Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. History Dept.

Advisor(s)

Danae Jacobson

Second Advisor

Jesse Meredith

Abstract

The romantic view of the Western United States from the perspective of a US resident is fueled by the thought of adventure and expansion. The phenomena of the "Wild West," frontier ideology, and manifest destiny have kindled a love of being outside and pursuing new and "unexplored" territory. Long before those ideologies came into play, people already inhabited these landscapes. As colonists moved West, many of those inhabitants were forcefully moved onto reservations. Those people include the Shoshone people of Wyoming, the Timpanogos people of Utah, and the Havasupai people of Arizona. Alongside this history of displacement, the United States saw a boom in the outdoor industry with the invention of public protected lands in the late nineteenth century. President Roosevelt spearheaded a movement to create massive allotments of public lands. But where did that land come from? Karl Jacoby calls it a "complicated reality that the prevailing narrative about conservation has long obscured." The government previously removed people from their ancestral homeland only to encourage visitors to that location, which directly overshadows the current United States recognition of any ancestral territory. This paper outlines that story, the impact of outdoor recreation on the histories of the displacement of the Shoshone, Timpanogos, and Havasupai people.

Keywords

Shoshone, Havasupai, Timpanogos, Outdoor Recreation, Frontier, Conservation

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