Today's post is the middle section of Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter."  Tomorrow we will post the final part of the letter. 

"Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Waldo Frank in the 1920s, said it better than I can.  'Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.... Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people.  The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains.  It had taken the shrillness out of them.  They had learned the trick of quiet....'

"We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it.  But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses as this, all the wild that still remains to us.

"It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial.  The more urban it has become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I believe our people, have become. 

"For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high valuation on what those places gave me.  And if I had not been able to periodically renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse.  Even when I can't get to the back country, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance that there are still stretches of prairies where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk and bowl, and where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation.

"The idea alone can sustain me.  But as the wilderness areas are progressively exploited or "improved", as the jeeps and bulldozers of uranium prospectors scar up the deserts and the roads are cut into the alpine timberlands, and as the remnants of the unspoiled and natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss is a little death in me.  In us.

"I am not moved by the argument that those wilderness areas which have already been exposed to grazing or mining are already deflowered, and so might as well be "harvested".  For mining I cannot say much good except that its operations are generally short-lived.  The extractable wealth is taken and the shafts, the tailings, and the ruins left, and in a dry country such as the American West the wounds men make in the earth do not quickly heal.  Still, they are only wounds; they aren't absolutely mortal.  Better a wounded wilderness than none at all. 

"And as for grazing, if it is strictly controlled so that it does not destroy the ground cover, damage the ecology, or compete with the wildlife it is in itself nothing that need conflict with the wilderness feeling or the validity of the wilderness experience.  I have known enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness; they belong on the frontier, moreover, and have a look of rightness.

"The invasion they make on the virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neolithic man, and they can, in moderation, even emphasize a man's feeling of belonging to the natural world.  Under surveillance, they can belong; under control, they need not deface or mar.  I do not believe that in wilderness areas where grazing has never been permitted, it should be permitted; but I do not believe either that an otherwise untouched wilderness should be eliminated from the preservation plan because of limited existing uses such as grazing which are in consonance with the frontier condition and image."

Please post a comment on this section of the letter, or on the foreground thoughts and ideas of Wallace Stegner that preceded it.