people are moving into the state than […]
She works to save the past
Longtime HCN subscriber Ann Phillips finds herself drawn time and again back to a place that many experience as timeless: southeastern Utah. There, with one hand, she tries to record archaeological sites before they vanish; with the other, she works to prevent them from vanishing. The educational consultant turned archaeologist came through Paonia recently with […]
