American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

Do Fence Me In -- Reflections on Iconic Fences in Jackson Hole

1/3/2014

0 Comments

 
A Photo Essay on Split Rail Fences in Buffalo Valley near Moran, Wyoming, and the Grand Tetons
Picture
Photos by Bill Youngs

"Don't Fence Me In" -- these words went through my mind a couple days during an evening walk beside Buffalo Creek and along  Route 287 toward Moran, Wyoming, and the Grand Tetons. Few songs evoke the spirit of the Old West as effectively as "Don't Fence Me In," and yet here I was in a quintessential western setting that was intersected by one fence after another, all blending in nicely with the scenery.

Admittedly there was a time when local "wars" were actually waged over proponents of open range for cattle and fenced farm yards for chickens, pigs, and crops. And in fact, the most famous movie filmed against the backdrop of  the Grand Tetons, Shane, is a story built around just such a conflict. 

The best-known version of "Don't Fence Me In" was written by Cole Porter in 1934 for the film, Adios Argentina, and wasfeatured subsequently in many other movies -- and sung around countless campfires ever since. Wikipedia offers a good little history of the song, including information about the original lyrics on which Porter built and the place of the film in popular culture. Here are the familiar lyrics:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above
Don't fence me in
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love
Don't fence me in

Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever, but I ask you please
Don't fence me in

Just turn me loose
Let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the Western skies

On my Cayuse
Let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise

I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in
I like the song with it's "starry skies," "evening' breeze," and that "murmur of the cotton wood trees." And I love Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as one of those places "where the West commences."  But on my walk on New Year's Day, 2014, I also liked the poetry of these fences.
Picture
Click here to view more entries on the American Realities blog...
(You know you want to!)

0 Comments

    Summary of Blog Posts

    Welcome

       Some years ago, while writing a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt I jotted this note in my journal: "I want to tell the stories of American History as though I were among friends, sitting beside a fire." In this web site and blog I aim to tell some of those stories in words, images, films -- and with other media marvels.

    Archives

    December 2020
    September 2019
    October 2018
    November 2017
    January 2017
    August 2016
    July 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed