Tag Archives: Great Plains History

02/19/2013

Wallace Stegner, “Wolf Willow: A History, A Story, and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier” (1955)

By Aaron Barth

There is a duality that comes to mind when reading Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1955), and it centers on the push and the pull between the country and the city. To Stegner, the villages of Eastend and Whitemud in southwest Saskatchewan represent both an idyllic countryside as well as rural idiocy. This stands in contrast to how a city is perceived, as it embodies a sense of the cosmopolitan on the one hand, and political and business corruption on the other. When the country and the city are played off of one another, one has a choice between the rural idiocy of the countryside, or the cosmopolitan corruption of a city.

In the case of Wolf Willow, Stegner focuses on remembering Whitemud as a former attempt of Western Civilization colonizing the Great Plains with a cosmopolitan ethos. A generation later, though, Stegner says these settlements devolved into rural idiocy. He is pointed and upfront about it in the first paragraphs of his final chapter, saying how Whitemud,

…is an object lesson in the naïveté of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and the repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to country rut, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village… That curve is possible anywhere in America, but nearly inevitable on the Plains, because on the Plains the iron inflexibilities of low rainfall, short growing season, monotonous landscape, and wide extreme of temperatures limit the number of people who can settle and the prosperity and contentment of the ones who manage to stick. (Stegner, 1955: 287)

This statement stands in contrast to his remarks in the opening of the book, where he remembers his boyhood as a “childhood of freedom,” this adolescence unadulterated with impressions of Western Civilization, history, and professional training. (Stegner, 1955: 25 & 27)

From beginning to end, Wolf Willow is an evolutionary remembrance of Stegner’s intellectual development, and how he chose to remember this upbringing. As an adult who returned to visit Whitemud and Eastend, he was at once in a place of countryside idiocy, a landscape he described as a “backwater peasantry incapable of the feeblest cultural aspiration.” (Stegner, 1955: 288) This smacks of his adult inability to understand his childhood, a rejection of his past for a possible alternative that never was nor could have been. For Stegner to learn about and ridicule Western Civilization on the Great Plains smacks more of his own familial past: this should easily be considered as a way in which Stegner mocked himself. This is why Wolf Willow should be understood as Stegner’s essay on his own personal identity, a tension between his professional city life and the frontier childhood he remembered in southwest Saskatchewan. Memoirs and narratives are set down so individuals can establish a linear way of looking at the path they have already made. In this way Stegner’s Wolf Willow is, as he describes it in the sub-title, a memoir and even a confession. As right and as wrong as Stegner is within this work, it remains an individual and personal contribution to that long Great Plains historical record.

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02/18/2013

Carl F. Kraenzel, “The Great Plains in Transition” (1955)

By Aaron Barth

Writing from Tehran, Iran, circa 1955, Carl Frederick Kraenzel produced a work that recovered a component of regionalist memory for the inhabitants of the Great Plains. It is a, and not thee, component, because the work is consciously or subconsciously written from the Euro-Ameri-centric position. Regionalism, however, was and is a universal concept. Kraenzel defined it as a unique and “democratic ordering and programming of the economic, social, and living activities of the residents of a common area, through political and all other avenues.” Regionalism enabled the greatest possible advantages to the local residents and, with a bit of idealism, Kraenzel also said it best benefitted nation-states and, ultimately, the globe. (Kraenzel, 1955: 8) In other words, it was a system by and for local inhabitants. The Great Plains had experienced bursts of regionalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, Kraenzel said that unless industry was developed by and for regions throughout the Great Plains, it would simply result in “antidemocracy.” (Kraenzel, 1955: 384)

Within The Great Plains in Transition, Kraenzel’s initial chapters outline the physiography of the Great Plains, and some early explorers from the Spanish, British and French empires. This includes Villazur’s (1720) and Coronado’s (1540-42) incursions onto the central and southern Great Plains, as well as the Mallet Brothers (1739-40). The first European to record their journeys at length on the northern Great Plains took place in 1742-43 with La Vérendrye and company, and five decades later with the Mackay and Evans expedition. After the founding of the American nation, though, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, mountain plainsmen had established themselves, and they started cultivating a set way of doing things — or a regionalism — throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Individuals such as Jim Bridger, John Colter, Jebediah Smith and Kit Carson brought about a common Euro-American culture between 1803 and 1846. Mountain plainsmen would hunt, kill and harvest furs and pelts throughout the Rockies and Rocky Mountain basin, and then bring the items into the fur trading forts established along the river networks (such as this one linked to here).

Nineteenth century routes across the Great Plains.

Nineteenth century routes across the Great Plains.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, pioneers and settlers also charted disparate routes across the plains in an effort to reach Texas, California, and Oregon. The routes included the overland Santa Fe and Oregon trails through the southern and central plains, and the Missouri River on the northern Great Plains. Eventually Anglo-American cattlemen appropriated some aspects of Gaúcho culture and brought it on to the Great Plains, but this culture was short-lived and within a couple decades devastated by industry and outside interests. In all, these individuals were perpetually in transition, and the Great Plains was a place to cross rather than a destination.

In all of this, it is worth remembering that Kraenzel wrote more from a perspective of a social scientist than from a historian of the humanities and liberal arts, and certainly from the vantage of a labor historian. Throughout this work, Kraenzel deepened the readers understanding of the otherwise scattered and complex European and Euro-American past of Great Plains culture. In 1955, this could easily have grounded inhabitants of the Great Plains who experienced some waves of post-WWII out-migration — would, they thought, the depopulation of the North American steppe ultimately end up as a return to a kind of buffalo commons? It did not, of course. And this largely had to do with co-operatives that Great Plains-men and –women organized in an effort to compete with outside Corporate interests and Federal programs. In some closing words, Kraenzel says

The co-operative movement… is that middle road between state or corporate capitalism on the one hand, which in its extreme instances can manifest itself as a kind of Fascism or Nazism, and socialism on the other hand, which in its extreme forms becomes a kind of militant communism. (Kraenzel, 1955: 385)

A summer 2012 photo of the elevator co-operative in Fessenden, Wells County, North Dakota.

A summer 2012 photo of an elevator co-operative in North Dakota.

This statement exemplifies why Kraenzel called for a heightened regionalism throughout the Great Plains in 1955, and it is universal gravity for ideologues aloof with a superficial understanding of the history of co-operatives. If one is from the central and northern Great Plains, one will have directly and indirectly benefitted from these co-operatives. Thus, co-operatives and regionalisms are an essence of Great Plains memory and identity, both in 1955 and in 2013.

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02/15/2013

Gilbert C. Fite, “The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900” (1966)

By Aaron Barth

In the final pages of Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), Fite used Walter Prescott Webb’s environmental determinism from The Great Plains (1931) as a point of departure. While Webb said a cultural breakdown came from the flat, treeless and semiarid Great Plains, Fite countered this and said it “was a symptom of the basic problem and not the problem itself.” (Fite, 1966: 222-223) With the absence of wood, settlers to the Great Plains used sod, traded the hand pump for a windmill, and used barbwire instead of wood picket and stone fences. According to Fite, any study of the Great Plains ought to oblige environment but amplify culture and the individuals as the key determinants who acted and reacted to one situation after another. Individual farmers managed labor and resources on farmsteads and “fit conditions on the Great Plains.” (Fite, 1966: 223)

From 1865 to 1900, the Great Plains underwent several Euro-American changes. The frontiersman eventually gave way to the miner, and mining communities created demands for beef that cattlemen and cowboys could supply. Before the arrival of the farmers, though, the Euro-American miner brought this singular industry to the American West. For example, in 1860, the United States Census reported that Colorado had a miner population of 22,086, a saloonkeeper demographic of 175, and a total of 195 farmers. (Fite, 1966: 11) This did not result from a culture of ideology, though. Rather, it resulted from the chaotic settlement and mechanization of the Great Plains, and a change of the Great Plains as the “Great American Desert” to a great American farming oasis. Following the American Civil War, farmers increasingly established themselves in the mining areas of Fort Benton and Bozeman, and in the Bitterroot, Beaverhead, Prickley Pear and Gallatan valleys of Montana, in Walla Walla, Washington, the Snake River, Idaho, the Rio Grande, New Mexico, and the Salt Lake Basin in Utah. (Fite, 1966: 11-12)

Amenia, North Dakota in the 1880s. (Fite, 1966: 77)

Amenia, North Dakota in the 1880s. (Fite, 1966: 77)

Individual farmers and corporate managers also took up small and large-scale farming operations on the northern Great Plains. In Dakota Territory in 1860, 123 farms were recorded. Ten years later, Dakota Territory had a total of 1,720 farms. (Fite, 1966: 11 & 36) By the 1870s, railroads had allowed for the advanced Euro-American colonization and settlement of the Great Plains, and this caught the attention of bonanza financiers and corporate managers. Agrarian mechanization took off in the Red River Valley in this period, and in 1875, Oliver Dalrymple purchased several thousand acres just west of Fargo. He eventually formed the Cass-Cheney-Dalrymple bonanza farms, “a compact body about 6 miles long and 4 miles wide, extending on both sides of the railroad,” or a total of 24 square miles. (Fite, 1966: 80)

By 1879, the Dalrymple family had swallowed up more than 10,000 acres in northern Dakota Territory, and Fite explains how this was managed. The land was divided into 1,280, 1,600, 2,000 and 5,000 -acre subdivisions. A foreman’s house was built on each subdivision, as were lodging quarters for the seasonal migrant laborers. Fite said bonanza farming was large-scale, corporate, had absentee ownership, a professional management staff, was highly mechanized, and they dealt in specialized production. To a degree this crowded out smaller-scale farmers, but they also learned about the effectiveness of mechanization, and how to apply it to their own farmsteads.

Threshing on the Dalrymple mechanized bonanza farm, Cass County, Dakota Territory, 1877. Photo with the ND Institute for Regional Studies, 2029.11.1.

Threshing on the Dalrymple mechanized bonanza farm, Cass County, Dakota Territory, 1877. Photo with the ND Institute for Regional Studies, 2029.11.1.

News of the Dalrymple bonanza farm would reach the media, and eventually generate a moneymaking perception for one and all. This perception increased settlement to these areas, and northern Dakota Territory experienced a “boom” up through 1883. To a large degree, it did matter that reporters got the news correct. What mattered even more, though, was that “reports of quick and large profits, even if exaggerated… excited the imagination of thousands of restless settlers and stimulated the rapid westward movement of the 1880s.” (Fite, 1966: 93) Corporate bonanza farms created the perception that any small-scale farmer could make a living and even get rich in northern Dakota Territory. In some cases that perception was realized, and in other cases it was not.

In 1917, a year before Willa Cather published My Ántonia, Fite’s mother filed a homestead claim in northwestern South Dakota, in what Fite referred to as “the very end of the farmers’ frontier in the United States.” (Fite, 1966: ix) By 1966, Fite had five decades from when his mother filed a homestead claim to consider what this localized story meant in the broader, national context. In his piece of scholarship, Fite is not so much concerned with socio-political problems, but rather with what contributed to the rapid farm settlement, processes of labor, and how dirt farmers responded to the particulars of the Great Plains environment. (Fite, 1966: x) The processes were complex, and through this Fite explained how perceptions of the American West shifted, and individuals and corporate managers brought about the beginning and the end of the farmers’ frontier from 1865 to 1900.

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02/11/2013

Walter Prescott Webb, “The Great Plains” (1931)

By Aaron Barth

WebbIn 1931, Walter Prescott Webb published The Great Plains, attributing the ideas in the book to two earlier works: Emerson Hough’s, The Way of the West, (1922) and Webb’s own piece, “The American Revolver and the West,” published in Scribner’s Magazine (1927). Webb tweaked or discounted some of Hough’s ideas about the west, or the Great Plains, and instead focused on three attributes. The definition of the Great Plains, according to Webb, necessitates 1) level land; 2) an area barren of timber, and; 3) a semi-arid place — somewhere in that proverbial rain-shadow just east of the Rocky Mountains. So long as two of these three elements remained, Webb said the region would have its “cultural character.” (Webb, 1931: 4)

Here in this early statement Webb makes a case to the reader that environment shapes culture. It is a little heavy-handed, though. Of course environment influences culture, but Webb is fairly aggressive in that he said environment determines culture. This determinism, or determinism light, is an outlook that denies historical actors any type of choice, or that individual cause-and-effect. This also denies historical actors a humanist reality: while environment nudges individuals one way and another, individuals are faced with an infinite number of choices, and they still make one localized decision after another based off an infinite number of variables.

Continuing along this deterministic trajectory, Webb focused on a particular ethnicity, and said that “the Great Plains have bent and molded Anglo-American life, have destroyed traditions, and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner.” Again, Webb would do better to have said that the Great Plains induced historical actors to cobble together a variety of solutions if something did not work the first time around. Willa Cather indirectly points this out in infinite ways in My Ántonia (1918), and Ernest Staples Osgood showed how cattlemen formed stockmen’s associations to bring order to ranching in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. Cultures are not destroyed, nor to they “rise” or “fall.” Humans tweak culture, and that culture slowly evolves over time, and turns into hybridized versions and variations.

In any case, Webb alluded to Cather twice in his 525 page study, referring to her novels as “farm literature” full of “ugliness,” “drudgery,” and “tragedy.” (Webb, 1931: 478) In this, Webb reveals his nostalgic and romantic outlook toward the Anglo-American gun-slinging cowboy (who was not a famer), and this is what he is really concerned with: the rise and fall of cowboy culture. He said cattle kingdom literature is filled with “nothing of protest,” nothing of “destructive criticism,” and nothing of “dissatisfaction” — Webb provided basic amplification to the later delusions intrinsic to Spaghetti Westerns in American cinema.

All of this is not said in a way that suggests Webb was conspiring to hide his fondness for the cowboy within his work. This simply means that when reading Webb, remember that he was a typical Texan of his times. His nostalgia for the past ought not to be taken any more or less seriously than anyone else’s nostalgia for the past.[i] One can understand his ideas without having to agree with them. Understanding how scholarship was framed throughout universities and publishing houses in the 1920s and 1930s might bring 21st century scholars to pause and contemplate what cultural baggage we bring to the evidence in otherwise “objective” studies of the past.

[i] For an exegesis on the typical Texan, see Joseph Leach, The Typical Texan: Biography of an American Myth (Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952).

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02/10/2013

Great Plains Blizzards Now and Then

By Aaron Barth
Snow measurements from February 10, 2013, at 7:00PM (CST) in downtown Fargo, North Dakota.

Snow measurements from February 10, 2013, at 7:00PM (CST) in downtown Fargo, North Dakota.

Last week I revisited Walter P. Webb’s 1931 work, The Great Plains. In the coming days, I’ll blog a bit more on Webb’s work. For now, though, Blizzard Orko (as of 7:03PM [CST], February 10, 2013) induced several departments of transportation to close sections of Interstate 29 and Interstate 94 on the northern Great Plains: north-south from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and east-west from Jamestown, North Dakota in to Minnesota (the MNDOT’s road condition map I found is more general than decisive about exactly what sections are closed). These closures, or specifically this blizzard, reminded me a bit about Webb’s remarks on Great Plains blizzards, or what he pulled from Clement A. Lounsberry, the Civil War veteran who started The Bismarck Tribune in the 1870s. Of blizzards, Lounsberry  (via Webb) referenced that historically they were known as a

…mad, rushing combination of wind and snow which neither man nor beast could face. The snow found its way through every crack and crevice. Barns and stacks were literally covered by drifting snow, and, when the storm was over, cattle fed from the tops of stacks. Persons lost upon the prairie were almost certain to meet with death, unless familiar with the nature of these storms… I learned of many instances where persons were lost in trying to go from the house to the barn, and of other instances where cords were fastened to the house so that, if the barn should be missed, by holding onto the cord the house could be found again (Webb, 1931: 25)

With this in mind, this evening I took some measurements of snowfall in downtown Fargo. At least 7 1/4″ of snow has fallen (it is now 7PM, CST). Tomorrow winds are expected to intensify, as is snow removal and book reading.

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02/04/2013

Willa Cather, “My Antonia” (1918)

By Aaron Barth

In 1918, Willa Cather published My Ántonia. It is a novel loaded with Euro-American homesteading experiences from the Great Plains, and it demonstrates how a seemingly isolated place can in fact have international scope. Without saying it so directly, Cather gives the reader a sense of how the Atlantic World brought itself to the Great Plains, and how these individual immigrants faced an endless amount of new frontiers. After developing the characters in the countryside, Cather moves the cosmopolitans in the country from the landscape of the Burden Homestead to a neighborhood in the town of Black Hawk, Nebraska. In this way it is also a novel that considers the contrasts between the country and the town.

Because Cather was a sharp author, it is fairly easy for a reader to reconstruct the landscape of the Burden Homestead. The landscape was inundated with international settlements, with the Russian neighbors of Peter and Pavel to the north, the Bohemian Shimerda family to the west, and the German neighbors to the south. Six miles east of the Burden homestead was the post office, a vestige of an Anglo-American institution that continuously crept further and further out onto the Great Plains and Euro-American frontier. The Burden Homestead itself was a white frame house on a hilltop, and the terrain gradually sloped westward to where the barn, corncribs, and pond were located. (Cather, 1918: 12-13, 15, 20-21) While reading this work, I reconstructed the Burden Homestead landscape from the text, and sketched it out on paper with pen.

Burden Homestead My Antonia 01.30.2013 Reduced SizeOn page 42, Cather also makes brief reference to the material cultural remnants left by Plains Indians, or what may have been a potential Sun Dance. The Euro-Americans are all in disagreement over what it could represent, and this is how Cather explained it. “Beyond the pond,” west of the Burden home, Cather said Jim Burden noticed that,

…there was, faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride. Jake and Otto [two hired hands, the latter from Austria] were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but grandfather [Burden] thought they merely ran races or trained horses there. Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.

In this singular paragraph passage, Cather’s piece of fictional prose exposes the reader to several different Euro-American perceptions and theses. There is the stereotypical perception of the “brutal” or “savage” Indian, the wise grandfatherly ballast that considered the plains Indians and their horses, and the mystic and romantic foreshadowing that Jim Burden felt when he viewed the circle in the landscape. In this way Cather’s statement inadvertently touched on several questions raised by humanities scholars and social scientists (historians, anthropologists and archaeologists).

Novels are fantastic in that they help a reader explore the infinite range of human emotion in a way that scholarship often cannot, and this is why My Ántonia is a central piece of fiction in Great Plains and world literature. There is much more to say about this work, and it certainly compliments Ernest Staples Osgood’s 1929 scholarship, The Day of the Cattleman, and Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Fronter, 1865-1900 (1966).

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02/01/2013

The Weekend the Music Died

By Aaron Barth
"Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury" (Orange County Museum of Art: Prestel Publishing, 2008).

“Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” (Orange County Museum of Art: Prestel Publishing, 2008).

This weekend marks the day the music died. I’ve been reading Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, And Culture at Midcentury, edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and issued by the Orange County Museum of Art (Prestel Publishing) in 2008. It is a kind of work that explores the genesis (or amplification) of “cool” from southern California, and this raises a chicken or the egg question: in the post-WWII world, did southern California create “cool,” or did southern California appropriate cool, embrace it, and then turn it up to — in the words of Spinal Tap — eleven?

Armstrong says that southern California in 2008 is renowned for nice weather, a laid-back attitude, a “propensity for fantasy indulgences,” an attachment to cars, hillsides covered with suburban tract houses, sunny beaches and blondes — those seemingly perfect suburban conditions that provide a launching off point for punk rock.

It’s not cool to talk about cool, and that is a primary working definition of cool from the post-WWII world (captured in many ways by Anatole Broyard’s 1948 essay, “Portrait of the Hipster”). In Armstrong’s words, cool is “an attitude that eludes those who try too hard to achieve it.” (Armstrong, 2008: 1) In the essay “Cold War Cool” by Thomas Hine (also in this work), he says “Those who speak and write most about it — including most of those quoted in this essay — don’t have it. Truly cool people know enough to keep their mouths shut. (Nevertheless, I shall proceed.)” (Hine, 2008: 194) So shall I.

Buddy Holly in the 1950s.

Buddy Holly in the 1950s.

Anyhow, and to not get too far off the topic of Buddy Holly, here is a photo of Buddy used in Birth of the Cool. The caption beside Buddy Holly notes his influence on The Beatles and Rolling Stones, among others (including Jonathan Richman). So in thinking about all this, it’s appropriate to say that my S-10 Chevy is snowed in an alley parking spot just 2.5 blocks from the levy, and this Friday evening I’m going downtown Fargo for a bit of whiskey rye. And to think a bit about the weekend day that the music died. The world sure missed out on a lot of great tunes because of that plane crash in Iowa on February 3, 1959. They were trying to get to a show in Fargo-Moorhead. At least Buddy continues to echo throughout the rock and roll ages, whether we know it or not, aesthetics and rhythm and all. Thanks Buddy.

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01/31/2013

Winter Memories

By Aaron Barth

Speaking of winter in My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather noted that “man’s strongest antagonist is the cold.” As I type (on 01/31/2013, just before noon), the dry temp in Fargo, North Dakota registers right around -9 F, around -9 in Grand Forks, -17 in Jamestown and Dickinson, -18 in Towner, -13 in Valley City and Bismarck, -20 in Williston,  and, for international scope, -11 in Irkutsk, Russia (a Siberian city with a population of over 1/2 million).

On the walk to work today I was thinking back to some of my elementary school days in the context of cold winter weather. The phrase “blizzard warning” often triggered the following thought — with an anxious question mark at the end — of “school closings due to severe winter weather?” in my earlier elementary school mind. When superintendents and sometimes governors yielded to the winter and Boreas, and they finally decided to shut institutions (sometimes the entire state) down for a day or two, the next thought that went through my elementary school mind was, “With school canceled, now I’ll have time to try and convince my mom that it’s still not bad enough for us to get outside to go sledding, work on that winter fort…” and so on.

Winter driving on Interstate 94 in North Dakota, February 2013.

Winter driving on Interstate 94 in North Dakota, February 2013.

In a big way, winter is dealt with by getting out in it (bundle up, of course).

The large snow piles heaped in the middle or on the edge of parking lots also reminded me of first grade “King of the Hill” matches on playgrounds. For whatever reason, students who partook in these matches had recess privelidges revoked (at least for that recess), and they got a stern talking to. What never made sense to me, though, was how an elementary school student was supposed to look at a giant heap of snow piled high in the middle of the playground and not feel hard-wired to climb it. I don’t know how today’s elementary schools deal with snow removal and snow piles. But looking back at it, I suppose those early piles of snow taught me some rudimentary basics of Darwin, and the blowback of cultural and institutional regulations imposed by those watchful recess supervisors.

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01/26/2013

Ernest Staples Osgood, “The Day of the Cattleman” (1929)

By Aaron Barth

Central to Ernest Staples Osgood’s 1929 scholarship is how cattlemen in Wyoming and Montana ignored previous perceptions of the Great Plains as an uninhabitable desert, and instead recalibrated their perspective to make a life on the North American steppe. Once the cowboy got to the Great Plains, Osgood said,

The solitude of the desert passed, and men began to realize that this, our last frontier, was not a barrier between the river settlements and the mining communities in the mountains but an area valuable in itself, where men might live and prosper. (Osgood, 1929: 9)

The chapters that follow elaborate on how the nineteenth-century Euro-American pushed west of the Mississippi River to initially make their way across the Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. By the time enough overland wagon trains arrived to the mountain basin, though, frontier fur traders and trappers had come down out of the Rockies to form encampments, and these settlements became stopping points and places of trade. The fur trader and trapper sold supplies to the wagon trains, swapping out locally-grazed cattle with emaciated wagon train cattle, the latter worn out from walking the hundreds of miles west. Once traded, the emaciated livestock revived themselves on the lush grasslands of the Great Plains, and they would fatten themselves up to be traded, sold or slaughtered.

Osgood LivestockThe increased arrival of the railroad supplanted the need for overland wagon trains, but the railroad itself brought laborers hungry for beef and protein. By this time, rumors about frontiersmen J.R. (Jim Bridger), Captain Richard Grant, and the firm Russell, Majors and Wadell making $15,000-to-$75,000 as cattlemen had landed in the ears of investors back east. (Osgood, 1929: 12-16) The response was profound in the post-Civil War world of the Great Plains. Texas ranchers utilized the warmer climes of the southern Great Plains as a place to breed cattle. After growing the herd, they then drove the cattle north to the lush grasslands of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. After fattening up the cattle, the cowboy would drive them to railroad loading points and ship the livestock to markets in Chicago and beyond. Osgood explains a local Wyoming example of this, as in 1873 approximately 286 railcars of cattle were shipped from Wyoming to eastern markets. By 1877, only four years later, the number of rail cars shipping cattle east had increased to 1,649. (Osgood, 1929: 51)

Between 1879 and 1885, the Federal government did not care to impose legislation to manage the chaos intrinsic to the ranching industry on the Great Plains. This gave rise to local cattle and stockmen associations that sought, at least in ideal, to preserve an individual’s ownership of the herd, protect the herd, and regulate public grazing to prevent overcrowding. (Osgood, 1929: 114-115) In this vein, Osgood’s scholarship sets a stage for later works that might consider what the industrialization of the Great Plains meant for a growing world population, and this also speaks to World and Public historians. Today, non-American restaurants can be seen advertising “American” beef, and ruins of yesterday’s mining towns — Bannack, Montana included — still dot the landscape.

The ruins of the mining town of Bannack, Montana. Photo by archaeological comrade Brian Herbel of Missoula, Montana.

The ruins of the mining town of Bannack, Montana. Photo by archaeological comrade Brian Herbel of Missoula, Montana.

The big idea in Osgood’s book is that the large-scale Euro-American perception of the Great Plains had altered, once thought of in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a desert and by mid-century as an oasis for cattle and cowboy. Published in 1929, this book also reflects the language of the times, as Chapter 4 is titled “The Indian Barrier.” Whether the Euro-American understood it or not, they appropriated the positive perception of the Great Plains that the Native American already had. This is something Osgood could have drawn out quite a bit more in his work, but 1929 is far enough removed from 2013 that it makes a bit more sense to understand this piece of scholarship as history as much as it is understood as central to Great Plains historiography.

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01/03/2013

Closer to Paul Sharp

By Aaron Barth

At first read Paul F. Sharp’s 1955 work might look like an extension of Frederick Turner’s frontier hypothesis. Yet the intellectual turn Sharp laid out in 1955 reacted to Walter Webb’s 1931 idea about man and nature. According to Webb, man entered the environment of the American West, and then reacted accordingly. In this way environment rather than man dictated the coarse of action. Yet Sharp tested this hypothesis by considering how man entered the North American west north and south of the 49th parallel. If Webb’s earlier ideas held true, then British Canadian culture and American culture (or Anglo-American culture) would have played out quite similarly on both sides of the geo-political border. The fact remains that they did not, though, since American culture and British Canadian culture were structured in two different ways. In the American West, chaotic and localized development ruled the day. North of the 49th parallel, though, a structured British-Canadian will set the course of its western development.

 

My first review from December 5, 2012 was analogous to how a Canadian might have regarded Sharp — here is just another Turnerian, Frederick’s same whiskey in a different cask. Yet the closer to an object, including Sharp’s 1955 work, the more amplified the details and subtleties become. I suppose this is an excuse for anyone to reread and revisit a good novel or piece of scholarship (or a novel piece of scholarship), Sharp’s work included.

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