the year of the nation’s bicentennial, the Agricultural History Society met at Montana State University for a symposium: “Agriculture in the Great Plains, 1876–1936.” In his remarks, the program organizer and editor of published proceedings (Wessel 1977) dwells upon the harshness of the Great Plains environment: the imperative of adaptation to “an environment unlike anything previously encountered” with a lack of water that was “discouraging and depressing;” the struggle of pastoralists and settlers who “fought the elements more intensely than they fought each other;” and the “uncertainty of life on the plains.” In closing remarks Gilbert C. Fite, the most respected agricultural historian in the land, speaks of a history of farmers “in a life and death struggle with the natural environment.” He warns that the chronic precariousness of agricultural enterprise is now aggravated by higher production and living costs. The outlook is sobering. It sounds like the end of agricultural history on the Great Plains.
A review of the region’s agricultural history and the efforts of its historians reminds us that the distilled wisdom of 1976, assumed to be conclusive, was in fact only another snapshot in the long and continuing arc of agriculture on the Great Plains.
Bibliographical Essay
The foregoing chapter may be considered historiographic, but more essentially, it is epistemological. It undertakes to explain how our understanding of agriculture on the Great Plains took shape in the way that it has. This bibliographic essay makes more explicit the building blocks composing the intellectual construction. Note: for additional factual background on aspects of the history of Great Plains agriculture, see applicable sections of David J. Wishart’s Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (2004).
Classic primary narratives are used in this chapter to impart a flavor of early agricultural experience. For example, the recollections of the Hidatsa woman Maxidiwiac, Buffalo Bird Woman, are without parallel as to sustained narrative description of Indian agriculture (Wilson 1917, 1987 ). Open-range cattle ranching is rich in good narratives, because the subject had a public. The cattle-buyer Joseph G. McCoy writes frankly of the commercial origins of the long drive (1874); Andy Adams situates the narrative on the trail north (1903); while Baron von Richthofen (1885 ) exposes the speculative boom that financed the range cattle industry. Marvin J. Hunter’s compendious compilation of cattle-trailing narratives (1920) evidences the iconographic appeal of the open range. Homesteading memoirs such as that of John Ise, on the other hand, are more muted, even tragic—although Sod and Stubble (1967) limns a quietly heroic female figure: his mother, Rosie Ise.
Predictably, in retrospect, academic historians come to the fore about a generation after the homesteading era. The lions of this emergence are Ernest Staples Osgood with his focused study of the range cattle industry, The Day of the Cattleman (1929); Edward Everett Dale with his more general treatment of the cattle business, The Range Cattle Industry (1930); Walter Prescott Webb with his inoculation of environmental determinism, The Great Plains (1931); and John D. Hicks with his history of agrarian activism, The Populist Revolt (1931), an early forerunner of which is Solon Justus Buck on The Granger Movement (1913). All these first-generation academic treatments not only are genesis works in their respective subjects but also document the deeply Turnerian foundation of both agricultural history and Great Plains history at mid-twentieth century.
Although the historiographic edifice built on these foundations is fairly sketched in the foregoing chapter, it is worthwhile here to note some outstanding signposts in the line of inquiry into agriculture on the plains.
On the region’s first farmers, Preston Holder’s The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains (1970) holds up well in its delineation of the two great subsistence traditions of American Indians on the plains. Beyond that, focused secondary work is slim; readers may consult R. Douglas Hurt’s Indian Agriculture in America (1987) for regional content.
The history of the range cattle industry was shaken by Robert R. Dykstra’s revisionist bolt, The Cattle Towns (1968), but in the long run, two works by historical geographer Terry G. Jordan do more to deepen our understanding of the business: Trails to Texas (1981) and North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers (1993). It falls to James E. Sherow in The Chisholm Trail (2018) to remind us there is still path-breaking work to do along this trail.
On homesteading and settlement, Gilbert C. Fite’s The Farmer’s Frontier (1966) is another work that holds up well as a general survey. Skipping forward to the most current work on the subject, the research in progress on homesteading coming from Richard Edwards’s team at the University of Nebraska, of which Homesteading the Plains is first fruit (Edwards 2017), is an exciting revision of our knowledge of settlement. The best focused lines of work on a particular subregion of the Great Plains (all of which concentrate on wheat) are those of James C. Malin on the Golden Belt of Kansas (1944); Hiram Drache on the Red River Valley of the North (1964, 1970); and Craig Miner on western Kansas (1986, 1998, 2006). David Moon’s The American Steppes (2020) details the Russian contributions to Great Plains development in fascinating fashion. For an efflorescence in the commodity culture of wheat, see the two books by Thomas D. Isern on wheat harvesting (1981, 1990).
The history of agricultural research and technology has had difficulty breaking free of the land-grant establishment and generating fearless interpretation specific to the region, but there is thoughtful work around the subjects of water and irrigation, beginning with Donald E. Green’s Land of the Underground Rain (1973). James Earl Sherow’s Watering the Valley (1990) focuses on the Arkansas River Valley, while John Opie’s Ogallala (2000) treats the deteriorating situation of the High Plains region underlain by the Ogallala Aquifer. David Vail’s Chemical Lands (2018) is a disturbing work talking about the elephant in the room of prairie farming since World War II: chemical agriculture.
“Chestnut” being an ill-fitting metaphor for the plains, we may say the history of agrarian politics since Buck and Hicks has been the prairie turnip of regional agricultural history. Around the subjects of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, and downstream from Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955), taking Hofstadter to task have been a score or more historians, including ones mentioned in this chapter: Walter T.K. Nugent (2013 [1963]), Norman Pollack (1962), and Lawrence Goodwyn (1976). The last of these, by going beyond the defense of Populism to explicate its “movement culture,” seems most salient. On the Nonpartisan League, the old standard by Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire (1955), remains valuable, but it is substantially supplanted by the more sophisticated analysis offered by Michael J. Lansing in Insurgent Democracy (2015).
Glenda Riley’s The Female Frontier (1989) liberates regional scholarship on gender, farm women, and families from the stays of Webb’s environmental determinism, only to subject it to the doctrine of separate spheres. Thankfully, a cohort of feminist scholars has enlarged both the historical sphere of women’s lives on the plains and our scholarly understanding of them. Outstanding among these are Katherine Jellison in Entitled to Power (1993), whose subjects engage technology beyond the shelterbelts; Mary Neth in Preserving the Family Farm (1995), who exposes the ambivalence of liberating technologies that actually diminished women’s status; and Deborah Fitzgerald, whose Every Farm a Factory (2003) traces the imperilment of the very ideal of the family farm by modernizing technologies and values. For a genuine sense of gender roles on farms in one quarter of the plains, no one surpasses Paula M. Nelson in her two books on West River South Dakota: After the West Was Won (1986) and The Prairie Winnows out Its Own (1986).
Another nexus of engaging scholarship is the Dust Bowl and attendant issues of land use, social viability, and soil conservation. Around 1980 emerged three quite different histories of the Dust Bowl: the most acclaimed work, Don Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979), which chalks up the environmental catastrophe to capitalist excess and situates farmers as its dupes; Paul Bonnifield’s The Dust Bowl (1979), which
