Far West

The interior west, the only American region shaped more by capital and climate than by who settled it. Everything between the hundredth meridian and the Sierra Nevada is too dry, too high or too remote for the farming model that worked further east, so settlement required railways, mines, dams and irrigation - all of which needed capital from elsewhere and federal land, water and subsidy. The result is a region with a fierce rhetoric of self-reliance and an economy historically dependent on outside investment and Washington: the federal government still owns most of Nevada, Utah and Idaho. Extraction set the pattern - copper at Butte, silver at the Comstock, coal in Wyoming, oil and gas since - with boom towns, absentee ownership and some of the most violent labour disputes in American history. Water is allocated by prior appropriation, first in time first in right, a doctrine invented for mining that now governs the arid west. The Colorado River compact of 1922 was negotiated in an unusually wet decade and over-allocated the river. Sagebrush rebellion politics recur. Population is concentrated in a few metropolitan islands. The region covers the Great Basin, the Rockies, the interior Northwest and the high plains. The federal government owns around eighty per cent of Nevada and over sixty per cent of Idaho and Utah. Its cities - Denver, Salt Lake, Boise, Reno - are isolated islands of population. Yellowstone was the world's first national park. Snowpack rather than rainfall supplies most of its water, which makes warming a direct threat to supply. Ranching and mining remain culturally dominant.

• Existed: 1850 CE – present
• Type: Entity