Dark Tourism in the American West

Jennifer Dawes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030211899
• eBook ISBN: 9783030211905
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection expands scholarly and popular conversations about dark tourism in the American West. The phenomenon of dark tourism—traveling to sites of death, suffering, and disaster for entertainment or educational purposes—has been described and, on occasion, criticized for transforming misfortune and catastrophe into commodity. The impulse, however, continues, particularly in the American West: a liminal and contested space that resonates with stories of tragedy, violent conflict, and disaster. Contributions here specifically examine the mediation and shaping of these spaces into touristic destinations. The essays examine Western sites of massacre and battle (such as Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and the "Waco Siege"), sites of imprisonment (such as Japanese-American internment camps and Alcatraz Island), areas devastated by ecological disaster (such as Martin's Cove and the Salton Sea), and unmediated sites (those sites left to the touristic imagination, with no interpretation of what occurred there, such as the Bennet-Arcane camp).

© The Author(s) 2020

J. Dawes (ed.)Dark Tourism in the American Westhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Dark Tourism in the American West

Jennifer Dawes¹

(1)

Department of English, Humanities, and Philosophy, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX, USA

Jennifer Dawes

End Abstract

What’s So Dark About the American West?

What is so dark about the American West? For the masses of westering pioneers in the nineteenth century, the West represented opportunity, freedom, and a new start. For those people who already inhabited the western United States, the West was (and is) home. Artists, photographers, and writers, inspired by the grandeur and purity of western landscapes, recreated its image and, in doing so, created the West as an imagined space, the interplay between the real and the imaginary perpetuating their awe. Years ago, looking at the sky over the Sierra Nevada mountains, I exclaimed that it seemed almost like a painting. My hiking companion replied, “No, the paintings look like the sky.” I was almost certainly thinking of Bierstadt’s elegant and dreamlike renderings of western vistas.

Then there is the “myth of the West” and the rugged individualism of the hearty men and women who, spurred by visions of opportunity, set about making homes in a sometimes tenuous and often inhospitable land. The 1880s’ impulse of early Anglo-Californians to memorialize their role in its founding has been amply documented in the numerous memoirs from this decade.¹

But every dream has its flipside, its counter, its nightmare. As in the case of the American West, one group’s dreams become another’s nightmares. It’s all in the perspective. From the brutal massacre of Native Americans to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, one does not have to go too far to find examples of the darker side of the West. And even the narratives of heroism and conquest echo with remembrances of death, privation, and loss.

It is these dark stories that compel the tourist to sites dotted throughout the American West. As the American West scholar Ann Ronald explains in her book GhostWest: Reflections Past and Present, “The American public, with its Titanic insatiability for tragedy writ large, prefers tragedies of epic proportions. Of all the travelers who pioneered the California Trail, we remember the Donners. Of all the Indian skirmishes and battles, we’re most enamored with Custer’s Last Stand.”² We may be drawn to larger-than-life stories of suffering and death, but when we broaden our focus to include under-represented stories, the true depth and breadth of darkness in the West become apparent.

The West as an Imagined Space

In Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place, American Studies scholar Kent C. Ryden writes, “For those who have developed a sense of place, then, it is as though there is an unseen layer of usage, memory, and significance—an invisible landscape, if you will, of imaginative landmarks—superimposed on the geographical surface and the two-dimensional map.”³ The American West is filled with these “imaginative landmarks”—items suggestive of a much larger narrative that has provided the source of inspiration for countless artists and writers.

In the summer of 1998, when my classmates and I encountered an abandoned piano rotting in the sun in the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada, our thoughts immediately turned to narratives of westward migration. We were enrolled in a University of Nevada, Reno, summer graduate class, “Reading and Writing the West,” led by the “three Steves”—Tchudi, Lafer, and Adkison. Our leaders had devised a class that focused on “Mapping the West” with a variety of field trips to engage us in charting western spaces. A highlight of the course was the Black Rock campout. One of our leaders had seen the piano before and led us out to its resting place. We were practicing the use of GPS devices. As we traveled from our campsite to find and view the piano, our ragtag band of desert campers speculated about this artifact, the larger cultural phenomenon of westward migration, and the tangible material losses the journey entailed. The piano’s former owner could be any one of the number of anonymous souls whose march across the vast and desolate playa was lightened by its discarding. Though it was certainly a twentieth-century relic, the piano found its final resting place on a trail that had become known as the “Death Route of 1849,” the Applegate-Lassen Emigrant Trail. Today, the piano has likely continued its disintegration into desert dust, and we will never know what tragedy discarding it potentially averted. It serves, however, as a reminder of the unmarked and unmediated western spaces that bear the tragedies of the West (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The abandoned piano in the Black Rock Desert, Summer 1998; Source: Dawes

As we made our way back to Reno from the Black Rock, we decided to take the dirt road through the Smoke Creek desert. It was a bumpy drive, but there in the middle of nowhere was an abandoned house, left vacant for who knows how many years. We wanted to see it firsthand. Upon our approach, there was nothing particularly unusual or ominous about the house. It was small and white with a little porch on the front. At this point, in 1998, it was in a state of arrested decay. While the story of the house was not obvious, the fact that it was abandoned was. We stopped at the site and got out of the car, though I refused to go inside. For some reason that I still to this day cannot explain, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up like an eerie sentinel of danger. We left the creepy site rather quickly and headed back to Reno. I don’t think I’ve felt such a strange sense of unease before or since.

Both the piano and the abandoned house have stuck with me all these years in my imagination of the American West. As a woman from the American South who grew up eating off her grandmother’s heirloom china and playing her mother’s baby grand piano, I imagined the women for whom the piano and the house may have represented ruptured domesticity. These experiences inspired me to consider the wealth of stories and potentially dark spaces and places in the West. My own fascination with dark places, and as a result this book, is an outgrowth of these early western experiences. Each chapter in this collection explores sites of dark tourism in the American West and considers how these places are shaped, mediated, and presented to the public.

Dark Tourism in the American West

Places of death, suffering, and disaster compel our attention. They both intrigue and repel us. Morbid fascination draws tourists to sites as diverse as Pompeii, Auschwitz, and Chernobyl. The phenomenon of dark tourism, or traveling to these sites for entertainment or educational purposes, has been described (and criticized by some) as the “commoditisation of suffering and death.”⁴ A growing body of scholarship explores the impulse to visit these places of misfortune and catastrophe and the mediation and shaping of these sites into touristic destinations. Scholars John Lennon and Malcolm Foley were the first to coin the term “dark tourism,” though they limit their definition to those places with events within living memory. They date the beginning of dark tourism with the sinking of the Titanic as it not only raised questions “about technological ‘progress’ but also because it receded into relative obscurity until the 1958 film A Night to Remember, revisited awareness of some of the social circumstances of 1912 and the issue of how close the possibility of rescue had been.”⁵ Lennon and Foley see dark tourism as both a product of and a critique of modernity. Using this definition, some of the places featured in Dark Tourism in the American West would not qualify as sites of dark tourism. However, I would argue that for the US public the events, even those prior to the twentieth century, are a part of the American consciousness and have shaped our view of the American West and our identity as Americans.

While Lennon and Foley attempted to define dark tourism in their 2000 work, today there is no agreed-upon definition of “dark tourism” or of what makes a site “dark.” In an essay in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, Philip R. Stone argues,

To some extent it matters little if agreement cannot be reached amongst the intelligentsia of what is or what is not ‘dark’ in dark tourism. Arguably, what matters more is scholarly recognition of heritage sites that seek to interpret death-events which have perturbed the collective consciousness. More importantly, academic interrogation is required to ascertain visitor behavioral reactions to such sites as well as identifying fundamental interrelationships with the cultural condition of society.⁶

Stone’s argument provides both a foundation to and argument for the chapters in this volume as each author seeks to understand how dark sites function within society.

Scholars have noted the disjuncture of juxtaposing sites of death and suffering with the recreational qualities of tourism. How can one both experience a place as a site of entertainment or education while simultaneously honoring the deceased? What is the role of empathy in encounters with dark sites? What is appropriate behavior at such sites?

The answers to such questions are not always clear. In 2017, Israeli-German writer Shahak Shapira took exception to what he perceived as inappropriate behavior at the Berlin Holocaust memorial. As a response, he created a website where he posted photos of the offenders superimposed in front of victims of the Holocaust. His name for the project, Yolocaust, is a mash-up of the acronym for “you only live once” and “holocaust.” “Mr Shapira’s trick was to design the website so that hovering over the images strips away the background of the memorial and replaces it with scenes from concentration camps, leaving the unwitting young selfie-takers suddenly surrounded by emaciated bodies and corpses.”⁷ A juggler practices his skill with a pile of bodies behind him. Two women take a selfie that, in Shapira’s rendering, features the emaciated faces of concentration camp prisoners. While some would criticize Shapira’s actions as public shaming, his images do far more than any words might. According to his website, Shapira’s powerful images actually reached all twelve people he featured in his photographs. He concluded the display, taking down the images, and featured the letter from one of the now remorseful culprits:

The photo was meant for my friends as a joke. I am known to make out of line jokes, stupid jokes, sarcastic jokes. And they get it. If you knew me you would too. But when it gets shared, and comes to strangers who have no idea who I am, they just see someone disrespecting something important to someone else or them.

That was not my intention. And I am sorry. I truly am.

With that in mind, I would like to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Dark Tourism in the American West
• Part I. Massacre Sites
• Part II. Sites of Imprisonment
• Part III. Natural/Ecological Disasters
• Part IV. Unmediated Sites
• Back Matter