Into the Land of Our Dreams

The Western states are to Americans what America so often is to the rest of the world, a myth-encrusted land of possibilities. Considered by the imagination, the plains of Texas and the deserts of Utah invite dreams of a footloose future. They promise a fugitive's paradise: not Arcadia, but a clean slate. The dreams are fed by novels and movies and by the bromides of Sunbelt boosterism. They are also prompted by more than a century of Western landscape photography, from the 19th century panoramas of William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins to the raptures of Ansel Adams. Such sources fed...