For more than 500 years the popular image of the great West has flip-flopped between that of a wilderness and of Eden. Pre-Columbian Europe was full of stories of what lay beyond the Atlantic—hideous monsters and irredeemable savages, islands of beautiful psalm-singing children and even the Garden itself. Columbus thought the first natives he met were "without knowledge of what is evil," and on a later voyage he believed he had found the immediate approach to Eden. Embedded in such images were cultural and religious messages about what was to be done with, and done to, these lands and the peoples living there. This new world—new, that is, to Europeans—was at once a wild land begging to be brought under civilization's dominion and an earthly paradise where men might glimpse their lost innocence.

This paired imagery has proved astonishingly resilient, although its focus has narrowed over the centuries. The realm of Eden, once all the Western hemisphere, was whittled down steadily by European conquest. By the late nineteenth century in the United States, its heart was in what was now called the West, particularly those parts most resistant to development. Among the purest survivals was the country between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada—arid, largely treeless, witness to nature's most extreme crankiness.

In this fine and subtle book, Mark Fiege leads us on a tour of part of that region, the valley of the Snake River in southern Idaho. Visitors today would find it an odd setting for fantasies from Before the Fall. You'll see lots of sagebrush. There are long vistas punctuated by lava outcroppings and bordered by distant ranges of desert mountains. And there are farms. The Snake, a tributary of the Columbia and itself one of the West's great rivers, bleeds off into canals and smaller ditches that feed fields of potatoes, grain, alfalfa and other crops. The country has its moments, but to most outsiders its appeal is limited. Vacationers usually consider it a place to get across.

But look closer, Fiege tells us. This nondescript landscape is full of lessons about our relations with the land we live on—and through that, about how we have imagined our world into what we need it to be.

On its face Idaho's irrigated farmland seems a clear instance of humans imposing their designs on a natural environment. People have taken a wild river, dammed and channeled it to resist its impulse to flood, then selectively directed its waters onto land of their choosing, there to nurture the crops they decide are best and the forage for the domesticated animals they set loose on the acreage they have transformed. As we drive along it seems clear enough who is in charge. Through Fiege's eyes, however, we see that this place is not at all what it seems. The usual descriptive terms—"wild" and "tamed" and "natural" and "controlled"—are suddenly slippery and not especially useful. Those gurgling channels, floodgates, grassy swards, fields and orchards turn out to be case lessons in how little we truly see and understand.

Fiege's own explorations began one day when he stopped his car to investigate a canal and found it was in fact a natural stream tied into the irrigators' scheme. He began to think about the boundaries between human and natural systems. Starting with this deceptively simple question—when is a ditch a ditch?—he was drawn into a wondrously ambiguous world.

The confident constructors of these systems quickly began to face a similar realization. "From the moment that they had completed the conduits," Fiege writes, "the irrigators had begun to lose biological control of them." Flocks of grateful waterbirds settled on the reservoirs and filled their bellies in nearby fields of newly risen grain. Seeds from dozens of plant species flushed down the ditches, took root and flourished, followed by fish and mollusks. When farmers prepared the fields by cutting away native brush and plowing the ground, new weeds colonized the surface while gophers and other rodents moved in to burrow happily in the loosened soil.

The uninvited new residents brought problems that tended to link and play upon each other. Coyotes, drawn in to feed on the gophers, turned for their next meal to a farmer's chickens. The new plants flourishing in the ditches slowed the flow and sometimes clogged it altogether. When water seeped from ditches into the tunnels of burrowing mammals, the saturated soil eroded and crumbled into the streams, sometimes creating unplanned dams and massive diversions. A washout in 1923 destroyed roads and railroad grades and flooded several farms. Investigators later identified the saboteurs: ground squirrels.

A less able historian might have made from this a simple morality tale of man's false pride getting its comeuppance. Fiege, however, pushes well beyond that obvious lesson to find more intriguing insights. The pioneers who thought they were engaged in a conquest and a progressive accomplishment of human control discovered in stead that they had begun "a kind of dialogue" with nature. In this ongoing conversation farmers spoke out their vision through acts of transformation. Wild animals and plants answered with changes of their own. People responded; the animals again talked back. Two biological worlds were scrambled to gether—the domesticated regime of the irrigators and the "regime of wild things" that both fed on and competed with the first one. The farmer's world was one of cleanly delineated spaces and stark boundaries between this crop and that, one man's land and that of his neighbors. The world of weeds, gophers, and seeping water ignored fences and worked continually to reintegrate a segmented land into an ecological whole.

The exchanges and collisions became themselves a creative force, with the result "a new landscape, a new world," a hybrid where humans and their surroundings were in continual negotiation and mutual influence. Rather than in command farmers found themselves, in the word's original meaning, bewildered: baffled and off-balance in an unexpectedly wild place.

Their responses were natural, in two senses of that word. They followed the logic of their situation by mimicking the patterns of life among the very creatures and plants they hoped to control. To decide how to distribute the water and its benefits they formed cooperative groups that transcended individual holdings. With networks of families and friends they built and maintained irrigation systems collectively and shared the labor of harvesting. In this heavily Mormon region such communal impulses were reinforced by religious faith and doctrine. Over and over the pioneers compromised their individualistic drive to carve up the country in favor of a land taken whole, its parts blurring together and each function inseparable from the others. Fiege concludes that nature's lesson, especially pertinent in a West obsessed with private property, is that "we, as individuals, have standing only in relation to the community."

Even so, Snake Valley irrigators held on stubbornly to old myths. Fiege ends his study with a fascinating look at the face that settlers put on their experience. They merged those two ancient traditions of Eden and the garden into yet another hybrid. Masculine themes of conquest blended with feminine images of settlers at ease in God's bounty. Dams and floodgates some how were reconciled with elegiac images to create a vision of an "industrial Eden," always pitched as proof of civilization's steady progress. Idaho's poet laureate, Irene Welch Grissom, pictured a pioneer looking back on his handiwork:

He sees the desert disappear,
A fair and smiling land appear,
With streams that sparkle here and there,
And new life springing everywhere.

The ironies of insisting on human control in the face of all the facts, of course, might apply to virtually any modern culture. The appeal of Irrigated Eden lies in Fiege's skill in dissecting the dense connections among the land and its inhabitants, human and otherwise, and in showing them all in a mutual, reciprocal evolution. With his help we see this rather ordinary landscape as a revelation of our enmeshment in our world, wherever we might find ourselves.

Elliott West is professor of history at the University of Arkansas. His book The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Univ. Press of Kansas) won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Pen Center West Award, the Ray Allen Billington prize, and several other awards for Western history.

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