The Bears Ears A human history of America's most endangered wilderness

David Roberts, 1943-

Book - 2021

"A personal and historical exploration of the Bears Ears country and the fight to save a national monument. The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by President Trump in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It's also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s. In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes... readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he's explored for the last twenty-five years"--

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Subjects
Genres
Travel writing
Published
New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, Inc [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
David Roberts, 1943- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
322 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [283]-308) and index.
ISBN
9781324004813
  • The place and the promise
  • In search of a lost race
  • Manuelito's dirge
  • Shumway's shovel
  • O Pioneers!
  • Cowboys and characters
  • Posey's trail
  • Countdown to showdown
  • Epilogue: The Bears Ears I'll never know.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Embedded in the land surrounding Utah's Bears Ears are "all kinds of poignant ironies and surprising contradictions," writes adventurer Roberts (Limits of the Known) in this engrossing history of an area that's become enveloped in controversy. Roberts's episodic "human history" ignores chronology to "jump around among the ages" and stretches back to the Ancestral Puebloans, who "flourished through all four seasons" on Cedar Mesa, near the two buttes called Bears Ears around 1250 CE. From there, he recounts the "first mention in print of any part of the greater Bears Ears domain" by a Franciscan priest and explorer in 1776; "British born aristocrats" who "exploited the fertile terrain" around Bears Ears with their team of Mormon ranchers in the 1880s; a 1970s county commissioner who "locked horns for decades with the writer Edward Abbey"; the campaign of Mark Maryboy, the "Navajo activist who got the snowball rolling that would become Obama's Bears Ears National Monument" in 2016; and the Trump administration's subsequent moves to greatly reduce the size of the Bears Ears protected area. Roberts intersperses his own exploration of the land as he surveys a place with great historical significance, physical beauty, and expansive cultural import. The result is a masterfully rendered portrait of Bears Ears as an endangered land worth celebrating and protecting. (Feb.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this "saga full of contradictions, characters, and conflicts," adventure writer Roberts (The Lost World of the Old Ones) returns to his beloved Bears Ears, the swath of desert in Southeastern Utah known for its scenery and cultural significance. With his rambling style and multiplicity of sources, Roberts "jumps around the ages," seamlessly blending memoir, history, and reportage to describe the region's human story. The controversy over national monument status for the area is a key topic, and the author's argument in favor of protection is both nuanced and convincing. As in his previous books on the Southwest, the influence of the Anasazi (i.e., the Ancestral Puebloans who migrated from the area in the 12th and 13th centuries, leaving traces of cliff dwellings, art, and artifacts) is felt in each chapter. Roberts offers appreciation for Diné chief Manuelito and Paiute chief Posey, while also including sketches of Mormon settlers, ranchers turned archaeologists, pothunters/culture thieves, uranium miners, and many more. Insight into the author's struggles with recurrent cancer lends a personal touch. VERDICT One last fond look at a favorite place? A swan song of a prolific author? Roberts adds inviting details throughout this must-read book, adding poignancy to an already fascinating read.--Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The popular historian and explorer of the Southwest digs deep into the secrets of a remote slice of the American wilderness. Roberts begins his narrative journey at a high place called Cedar Mesa, the epicenter of the geological and geographical complex of plateaus, canyons, and mountains gathered under the rubric of the Bears Ears National Monument. "All of these landscapes," he writes, "are virtually uninhabited today but incredibly rich in antiquities." They have also been the locale for busy generations of "pothunters," whose illegal gathering of archaeological materials has removed those things from their context. The author, who for some reason continues to use the now-discredited term Anasazi for the ancient peoples of the region, delivers a fluent, anecdotal history that includes accounts of his own travels. The narrative encompasses the sometimes-intersecting lives of figures like Edward Abbey and Zane Grey on the literary front and the likes of Butch Cassidy and an anti-government activist son of Cliven Bundy's on the criminal edge. Roberts' own travels sometimes got him into trouble, as when, out in a remote corner of the monument, he encountered a Navajo man who threatened him with violence for trespassing on Native land even though another Navajo had given him permission to be there. The author is strong on both history and anthropology, aware of the most recent theories on such matters as Navajo origins. "Among southwestern Athapaskans, only the Navajo and the Western Apache have clans," he notes, lending credence to the emerging thought that those migratory peoples might have absorbed some of the original inhabitants. Like Craig Childs' kindred (though more poetic) book House of Rain (2007), Roberts' latest combines research, journalism, and memoir in a satisfying whole that will please fans of his earlier books of both travel in wild places and key moments in Native American history. At the top of the half-dozen books recently published on Bears Ears and a pleasure for travelers in the Southwest. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.