Two things surprise many visitors to the West. First-time visitors are often shocked to discover so many cities and towns. In fact, the West's status as the most urban region in the United States-the region with the greatest percentage of people living in towns and cities-is hardly well known or even recognized locally.

If visitors are surprised by the cities, the second thing they notice is the distances that separate here from there. The distances do in fact provide the long view, a sense of isolation, a mentality of enforced self-reliance, and willingness to go the extra mile. It is that willingness and a scarcity of resources that has helped forge communities that were unlikely back East.

The West is a multicultural, multi-accented, multi-layered space whose various cultures exist both separately and in dialogue with all the others that exist around them.

"Put the idea of a rendezvous in the place of the old model of the westward-moving frontier, and western American history gains new, and deeper, meaning. The idea of a frontier-a line of encounter where white English-speaking Americans met 'the others'-was stretched to the point of snapping by the complex human reality of the American West. The idea of the rendezvous, however, has flexibility built into it; using it as a model, the American West comes forward in its true colors as one of the great meeting grounds of the planet, a region where representatives of Indian America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia continue to meet.

"Collecting cattle hides on the Southern California beach in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana noted the diversity of his co-workers: 'We had�representatives from almost every nation under the sun-two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welchmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen (two of whom were Normans, and the third from Gascony), one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards (from old Spain), half a dozen Spanish Americans and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chile and the island of Chiloe, one Negro, one mulatto, about twenty Italians, from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Tahitian, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.'

"Rather than finding this hodgepodge irritating or frightening, Dana and his companions seemed to find it a pleasant challenge: 'amid the Babel of English, Spanish, French, Indian and Kanaka,' he wrote, 'we found some words that we could understand in common.'

"This vision of a cosmopolitan West was by no means unique to California. 'It is seldom that such a variety of ingredients are found mixed in so small a compass,' the Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg reported of his companions on the trail in New Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s. 'Here were the representatives of seven distinct nations, each speaking his own native language, which produced at times a very respectable jumble of discordant sounds.' Henry Villard, observing a scene in 1859 at the Colorado Gold Rush, recorded a similar impression: 'There was no want of human elements on Cherry Creek in those days. Anglo-Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Mexicans, Indians-all figured there in large numbers.'

"After a century and a half of these improbable encounters, it is simply too late to find the diversity of the region to be inappropriate, unexpected, or somehow 'not the way the West should be.' The presence of people from widely different origins has been a central fact of life in western America, and there is, [in the 1990s,] every reason to take that spectrum as one of the region's assets, and not as a disappointing liability to be denied or evaded." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Rendezvous Model of Western History," Beyond the Mythic West [Salt Lake City UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990], 40)

That said, it is also significant to note that in both these examples (California in the 1830s and New Mexico in the 1840s) economic factors drove the diversity that Gregg and Dana comment on. In the West there has been a dependence on people from other places, but also a sense of being troubled by the same racial/ethnic diversity.