Lasso the Wind Quotes

“We the people of Montana, grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of its mountains, the vastness of its rolling plains …,”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“what Truth or Consequences used to be called”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“Pope Julius II issued an encyclical in 1512 declaring that the native people of North America were more than muscle and fiber; in fact, he declared, they had souls. The bad news was, this meant that they were also burdened with Original Sin, thus putting them in urgent need of baptism, which would wipe the stain from their souls.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“THE FIVE HUNDRED or so homes atop Acoma are still heated by wood, with mounded clay ovens outside that look like big beehives. The old timbered ladders, baked white by the sun, still rise to the top terraces, and there are deep footpaths along the tabletop of the rock. It is not a museum, but a living town, somewhat iced in time. The wind dominates all other sounds.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“Cowboys are like bears and mountain lions,” the Border Country poet Drum Hadley, a rancher himself, has said. “They need a certain range, a certain critical mass of land, on which to exist.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Leopold wrote later. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“You would think that one of the largest perennial streams in the American Southwest, brought to life by a wilderness holding deep snows in its higher reaches, would be full of life. But the Gila River is all but dead. And so is the forest. Much of it looks devastated. There used to be wolves, grizzly bears, Merriam’s elk, beavers, black-footed ferrets, and river otters here. Most of them exist, now, only on the cracked pottery of the long-vanished Mogollon.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“He works twelve hours a day, with some of the world’s stupidest animals, placed in an environment that is foreign to their native ground. He might as well be raising chickens in Rockefeller Center.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“As it turns out, the world has plenty of cheap meat. Cattle feedlots are stuffed with steroid-pumped, ready-to-slaughter-and-wrap beef that can find its way into a hamburger bun much quicker and cheaper than anything a lone cowboy in southern New Mexico can do. The”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“They live in a little place without electricity. He hauls water and cuts wood for the stove. They raise pigs, milk cows, and make their own butter and bacon. They have a big garden in the summer. Sherri makes horse saddles. Preferring to live like Jeremiah Johnson instead of Tim Allen, they shun the new Wal-Mart down in Silver City and weave their own clothes. They live off game, beef, and canned vegetables. Their grocery bill for an entire year, Laney says after warming up to me, is just over a thousand dollars.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“may be easier to lasso the wind than to find a sustaining story for the American West. Still, as storytellers it is our obligation to keep trying.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over, then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession. On many days it looks as if the possessors have won. Over the past century and a half, it has been the same crew, whether shod in snakeskin boots or tasseled loafers, chipping away at the West. They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it. They use a false view of history to disguise most of what they are up to. They seem to be afraid of the native West—the big, cloud-crushing, prickly place. They cannot stand it that green-eyed wolves are once again staring out from behind aspen groves in Yellowstone National Park. They cannot live with the idea that at least one of the seventeen rivers that dance out of the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada remains undammed. They are disgusted that George Armstrong Custer’s name has been removed from the name of the battlefield memorial, the range of the Sioux and Crow and Arapaho, replaced by a name that gives no special favor to either side: the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Worse, the person now in charge of the memorial is an Indian.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“the West of open spaces, or the West of mythology, this region’s hold on the American character never seemed stronger. A person puts on a cowboy hat anywhere in the world, even if alone in a room, and starts acting differently—sometimes stupidly, sometimes nobly, but it is a new personality.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“The West is full of mountains imprinted with pedestrian names. But the French-Canadian fur trappers, openly lustful, had it right when they named the Tetons for their wet dreams.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

“[Las Vegas] is the American Vatican for vice, requiring grand ritual and show for pilgrims dressed like six year olds.”
― Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West