Five Best
The Modern American West

1. What You See in Clear Water
By Geoffrey O'Gara
Knopf, 2000

This timely work sheds light on the conflict over water rights in the American West, but it also describes the history of the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes who now live on the enormous and gorgeous Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, and it explores their relations with white settlers and their descendants. Geoffrey O'Gara's writing, though informed by careful research, is rooted in the land. He writes of Indian Inspector James McLaughlin's trek to the Wind River Canyon a century ago: "On the long trip north, he rarely looked up at the tall skidding clouds, or down at the sudden draws that dropped through the floor of the plains. It was spring, but barely spring, and scalloped ridges of snow still snugged against the lee sides of the hills." It's all there in "What You See in Clear Water" -- a tragedy in the making but overlaid with such tender beauty that you can't tear your eyes away from the page.

2. The Meadow
By James Galvin
Holt, 1992

As James Galvin tells it, the patch of ground that gives "The Meadow" its name is a sort of no-man's land accidentally left off the map when lines were being drawn between Colorado and Wyoming. But the land exerts a powerful hold on the people who work it. Weaving back and forth across the past century, Galvin traces the ownership of the meadow from Appleton Worster, who homesteaded the land in 1895, to App's son, Ray, and then to Lyle Van Waning in the present day. It might be fairer to say that the men were owned by the land than the other way around: "The way people watch television while they eat -- looking up to the TV and down to take a bite and back up, that's how Lyle watches the meadow out the south window while he eats his breakfast. He's hooked on the plot and he doesn't want to miss anything."

3. The Solace of Open Spaces
By Gretel Ehrlich
Viking, 1985

"It's May and I've just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog has taught me to sleep -- sheltered from wind," begins this collection of essays by Gretel Ehrlich about her beloved Wyoming. "A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me in the head. I'm trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands." Ehrlich is frank about the rural "small-mindedness that seals people in," but she has a rough affection for the sheepherders she chooses to work with and for an uncompromising way of life, the "sperm, blood, and guts of ranching."

4. Refuge
By Terry Tempest Williams
Vintage, 1992

In "Refuge," Terry Tempest Williams tenderly records two disasters -- one natural, one personal and unnatural. The first is the rain-fueled rise of the Great Salt Lake in the 1980s to record levels, destroying a migratory-bird habitat that she cherished. The second is her mother's slow death from cancer, an illness -- like that of her grandmother and an aunt -- that Williams attributes to the fact that her family lived downwind from a nuclear-weapons testing facility. Williams concludes that her only refuge is in the acceptance of change. "The birds have simply moved on," she writes. "They give me the courage to do the same."

5. Breaking Clean
By Judy Blunt
Knopf, 2002

"I rarely go back to the ranch where I was born or the neighboring land where I bore the fourth generation of a ranching family." Thus Judy Blunt opens her dryly funny memoir about the hardships and frustrations of the ranching life in remote northeastern Montana -- where she grew up, married a rancher and then, after a dozen years as his wife, decided to escape into the arms of poetry and learning in a college town. Anyone who has ever chafed at the isolating intimacy of rural life will cheer her on.