The WestOn January 24, 1855, Henry David Thoreau sat down at his journal to think about all the ways his native country had changed since the first English settlers arrived on the shores from Massachusetts two centuries earlier. . For several days, Thoreau had been reading the accounts of some of the early settlers. Compared to the America they had found, Thoreau reflected, his experience in the forests was like listening to a symphony played without most of the instruments. As he considered in more detail in what became his essay "To Know a Whole Heaven and a Whole Earth," Thoreau decided that the European colonists had acted like demigods who had impoverished his world by snatching many of the best and brightest stars. Only a few years later, on a continent further west, Crow Chief Plenty Coups, speaking of his vision atop the Crazy Mountains where he witnessed the replacement of buffalo by speckled cattle, summed up the Indian perspective on this change with this enigmatic remark: “After that, nothing happened. » Even the Western pioneers who experienced this change were shocked. As LA Huffman, the famous Montana photographer, remembered on his first trip to the West in the 1870s: "This country of Yellowstone and the Big Horn was then unwired and unspoilt... looked around and said: “This is the last West. ... "There was no more West after that. It was a dream and an oblivion, a chapter forever closed." From any perspective, this great world of sun and grass, of endless forests and clear streams from which everyone could drink at any time, now seems central to our experience as a people. Being born literary, Native American, or a sensitive pioneer was and is not a necessary condition for grieving the loss of a... middle of paper ...... becoming heavy with seed heads that resembled rows of feathers on paper. a spear. It was magnificent. Then the weather started to change. The period we associate with the classic description of the American wilderness, from 1500 to 1850, was a period of climatic anomaly, the Little Ice Age. It was great for grass, great for large animals. There is now global warming, with its tendency in the Southwest, at least, to produce droughts interrupted by almost unprecedented gullies, so that annual precipitation increases while soil moisture decreases. Fifteen years later, I watch cacti and kangaroo rats walk on the ground. Photos from Indian times show an empire of waving grass. This is a small example of what we are likely to face at all levels of dining in the 21st century. century, and a new demonstration of that old maxim of history: what happens next is going to be terribly interesting.