The settling of the West came within that tributary of time which swept the aboriginal cultures of western North America into the mainstream of history, thereafter spewing them into a sea of historical randomness and cultural uncertainty. Arriving settlers of European descent displaced them, usually staking their own claims to land along the same waterways that for thousands of years had nurtured the earlier peoples and provided highways for their commerce.

In the ripple and flow of time across that territory now known as Wyoming, mountain men trapped beaver, hunters exterminated the buffalo, and the Shoshone settled their territorial disputes with the Crow over the land cradling the upper stretches of the Wind River.

It was the enticing force of the slip stream of Manifest Destiny that brought my European ancestors to Wyoming. In the history of the West my father, immigrating from Scotland in 1920, came late; but like most of those who came before him, he too sought to live by exploiting the natural resources of the land.

But the land, especially a vast and wild land, has seductive power over those who would try to tame it, to wrestle a living from it. Eventually, in the struggle for survival there comes an understanding; and the relationship between the human and the land deepens into a marriage and a birthing, an exultation of raw beauty, shared experience, mutual dependency, and productivity.

Successive waves of new immigrants brought rapid and continuous change to the land. My father watched those forces work in Wyoming with mixed feelings. He knew as well as anyone that change was inevitable, but he did not like the way things were changing. He did not think the world should remain static, but believed that change should take place within some kind of constant based on what it meant to be a person in a community attached to some place. Perhaps it was his own experience as an immigrant that sensitized him to the importance of place and the tragedy of displacement as the consequence of change.

My father had never heard of Heraclitus, that ancient Greek philosopher who argued reluctantly that instead of being grounded in permanence reality seemed to be characterized by change; but in his own way Dad wrestled with the same vexing problem. He had an aggrieved feeling for things that once were not literally everything, but for the spirit of those times expressed in the people who engaged the raw spaciousness of the land. It was as though he felt the loss of that first bride, that common law linkage with the land and the people he had first come to. "Change should take place within a marriage," he used to say, " but the marriage itself should not change."

He would call my attention to remains of old sheep camps and deserted homesteads, frontier institutions that had once supported families whose names he remembered, but who had mostly disappeared he said, "like dust blowing in the wind." Some had gone broke and moved on, but most had sold out to larger "outfits." Whichever way it was, their presence had vanished, their voices had faded away into whispers of his memory, and the richness of their characters lived on only in the stories he told.

One fall, sometime during my early teens, he took me to the north side of the Big Wind River, several miles below its confluence with Bull Lake Creek, to scout out the land. In the fall and winter months we were hunters and trappers. On the north side of the valley along that stretch of the Wind, high sandstone ledges stand above the river bottom. Early settlers took advantage of the protection these ledges offered from northerly storms and built cabins and out-buildings along their base.

We descended from the flats above by way of a steep-sided gorge. Once on the river bottom we observed in a dusting of fresh snow the imprint of bobcat tracks. We followed them up river until they disappeared then reappeared through the open door of what seemed to be an old root cellar dug down and into the erosion mound at the base of the sandstone ledge. The root cellar seemed to be the only visible evidence that this place had once been inhabited. "This is the old Smoyer place," my father said. "Years ago they sold out to the Winchesters and left--God knows where they are now--maybe dead."

This was a good place for trapping. The river swung in toward the sandstone ledges, bringing the river bottom almost to an end except for a narrow finger of land along the cliffs that provided continuity with land farther down stream. This feature, plus the gorge which offered a trail through the sandstone cliffs to the flats above, spoke clearly to those who understand wild things that many paths, both seen and unseen, converged here.

We set a box trap near the old root cellar door. We knew the ways of the cat. This bobcat would visit the cellar again.

Daily, as I checked that box trap on the old Smoyer place, I too was drawn by the stark desertion of that place to contemplate change, change dictated by philosophical and economic forces that at the time I knew nothing about. It seemed to me that in the scheme of things there was the potential, almost determinism, for displacement for one people or family, by the acquisition of others who had larger interests. "Big fish eat little fish," the proverb goes. It just seemed to be the way things were.

That fall, after the wind had cut the snow to expose the ground, I could make out a rock foundation where a cabin had been. It did not seem to have burned down; there was no charcoal to be seen. It had probably been torn down and hauled away by someone who wanted the logs. A tree was growing through the center of some old bed springs, and a rusty oil-burning stove, half buried by time and soil, stuck barely through the frost-browned grass. There were other things revealed by a sweep of a foot across the grass or a kick at heavier brush: bottles, a crushed milk pail; here an old tin cup, and there a porcelain coffee pot. Inside a broken crock, I found a girl's shoe, brittle and shrunken by time and the elements.

The old shoe awakened my imagination to the girl who had worn it. I wondered about the color of her hair and eyes, the sound of her voice. Was she was pretty; would I have liked her? Did she have brothers and sisters? The artifacts remaining didn't reveal any of these things. What about her mother and father; were they happy on this isolated homestead?

Nearly fifty years after I first saw the Smoyer place I returned, drawn by the resurgence of a latent sense of place. The site had changed some, the foundation stones of the house were hidden by heavy brush. Try as I might I could not locate a single stone. The timbers of the root cellar's roof had finally rotted sufficiently for Winchester cattle walking over it to cave it in. Rain and melting snow were doing the rest of the destruction, or maybe reclamation. It won't be many years until the timbers are returned to the soil--reclaimed by the wild which always waits on the down hill side of settlement.

A five foot bull snake slithered out of the ruined root cellar to remind me that this was his home now.

My interest no longer being in trapping bobcats, but my disposition for meditating on those ruins still strong, I decided to cross the river to the residential hub of the Winchester Ranch and ask Hazel, living matriarch of the family now well up in years, if she knew anything about the Smoyers. I can't imagine why I hadn't asked years before. I must have been too engrossed in the inner, psychic life of the place to engage its external history.

To my surprise Hazel remembered the Smoyers well, although it had been nearly sixty years since the Winchesters had bought the Smoyer place. She recalled that the Smoyers milked nine cows, raised chickens, sold eggs, and made about $200 a month, quite a good living in the 1930's.

Hazel also informed me that there were five Smoyer children: four girls, Ferrell, Beyrl, Marion, Ruth, and a boy, Ray. Old enough to strike out on his own about the time the farm was sold, Ray left home and went to Montana. Hazel wasn't exactly sure why Ray left, or why Smoyer had decided to quit farming.

But the fact is, the Smoyers sold out and left. Neither they nor their progeny remained on the land. They are mere memories. Phone books in the area contain no Smoyer names, and computer searches of Wyoming and Montana yield nothing . Time seemed to have swept them away.

The Smoyers were just one more phase of a process tied to a particular ideology about land and people. They claimed land which once supported nomadic American tribes--the latest, the Crow and the Shoshone. But they too gave it up to someone with greater resources and a wider economic vision.

Despite the belief that under certain circumstances it is deemed necessary, one would think it a difficult decision to give up one's place on the land, whether it is surrendered for financial reasons, an opponent's superior weapons, or someone's greater purchasing power. But the land seems always to be changing hands, and each time it does part of the personal bond that makes it home, part of what makes community is lost to someone. And with contemporary society's fixation on mobility, the sense of place as space inseparable from one's identity is progressively weakened.

About the time my brooding over the disappearance of the Smoyers had become obsessive, I received a copy of my home town newspaper, the Lander Journal. In it, there was an obituary of a Bea Mazet Schmoyer who had lived most of her life in Riverton, about 40 miles from the Winchester's ranch. She had been preceded in death by her ex-husband Ray Schmoyer many years earlier. I called Information and obtained a telephone number for one of the names mentioned in the obituary and called. Eureka, I had found the remnants of the Schmoyer family. I had been looking for a Smoyer of French origin, not a Schmoyer of Dutch origin. Ruth, now Ruth Jacques, was still alive and lived in Casper. From her I got some details of life on the farm and the history of the family after the farm sold. To my surprise what I had assumed was a root cellar turned out to be a chicken house dug back into the hillside to keep the hens warm.

But even though I had located the Schmoyers, their loss and departure from their land was still painfully real. They had sold out to progress. The building of Diversion Dam for a large dry land irrigation project greatly reduced their land holdings, and when the Winchesters made an offer, Irvin Schmoyer sold and moved on.

A bit of Buddhist wisdom says that to call a place home you must have lived there for a thousand years. By this view, one is joined with the ancestors and the community, past and present, in a spirit of continuity with the land. This doesn't seem to be the popular viewpoint of the western world. Here there seem to be successive waves of displacement and acquisition largely driven by the creation of new economic situations and the needs of those with the power to bring these economic conditions into being.

Within this economic process, not only does displacement occur, but the monetary value of land is seductively inflated as it changes owners, and the social value of the survival and continuity of a community, whether a family farm or a small rural town, rooted in the idea that the land is home is eroded and subordinated to the values of acquisition, consumerism, individualism, and competition. These counter-values progressively compromise and subvert the idea of permanence rooted in the personal and community values of "land as home."

In the story of settlement, corporations, and affluent individuals who are usually new to a locality, are among the latest to stake their claim to the land. Of course, corporations are the formations of the affluent, the stock holders, but corporations threaten the idea of land as home in more impersonal ways than individuals do. Corporations have no ideological or spiritual ties to place, moving on when motivated by purely economic considerations. Also, corporate survival is more important than the survival of any of the individuals within it or outside of it.

Corporations operate with detachment from bonds which join people to place, thus are among the newest forces of large scale human displacement from the land. Agribusiness swallows up the small farmer and undercuts the economic base of small towns. Industrial and technological corporations turn fields into factories, and by economic promises dissuade the dispossessed and the unwary from esteeming land and community as home. When people are removed from the land, the land loses its personal dimension and becomes merely a geographical feature of the corporation and a means to an economic end.

Of course, it would be simplistic and wrong to describe farmers and ranchers who enlarge their holdings by buying out smaller operators as promoters of the corporate model. But it would be equally wrong to insist that they are not following that model. Those farmers and ranchers who have expanded their operations can still feel close to the land, still consider the land their home; but the corporate spirit of acquisition and competition which pervades our economy works against it for future generations.

I couldn't imagine there ever not being a Winchester Land and Cattle Company; my psyche was too permeated by memories of helping put up its hay, irrigating the alfalfa fields, branding the calves, building its fences, and trapping the river bottom. I had lived to know all four generations of Winchesters living on their cattle ranch. Old Jack, the patriarch, was killed by a horse when I was about ten, and his oldest son, Albert, died a few years ago after a stroke and a fall from a hay wagon. But the Winchesters still occupied; young Jack, my age, and his son Larry, were still working the place when I began drafting this story two years ago. The land was still their home. Other family members who were also stockholders in the ranch made their pilgrimages for the family reunions. Most knew where home was.

But, I also learned during this time that the Winchesters had put their ranch up for sale. Over the years there had been several inquiries from potential buyers, including a corporation, one movie actor, and at least one wealthy eastern family. But the Winchesters, though tempted, would not sell.

But recently a change of attitude emerged: Jack told me that the government had imposed too many regulations and were protecting too many predators for him to continue. It was time to go.

The land was ecologically rich, populated by wild creatures: elk (along with their calving grounds and migration routes), moose, grizzlies, and wolves, among other species. That richness caught the eye of the Nature Conservancy, which eventually put down the speculated 10 million to acquire it. I breathed a sigh of relief that an organization I have been a member of for many years took as much interest in the place as I did. In fact, in addition to prohibiting any commercial development of the ranch land, they intend to restore the old homestead buildings for their historical and aesthetic value.

Some ranches on the headwaters of the Big Wind have already been developed into small acreage ranchettes. Conditioned by the mobile nature of our society, some of the buyers are interested in the property only for a summer home; others are simply real estate speculators.

Other ranches on the head waters of the Big Wind have been purchased by the affluent. The "Diamond G" was once just a cattle ranch in one of the most scenic areas of the Absaroka Mountains, but it has been bought and sold several times. Mrs. Walt Disney once owned it. The present owner is a former New York lawyer who reportedly is only an infrequent visitor to the ranch.

These are the new forces in the settlement of western lands. There is no appeal to treaties; land is not taken by force of arms, or by the doctrine that applying the labor of one's hands to the land renders the land the property of the laborer. These acquisitions are largely driven by developers, real estate speculations, or the desire to have something which few others can have. In most cases, for the new owners, the land is not a condition of existence, nor is there any ancestral or sacred significance attached to it. It is an object to be acquired, not a subject with which to share identity, to give oneself to.

Correspondingly, the spirit of community erodes with this flux of population detached from the values that promote a sense of place and of vocation wherein people and land bond. The unity of people and place eventually deteriorates until the need for community is replaced by the demand for individuality and privacy.

The Winchesters are gone-replaced. As my father would have observed, change has taken place not only within the marriage, the marriage itself has changed.

A new set of values has come to dominate our belief systems, and in the process has predisposed us to accept, with few questions, ideas of impermanence, flux, and temporality. But to compromise our intuitions that somehow the nature of reality also consists of the constant and the changeless amounts to an unwarranted philosophical surrender. When those with a long relationship with the land and its people move on there is a disintegration of that marriage, a loss of home--the sense of belonging to some particular place and to someone.

Winchester kith and kin, who for years met at the ranch for family reunions, now wonder if there is anything with equal strength of attraction that will continue to draw them together as an extended family.

It would be incredulous to demand that everyone should remain in the place of their birth; the different kinds of interests we cultivate and the diverse talents we have often take us elsewhere. The question is, have we broken our bonds, forgotten our place? Do we know where home is; do we feel the power of the land and the people to draw us back to the place we were born and reared, where we learned that the soil and our flesh were the same, and as a community we shared a common spirit?

The tragedy is that too often we return to find the land violated and the community in tatters.

The first inhabitants of the land were the first to lose it. Then came settlement. The old Schmoyer place, which fills the chambers of my memory, is a microcosm of the world. In a way, we fail our home when we allow our sense of place and community to be devalued by something deemed of greater importance. We become too inured to uprooting, too willing to be uprooted by novelties and the promise of greater prosperity. If sense of place is among our highest values we should devise ways of building communities and economies that embrace the land as an intrinsic and non-negotiable value for the character of the community. This would assure that more people would remain at home on the land, and that those who leave would retain the value of the land and a love for its people.

Change may be inevitable, but we live in a world where everything seems to be following the arrow of time at breakneck-speed. The evaluative mind simply cannot keep pace in a world where novelty and impermanence out race tradition and constancy.

The essence of life is to be found in the back current behind the head of the arrow, in that space which swirls against the forward motion, something which resists its progressive nihilism and creates a stabilizing structure. If the surge for stability within the relentless motion of change is not joined, values which define our humanity and our community will be swept away in pure process.

Likewise, if the constancy of a value born of a people living in a place inseparable from their personal and communal identity is not affirmed, then displacement will be assured, the new settlers will keep coming, and the inhabitants of the land will continue to blow away like dust in the wind.