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Ferguson: Rocky Mountains helped shape American character from trappers to tourists
Summary
In a Missoula lecture, author Gary Ferguson traced how the Rocky Mountains influenced U.S. culture—shaping settlers, trappers, women, artists and the rise of national parks—and closed by asking whether younger generations still imagine nature the same way.
Gary Ferguson, the Kittredge distinguished visiting writer in environmental studies, told a Missoula audience that the Rocky Mountains have played a formative role in American culture from the early fur trade through twentieth‑century tourism.
Ferguson laid out historical examples—including Black trappers and cowboys, women who found social freedom on Western ranches, the Hudson River School of landscape painting and the artists who popularized scenes of Yellowstone—to argue that the Rockies supplied symbolic and practical models of freedom and equality for Americans. “Does it have the texture or dimension that it once did?” Ferguson asked near the end of his talk, questioning whether modern, technology‑rich life changes how people imagine wild places.
Ferguson illustrated the point with instances from 19th‑century history: he described Black trappers who gained local authority among Indigenous groups, wealthy “remittance men” who abandoned estates to live in the West, and daughters of Eastern elites who embraced ranch life and outdoor pursuits previously denied them. He said artists such as Thomas Moran and members of the Hudson River School removed Anglo settlers from many canvases to make wilderness itself a moral and patriotic symbol—an idea that later bolstered national park advocacy. He noted Thomas Moran’s Yellowstone paintings were purchased by the U.S. Congress and displayed in the Capitol as civic reminders.
During the lecture Ferguson connected the imaginative power of landscape to movements for democratic equality and reform in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and cited writers and cultural examples—from Lewis and Clark’s influence on New England debates to hundreds of working‑class visitors who historically traveled to Yellowstone. He argued that landscapes were used both to justify westward expansion and, in other writings and images, to critique concentrated wealth and industrial excess.
The lecture concluded with Ferguson asking whether younger generations—whose nature exposure often comes through video games, social media and packaged media—retain the capacity to imagine wild places the way earlier generations did. He posed that question to the audience as a prompt for the hour of questions that followed.
Ferguson also noted his background as the author of 16 books on nature and science and mentioned his recent titles, including Decade of the Wolf, which he said was chosen as a Montana Book of the Year.
