Speculation, tourism, and The Professor's House

In the summer of 1915 Willa Cather visited Mesa Verde National Park, probably to gather information for what eventually became "Tom Outland's Story," book 2 of The Professor's House (1925). (1) The following January she published an article in the Denver Times that spells out for readers precisely "what the Mesa Verde means" (qtd. in Rosowski and Slote 84)--a remedy for modern society's estrangement from the land. (2) Cather explains that the cliff dwellers "seem not to have struggled to overcome their environment. They accommodated themselves to it, interpreted it and made it personal; lived in a dignified relation with it. In more senses than one they built themselves into it" (85). She suggests that tourists to Mesa Verde could recapture this organic relationship. For Cather, the tourist gaze--as a modern form of ritual that restores the relation between landscape, aesthetic value, and cultural heritage could heal the alienation from the land that Americans had suffered through the dominance of speculators, who treated land as a commodity. (3)

In the 1916 Mesa Verde article Cather pointedly ignores the commercial aspects of promoting travel to the relatively new national park, but because she was an established "authoress"--a fact proclaimed in the headline to her article, "Colorado Show Place as Authoress Sees It" (82)--her vision of the mesa and its inhabitants attracted tourist dollars to the area. Despite her implied criticism of the commodification of land, her article played into the speculative fever still strong in Colorado, whose economy was expanding from the extraction of natural resources to tourism.

Although Cather suppressed the economics of tourism in her article, on some level she must have recognized that the ruins--which she represents as preserving "like a fly in amber" (84) a "human record" (85) of an organic relationship to the land--had been treated as a commodity ever since their discovery by white explorers and settlers. Certainly in her later ruminations on the meaning of Mesa Verde in The Professor's House, she engaged rather than denied the complexities of Western history. She depicted the inextricable relationship between the stories used to recover the values of the past and the entrepreneur--a relationship that challenged her belief in the transcendence of art. Cather recycled in The Professor's House a great deal of material from the Denver Times article, basing Tom Outland's adventure at Blue Mesa on her earlier depiction of Dick Wetherill's discovery of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. (4) But from the later perspective she acknowledged what was anathema to her: the impossibility of imagining an ideal outside the language of business. (5)

Perhaps because her own father's speculation jeopardized the family's finances, Cather was deeply suspicious of land speculation and speculators. She had also been influenced by the populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, which argued that speculation obliterated the ideal of an organic relationship to the land. (6) As Patricia Nelson Limerick explains, although white settlers in the West viewed "the acquisition of property as a cultural imperative," speculation

   stripped the social fiction of property of all its softer, justifying
   touches. Speculation revealed ownership to be a purely conceptual
   act.... Property could never look more arbitrary or distant
   from the ideal of the farmer-citizen made secure and independent
   by his land. (55, 69)

Cather demonized speculation as the source of estrangement from the land in an early story, "El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional" (1901; Collected Short Fiction 293-310). But the phenomenon of speculation had so thoroughly permeated Western thinking that Cather--like the historical Dick Wetherill and her character Tom Outland--found it impossible to conceive of a reality free of it. The intoxication associated with its risky but possibly remunerative activity was an integral part of Western adventure. Speculation privileged above all else getting there first, making the discovery that would lead to wealth and fame. Populists' antispeculation campaign could not squelch its appeal; it had sunk too deeply into the emotional aura surrounding land settlement in the West.

"Tom Outland's Story" in The Professor's House represents Cather's belated, grudging understanding of the "real story" of Western adventure. Through Tom Outland, who like Dick Wetherill was both a consumer and a supplier of the tourist experience, she confessed that the idyllic world of Blue Mesa could not be kept separate from speculation. Thus she also confessed her awareness that speculation had indelibly shaped Tom's story--and her own as well. At first glance, this reading might seem at odds with Cather's many commentaries on aesthetics in which she sought to sever art from the commercial culture that she abhorred. Cather bluntly insisted that "Economics and art are strangers" (Cather on Writing 27). Like tourism, art for Cather was "a search for something for which there is no market demand ... where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values" (103). As John Hilgart points out, Cather struggled in her fiction "to preserve the thing of beauty from the marketplace" (377). (7) My claim also seems at odds with Cather's own stated intentions for "Tom Outland's Story." In a 1938 letter, she explained that she inserted Outland's Blue Mesa story of a "world above the world" (Professor's House 240) into the center of the novel to open a window onto a realm free from the commodification that stifled Godfrey St. Peter's home and American culture in general (Cather on Writing 30-32). Not surprisingly, then, critics have traditionally interpreted Tom Outland as a vehicle for Cather's idealism. Yet I argue that Cather's revisions of the meaning of Mesa Verde mark her surrender of youthful idealism and her consciousness of the indissoluble ties between land economics and storytelling. For Cather's bitter resistance to speculation's commodification of landscape spurred her to construct her ideal in opposition to it. Even as she sought to validate the authenticity of her 1916 vision of Mesa Verde in The Professor's House, she perceived that the drama of discovery bore the imprint of the very market forces that Outland--and she herself--had sought to escape.