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sister, Enrique and Rosa, are tormented in their homeland of Guatemala and flee to Mexico, then to the United States. They are looking for “home.” This central focus—“the pursuit of a sense of place,” Redford calls it—permeated all the projects of that first Sundance lab and has woven in and out of everything Sundance has done since. Its importance cannot be overstated. Over the years, Redford has strived to encapsulate Sundance in a phrase: It’s a place of experiment. A place of risk. Of diversity. This welter of branding somehow obfuscates the point. As flagged by El Norte and repeated ceaselessly since, the Sundance arts aspiration is toward an inclusive statement of Americanism.

Like Sundance, Robert Redford bestrides two worlds. He is the product of two very different and disparate families, one part New England settler, one part western. His life has been peripatetic. He has engaged careers on the East Coast and West. It may not be a coincidence that his arts laboratory—his “great experiment”—is not too many miles from Promontory Summit, where, in 1869, the golden spike was hammered that joined the East Coast and West on the transcontinental railroad. It may be that Redford’s fugacious nature is not so mysterious, that it is studded in the artwork of the labs and the very stones of Sundance. It may be that Redford’s journey is the same as Enrique and Rosa’s: toward the integration of personal understanding and the harmony of home.

MICHAEL FEENEY CALLAN

Dublin

January 2011

PART ONE

California Role

For our country here at the west of things

Is pregnant of dreams; and west of the west

I have lived.

Robinson Jeffers, “Epilogue”

1

West

America bloomed on a dream, consolidated in the pages of the Democratic Review in 1845 when journalist John O’Sullivan wrote that it was “our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Prior to then, “America” existed in a huddle of sparsely populated states that were outgrowths of the East Coast Dutch and British settlements. Across the Appalachian divide was limbo, and the travelers who first set out on the Oregon Trail wrote wistfully of “going home to America.” Within two centuries, the wilderness was taken from the Native Americans, but its settlement was mythologized in blithe imaginings wrought by the stories of Owen Wister and the paintings of Frederic Remington. In truth, there were few cowboys, fewer than ten thousand at their peak, and the pioneers who trekked west traveled not in Conestoga wagons, but on draylike prairie schooners hauled by oxen. Fantasies are inherent in human nature, and much of the American landscape, unchanged for millennia until the great drive west in the nineteenth century, provoked heaven and hell.

California, especially, inspired heaven. It was huge, its very geography offering a multitude of opportunities for exploitation. Gold had been sprinkled there by the gods. Starting in 1849, the influx began, filling the twin ramshackle metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles with their various dreamers. In 1800 the California population measured a few thousand. By 1853, after the gold rush was finished, the population was a quarter of a million. The entrepreneurial energies of great financiers, including Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, made San Francisco the Paris of the West. Los Angeles, in competition, boomed by nurturing its reputation for blue skies and perfect, balmy breezes. The mission Spaniards, set on sanctifying paradise, persevered with Spanish orange and Portuguese lemon crops, which took hold when the early cattle kings dispersed. These Californian delicacies caught on back east and gave the environs of Los Angeles a bedrock export economy.

Still, California was no easy sell. To the recent immigrants settled on the East Coast—Scots-Irish folk like Redford’s maternal great-grandfather, John Hart—the industrial options of the more established towns were more desirable. As the gold rush subsided and the Civil