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We get an occasional manhunt hereabouts, usually after a prison escape, but nothing in my memory has reached the magnitude of the search in the Four Corners area last week.
Two men, both identified as survivalists
with
anti-government sentiments,
apparently stole a water
truck near Cortez and then went a spree, shooting at
anybody in a uniform. A Cortez policeman was killed and
two other peace officers were wounded.
One uniformed man who got shot at, although he was not wounded, is somebody I've met a few times -- Art Hutchinson, who grew up in Salida (his father, Doc Hutchinson, has been a veterinarian here since, well, to put it another way, the first Hutchinsons in this area not only ranched, but traded with the Utes).
A National Park Service ranger, Art had parked to block the road from the highway to Hovenweep National Monument, so as to protect his visitors from armed intrusions. Fortunately he was perched away from his vehicle when it got riddled by bullets as the fugitives went by.
While that was a comfort, I reckoned without the effects
of the manhunt on the tourist industry. According to
yesterday's Post, Many businesses already have lost
thousands of dollars in tourist business in what is usually
a heavily booked early summer season of rafters and
sightseers.
A lodge owner provided details about how he had been
fully booked until Bluff, Utah, became known to the
nation as a modern-day outlaws' hideout,
and then he
started getting cancellations from as far away as
Europe.
You can't really blame people for canceling a trip to a zone where two killers are on the loose, being pursued by an army of tired and edgy peace officers who are heavily armed and use tanks and helicopters. That's not my idea of a vacation.
Upon further thought, though, I realize that the current tourist-industry problem is timing. If all this had happened a century or so ago, it would attract tourists now.
The wanted posters that now adorn every shop window within a hundred miles of the Four Corners are part of a real and substantial effort to find two men who have been terrorizing the territory.
But you can go into just about any Old West curio shop and buy a wanted poster for various homicidal maniacs from our past -- Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Wes Hardin, Harry Orchard, Alferd Packer, to name a few.
People then were just as frightened, and often for as good a reason, as people are now by the prospect that Jason McVean and Alan Pilon are on the loose.
Yet in one case, it's rather quaint and entertaining, and in the other, it's life and death. The old-time gunmen serve as tourist attractions; the modern ones perform the opposite duty.
This tendency to romanticize Old West phenomena that alarm us now isn't confined to wanted posters, of course.
A month or two ago, I read several stories about the adventures of a fellow who arrived in Crested Butte 25 years ago, where he became a community fixture under one name.
But that wasn't the name his parents gave him, and it turned out he'd been wanted Back East for some violation of the idiotic drug laws of this country, and he'd been a fugitive for all these years -- and I guess he still is, since he fled Crested Butte, too.
This was so common in the Old West that there was even a
song about it, which went something like Oh what was
your name in the States? Was it Thompson or Miller or
Bates?
And it was often considered shooting-offense
rudeness to ask a man where he hailed from.
It's romantic if it happened then; it's a shock when it happens now.
Closer to home, certain Salida boosters have proposed
some Old West Days
for later this summer with fake
gunslingers, dancehall girls on the street, etc.
But it wouldn't be a tourist attraction if they brought back the real thing -- lead bullets instead of paper wads in the thumb-buster revolvers, prostitutes soliciting patronage, an opium den on Front Street and cigar-smoking 14-year-old boys toting guns and drinking gin. Instead, the boosters would be trying to call in the National Guard.
I have great respect for the historian Patty Limerick and her argument that the West is a continuum where the same issues and conflicts have persisted for centuries, that these distinctions between Old West and New West vanish upon a fair examination.
But I think she's wrong about one issue. There is a difference between Old West and New. If something violent happened in the 19th century, it's a tourist attraction. If it happens toward the end of the 20th, it scares tourists away. We might drive hundreds of miles to see where Billy the Kid once operated, but we sure don't want to meet up with his modern counterparts.
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