Peering closely at the glossy sales pictures of billionaire business tycoon Bill Koch’s $80m Aspen ranch I have, sadly, not been able to spot his treasured photograph of Billy the Kid among the romantic landscapes, cowboy paintings and other nostalgic American works of art in his sprawling Colorado compound.
The billionaire industrialist bought the picture of the infamous outlaw for $2.3m at a Denver auction in 2011. At that time it was the only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid in existence; another, more contentious one has surfaced since.
It is an eerie image: Billy stares right back at you out of a silvery bath of light. That’s the real light of the Old West caught in a dead man’s killer eyes. His face is at once idiotic and amoral – he looks like he would shoot you as soon as look at you, as dumbly lethal as a rattlesnake.
Billy the Kid would probably put his feet on the coffee table and strike a match on the floorboards of Elk Mountain Lodge before massacring everyone in the house. He’d recognise it as the ultimate dude ranch. This is the wild west made comfortable – very comfortable. All the imagery of open plains and great mountains is here, domesticated, refined and lathered in luxury. It is an America preserved in amber, a polished mahogany dream of nature and masculinity. Antlers under the tall stone hearth, wilderness paintings on the walls, views of the spectacular snowy valley where his estate is so tastefully set.
One of Koch’s other homes, on Cape Cod, is at risk of losing its similarly magnificent views if the Cape Wind project gets permission to build a wind farm on Nantucket Sound. Koch has given money to a campaign to stop it.
It’s probably not just the spoiled views that Koch objects to. Along with his brothers, Charles and David, Bill is a spectacularly influential Republican and Conservative power broker. According to Greenpeace the Koch family business, run by David and Charles, is a “kingpin of climate science denial”.
Bill Koch is apparently more interested in racing yachts than funding Tea Parties, but his opposition to Cape Wind certainly suggests he shares the familial scepticism about green energy. Who needs wind power messing up your views, especially when “climate change” is a myth?
The political backstory adds a certain piquancy to the romanticism of unspoiled nature that enfolds Bill Koch’s Colorado estate. The paintings that hang in his rustic lodge are dominated by the landscapes of the Hudson River School, the first really self-conscious American art movement.
In the 19th century, these ambitious artists including Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church took their inspiration from European painters such as JMW Turner, and their subject matter from the great American wilderness. Over Koch’s colossal mantelpiece hangs a Hudson River School painting whose looming, shining vision of western mountains revealing their pristine glory to trekkers expresses a seductive myth of America: limitless, capacious and sublime.
The Koch estate nestling in its mountain valley epitomises what has happened to that American dream in the 21st century. Once – forgetting, of course, the native Americans who already lived there – settlers could see a continent open up before them, where anyone might stake a claim or found a homestead. Now you have to be a billionaire to own the dream.
A Koch can create a luxury homestead in the mountains, fill it with nostalgic landscape art, and ignore the changing climate as he plays at American pastoral. For most Americans such aspirations are fantastical.
If a family of propertyless pioneers turned up in his valley they would be chased away. Koch dreams of cowboy days but he is no Shane, no High Plains Drifter. This land is not your land. Donald Trump is drunk in the saloon, firing his guns at random. The old conservative elite sit in the dark in the ranchhouse. Should they hire some desperadoes? Call for the marshals? Billy the Kid’s dead eyes look on.
