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Bz haffer, Marguerite S. ““The West Plays West’: Western Tourism and the a Lanscape of Leisure.” A Companion to the American West. William Deverell, ed. Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2004, 375-389. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE i “The West Plays West”: Western Tourism and the Landscape of Leisure MARGUERITE S. SHAFFER In the summer of 1915 Mary Roberts Rinchart, a popular writer famed for her short stories, comedies, and mystery thrillers, traveled through Glacier National Park with the noted western outdoorsman and dude rancher, Howard Eaton. Rinehart and forty-one other “adventurers” packed three hundred miles across the park from the Glacier Park Hotel up along the spine of the continental divide through mountain passes and glacial valleys to Lake McDonald on the west side of the park. Rinehart published her account of the Eaton expedition in a series of articles for Collier’s mag- azine in April, 1916, She described ber outdoor experience in rhapsodic terms. “If you are normal and philosophical,” she wrote; “if you love your country; if you like bacon . ..; if you are willing to learn how little you count in the eternal scheme of things; if you are prepared, for the first day or two, to be able to locate every muscle in your body ..., go ride in the Rocky Mountains and save your soul” (Rinehart, 1983: 4). For Rinehart the park represented true wilderness and the “real” West. “I object to the word ‘park,’ especially in connection with the particular National Reserve in northwestern Montana known as Glacier Park,” she wrote. “A park is a civilized spot connected in all our minds with neat paths and clipped lawns.” Glacier was the antithesis of these civilized city oases in Rinchart’s perspective. “It is the wildest part of America.” Glacier offered trails of adventure, wild animals, and wild flowers: “Here is the last stand of Rocky Mountain sheep, the Rocky Mountain goat. Here are ante- lope and deer, black and grizzly bears, mountain lions and trout ... Here are trails that follow the old game trails along the mountain side; here are meadows of . ..a thousand sorts of flowers beside snow-fields. Here are ice and blazing sun, vile roads, and trails of a beauty to make you gasp” (ibid.: 5). ‘This pristine wilderness was insep- arable from its western context. Rinehart described her arrival at Glacier: “West. Still west. An occasional cowboy silhouctted against the sky; thin range cattle; impassive Indians watching the train go by; a sawmill, and not a tree in sight over the vast horizon!... . "Then, at last, at twilight, Glacier Park Station, and Howard Eaton on the platform, and old Chief ‘Three Bears, of the Blackfeet, wonderfully dressed and preserved at ninety-three” (ibid.: 7) The cowboy and the Indian, the prairies and the mountains, the camp fire and the game trail embodied Rinehart’s image of Glacier National Park and the West. However, she lamented, “There is little of the old West 
