Western United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Western United States covers nearly half the land area of the contiguous United States, which makes it the largest region the Census Bureau recognizes. It is also the most geographically diverse, holding temperate rainforests, the highest mountain ranges, and the majority of the country's deserts. Yet for all that mass, almost nobody can agree on where it begins.

  In the early 1990s, a historian named Walter Nugent sensed that the popular idea of the West might be shifting. He surveyed three groups of professionals tied to the region: 187 Western historians, 25 journalists and publishers, and 39 Western authors. A majority of the historians pushed the eastern boundary well past the official Census line, out toward the edge of the Great Plains or the Mississippi River.

  So what exactly is this place that holds Death Valley and the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest in the same breath? Why does the federal government own so much of it? And how did a frontier that once stopped at the Appalachian Mountains stretch all the way to mid-Pacific islands? The answers run through water, myth, and a population that keeps reshaping who lives there.

• 2. A Moving Frontier

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  Before around 1800, the crest of the Appalachian Mountains marked the western frontier. The word West pointed at a line that has since vanished from the American map entirely. As settlement pushed onward, the frontier moved with it, until the lands west of the Mississippi River carried the name instead.

  The Census Bureau eventually drew its own version of 13 westernmost states. That definition runs from the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin to the Pacific Coast, and it reaches across the ocean to Hawaii. To the east sit the Midwestern and Southern United States; Canada lies north, Mexico south.

  The bureau splits the region into two divisions. The Mountain states are Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. The Pacific states are Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, and Hawaii. Other classifications cut differently, separating a Southwest of Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, and the Oklahoma panhandle from a Northwest of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

  Even the Pacific islands stretch the boundaries further. American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands are sometimes folded into the Western United States. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands hold district courts within the 9th Circuit, the same circuit that covers California and Nevada.

• 3. Water And Aridity

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  Death Valley, California is the driest place ever recorded in the United States, and it captures the region's defining problem. Most of the West is semi-arid, and parts are true desert that receive less than 5 inches of rain a year. The climate is increasingly unstable and prone to severe drought.

  The Colorado River snakes through the Mountain states and at one point carves the Grand Canyon. It is a major source of water in the Southwest, with dams such as the Hoover Dam forming reservoirs along its length. So much is drawn off for drinking water across the West and for irrigation in California that in most years the river no longer reaches the Gulf of California.

  Starting in 1902, Congress passed a series of acts creating the United States Bureau of Reclamation to oversee water projects in seventeen western states. In the first half of the 20th century, dams and irrigation turned subsistence farming into rapid agricultural growth. After World War II, the cities boomed, and water was diverted from farms to centers like the Las Vegas Valley and Los Angeles.

  The Columbia River tells the opposite story of plenty. It is the largest river by volume flowing into the Pacific from North America, and together with its tributary the Snake River it waters the Pacific Northwest. The Platte, by contrast, was known for being a mile wide and only a half-inch deep.

• 4. Mountains And Fire

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  Mount Whitney rises 14,505 feet in the Sierra Nevada, the tallest peak in the contiguous 48 states. The Coast Ranges along the Pacific catch the first moisture moving in from the ocean. East of them lie fertile valleys, the San Joaquin and Sacramento of California and the Willamette of Oregon, before the land climbs again.

  Mount Rainier, a volcano in Washington, also stands over 14,000 feet, and the Cascades that hold it are volcanic through and through. Mount St. Helens erupted explosively in 1980. Far earlier, a major eruption at Mount Mazama around 4860 BC formed Crater Lake. These ranges seize most of the remaining moisture and cast a rain shadow east, leaving vast arid stretches across Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.

  The Rocky Mountains run uninterrupted from New Mexico to Alaska, hundreds of miles wide, and form the highest overall area of the country at an average elevation above 4,000 feet. Of their tallest peaks, 54 rise over 14,000 feet, clustered in central and western Colorado. In the north the Rockies crowd so close to the Cascades that the desert between them narrows to just a few miles by the Canada-US border.

  Dryness here is bound to fire. In Western states drought is closely tied to fire risk, and notable wildfires have destroyed both property and wildlife habitat. The region is predicted to face drought-like conditions for much of the 21st century.

• 5. Land The Government Holds

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  Public lands account for 25 to 75 percent of the total land area in the Western states. Because the tide of development had not reached most of the West when conservation became a national issue, federal agencies came to own and manage enormous tracts. The most important are the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the Interior Department, and the U.S. Forest Service in the Agriculture Department.

  National parks are set aside for fishing, camping, hiking, and boating. Other government lands permit commercial use as well, including ranching, logging, and mining. That dual purpose breeds friction. In recent years some residents who earn their living on federal land have clashed with the managers required to keep land use within environmentally acceptable limits.

  Agriculture bends to rainfall, irrigation, soil, elevation, and temperature. Arid country supports mostly livestock grazing, chiefly beef cattle. Washington is famous for its apples, Idaho for its potatoes, and many varieties of chile peppers grow in the valleys of New Mexico. Texas is a major cattle and sheep area and the nation's largest producer of cotton, while declining water and urban sprawl have sharply cut citrus production in Arizona.

• 6. Who Lives Here

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  Just under half of the 78.7 million residents of the West lived in California as of 2022. The 13 states defined by the Census Bureau held a total 2020 population of 78,588,572, yet the region remains one of the most sparsely settled in the country at 49.5 people per square mile. Only Texas, Washington, and California exceed the national average.

  The racial makeup in 2022 was 51.9 percent White, 30.8 percent Hispanic or Latino of any race, 10.8 percent Asian, and 4.5 percent Black or African-American. The largest reported ancestries were Mexican at 24.2 percent, then German, English, Irish, Italian, Filipino, and Chinese. In many Western and California cities, whites and blacks together make up less than half the population.

  The West holds much of the country's Native American population, concentrated in large reservations across the Mountain and Desert states. As of 2022 it was home to 365,351 Navajo, 109,208 Apache, and 78,364 Blackfeet, along with 276,082 people identifying as Indigenous Mexican.

  The largest concentrations of African Americans appear in cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver. The region also carries a higher sex ratio than any other in the United States.

• 7. The Myth And The Movies

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  Bret Harte and Zane Grey wrote of cowboy culture, celebrating or deriding it, while the artist Frederic Remington recorded westward expansion in paint. From real events the late 19th century built a myth of the West that has shaped American popular culture ever since. The cowboy, the homesteader, and the open road became a shorthand for self-reliance.

  Major settlement came fast in the 1840s, carried largely by the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush of 1849. California grew so quickly that it was admitted to statehood in 1850 without first becoming an official territory. In that same decade one of the largest migrations in American history unfolded, as the Latter Day Saints left the Midwest to build a theocracy in Utah.

  Both Omaha, Nebraska and St. Louis, Missouri claimed the title Gateway to the West. Omaha, home to the Union Pacific Railroad and the Mormon Trail, made its fortune outfitting settlers. St. Louis built itself on the fur trade. Between 1863 and 1869, North America's first transcontinental railroad linked the eastern states to the Pacific coast and made transport quicker, safer, and cheaper.

  The automobile then opened the West to the average tourist. Western businessmen promoted Route 66, and in the 1950s representatives from all the western states built the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center to greet travelers from the East. The Dust Bowl, meanwhile, pushed the children of the original homesteaders even further west.

• 8. Independent Politics

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  Women cast votes in Utah and Wyoming as early as 1870, five decades before the 19th Amendment was ratified, making the West the first region to see widespread women's suffrage. The region's distance from eastern centers of power and its celebrated frontier spirit are the two clichés offered for its independent, heterogeneous politics. California birthed both the property rights and conservation movements, and produced the Taxpayer Revolt and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

  Three presidents came from the region: Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Libertarian attitudes run wide. Most Western states have legalized medicinal marijuana, all but Idaho and Wyoming, and Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Montana have legalized physician-assisted suicide.

  The map leans in clear directions. California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii, and New Mexico tilt Democratic, with Arizona beginning to follow as seen in the 2020 presidential election. Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming are Republican strongholds. Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming have backed every Republican presidential nominee since 1964.

  Nevada and New Mexico both serve as bellwethers. Nevada has voted for every president except twice, in 1976 and 2016, since 1912. New Mexico has chosen the popular vote winner in every presidential election since statehood, except in 1976 and 2024.