Synthesizes historical research and journalism to sketch the socioeconomic trajectory of Oregon east of the Cascades since 1850, observing the arid yet variegated environment shapes the populace but its communities have never managed a workable approach to land usage. Between 1845-70, some 400,000 settlers passed through on the way to Portland and the Willamette Valley. Some stayed, others came directly in pursuit of mining, lumber, livestock, and dry farming, especially wheat in the north/northeast. The author rejects the ‘colonial’ economic paradigm: while outside capital was often required, these were individual agents in pursuit of a better way of living. The federal government initially sought to manage Indian claims – calling into question ‘Manifest Destiny’ as a policy. Later the Carey Act (1894), concerned with irrigation, the Taylor Grazing Act (1934), and others aimed to restrict and proscribe ‘exploitive’ land usage. Though Carey generally failed its purpose, it reshaped central Oregon, particularly Redmond and Bend (Oregon’s Jackson Hole, no longer belonging to the high desert paradigm). Indeed there is substantial evidence of Progressivism’s shortcomings: outside experts simply weren’t, but only another self-interested party. Late 19th-century railroads shaped regional economic development, but in the 1920s and 30s state-managed highways did more to enlarge eastern Oregon’s worldview, surprisingly including commodity export. In the postwar era, birds not the broader conservation movement drew in outside nonprofits, yet conflicts broadened into local defenders of property rights pitted against external, self-styled land managers. Cox devotes a large part to more recent controversies in the easternmost counties such as Grant, noting the state is deemed to evidence America’s highest degree of county autonomy. Detailed with personal anecdote and descriptive but not quite analytic, Cox leaves one yet searching for a balanced polity encompassing external actors.