Reckoning with the West: By the Numbers

The U.S. Census Bureau defines the West Region as 13 states: Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, and Hawaii. Together, they constitute 1,873,253 square miles of land, roughly 3 percent of the land area of the planet.

An estimated 30 million bison inhabited North America in the 16th century; today, just 500,000 remain. Gone, too, are most of the wolves, California condors, wolverines, and pygmy rabbits.

In the generation from 1846 to 1873 alone, more than 100,000 Indigenous Californians were killed directly or indirectly by marauding settlers and soldiers. Death storms also raged in the Northwest, in the Intermountain West, up and down the plains, and south to the borderlands.

Disneyland rakes in an estimated $5.5 million a day in profits.

Some of the most diverse cities in the world are now in the American West; an estimated 224 languages are spoken in Los Angeles.

In California, as of 2020, about 148 miles, or 14 percent, of the coastline had been fortified by hard barriers like seawalls, jetties, and breakwaters.

120,000 people of Japanese descent were incarcerated in western camps during World War II, about 6,500 young men from western states died in the Vietnam War, and more than 200,000 lives in the West had been lost to COVID-19 as of March 2023.

In 1852, more than 67,000 people pushed their way into California, close to a third of them newly arrived Chinese immigrants.

750,000 pounds of gold were mined during the California gold rush, which would be worth about $22 billion today.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160-acre plots of land in exchange for leaving behind one’s life and moving west, often on foot for 2,000 or more miles, and eking out a living with bare hands and a draft animal (if there was one) for five years. Four million people accepted the challenge. Fewer than half succeeded.

Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, occupies .78 square miles, about the size of three homestead plots.

Most western land is still thought of as “wilderness,” a term denoting a kind of untamed ferocity that to modern ears is problematic at best. However, just 167,650 square miles, or 9.3 percent of the West, retain a legally binding wilderness designation.

The primary driver of the loss of wilderness is what brings so many people to it in the first place—roads. In Oregon and Washington, there are 90,000 miles of forest roads, covering a distance that is over three times the circumference of the earth.

There are nearly 13,000 dams in the West, according to the National Inventory of Dams, a list maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

In Utah, the Bingham Canyon copper mine, the largest open-pit excavation in the world, descends .75 miles into the ground. Made a national historic landmark in 1966, it is visible from space.

In 2020, the average life expectancy in Idaho was 78.4 years, 1 year more than the national average.

Invasive ivy is estimated to cover 10 percent of all public land in Seattle.

More than 3 billion pairs of blue jeans, an invention of the gold rush era, are sold around the globe each year.

Nearly 2,300 metric tons of cannabis were legally grown for recreational purposes in western states in 2022.

Hollywood covers 17.2 square miles, or 69 homestead plots.