There have been numerous studies of ethnicity and ethnic identity and communities in the region. The starting point is Jon Gjerde, Minds of the West (1997). Gjerde explained the importance of the Midwest for immigrants as a place to recreate both real and imagined communities free from interference by the state. Gjerde’s earlier work in From Peasants to Farmers (1985) and Robert C. Ostergren’s A Community Transplanted (1988) detail the continuity and change from Scandinavian communities to the Midwest. Jane Pederson’s Between Memory and Reality (1992) explicitly engaged Curti’s Making of an American Community, documenting ethnic communities in Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County in the period after Curti’s study and challenging Curti’s assumptions. Other important studies include Carol Coburn’s Life at Four Corners (1992) and Bradley Baltensperger’s essay documenting two counties in eastern Nebraska, “Agricultural Change Among Nebraska Immigrants, 1880–1900” (1980). Sonya Salamon’s Prairie Patrimony (1992) is a fascinating study of farm inheritance in Illinois that reveals the persistence of immigrant culture into the late twentieth century.
The role of small towns and institutions in the region has been addressed by several scholars. Richard Davies in Main Street Blues (1998) depicted a story of decline in Camden, Ohio, as small towns were undermined by automobile culture, discount stores, and the outmigration of young people. Cornelia Flora and Jan Flora, in “Midwestern Rural Communities in the Postwar Era to 2010” (2014) demonstrated that while decline was part of the story, there was also innovation and, in some cases, even growth. David Reynolds examined the fights over school consolidation in the early twentieth century in There Goes the Neighborhood (1999), highlighting the importance of ethnicity and local autonomy in Progressive reform of the countryside.
Numerous scholars have addressed the economic structure of farming in the Midwest, but much of that work is dated. Margaret Bogue described changes in farm tenancy and ownership in Patterns from the Sod (1959), not to mention trends in cattle raising and cash grain farming. Paul Gates offered assessments of landholding and other topics in Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier: Studies in American Land Policy (1973). Donald Winters authored a broad account of economic structure and change in his essay “The Economics of Midwestern Agriculture” (1990). Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman’s To Their Own Soil (1987) deals with tenancy, mechanization, and a host of other issues, drawing on census data from across the northern states, including multiple counties from the Midwest. Both Seddie Cogswell and Donald Winters examined tenancy in the nineteenth century in their respective works Tenure, Age, and Nativity as Factors in Iowa Agriculture (1975) and Farmers without Farms (1978).
The role of land policy and speculation, once a popular area of inquiry, has faded in recent years. Standard accounts include Malcolm Rohrbough’s Land Office Business (1968) and Allan Bogue’s Money at Interest (1955). Robert Swierenga’s Pioneers and Profits (1968) echoed Bogue’s mostly positive interpretation of the role of speculators and speculation, contending that speculators wanted to be repaid rather than pursue foreclosure when borrowers fell into arrears.
Chapter 6
THE GREAT PLAINS
Thomas D. Isern
Two landmark works in the agricultural history of the Great Plains appeared in the same year, 1931: The Populist Revolt by John D. Hicks and The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb (Hicks 1931; Webb 1931). These are books so significant—not that they are considered current, but that they are touchstones and foils—they may be deemed (along with their immediate predecessor, Ernest Staples Osgood’s The Day of the Cattleman) headwater-works for the field (Osgood 1929). Written by aspirational academics grounded in the region, they sowed the seeds and, as Webb liked to say, cared not for the birds. Several generations of scholars have worked this ground since the days of the Osgood–Hicks–Webb trinity, while public memory, as expressed by county histories, community monuments, and rural rituals continues to confirm the centrality of agriculture, even as the number of farmers dwindles. The Homestead National Monument, created during the Dust Bowl era, at the site of Daniel Freeman’s 1862 homestead near Beatrice, Nebraska, cinched a federal buckle on the farm belt of the plains.
In both popular conceptions and scholarly treatments, however, the Great Plains lurk as a challenging, even hostile environment for agriculture. Film clips from The Plow that Broke the Plains are as pervasive in historical documentaries as was the phrase Great American Desert in nineteenth-century geographies. The environmental dominance of historical narratives, whether triumphalist or declensionist, suppresses deeper discussions of regional agricultural history. Moreover, scholarly treatments and public discourse treat prairie agriculture as a problem, a regional subset of what is nationally known as “the farm problem,” with prairie farmers to be pitied, corrected, and helped.
Three corrective tropes are emerging to open up and reenergize such dead-end discussions. The first of these is the longue durée, recognizing that our conventional conceptions of regional agricultural history derive from the relatively brief experiences of Euro-American agriculturalists. What is required is to go deeper in time, at the same time enlarging the definition of just what constitutes agriculture. The second corrective is to embrace complexity, allowing not merely multiple causes but interdependent causes for emergences in the field. The third corrective is to recognize agency in the historical actors of Great Plains agriculture, to upend the assumption that environment or economics or any other disembodied factor determines developments and to make human agents the protagonists of agricultural history. An agricultural history constructed along these lines promises to retire the subject of Great Plains agriculture as an impoverished problem and redefine it as a rich narrative—thereby, too, enabling a constructive sense of place and identity among regional agriculturalists.
Among the Hidatsa people, farmers for centuries in the upper Missouri River Valley on the northern plains, women controlled the agricultural agenda and did the field work. During the growing season, detachments of girls and young women ascended adukati’, platforms erected among the corn, beans, and sunflowers, to keep watch over the crops, scaring away birds and driving off boys who were likely to pilfer the green corn. “You bad boys, you are all alike,” they would sing, but they also sang songs to the corn, because the corn responded to them and thrived. To read of the agricultural practices of the Hidatsa is to be reminded of several pertinent facts in the agricultural history of the Great Plains: that American Indians were the first farmers of the plains; that although anthropologists chose to label as “Plains” those native cultures characterized by keeping horses and hunting bison, there were other indigenous ways of life perhaps better suited to the region for the long term; that agriculture need not be a male-dominant pursuit, as it was for most Euro-Americans; and that the Great Plains need not be considered a hostile environment. To the Hidatsa and the other village farming peoples of the plains, they were a comfort landscape, even kin, a mother.
The classic narrative of village farmer lifeways began its life in print as Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation, a title befitting an anthropological treatise, but was later retitled Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, a title recognizing the agency of the teller of the story instead of its recorder (Wilson 1917, 1987). Maxidiwiac, Buffalo Bird Woman, gave her remembrances and wisdom to the clergyman-scholar Wilson during the years 1906–1918, when she and some others still persisted in many traditional practices. It was a fruitful partnership that revealed not only the rich culture of the Hidatsa but also the impressive expertise and productivity of their agriculture. The crop cultures described by Maxidiwiac possessed a material toolkit in which the bison-scapula hoe, often stashed under the sleeping platform of an older woman, figured prominently. They also demonstrated a good grasp of environmental conditions, from soils to climate; recognized the virtues of diverse genetics in crop varieties; devised ingenious methods of production and preservation; and involved the entire community in the food system.
The