Customer Reviews

The Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide

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I like a book that takes my assumptions about something and turns most of them upside down, and this book did that. To begin with, even though I had heard most of a radio interview with the author, I was expecting a book mostly about hiking the Rocky Mountains. Instead "Backbone of the World" is about a series of encounters with people who live and work along the Continental Divide. And Clifford uses these encounters to discuss the competing points of view of those with an interest in what's left of America's wilderness areas -- environmentalists, housing developers, ranchers, cowboys, sheep herders, national park service rangers, wildlife preservationists, back country outfitters, hunters, Native Americans, game wardens, hangers on in dying company towns, and the owners and employees of the mining, logging, and energy industries.

As a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Clifford has his preferences about the fate of the wilderness, but he allows his subjects to speak for themselves without passing judgment on them. To that extent, the book is not a polemic but an array of human opinions nearly as sweeping as the mountain and desert vistas that are the subject of this book. He goes on horseback into the mountains of northern Montana with Blackfeet Indians. He spends time with a sheep herder in Colorado, who is barely scraping by. He is the guest of two ranch owners, riding along on a cattle drive in Wyoming and helping with a round-up in New Mexico, in the arid high country along the Mexican border. He goes coyote hunting with an ailing and broken former uranium mining worker in Wyoming. He visits a park ranger in Yellowstone, who spends his days busting illegal hunters. And he accompanies an environmental activist as they pony trek into the mountains of Alberta.

And as the people he interviews speak, you learn of the impact of humans on the wilderness -- overgrazing, destruction of habitat, the invasion of roads and all-terrain vehicles, the decimation of wildlife populations, the spread of urban sprawl, the expansion of the recreation industry, the hunting camps where big city executives can shoot game that have been lured off public lands with conveniently located salt licks. And over and again, there is the theme of a ravaged landscape, diminished by clear-cutting, exhausted mines, and aggressive drilling for oil and gas. At this level, the book is a quiet litany for the destruction of everything wild, pristine, and beautiful.

All this may sound like a depressing read, but I enjoyed Clifford's accounts of encounters with the people who inhabit this region. He puts a human face on the economic, environmentalist, and conservationist forces in contention over the fate of what once was a vast wilderness. The 8-page bibliography at the end of the book is evidence of his long and thoughtful study of his subject. And his writing is that of an observant journalist. The people and places he describes come alive, and like viewing an excellent documentary film, you come away with an appreciation for the complexity of the issues, a sense of having witnessed them firsthand, and your own assumptions turned upside down.

I was given this book by a friend. It was a surprise from the beginning to the end. I can't recommend this book enough. I live in the Rocky Mountains and see what is happening all around me in the "Last Best Place." I expected the environmental writer from the LA Times to write this book with a prejudiced point of view and?probably my own point of view. Instead it was so insightful, to so many different walks of life and belief systems that I was amazed in every chapter. I work for the park service and read the chapter on "Action Jackson" with great interest and know about the conflicts of that situation and still Mr. Clifford amazed me with his sensitivity to the people involved. This book, for the first time made me see the way people of many different backgrounds from mine view the wilderness, not necessarily all bad, not necessarily all destructive, just different. The author is a teacher of tolerance and we all need more of that in this time and in this world. I cannot recommend this book any more highly. I will buy it and give it to many people. I was inspired to not give up the fight to save the American west. Thankyou Frank Clifford.

Clifford is a journalist and it shines through in this book. His observations are clear and unbiased. In fact, there are few stories where he's not riding a horse, sitting in a pick-up truck or walking with an outfitter or cowboy. The stories jump all over the map along the Continental Divide of the United States. One moment you're taken for a morning coyote hunt outside of Jeffrey City, WY and the next plunged into a gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation.

The geography he travels is seen through the eyes of the long time residents who are rooted in the land. Their fortune at the mercy of the natural forces that get bigger, stronger, and more unpredictable the deeper you go into the terrain. The natural forces of weather and wildlife are but one part of the picture that Clifford paints. What makes this book unique is the author's ability to put each story in a larger context.

For the Western United States that larger context is... change. Sensing this change, Clifford takes us to meet people that are fighting to hold-on to a uniquely Western life-style. A life-style as honest and straightforward as the writing in this book.

Never seen a hawk on the wing... for the many Americans that the lyrics of this old Jerry Jeff Walker song apply, Clifford's book is a marvelous remedy. As he explains in the prologue, he undertook the book in conjunction with the development and opening of the Continental Divide Hiking Trail. But his book is less about the physical panorama of the scenery along the Divide, as it is of the hard-scrabble existence and diversity of people who hold on to the "old-ways" of life along the Divide. Some of Richard Ford's books like "Rock Springs" serve as a wonderful fictional compliment to Clifford's work.

Clifford has a journalist background; he is able to find very real people truly "hanging on," even if it means going around the sign in Catron Co. NM that says: "Visitors not Welcome. Trespassers will be shot."

In the "boot heel" of New Mexico he interviews a descendant of a polygamist Mormon sect that fled the United States in the late 1800's so they could continue to practice their beliefs which had recently been outlawed. These "higra" Mormons were, if anything, too successful in Mexico, and were eventually driven out by Pancho Villa, with some settling along the border line, back in the States. Clifford has done his background work on this area, quoting Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian."

At the other end of the trail he rides horses with the Blackfeet Indians along the Canadian border, conveying insights into the reservation life, and he rides with a radical environmentalist, of the "Monkey Wrench" variety. In between, there is a National Park Ranger who fights the poachers at Yellowstone; the miners dying from the effects of their work in the uranium mines of Wyoming; documenting the extent of work that cattlemen must do to make a ranch viable in these arid lands; the Hispanics of Northern NM who have their own laws, and strongly resist outside intrusions; and a hippie-like shepherd struggling in Colorado, whose method of castrating his sheep you will never forget.

I felt myself savoring each vignette, and wished the author could have spent an entire month with each of his subjects. He has the knowledge to cite various literary, historical, and political antecedents to each situation. As others have noted, the book's title is a bit of an overreach, but if America is your whole world, so be it.

And excellent summation of one of the book's central themes is: "This strange legacy of socialism is one of the abiding ironies of the West. No region of the country is more devoted to the myth of rugged self-sufficiency, none more dependent on federal largesse, and none more contemptuous of the hand that feeds it." (p 159)

An excellent read for those who live along the Divide, and for those who don't.

Clifford writes with too much evenhandedness and too little anger to suit me about what's happening to The West. Even so, there's no doubt that he cares deeply about what's being lost. This book ought to be required reading for anyone who crosses the state lines of NM, CO, WY, ID or MT.

The Backbone of the World is a collection of random vignettes recording the author's experiences along America's continental divide. From the boot heel of New Mexico to Canada's Alberta province, Frank Clifford finds no shortage of eccentric, hardscrabble westerners with which to commune. Although ostensibly exploring the newly commissioned (and largely conterminous) Continental Divide Trail, the author actually spends little time on it. He prefers to alight sporadically in places collateral to the divide - the story becoming less reminiscent of a "backbone" and more of a vertebra here and a vertebra there.

And there's a larger problem with this appellation, as well. One assumes that Clifford derives "The Backbone of the World" from the Blackfeet name for an area in Glacier National Park, yet, in socio-geologic terms, it seems overly hopeful to apply it to the continental divide as a whole. The world is a big place and Clifford singularly fails to defend the distinction. Indeed, he completely ignores it. Why such a lofty claim when the author's protagonists are so quintessentially local (so local, in fact, that they inhabit only the eastern front)? In the absense of an answer, the reader is forced to conclude that Clifford has bestowed the honorific merely because it sounds good.

Lest I criticize too harshly however, the book's subtitle is right on the money. Frank Clifford meaningfully portrays a vanishing way of life. He has filled his book with people of extraordinary character from which he extracts stories disarmingly genuine. In fact, it is this talent that saves the effort from becoming a run-of-the-mill travel book and compels me to award it 4 stars. The Backbone of the World is recommendable, if somewhat arbitrarily constructed. For a more immersive experience regarding life along the divide, I recommend Leaning on the Wind by Sid Marty.

Anyone interested in reading about the glamorized West - artist retreats in Santa Fe, Denver socialites, ski resorts in million-dollar-home settings - will probably be disappointed in this book. Frank Clifford instead takes the reader to isolated outposts where people are just barely surviving: a sheep rancher north of Vail who lives in a ramshackle trailer; one of the last residents of Jeffrey City, WY, who is sick from years of working in the now-closed uranium mines and is too poor to see a doctor; a park ranger in Yellowstone hellbent on stopping illegal hunting practices along the park's isolated boundary; a trapper in New Mexico who sometimes goes six months without human contact; a Canadian environmentalist fighting a losing battle against gas and timber companies; a group of Blackfeet Indians trying to maintain ties to their ancient culture on their reservation near Glacier NP; a ranch family in southern New Mexico frightened of the drugs and violence along the border.

A few things unite most of Clifford's subjects: a fierce independence; a hatred for governmental interference, especially when it interferes with their livelihoods; and a similar disdain for "outsiders" who they feel look down upon them as inferior people, hicks, and want to impose restrictions on how they can and should use the land (i.e. environmentalists). Clifford, who is a journalist from California, must be commended for not taking a position for or against his subjects (he realizes both sides have valid arguments) and for becoming one of them, even if it's only for a short time (he rides horses with his subjects, helps them with their cattle and sheep, etc.). The book will definitely take the wind out of the sails of anyone who pictures the West as merely a drop-dead beautiful mountain backdrop to be enjoyed while sipping red wine on a dude ranch porch. This is the real deal, the other-side-of-the-tracks picture where people count pennies to survive the year and every cow or sheep lost to a grizzly bear or coyote means they go a little bit deeper into debt. It's an eye-opening book - one of the best on the West of today that I've come across. Highly recommended.

I am normally not a non-fiction reader, but this book caught my eye in the bookstore and I'm still recalling stories from it almost one year later!

The stories are told from such a raw human perspective, it's hard not to empathize with each of them. I live in the Rocky Mountains (not far from the Divide) and think about the issues related to life up there frequently as I view it through my windshield every day on my drive to and from work. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about the history and present-day issues faced by people along the Divide.

Clifford is a journalist and it shines through in this book. His observations are clear and unbiased. In fact, there are few stories where he's not riding a horse, sitting in a pick-up truck or walking with an outfitter or cowboy. The stories jump all over the map along the Continental Divide of the United States. One moment you're taken for a morning coyote hunt outside of Jeffrey City, WY and the next plunged into a gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation.

The geography he travels is seen through the eyes of the long time residents who are rooted in the land. Their fortune at the mercy of the natural forces that get bigger, stronger, and more unpredictable the deeper you go into the terrain. The natural forces of weather and wildlife are but one part of the picture that Clifford paints. What makes this book unique is the author's ability to put each story in a larger context.

For the Western United States that larger context is... change. Sensing this change, Clifford takes us to meet people that are fighting to hold-on to a uniquely Western life-style. A life-style as honest and straightforward as the writing in this book.

Clifford is a journalist and it shines through in this book. His observations are clear and unbiased. In fact, there are few stories where he's not riding a horse, sitting in a pick-up truck or walking with an outfitter or cowboy. The stories jump all over the map along the Continental Divide of the United States. One moment you're taken for a morning coyote hunt outside of Jeffrey City, WY and the next plunged into a gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation.

The geography he travels is seen through the eyes of the long time residents who are rooted in the land. Their fortune at the mercy of the natural forces that get bigger, stronger, and more unpredictable the deeper you go into the terrain. The natural forces of weather and wildlife are but one part of the picture that Clifford paints. What makes this book unique is the author's ability to put each story in a larger context.

For the Western United States that larger context is... change. Sensing this change, Clifford takes us to meet people that are fighting to hold-on to a uniquely Western life-style. A life-style as honest and straightforward as the writing in this book.