a society of transients, looters, raiders of the beaver, grass, timber, minerals, with more hit-and-run migrants than stickers. Those conditions have not changed materially. The frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner thought has ended in 1890 did not end, as if a gate had been closed, when the census revealed no border region with less than ten people to the square mile. As Patricia Limerick and other have demonstrated, the frontier went on, and still goes on. It was not a period in our history, but a process. The West was not a timeless tableau but a continuum, a developing adjustment of people to the large, empty, arid, unforgiving spaces of the country beyond the hundredth meridian. Its past and present are not two things, but one. As Courtney White suggests, they can be studied with the same tools.

The tool he chooses is his camera. In image after image he catches, past or present, the confrontation of human energy, need, and habit with a hard and obdurate country whose rules are strange and take a long time in the learning. Some of his images are images of failure, some of apparent (don't count on it) success, some of a stand-off or compromise. In some of them the past survives almost without change; in some the present has overwhelmed all memory of the past. All of these images, of country or people, past or present, are worth our attention for they reveal forming Wests that have been too little studied or understood, but that rebuke romantic myth-making with their plainness and honesty.

What is the West becoming? What does this continuing frontier lead to? It would take a bold person to predict. The West's history of boom and bust suggests a future of the same, for aridity is not going to go away. The past emphasis on extractive industries is likely to be continued into the future simply because the available water permits only an oasis civilization, towns located on dependable  water, with  great empty  dry spaces  between them.  Western  space,  and the  human