What is "the...West"? For many it can be defined as the contiguous section of the continent west of the Missouri River-a huge land mass that hosts old growth forests in the Northwest, deserts in the Southwest, the Great Plains in the Midwest and North, and the Rocky Mountains-hardly a cohesive whole!

That said, most historians, scholars, and writers agree that three characteristics uniquely unite this region. Aridity has encouraged an oasis society in the inland West-growth based on the location of available water with vast space in between. Aridity presented farmers with the greatest challenge they faced in the West. That one problem-water-is a major one. In these western arid lands water, too, is a commodity and a form of energy, like oil and electricity. Westerners often say that water is precious, but in reality our "lifeblood" is often used inefficiently and many say wantonly wasted throughout our region.

The writer Wallace Stegner illustrates the ambivalent attitude many westerners share toward growth; "the West has been oversold as the 'Garden of the World' and growth is something that has always been a gleam in the eyes of Western boosters; but growth is exactly what the West does not need and cannot stand."

Few parts of the world have ever experienced such explosive growth. "Two lifetimes ago, the West was home to 250,000 people," says geographer Dennis Brownridge (ca. 1990). "Now it has 50 million-an increase of 20,000 percent. If the rest of the world had grown at the same rate, we'd be staggering under the weight of 200 billion people." According to the US Census for 2000, the West's growth outstripped the rest of the country: It grew by 20% in the 1990s, adding 10.4 million people.

Public lands means that control of half the land in the West rests with federal agencies in Washington, D.C., not the state or local governments who reside here.

Historian Richard White says that the American West is a creation not so much of individual or local efforts, but of federal efforts. More than any other region the West has been historically dependent on the federal government.

The federal government's role in distributing lands meant that American citizens in the West felt the presence of the federal government far more directly than did citizens elsewhere. That presence was supposed to be temporary, because the public domain, it was thought, would in time become entirely private property. But, that did not turn out to be true. The federal government retained so much of the land that western states stand in a different relationship to the central government than do those in the East.

The West is a place of conquest. To Hispano settlers moving into the area during the Spanish and Mexican eras and the masses of Anglo Americans migrating in the mid and late nineteenth century the West was a wilderness. But it was only a wilderness to them because they defined it as such. Human habitation hadn't shaped the West into a landscape familiar to Western Europeans and those coming from eastern North America. They concluded that humans had not shaped the land at all. In fact, native peoples had been altering the land for millennia.

If the West is a place of conquest, it is also a place where diverse groups of people have mixed and lived. It is an area that didn't suddenly emerge but is rather a place where people of European, Indian, African and Asian ancestry began to meet and create communities. These connections could be made on the basis of mutual benefit and dependence. At times, one group has violently tried to expel another (reservation, Chinese exclusion), while other communities have found ways for diverse people to create cohesive settlements based on mutual interest and dependence. Those meetings often created conflict but also helped build strong communities. These communities came together and have stayed cohesive based on mutual dependence.