Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

These observations naturalize the silence of Wyoming residents, equating a lack of voice with the nature of the windy state. Further, rather than exploring the internal complexity of these characters, Ehrlich allows her ranchers to remain undeveloped caricatures who fit neatly into vague generalizations about the West. Ehrlich’s characters are both larger than average human beings and significantly less complicated. They are in a sense determined by their “westernness,” as their actions conform entirely to mythic expectations of stoicism, strength, silence, and endurance.

Ehrlich’s assumption that the West is premodern and preindustrialized is central to the text’s fixed notion of “westernness,” which is at odds with recent interpretations of the hybrid nature of identity. Ehrlich’s desire for a preindustrial landscape informs her discovery, upon heading out to herd sheep, that the “open spaces” are limitless. When she asks her foreman, John, “‘[w]here are my boundaries?’” he replies, “‘[b]oundaries?’ He looked puzzled for a minute. ‘Hell, Gretel, it’s all the outfit’s land, thirty or forty miles in any direction. Take them anywhere they want to go’” (55). This sense of boundlessness is confirmed when Ehrlich realizes while chasing sheep that she “can see a hundred miles in every direction” (60). Ehrlich’s vision of sheepherding as “a first-century job with nineteenth-century amenities” (21) erases the historical changes that ushered in contemporary industrialism as well as the fact that following World War Two, “[w]ealthy individuals and corporations…were buying up hundreds of ranches with an eye to recreation, subdivision, mining, water rights, or tax write-offs” (Larson 524).