Media Politics And The Network Society 1st Edition Robert Hassan

Media Politics And The Network Society 1st Edition Robert Hassan
Media Politics And The Network Society 1st Edition Robert Hassan
Media Politics And The Network Society 1st Edition Robert Hassan

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5. Media, Politics and the Network Society• What is the network society?
• What effects does it have upon media, culture and politics?
• What are the competing forces in the network society, and how are they
reshaping the world?
The rise of the network society – the suffusion of much of the economy, culture
and society with digital interconnectivity – is a development of immense significance.
In this innovative book, Robert Hassan unpacks the dynamics of this new information
order and shows how they have affected both the way media and politics are ‘played’,
and how these are set to reshape and reorder our world. Using many of the current
ideas in media theory, cultural studies and the politics of the newly evolving
‘networked civil society’, Hassan argues that the network society is steeped with
contradictions and in a state of deep flux.
This is a key text for undergraduate students in media studies, politics, cultural studies
and sociology, and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the
network society and play a part in shaping it.
Robert Hassanis Australian Research Council Fellow in Media and
Communications at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University, Australia.
He has written numerous articles on the nature of the network society from the
perspectives of temporality, political economy and media theory, and is author of The
Chronoscopic Society (2003).Cover illustration: Charlotte Combe
Cover design: Barker/Hilsdon
Media,
Politics
and the
Network Society
Media, Politics and theNetwork Society
Robert Hassan
Hassan




I
S
SU
E
S
in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIES
I
S
SU
E
S
in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIESSERIES EDITOR: STUART ALLAN
www.openup.co.uk
Media and politics… 11/3/04 3:11 pm Page 1

6. MEDIA, POLITICS AND THE
NETWORK SOCIETY

7. in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIES
ISSUES
Series Editor: Stuart Allan
Published titles
News Culture
Stuart Allan
Modernity and Postmodern Culture
Jim McGuigan
Sport, Culture and the Media, 2nd edition
David Rowe
Television, Globalization and Cultural
Identities
Chris Barker
Ethnic Minorities and the Media
Edited by Simon Cottle
Cinema and Cultural Modernity
Gill Branston
Compassion, Morality and the Media
Keith Tester
Masculinities and Culture
John Beynon
Cultures of Popular Music
Andy Bennett
Media, Risk and Science
Stuart Allan
Violence and the Media
Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver
Moral Panics and the Media
Chas Critcher
Cities and Urban Cultures
Deborah Stevenson
Cultural Citizenship
Nick Stevenson
Culture on Display
Bella Dicks
Critical Readings: Media and Gender
Edited by Cynthia Carter and
Linda Steiner
Critical Readings: Media and Audiences
Edited by Virginia Nightingale and
Karen Ross
Media and Audiences
Karen Ross and Virginia Nightingale
Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and
the Media
Edited by David Rowe
Rethinking Cultural Policy
Jim McGuigan
Media, Politics and the Network Society
Robert Hassan

8. MEDIA, POLITICS AND THE
NETWORK SOCIETY
Robert Hassan
OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

9. Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL
email: [email protected].
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk
and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2289, USA
First published 2004
Copyright © Robert Hassan 2004
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency
Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be
obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London, W1T 4LP.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 335 21315 4 (pb) 0 335 21316 2 (hb)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in the UK by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

10. For Kate, Theo and Camille

12. CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xii
ABBREVIATIONS xiii
INTRODUCTION 1
||WHAT IS THE NETWORK SOCIETY? 8
1
The revolution has been normalized 8
Noticing it 1: the rise of the network society 12
A few facts on the history of the Internet and the network society12
Noticing it 2: a way to think about networks (not just the Internet)15
Digital Technology 16
Digital Capitalism 18
Digital Globalization 23
Digital Acceleration 27
Pessimism or critique? 30
Further reading 32
||THE INFORMATIONIZATION OF MEDIA AND CULTURE 332
So what is ‘media’ and what is ‘culture’ anyway? 34
Media 34
Culture 36

13. The dialectics of media–culture 40
Spaces of culture 41
Mass media = mass culture? 41
Hegemony and mass media 44
Networked media, networked culture: the disappearance of the dialectic47
Going, but not gone 52
Further reading 54
||ADDICTED TO DIGITAL: THE WIRED WORLD 553
Connecting . . . 55
CyberAsia 59
Roll with it 61
Get a life(style) 63
A wired world of risk? 64
Deleted . . . the digital divide 66
Wired world wars 70
The surveillance society: living with digital ‘Big Brother’ 73
Further reading 78
||LIFE.COM 794
‘The future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed’ 79
A day in wired life 81
Bits and atoms 90
Cyborgs ‘R’ Us 95
Further reading 99
||CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE NETWORK SOCIETY 1005
The colonization of civil society 100
A global political movement for the age of globalization 105
The politics of technopolitics 112
Further reading 115
||TACTICAL MEDIA 1166
Tactical media in action 119
Culturejamming 120
Warchalking 121
Digital direct action 123
Further reading 125
||A NETWORKED CIVIL SOCIETY? 1267
Neoliberal globalization today 127
||MEDIA, POLITICS AND THE NETWORK SOCIETYviii

14. Countertrends from the networked civil society 131
Conclusion 134
Further reading 139
GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS USED IN THE BOOK 140
REFERENCES 145
INDEX 153
CONTENTS||
ix

15. SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
A new world is beginning to take shape before our eyes, the world of the ‘network
society’ to use Manuel Castells’ evocative phrase. Social theorists such as Castells argue
that the network society is the social structure of the Information Age, being made up
of networks of production, power and experience. Its prevailing logic, while constantly
challenged by social conflicts, nevertheless informs social action and institutions
throughout what is an increasingly interdependent world. The Internet, he points out,
‘is the technological tool and organizational form that distributes information power,
knowledge generation and networking capacity in all realms of activity’. As a result, he
adds, to be ‘disconnected, or superficially connected, to the Internet is tantamount to
marginalization in the global, networked system. Development without the Internet
would be the equivalent of industrialization without electricity in the industrial era.’
It follows, then, that the use of information by the powerful as a means to reinforce,
even exacerbate, their structural hegemony is a pressing political concern. Celebratory
claims about the ‘global village’ engendered by new media technologies ring hollow,
especially when it is acknowledged that the majority of the world’s population have
never even made a telephone call, let along logged on to a computer. Critical attention
needs to be devoted to the processes of social exclusion – the very digital divide – at the
heart of the network society.
Robert Hassan’s Media, Politics and the Network Society takes up precisely this
challenge. The network society is more than the Internet, he points out; it encompasses
everything that does and will connect to it, creating in the process an information
ecology where the logic of commodification constitutes its life-blood. The information
and communication technology (ICT) revolution that has shaped this process from the
outset, he maintains, did not emerge in a political, economic or cultural vacuum.
Rather, it is inextricably tied to the cultural dynamics of ‘neoliberal globalization’ as
an ideological force, one that is changing the role and nature of the media in modern

16. societies. Accordingly, a number of emergent struggles over who owns and controls
access to the very infrastructure of the network society are examined here. ICTs,
Hassan suggests, are serving as the weapons of choice for a new generation of activists
intent on rewiring the network society in more politically progressive terms. Through
new forms of ‘technopolitics’, fresh ideas are being generated and collectively
negotiated with an eye to launching global protests and boycotts, of which the impact
on everyday life is remarkably profound at times. In assessing the issues at stake for
cultural and media studies, Hassan argues that the first decade of the twenty-first
century is witnessing the beginnings of a critical, ‘informationized’ resistance to the
hegemony of neoliberal capitalism – not least, as he shows, from within the network
society itself.
The Issues in Cultural and Media Studies series aims to facilitate a diverse range
of critical investigations into pressing questions considered to be central to current
thinking and research. In light of the remarkable speed at which the conceptual
agendas of cultural and media studies are changing, the series is committed to contri-
buting to what is an ongoing process of re-evaluation and critique. Each of the books is
intended to provide a lively, innovative and comprehensive introduction to a specific
topical issue from a fresh perspective. The reader is offered a thorough grounding in
the most salient debates indicative of the book’s subject, as well as important insights
into how new modes of enquiry may be established for future explorations. Taken as a
whole, then, the series is designed to cover the core components of cultural and media
studies courses in an imaginatively distinctive and engaging manner.
Stuart Allan
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD||
xi

17. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book, like my first, was made possible primarily through the space, time (and
salary) provided by the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in
Melbourne, Australia. Thanks again, then, should go to its Director, David Hayward,
for his trust, faith and patience – and for leaving me to get on with it. Thanks also to
Denise Meredyth for putting me in contact with the Series Editor at Open University
Press, Stuart Allan. A specific debt of gratitude goes to Stuart for his unstinting
cheerfulness and help in the development of the book. I could not have done it without
him.

18. ABBREVIATIONS
BBS Bulletin Board Systems
BSE Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research
COMINT communications intelligence
CSAE Committee for the Study of the American Electorate
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation
EU European Union
FLAG Fibre Optic Link Around the Globe
GM genetic modification
GPL general public licence
GPS Global Positioning Satellite
GUI Graphical User Interface
IFJ International Federation of Journalists
IMF International Monetary Fund
IP Internet Protocol
ISP Internet Service Provider
LAN Local Area Network
MSC Multimedia Super Corridor
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NGO non-governmental organization
NSA National Security Agency
NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration
OS operating system
PET Personal Electronic Transactor
R & D research and development

19. TCP Transmission Control Protocol
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme
WEF World Economic Forum
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
||MEDIA, POLITICS AND THE NETWORK SOCIETY
xiv

20. INTRODUCTION
We live in an age of information, in a networked society. What is the nature of this
thing? How did it evolve and what sustains it? What, moreover, are its effects upon
media, upon cultural production and upon politics? These are the principal questions
that this book will deal with. In response to these sorts of questions many have
predicted wonderful times ahead for life in the network society. Others, less numerous,
foresee only doom and gloom. These are either the worst of times or the best of times,
according to the differing poles of perception regarding the networked world. These
are also the partisan positions. Alternatively, one can ignore competing claims
altogether and just get on with one’s own life. This is what most people do. And this
is understandable. One of the features of the rise of the network society has been its
rapidity. Life has accelerated to the point where there is hardly the time to consider
such questions, much less have a ready answer to, or reflective opinion on, them. Life is
fast and so life can be hard. Jobs need to be got and kept, rent paid, kids fed. There’s no
time to think in terms of root causes and branching effects. Besides, life in the network
society can have its undoubted ameliorative effects upon frazzled brain and tired body.
For example, after work or school we can relax at home and slip a DVD movie into the
player, or insert a Playstation game and blast away at something virtual. We can text-
message a friend, log on to the Internet and buy dinner, getting someone else to prepare
and deliver it. And while in cyberspace we can email a friend, lurk or participate in chat
rooms, view pornography, make a bid for that kitsch 1950s Japanese toy robot on eBay,
or download via broadband the latest (bootlegged) Hollywood blockbuster, while
waiting for waiting for the pizza delivery to arrive. In other words, we can let the
network wash over us. We can opt to savour its fruits while we can and try to cope with
its nasty surprises if and when they arrive. This is the neutral position.
This book presents an analysis of the network society and considers the above
questions from a critical position. It takes as given that its readers have moved beyond

21. the partisan and neutral positions and believe that there is more to the network society
than being able to vote Josh, Jamie, Janey or Josie off the Big Brother set with the press
of a button on a mobile phone; or of being able to avail oneself of the wonders of the
Internet – from gaining a degree, to compiling a vast musical library of one’s own from
free downloaded MP3s. This book is premised upon the idea that these networking
activities in themselves are neither good nor bad; but they do mean something, and
they say something about the sort of society we live in. They are part of much larger,
interconnected dynamics and it is important that we understand what these are, and
the ways in which they affect us. Why is it important?
It is no exaggeration to say that the evolution of the network society is a world-
historical development. Not since the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries has capitalist society experienced such far-reaching economic
and technological change. And never has such change happened so fast. The Industrial
Revolution was rapid by the standards of its time. Blindingly fast, even, but that
revolution took many decades, indeed generations, to ripple through economies,
industries, cultures, politics and societies. Now, however, it is hard to find points of
real similarity in our present-day network society with that of the world as it was as
recently as the 1970s or 1980s, so completely has it changed. We work differently, we
learn differently, we think differently. We do so many things that would have been
unimaginable twenty years ago. What is more, we take all this for granted. Now, I
realize this sort of talk hovers dangerously close to network society-cliché, but it has to
be said again and again to emphasize and to remind ourselves of the newness of the
world we live in. Sons and daughters of earlier generations could at least recognize
many aspects of their parents’ world. Their media, cultures and politics were broadly
similar and readily recognizable. Contrastingly, young people born in the 1990s and
coming to adolescence and adulthood any time soon will have major difficulties in
relating to what was a very recent pre-digital world. This was a world in which the
social and economic organizing principals of Fordism were dominant to the extent that
they had become what David Harvey (1989) called a ‘whole way of life’. This was a
world, for example, where a ‘free-market economy’ would have been widely viewed as
a form of barbarism, a world where computers were slow and cumbersome and were
applied very selectively in industry and in research, a world where we were connected
by means of a ‘telephone’ (a word that is already dying through neglect) which came in
a choice of blue, black, white or beige and which sat, expensive and immobile, in the
hallway next to the pot plant.
So why the focus upon media, culture and politics when trying to understand the
network society, when the network society is, as I will show below, fundamentally
an economic and technological phenomenon? Allow me to sketch these reasons
schematically for the moment and then deal with them in some detail in the chapters
below. I focus on these because primarily it is these realms, in complex combination,
that make the economic and the technological possible. And it is these realms,
moreover, that have been most radically transformed due to the rise of the network
||MEDIA, POLITICS AND THE NETWORK SOCIETY
2

22. society. Economics and technological development are closely linked processes and
have their own powerful imperatives, of course. However, these are only brought
to bear and legitimized in society through the interactions of media, culture and
politics.
Take the role of the media. In modern societies, the ideas that constitute the basis
upon which society is formed and developed are transmitted through (mainly) mass
media. This is an endlessly contested terrain, but it is also one that has observable
dynamics and identifiable preponderances. It is here that the increasingly intricate
interactions of what Antonio Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’ have their effects.
For Gramsci, organic intellectuals emerge as the organisers of ideological prepon-
derance, or hegemony, for the bourgeoisie, that is to say, the owners and controllers
of capital. Through their access to mass media forms, they are those who are able, as
Zygmunt Bauman (1992: 1) put it, to:
...articulate the worldview, interests, intentions and historically determined
potential of a particular class; who elaborate the values which needed to be pro-
moted for such a potential to be fully developed; and who legitimise the historical
role of a given class, its claim to power and to the management of the social
process in terms of those values.
These are the journalists, the artists, designers, managers, radio talk-back hosts,
newspaper proprietors, academics and so on, who help shape the ruling ideas that
feed directly into the forms of economic organization and levels of technological
development that dominate within society.
In terms of culture, Raymond Williams, a social, cultural and technology theorist
who has had a seminal effect upon the cultural studies discipline, and whose ideas will
interweave this narrative, famously argued that ‘culture is ordinary’ (1958b: 6). Culture
is produced, he maintained, through the everyday dynamics that suffuse all social life.
These generate the symbols and the representations that shape identity and help us to
attribute meaning to the world and our place within it. Cultural production, being
both ‘ordinary’ and vital to the constitution and shape of society, has been trans-
formed by the networking of society. Forms of media, media practices and media
institutions, it will be immediately obvious, play a significant role in cultural pro-
duction. It is in and through these that ideas are transmitted, traditions passed
on, ideologies disseminated, hegemonies consolidated, and where the symbols,
customs, norms and values that go to make up ‘the cultural’ are created, contested and
manipulated.
Lastly, the political process, primarily institutional politics and the processes of
civil society more generally, has traditionally been the power-dynamic between these
interacting forces of media and culture within society. It is through politics that the
major society-shaping ideas and the forms of cultures get worked out, where they
become legitimized and possibly hegemonic – or made taboo or marginal (illegal or
sub-cultural). This overarching process, as I see it, is profoundly dialectical.
INTRODUCTION||
3

23. Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

24. and the soil is invariably found to be rich and responsive.
Throughout these remote creek-sides, then, a large farming and
stock-raising population has already settled itself; and though out of
sight, it forms a large element in the class of buyers for whom the
merchant at the railway station must provide. Those living on the
lower part of the North Fork trade at Delta.
Lately coal has been found within half a dozen miles of town, and
veins of great thickness and soundness are being opened in several
places by Montrose men, who can sell it much cheaper than it has
hitherto been brought from Crested Butte. At Cimmaron, about
twelve miles from Montrose, coal of very good quality occurs in great
abundance, and is being mined. On the mesas, surrounding
Montrose, grows timber of unusual size and importance, and nearly
all the large sticks—some forty-four feet in length,—used by the
railway in the construction of bridges on this half of the line, were
derived from those forests of yellow pine. Several sawmills, each a
nucleus of small settlements, buy and sell at Montrose. Local cattle-
owners make the town their headquarters, the herds ranging on the
upland pastures within a few miles. The cattle business in this region
has just begun, but everything proves so favorable that great
expectations are entertained of it as a source of wealth. The object
is to raise fat beef for local markets, and Durham blood is being
introduced to raise the grade of the native stock. The Cimmaron
range, the heights beyond the North Fork and the Uncompahgre
mesa, supply the chief ranges at present. A good many people are
employed at Montrose, also, in the forwarding business,—that is, the
re-loading of merchandise and other goods into the huge trailed
wagons which they used to call “prairie schooners” on the plains, to
be dragged away to the mountain mining camps. Finally, the town is
the county seat.

25. EXPLORING THE WALLS.
While these resources are all of importance Montrose depends
mainly upon the farming which she says is to make her valley and
the dun-colored mesas, “blossom as the rose.”

26. “They tell me,” says Chum, “and they prove it, too, that there is
nothing you cannot raise here short of tropical fruits, and they’re not
quite sure about that, for they propose peaches, nectarines, and
apricots. And as for grain, great Injuns! why I saw stalks of oats as
big as a walking-stick, and stems of barley that looked like gun-
barrels.”
The Madame raises her eyebrows and coughs slightly, but I take no
notice.
“And as for wheat, sir,—wheat? why it’s immense! Thirty-five and
forty bushels to the acre is the regular yield, and of oats they will
produce fifty or sixty bushels, and of barley eighty or ninety. As for
corn, I forget the figures, but when we go down the road this
afternoon you’ll see great green fields of it that’ll make you think
you’re back on the banks of the Wabash. There isn’t anything they
can’t raise in these bottoms, where they have more water than they
know what to do with, and it’ll be only a few years before this whole
great patch of greasewood and chalk will be verdant with—with
potatoes and corn.”
It was a bit of a break, but when this young man gets a fair grip
upon poetry he don’t let go so easy. He frowned down the suspicion
of a smile round the corner of our eyes, and rising to his feet,
continued:
“I tell you, sir, in five years from now the people of this favored spot
can say in the words of the immortal singer—speaking historically, of
course, you understand—can say,

27. “Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed
By many an icy horn”
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     
“Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed
And green with vines—
(watermelons, squashes, pumpkins, hops, morning glories, grapes,
strawberries, parsley, honeysuckles—I’ve seen ’em all!)
“—and corn.”
We exploded with laughter, and even the enthusiastic orator smiled
grimly as he sat down.
“May be Mr. Whittier wouldn’t have seen so much poetry in the way
I used his words, but I tell you Montrose knows there’s a heap of
truth in it.”
“Yes, no doubt. But how about the ‘icy horn’—these high and dry
benches up here?”
“Well, they say the very strongest and most productive soil of all is
on those same gravelly mesas. It’s lighter and different from the
saline clays of the bottoms. Now, over there”—pointing to the great
upland, which lay elevated a hundred feet or so above the river on
the southern side of the Uncompahgre—”lies a mesa that contains
about twenty-two thousand acres. Then down below, at the mouth
of the river, is another stretch just twice as large. All that is needful
to make that productive farming land is water. A company here is
building a canal which will be twenty-seven miles long and will cost a
hundred thousand dollars. It takes the water out of the
Uncompahgre away up by the Cantonment, leads it along the foot of
the wooded bluffs behind the mesa, and can furnish enough to
water the whole expanse. If you have a farm there, all you have to
do is to select half a mile square or so—there’s heaps of it left
untouched as yet,—pay $1.25 an acre, dig side ditches and draw as
much water as you need at so much an inch rental from the
company. That’s going to make one vast wheat-field.”

28. “I see, but what next?”
“Well, by the time your wheat is grown there will be mills here to
grind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from
seventy-five to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the
crops get ahead of it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and
fancy and talk; it is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more
places than one, and—but, hello! there’s our train!”
Precipitately retreating to our “parlor,” we don our dusters and go
steaming down toward Grand Junction.
The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered
heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the
separate peaks though they are fifty miles away.
“You should have seen that long hill-range
With gaps of brightness riven—
How through each pass and hollow streamed
The purpling lights of heaven—
“Rivers of golden-mist flowing down
From far celestial fountains,—
The great sun flaming through the rifts
Beyond the wall of mountains.”
On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled
with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The
strata in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been
cut by water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes
and equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and
glaring.
The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these
bluffs were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line
of farms watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove
of cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the
flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance
of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was

29. the Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the
bottom-lands spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its
junction with the Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long
bridge.
Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau,
protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer
substances that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between
the Gunnison and the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa.
We know that its surface is hilly and rough, but from here and
everywhere else, its edge, as far as can be seen, cuts the sky with a
perfectly straight and even line as though it were as level on top as
a table. In color it appears dark crimson above the brown and green
of mingled forest and exposed rocks that cover its lower front.
Looking past it, up the river, we can see the snowy Elks, and a line
of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right down to this point
through a series of cañons. There is little opportunity for farming
below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt walls of red
sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem it so closely that a
road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river has grown,
since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred yards wide.
It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the cataracts. Its color,
too, after so much contact with loose earth, has changed from green
to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight and swift.
Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid rock, and
the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One of
these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of
carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and
round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a
great height. The strata of these cliffs—which also have bands of
yellow—wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that
you can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take
the form of “volutes;” and this will continue for long distances
unchanged, as if the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of
molding. It is one of the most interesting stages of the whole
journey.

30. Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,—great piles of
ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive
block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying
tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic
proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony.
Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state—
950 feet—spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just
above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand
Junction.

32. XXXI
THE GRAND RIVER VALLEY.
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in
Paradise was more favorably situated, on the whole, than a
backwoodsman in this country.
—Thoêeau.
A very honest little circular—quite a phenomenon among
prospectuses—had come into our hands, which gave in
terse language the claims that Grand Junction made to
the notice of the world and upon the attention of the
man who was looking for a place of residence in
western Colorado. This honest little circular, toward its end, contains
the following paragraph:
We desire, however, to inform all eastern people who may be
thinking of coming west, that, while this is one of the most
productive valleys in Colorado, it is anything but this in
appearance now. Excepting along the banks of the streams or
near them, there is probably not a tree to be seen in the valley,
unless it was planted since the valley was settled, or within the
past eighteen months. The soil has a dull grayish appearance, with
hardly a blade of grass growing in it for several miles back from
the river, and it produces naturally only sagebrush and
greasewood. It is uninviting and desolate looking in the extreme,
and yet it is far from being so in reality. We are thus explicit in
speaking of the desolate appearance of the country, so that no
homesick wanderer in this far-off western land will say when his
heart fails him in looking over our valley, that he has been
deceived, and that all that has been said of Grand Junction and its

33. surrounding country is a delusion and a snare. If the reader of this
lives in the east, he will almost surely be disappointed at first, if he
comes out here. It will be the disappointment of ignorance
though, for it is only a man who is ignorant of the productiveness
of this country who will refuse to believe what is said of it in this
respect.
That paragraph put us upon our metal. We were eastern people
undoubtedly, but then we had seen “a heap” of Colorado, and the
word “ignorance,” we would not confess applied in our case. It was
therefore with no little curiosity, and something of a resolution to be
pleased anyhow (since we had been told we might not be,) that we
detached our peripatetic home and slipped into a resting-place upon
the customary siding. The glow of the sunset filled the valley with a
blaze of yellow light, and the mesas wore chevrons of indigo shadow
and pink light to the northward, while the scarred bluffs across the
Grand reflected the last rays from burning crests of red sandstone.
Weary with travel we threw open our doors, brushed and dusted and
bathed, while the kitchen was busy, and then sat down to dinner in
the cool soft air of the twilight. When it was over a multitude of
twinkling lights alone showed where the town lay, and so we left
until morning learning more about it.

34. CASTLE GATE.
When we came to the learning, there were persons enough to teach
us, besides all the explicit information Mr. William E. Pabor and
others have put into type about the new town—the western Denver,
the metropolis of—
“Didn’t we hear Gunnison called that, too? and Montrose? and—?”
asks the Madame, whose serious mind can never quite become
accustomed to local flowers of speech.

35. Undoubtedly we had; but who shall say which one of them, a
century from now, shall not deserve the name? Describe it? That
would be merely repetition. Situated, as I have said, in the midst of
a level sage-plain, utterly treeless, it is an orderly jumble of brick
buildings, frame buildings, log cabins, tents, and vacant spaces. It is
South Pueblo or Salida or Durango, or Gunnison of two years ago
over again. The more important question to be answered, is, why is
a town built here at all? It is here in anticipation of the agricultural
productions of the valley by which it is surrounded, water for the
irrigation of which is supplied by the largest river in Colorado, and
therefore inexhaustible.
A year before the railway came, speculators, chiefly from Ruby and
Irwin, who had no dread of loneliness, went to this point and started
the town. “They staked off several ranches,” says the report, “and
located one irrigating ditch and a town site.” This town, which they
called Granville, is situated across the Grand from the mouth of the
Gunnison. A town site was afterwards staked by the Crawford party,
and given the name of Grand Junction.
That is the way these marvelously new and flourishing towns are
started out here. They reverse the proverb and may be said to be
made not born; or, as Chum puts it, fititur non nasce. I couldn’t have
done that, but it was easy enough for Chum who has been to
college; he don’t mind a little gymnastics in Latin like that.
In the mountains dividing Middle park from North park the clustering
streamlets pour steadily into Grand lake, whose surface is rarely free
from gusts of chilling wind or the shadow of gathering storms.
Hidden in heavy forests, it occupies a basin scooped out by the
mighty plow of a glacier and held back by moraines and montonnes
that record a geological history of the utmost interest to the student.
About this solitary lake gather gloomy traditions of fierce warfare
between Ute and Arapahoe, and since the Indian owners have
yielded it to the white men, one of the darkest crimes in the history
of the Rockies has happened upon its shores.

36. From this dark mountain-tara flows a strong outlet fed by the snows.
Its whole youth lies in the depths and gloom of cañons, for range
after range open their gates to let it pass, but the gates are narrow
and the pathway rough. Thus this river, constantly recruited, more
and more the Grand, fights its way from the center almost to the
western edge of the state. There, when its labor is fairly done, and
aid is no longer needed, comes the help of the powerful Gunnison,
and doubly strong it rolls westward to the Utah line, and then
southwestward till it meets the flood of the Green and both become
the Rio Colorado.
Where the Gunnison now empties into the larger stream was once a
wide lake embanked by the abrupt and lofty bluffs that now bound
the plain, and whose mesa-top indicates the ancient level of the
whole country, out of which the valleys, cañons and lake-beds were
eroded.
Into this old expansion of the rivers, had been poured the freight of
soil brought down from the mountain-sides, where the varied rocks
were being ground to powder under the feet of glaciers, and swept
along by gigantic torrents fed with endless meltings. Hither was
carried by the swift waters the mingled dust and pebbles of primeval
granite, volcanic overflows and sedimentary sands, lime, and
argillaceous rock. It was the latest mixture of all that before this had
been handled again and again through the fires that upheaved the
inner ranges, and the waters that laid down the rocky tables, leaning
against their flanks. Into the river-lakes went all this mixture to sink
into mud upon the bottom of the quiet sea,—a union of the best
elements in all the composition of the western slope of the Rockies.
In the whole world you could not find a soil made after a better
recipe. Slow changes in the climate proceeded, and the lake drained
away and left a valley twenty-five miles long and half as wide,
waiting to nourish the farmer’s grain and the children’s flowers.
The first requisite to adapt it to human service, however, was that
the valley should be watered. Thousands of acres of good land in
the Rocky mountains from Kootenai to Chihuahua remain worthless

37. because there is not enough water available to spread over them,
but at Grand Junction there is no such deficiency. The great drainage
of the Grand would not miss all the water that could possibly be
used. Already along its margin miles of ranches have been begun, by
men digging small and temporary ditches bringing water to irrigate a
single farm or a small group of fields in the bottom. These were the
first comers who had choice of the whole area. Later two or three
larger ditches were made having a greater scope, and now there has
just been finished a waterway, led for twenty-five miles along the
benches at the base of the Roan or Little Book Cliffs, bounding the
plain on the north, which will bring under cultivation thirty thousand
acres of valley heretofore unwatered, and may be extended when
the population demands. This ditch comes out twelve miles above
town. It is fifty feet wide across the top, and is thirty-five feet at the
bottom; the depth is five feet, and it delivers seven hundred cubic
feet of water each second, at a speed of two miles an hour, though
there is only twenty-two inches of slope in each mile of length. A
ditch like this costs $200,000, yet dividends are confidently
expected. If anybody can invent a steamer which will not wash the
banks, pleasure yachts and freight barges will be put upon it, for it is
of considerably greater dimensions than the Erie Canal when first
opened. There is no lack of water, therefore. Competent observers
say the supply is sufficient for half a million acres, so that the
intricate and expensive lawsuits vexing the farmers of the eastern
slope can hardly arise here. This abundance is a matter of vital
importance, and an inestimable advantage. Water has a value above
that of land everywhere in Colorado. Where land, in the valley of the
Cache la Poudre, is valued at ten dollars per acre, a water right
carries a cash valuation of fifteen dollars per acre and is more easily
disposed of. The blessing attending the cultivation of the soil where
the water-supply exceeds the area of land, can only be appreciated
by those who have seen their crops wither for want of it.

38. IN SPANISH FORK CAÑON.
It is only recently that this water-supply has become available,
however, through the medium of the canals, for any extended
farming. Large crops, therefore, cannot be expected until next year,
but enough has been learned to make it sure that when the
peculiarities of this adobe soil and the looser mesa soil are
understood, so that the farmers may know exactly how to supply
their irrigation to the best advantage, the most plentiful crops of all
the cereals can be produced. We were told that the experiments

39. right here at Grand Junction already, had yielded corn-stalks eleven
feet seven inches high; a bunch of wheat having seventy-four stalks
in one stool; barley with seventy-six stalks in a stool; oats five and a
half feet high; Egyptian millet, one hundred and five stalks from a
single seed, weighing thirty-six pounds; four cuttings of alfalfa; Irish
potatoes weighing from two to four pounds apiece; cabbages from
five to twenty-three pounds apiece; beets, carrots, parsnips, and all
the vegetables of equally prodigious dimensions. There can be no
question of the extraordinary productivity of this region, and that its
agricultural future is to be a very prosperous one.
Equally large expectations are held at Grand Junction, Delta,
Montrose on the North Fork, and in all the adjacent lowlands, that
this whole region will prove a great fruit-bearing country. The
plentitude and excellence of the wild fruits along the streams and in
the foothills is remarkable, and formed one of the attractions of the
reservation in the eyes of the Indian. The similarity in soil, climate
and altitude to the fruit-growing region of Utah is adduced, and, in
respect to grapes, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and all the
small fruits, successful experiments have justified all the arguments.
Just below Ouray, last year, a ranchman raised seven thousand
quarts of strawberries for market. I saw watermelons and
muskmelons growing finely on Surface creek at the foot of the Grand
Mesa near Delta, and everywhere you will find young fruit trees
doing well and uninjured by winter, which is always mild so far as
known, the thermometer rarely indicating cold below zero, and the
snowfall in the valleys being light. “This new Colorado has a climate
essentially different from that of old Colorado and the country east
of the Continental Divide. It is the climate of the Pacific coast
modified only by altitude and latitude. The air currents come up over
the valleys, plateaus, hills and mountain sides, fresh from the ocean
currents that wash the Pacific shores. These ocean streams are
heated under an equatorial sun and sweeping north around the
circle of the earth, temper the whole western slope.”

40. In this neighborhood, too, are splendid grazing regions, which are
rapidly filling with cattle. I have before me a trustworthy scrap from
the Colorado Farmer on this point: “The face of the country,” says
the writer, referring to the hill regions of the Uncompahgre and the
grand plateaus, “is gently sloping but cut by gulches, ravines and
cañons; grass grows luxuriantly from the creek and river bottom to
the very tops of the highest plateaus; on the higher uplands there
are plenty of pine and piñon trees, in many places interspersed with
cedars and aspens; many small brooks and springs course their way
down the hillsides; natural shelter is found in every neighborhood
from storms when they come, which is seldom. Game abounds in
the greatest plenty and taken all in all, it is probably the finest stock
range in the state. The quality of the grass is excellent and cures
completely. It is different from the plains grass, grows tall with an
abundant wealth of leaf, stem and seed. This country is to be the
great cattle country of the state. The Rio Grande railway runs
through it and will carry the fattened beeves to the market of the
mountains and to Denver and even start them on their way to the
great markets of the East. There are already cattle there and they
are but forerunners of the thousands yet to come.”
The important point is, that the wide mountain areas insure summer
pasturage without driving to great distances; while the valleys afford
good winter grazing. I have been in every cattle region in the United
States, and I never saw anywhere such magnificent grass as I have
ridden through for miles and miles along the upper part of Surface
creek in Delta county. When the herds have so increased that the
winter pasturage falls short—some years must elapse before that—
the valley lands will furnish an abundance of millet, oats, alfalfa and
other grasses, by means of the inexhaustible supply of water which
is possible for irrigation.
As further aids to her progress, Grand Junction has easy access to
coal, both hard and soft; has limestone in great abundance, and
excellent white sandstone for building purposes; while the soil is
adapted for making sun-dried adobes or for being made into burned

41. brick, of which material most of the buildings and many of the
sidewalks in town are now constructed. Game is common in the
neighboring mountains, especially throughout the great wilderness
which stretches northwest, and the rivers abound in edible fishes.
At length there comes a day when we are ready to leave Grand
Junction and “go West.” It is a long ride that lies ahead and we turn
our parlor car into a sleeper by setting up the cots and curtains that
have not been needed for several weeks. It is late in the afternoon,
and when the morrow’s light dawns we shall be out of Colorado and
among the lakes and deserts, the mountains and Mormons of Utah.

43. XXXII
GREEN RIVER.
And then the moon like a goddess came
Over the mountains far,
Wrapping her mantle of silver light
Over each golden star;
And the cliffs grew grand in the dazzling light,
High as the skies, and still and white.
—Fannáe I. Sheêêáck .
The sweet clear twilight was fading from the cliffs, and
had long since left the valley, when it came time to
leave Grand Junction. The rising moon beckoned us on,
however, and we look forward with eagerness to our
journey, for to-night we are to cross “the desert,” to
span the cañon-begirt current of Green river, and beheld the
mountains of Utah. Doubtless the silent hours of the dog watch
would finally close our eyelids; but now we bade Bert be sure that
the lamps in the parlor car were well filled and trimmed, for none of
us would confess the least desire for sleep.
In a short time the valley of Grand Junction had been left behind,
and we quickly passed through the gravelly, grass-covered hills that
lie between the river and the cliffs in this region. It was not quite
dark, therefore, when all this had disappeared, and our train ran in a
swift straight course across an open and level, though by no means
smooth plain. Northward it was bounded at a few miles distant by
the frowning and banded wall of the Book cliffs, colorless now in the
wan light, but distinct in their majestic outline; southward it
stretched to the horizon, save where it was broken by the splendid
file of the Sierra La Sal—an isolated group of eruptive mountains

44. singularly graceful in contours. The surface of the ground was drab
or blue or yellow in color, nowhere quite flat, but divided into low,
rounded ridges and conical mounds, by the shallow dry channels,
down which have coursed the waters of the powerful storms that at
long intervals burst over the desert. Stimulated by the occasional
moisture in these channels, a few spears of grass and twigs of
wormwood are thrust up through the soil, along their depressions;
but between—over the general face of the country,—not a sign of
water, vegetation, or animal life appears. It is the repose of utter
silence and quietude, a netherworld only half lighted by the worn-
out moon. Yet it has a fearful beauty, found in the magnitude of the
space—the grandeur of the huge rocky masses faintly but
continuously outlined against the bright sky north of us—the wide
realms of gray darkness southward—the marvelous brilliance of the
moon—the luminous glory of the overspreading dome, unbroken
from horizon to horizon, almost as at sea, and so seeming really a
part of the globe and not an external thing. These things impress us
greatly and emphasize the sense of loneliness and remoteness. No
other railway journey in the country, I believe, could reproduce as
this does the impressions of an ocean-voyage.
At Grand Junction we leave the Grand river, though our course for
some miles is parallel with it and not far remote. Skirting the edge of
the great Uncompahgre plateau which lies between the
Uncompahgre and Gunnison rivers and the Rio Dolores, the river
flows west and southwest through deep gorges in the Jurassic and
Triassic rocks as far as the mouth of the Dolores. This river comes in
from the southeast, taking its origin in the Sierra de La Plata, and
running a most picturesque course. Through its mouth it is supposed
the Gunnison, before it was deflected toward its more northern
outlet by the slow upheaval of the plateau, once flowed by the way
of a cañon which connects the present valleys of the two rivers. This
deserted cañon was called by the Utes Unaweep (Red Rock),
describing the scenery it presents. The granite rises vertically from
the bottom of the valley, in narrow, bas-relief columns, for some
hundreds of feet; above, the beds of red sandstone cap it in broken

45. precipices. In some places massive promontories of the granite,
whose slow elevation has raised the whole breadth of the plateau
upon its shoulders, juts out into the valley worn down through it.
The scenery reminds one strongly of the Yosemite.
In the acute angle between the Rio Dolores and the southward
bending Grand lies the Sierra La Sal,—a center of drainage in all
directions. It is a mass of volcanic rocks thrust up from beneath. Like
the Henry mountains, the Sierra Abajo and other groups of that
region, these peaks were once covered by a great thickness of
sedimentary strata bent over them; but they have been cleaned
away, leaving the hard core of porphyritic rock exposed. The original
shape of the upthrust was probably that of a huge dome, but the
tooth of time has gnawed it into a score or more of clustered
mountains rising eight and nine thousand feet above the level of the
adjacent rivers. Yet there is no doubt that the summits of mountains
like these, as I remarked of the elevations about Abiquiu in New
Mexico, mark the depressions in the primitive surface before this
prodigious work of erosion and corrosion had begun. One of the
streams flows with strong brine, suggesting the name Salt
mountains to the group; but the rest give pure, sweet currents when
they flow at all, which with many of them is only for a few hours
following a storm. The source of Salt creek is in Sinbad’s valley,—a
steep-walled nook in the mountain-side abounding in crystallized
salt.
After receiving the Dolores the Grand river flows straight southwest
to its junction with the Green, burying itself at first in a deep,
narrow, winding cañon in the red beds, then emerging into a valley
of erosion surrounded by tremendous cliffs of deep red sandstone,
1,600 to 2,500 feet high, carved in fantastic forms. It rose 8,150 feet
above the sea, 350 miles away; it has fallen to 3,900 feet, or an
average of more than ten feet in every mile, and delivers to the Rio
Colorado about 5,000 cubic feet of water every second. Considering
this weight and speed we need not wonder at the profound cañons

46. it has cut, and is still chiseling deeper and deeper, nearly keeping
pace with the slow elevation of the land.
The line of ragged, roan-tinted, book-edged cliffs on the north,
behind whose battlements stretched an invisible plateau of broken
wilderness, covered with grass, but almost treeless and waterless,
where the traveler must not leave the Indian trails,—this line of
massive and vari-colored cliffs stretched all the way to Green river
(and far beyond it,) rising there into the loftier and bluer bluffs which
have been named Azure, and, in the sunlight, seemed carved from
cobalt. Between their towering portals, through the corridors of Gray
cañon, came the yellow flood of the Green river, sweeping with

47. enormous power from north to south, and crossed by us toward
midnight upon a long and lofty bridge. We looked down with eager
eyes upon its swift flood of chocolate-colored water, half as broad as
the Missouri—twice as deep and impetuous. We wished it had been
daylight, that the pregnant mysteries of the half-darkness might be
revealed, wherein distant forms full of curious interest were dimly
suggested. They told us that here, at noonday, the passenger upon
the railway can see the summits of the broken walls that form the
Grand cañons of the Colorado, fifty miles to the south.
But all the “grand cañons” are not away in the southern drylands.
The whole track of Green river from its birth to its death runs in
gorges whose depth and splendor excite our amazement. There are
few rivers in the world that have a history so striking; and if, as is
fair, we count it one stream from the Wind River mountains to the
Pacific, the mighty river is without a peer in its erosive work.
Its source is at the southwestern corner of Yellowstone park, in
Wyoming; its mouth, two thousand miles southward, at the head of
the Gulf of California. The present writer pens with gratification the
record that he has seen both these points. Its upper course lies in
open, or wooded valleys, where sparkling, trout-haunted rapids
alternate with pools in whose mirror-smooth surface the images of
fleecy clouds play with the tremulous forms of snowy peaks. Then it
learns lessons for the hard-working future among the plains and
buttes of southern Wyoming, cutting through its first obstacle where
the Alcove bluffs rear their gaudy crests abreast of Bitter creek.
Here is a little village, settled long ago by emigrants and cattle-
breeders, and here, in 1869, Major J. W. Powell, now Director of the
United States Geological Survey, and chief of the Bureau of
Ethnology, began his celebrated exploration of the river in small
boats, which ultimately navigated all the thousand miles of almost
continuous cañons that lay unexplored, uncanny and perilous before
them. Wonderful stories of it were believed by the frontiersmen.
Boats, they told Major Powell, had been carried into overwhelming
whirlpools, or had been sucked with fearful velocity underground,

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