After COVID Emerges the American West
Boom towns on the brink of the apocalypse
The American West is no stranger to feverish periods of boom followed by crushing eras of bust.
The gold rushes of California, Pikes Peak, the Black Hills and the Yukon dominate the first pages of western history books. By then, though, the whole western half of the continent had already experienced one of the most dramatic population declines in human history; the decimation of the western indigenous peoples via diseases, conflicts with migrating eastern tribes and genocides by Europeans. The resulting extended population decline stayed, in many places, unbroken until either the railroad went through or some sort of precious metal was discovered in the region. General George Custer’s 1874 Black Hills expedition would, famously, discover gold in the hills and spark an immediate and overwhelming wave of white migration onto treaty Lakota land. The Lakota would end up killing Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. But the larger tide had turned already, and by the end of the Great Sioux War, the last significant military opposition to American westward colonization had been shattered.
Once the mines had dried up and the homesteading craze had died down, however, the west again came to a lull. While the southwest experienced a more muted period of growth and California continued to develop into a formidable hub of culture, agriculture and urban innovation, the vast lands of the Rocky Mountain region settled into relative silence. Until, that is, the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st saw the west rise to prominence again as its population quietly skyrocketed. From 1958–2020, the Rocky Mountain region (defined here as Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming) experienced a population growth of 203%, far outpacing the overall national growth of 89%. Already, the West is in a boom, and that doesn’t seem about to slow down.
This all brings us up to today. COVID rocked just about every economic sector in America — other than the outdoor recreation sector, which did nothing but prosper for the whole pandemic. Despite COVID closures, national parks and forests have seen enormous swells in visitors that have simply never dissipated since. Public and private campgrounds alike were swarmed like never…
