The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness

by David Roberts

was backpacking a mere upper-class Anglo luxury? Was the very passion for wilderness, as opposed to land to be lived with, a Romantic fixation?

“There were special places way back in, where the people would pray in spring, before any Anglos came here. They used to talk to the land. And the old people, they said it was the land that made us human.”

Eurocentric notions of “truth” do not fit well with certain kinds of Native American tolerance of ambiguity.

I had instead to imagine a certain population of early Southwesterners being, as it were, “left behind.” They would have clung to the hunter-gatherer life even as their neighbors created a sedentary civilization.

conjures up the struggle of two men trying to coax 300 bovines across the powerful river in early

He lived by the Depression adage: ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.’