Midway between Billings, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park,
tourists encounter the quaint little town of Red Lodge. Here one
may see cowboys, Indians, and mountain men roaming a downtown
that's on the National Register of Historic Places, attend a rodeo
on the 4th of July, or join in a celebration of immigrants during
the annual "Festival of Nations." One would hardly guess that until
recently Red Lodge was really a down-and-out coal-mining town or
that it was populated mainly by white Americans.
In many ways, Red Lodge is typical of western towns that have
created new interpretations of their pasts in order to attract
tourists through a mix of public pageants and old-timey facades. In
Red Lodge and the Mythic West, Montana-born Bonnie Christensen
tells how Red Lodge reinvented itself and shows that the "history"
a community chooses to celebrate may be only loosely based on what
actually happened in the town's past.
Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present,
Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries
of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She
connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical
forces to show how national and regional influences have
contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how
and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western"
images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation
became part of the identity that defined one town.
Christensen takes us behind the main street facades of Red Lodge
to tell a story of salesmanship, adaptation, and survival.
Combining oral histories, newspapers, government records, and even
minutes of organizationmeetings, she shows not only how people have
used different interpretations of the past to create a sense of
themselves in the present, but also how public memory is created
and re-created.
Christensen's shrewd analysis transcends one place to illuminate
broader trends in the region and offer a clearer understanding of
the motivations behind the creation of "theme towns" throughout
America. By explaining how and why we choose various versions of
the past to fit who we want to be -- and who we want others to
think we are -- she helps us learn more about the role of myths and
myth-making in American communities, and in the process learn a
little more about ourselves.
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