Geographical Definitions of the American West

Geographical Definitions of the
American West

State Map of the 20th Century American West

"The West is the United States west of the ninety-eighth meridian, a line passing through the eastern Dakotas down the Great Plains through central Texas. ...[The West] includes the entirety of that tier of states embracing the ninety-eight meridian, including their eastern portions, since state boundaries do not coincide with geographic boundaries and since it makes no sense to speak only of the western and less populous portions of those states, states that are truly a part of the West."

M. Malone and R. Etulain, The American West (p. 9)

"The American West is that contiguous section of the continent west of the Missouri River acquired by the United States beginning with the Lousiana Purchase of 1803; continuing through the acquisition of Texas, the Oregon Territory, and the Mexican Cession in the 1840s; and ending with the 1854 Gadsen Purchase of the lands between the Gila River and the present Mexican boundary"

Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own (p. 4)

"...The West, which stretches from around the ninety-eight meridian to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the Mexican border, is actually half a dozen subregions as different from one another as the Olympic rain forest if from Utah's slickrock country, or Seattle from Santa Fe."

Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebeard Sings to the Lemonade Springs (pp. 45-46)

"The West is a semi-desert with a desert heart."

Walter Prescott Web

"New Western Historians define "the West" as a
place--the trans-Mississippi region in the broadest terms, or the region west of the hundreth meridian. The boundaries are fuzzy because nearly all
regions boundaries are."

Patricia Limerick, "What on Earth is the New
Western History"

"[The West] is a region with flexible borders at
the Pacific and at the hundredth meridian, where
rainfall drops below the twenty inches a year
needed to sustain irrigated agriculture."

Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil

"The West...begins with the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. So defined, the West would become, along with the North and the South, one of the three great geographical regions of the...United States."

Donald Worster, "New West, True West"