REBECCA SOLNIT S A V A G E D R E A M S A JOURNEY INTO THE HIDDEN WARS OF THE AMERICAN WEST Twentieth Anniversary Edition With a New Preface University of California Press Contents Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments DUST, OR ERASING THE FUTURE: THE NEVADA TEST SITE From Hell to Breakfast Like Moths to a Candle April Fool’s Day Trees Lise Meitner’s Walking Shoes Golden Hours and Iron County Ruby Valley and the Ranch The War Keeping Pace with the Tortoise WATER, OR FORGETTING THE PAST: YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK The Rainbow Spectators Framing the View Vanishing (Remaining) Fire in the Garden The Name of the Snake Up the River of Mercy Savage’s Grave Full Circle Afterword Sources Index It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time And he never was in Eden, because coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted their sad heads and saw Coyote, grinning. Ursula K. LeGuin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” PREFACE TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION What the Landscape Taught I I was so lucky. Some people might read this book as an account of labor or duty: in it, I do a lot of work as an activist and more as a historian, getting arrested and getting into archives with equal enthusiasm. But it was all a gift, all an opening up of the world for the young woman I was then. And the archives, stories, and historical context strengthened my commitment, while the protests taught me things; they belonged together. They made me. Those gifts are what this book endeavors to pass on. It is strange to meet the writer of this book twenty years after I was her. She is both familiar and a little strange to me; I agree with most of what she says and disagree with some of how she says it. The excitement of that formative era comes back like hot desert wind when I read this book; I smell the dust and desert creosote and sagebrush, see the faces of heroes now gone, remember awkward moments and revelatory ones. With some of the 1991 money I received for this book from its original publisher, Sierra Club Books, I bought a used Chevy S10 pickup. That truck took me all across the West, from Texas to Alberta, and to Nevada and New Mexico and the Mojave over and over, through the 1990s. I hauled friends and camping gear and books and printers and often slept in the back of it. With it, and on foot after it was parked, I made my way to the high country of the Sierra and the Rockies, the arid country in between, and the deserts of southeastern California. I was never so free before or since; I learned confidence and how to move across vast expanses of space in ways I had not known before. Afterward, that beast sometimes called success came and clamped onto me and made me more and more busy with contracts and obligations, schedules and expectations, and I was never again quite so able to take up an invitation to go west with a day’s notice or to take two weeks to get somewhere. That lost, former self and that freedom are two things I taste when I reread this book. Even more than that, the people and the places return with delight. This is a book about my education—or rather about the remarkable things that were given to me after I was supposedly educated but when I was just finding out who and where I was and what I might do and say about it. I wrote Savage Dreams so that it could be everyone’s education, because the people I listened to and the histories I dug into, the adventures I had and the heroes I found, were not and, twenty years later, still are not so well known. And they matter: the Nevada Test Site’s Peace Camp; the eastern Nevada ranch of the Western Shoshone matriarchs who were more or less at war with the federal government; and the secret recesses and archives of one of the most visible places on earth, Yosemite National Park. In those places, I found the other American histories: of the Columbian invasion that had never ended, because the indigenous people here had never been entirely conquered or erased; of the scale of the mistakes Europeans had made about nature and time when they imagined this hemisphere as pristine, static, waiting to begin when they arrived; and of the real shape of the nuclear wars, which were not a terrible eventuality, as even most antinuclear activists then believed, but included this low- intensity domestic war that was pursued at the rate of about a nuclear detonation a month in Nevada between 1951 and 1991 and that looms over us still. The Indian war that began in Yosemite and never ended, the nuclear war that started not so very far away as the crow flies a century later and will end when the last radiation from the bombs fades from the landscape—these were not the world as