Pick–Sloan Project took most of the best farmlands in the Missouri River Valley for dam and reservoir sites. What historian R. Douglas Hurt says of Indian agriculture across the country is certainly true more specifically for the Great Plains: “In the end, white civilization ruined, rather than promoted, Indian agriculture.” Interestingly, however, in the twenty-first century the pastoral aspect of Indian agriculture has reasserted itself, as one tribe after another has established a tribal bison herd and used it to feed its people.
Transportation development and military invasion displaced natives on the plains before practitioners of field agriculture were prepared to occupy the ground, and so there ensued an interlude of what is known in much of the rest of the world as extensive pastoralism, in North America as open-range cattle ranching. This is the chapter in the agricultural history of the Great Plains that has been celebrated in American popular culture, but it is, too, a historical development of consequence. Beneath the popular veneer lies a substructure of substantial primary narratives—Historic Sketches of the Cattle Industry of the West and Southwest (McCoy 1874), Log of a Cowboy (Adams 1903), and Trail Drivers of Texas (Hunter 1920), to begin with. These works all treat of the long drive during the cattle-trailing era from Texas to Kansas and Nebraska railroad towns during the 1860s–1880s. A key primary work that bridges into the next era of the open range, by which longer drives brought herds to occupy the northern plains, is Baron von Richthofen’s Cattle Raising on the Plains of North America (Richthofen 1885), which along with other similar promotional tracts, lured eastern and foreign investment into beef on the open range.
Predictably, in retrospect, about a generation after the passing of the open range, scholarly historians commenced crafting solid and interpretive work on the subject. The Range Cattle Industry (Dale 1930), which originated as a study for the US Department of Agriculture and then became a university press book, was the first great survey of the subject, and its author, a cowboy historian, won the hearts of a generation of students of western Americana. The Day of the Cattleman (Osgood 1929) brings out details of organization and practice on the Wyoming Range, but unfortunately, being based heavily on the records of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, is somewhat captured by its archival base—with the result that even as popular culture valorized cowboys as the knights of the range, scholarly literature enthroned big stockmen as monarchs of the cattle kingdom. The Great Plains (Webb 1931), exhibiting the author’s fascination with both cowboy and stockman, makes open-range cattle ranching a centerpiece for the intellectual creation of the Great Plains as a cultural region. Webb presents the efflorescence of the range cattle industry as, first, an Anglo-American appropriation of Hispanic cattle culture in Texas, as well as a colonization of the rest of the plains by Texas longhorns and their Texas handlers and, overall, a salubrious adaptation of livestock enterprises to the environment of the Great Plains. The open-range industry, even as it gave way to subsequent developments following the hard winter of 1886–1887, nevertheless installed on the prairies a distinctive material culture anchored by adaptations of fencing (barbed wire; McCallum 1965) and stock watering (windmills; Baker 1985).
Webb and other traditional tellers of the saga of the open range underwent consolidation and correction, making the narrative deeper and more interesting. The irascible West Texan J. Evetts Haley, although enamored of the “early days” of ranching on the southern plains, and amplifying the lionization of big operators with his biography of Charles Goodnight, nevertheless does reveal the transition from open-range to fenced pastures and the continued operation of ranching on a great scale following enclosure (Haley 1929, 1936). The legendary Matador ranch also gets a scholarly treatment that navigates its geographic expansion (even into Canada) and also its transition to modern ranching (Pearce 1964). Notably, when Charles Wood essays to chronicle the beef industry in Kansas, he eschews the glory days of the open range and commences in the 1890s with the upbreeding of herds and the “triumph” of Herefords. Likewise, Chapter 1 of John Schlebecker’s history of the cattle industry on the plains is entitled, “The Closing of the Range” (Schlebecker 1963). Published in 1963, that work only touches the hem of the garment of great changes, hinting at the transformational impact of biochemistry on cattle and finishing at a time when the boom of the Great Plains feedlot industry was yet to come.
When Gunsmoke was at the height of its popularity on network television, a boldly revisionist work with a Marxist cast did more to pacify the cattle-town frontier of the central plains than Matt Dillon ever did (Dykstra 1968). Its author determines, first, that there were few fatalities from armed violence in the cattle towns of the 1860s–1880s and argues, second, that the meaningful conflict therein was a class conflict: business interests in the towns used the cattle trade to jump-start their towns, then dismissed the drovers when they wished to pursue other developments, such as the encouragement of farm settlement. As for the cultural origins of cattle-raising, revisionist works of historical geography called into question its wholly Spanish antecedents (Jordan 1981, 1993). Terry G. Jordan first establishes that in the South Texas hearth of the industry, Celtic roots out of the Gulf Coast states were also important. He then goes on to survey the dissemination and development of cattle culture throughout western America and finds that eastern influences—including Shorthorn cattle, followed by Herefords and Angus—were equally as salient as Texans and Longhorns. Finally, new scholarship on Wyoming’s infamous Johnson County War (Davis 2010) exposes the underhanded tactics and violent character of big-time cattlemen in the very place where Osgood enthroned them historically.
Despite all this work, the scholarship of the cattle industry remained limited and even parochial in two respects: first, in its paucity of attention to environmental relationships and effects, and second, in its lack of scale. Now comes The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble (Sherow 2018), in which James E. Sherow not only brings the lenses of environmental history to bear on the cattle-trailing industry but also expands the scope of investigation to eastern stockyards and packinghouses and overseas consumers. The pastoral aspect of Great Plains agricultural history is revealed as the internationally significant enterprise that it was.
Back on the plains, one aspect of the animal industries remains unrecognized: sheep. The author of the classic primary narrative on the sheep industry of the plains writes, “There is somewhere in the West a cattleman whose wife some years ago went into sheep on her own account and with her own money” (Gilfillan 1929). Her sheep, of course, end up subsidizing her husband’s cattle habit. Indeed, during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, sheep were the expansionist industry on the northern plains. There is dated work on sheep in the West (Wentworth 1948), but little to be read on the Great Plains.
“As Henry stepped out of the door, he noticed a peculiar cloud in the west, too light in color to be rain, or even dust. He called Rosie to the door to look.” Henry and Rosie Ise, homesteaders in northern Kansas, as described in the compelling memoir, Sod and Stubble (Ise 1967), faced a grave challenge coming from the land itself: “Grasshoppers—millions, billions of them—soon covered the ground in a seething, fluttering mass, their jaws constantly at work.” The narrative contains all the standard trials of homesteading, plus a few special ones—and yet Henry and Rosie proved up and raised their family on that claim. Their son John, although busy with his academic career as an economist, took the time to tell their story. For homesteading, indeed the farm settlement experience in general, like pastoralism, is a defining theme in Great Plains agricultural history, distinguishing it from other agricultural regions.
“Homesteader” is sort of a holy word in the settler society of the plains, given pride of place in every county history and represented in countless local monuments. Scholars, on the other hand, have been dubious about the Homestead Act of 1862 (as well as its various additions and amendments). Mid-twentieth century scholars such as Fred A. Shannon and Paul Wallace Gates debunked the reverent mythology of homesteading, arguing that much land on the plains, and most of the better land, was unavailable for homesteading; that homesteaders faced so many disadvantages, most failed to prove up; that the land patent system was rife with fraud; that quarter-section homesteads were impractical in a semiarid region; and that perhaps the
