The narrative documentation on the village farming peoples of the central and southern plains is not so impressive, but archaeological work fills the deficit, especially that of Waldo R. Wedel—who, being Mennonite himself, and thus representative of another prairie culture with strong agricultural values, paid close attention to agriculture among the peoples who figured in his excavations (Wedel 1941, 1947, 1986). His early work on the Quiviran peoples (ancestral to the Wichita) encountered by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in 1541 establishes them as accomplished and prosperous agriculturalists on the central plains. His later work on the Republican River Valley reaches back to the early big game hunters of the Pleistocene but waxes warm with the advent of the Central Plains Tradition of village farmers. “On present evidence,” Wedel writes, “crop growing as a major or primary subsistence activity seems to have appeared in the central plains about the time of the Neo-Atlantic climatic episode, which is radiocarbon dated at ca. A.D. 700–1100” (Wedel 1986). He also credits, however, “the extensive use of bison meat” which “offset the nutritional deficiencies of maize.” Thus, Wedel perceives in what he calls “prehistory” the practice of a diversified food base, combining both crop husbandry and animal resources—exactly what in his own time would be lauded by agriculturalists as the virtues of diversified farming. Wedel also perceives, in the longue durée, the responsiveness of native peoples to the opportunities and constraints of environment. They came and went, prospered and declined, according to changing climatic conditions.
Neither Wedel nor Preston Holder, the scholar who makes the general case for the significance of the village farmers on the plains, ever overcame the tendency to refer to the husbandry of their subjects as “horticulture,” a usage that diminishes its gravity—perhaps because the cultivation was done by women. What Holder says of the Caddoan peoples who are his focus in The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains applies equally to all the village farming peoples of the region—the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Pawnee, Wichita, Omaha, Ponca, Kansa, Osage, and others. “Society stood tied to the earth,” he writes. “Corn was its protector. The fields of the river bottoms were its insurance in the face of a difficult environment. The labor of the village and the rewards of life were focused in these fields. The whole was woven into a fabric which continued through time.” Holder observes that the village farmers eventually were swamped by invasive native equestrians and Euro-American farmers. Elizabeth Fenn’s work on the Mandan (Fenn 2014) suggests that epidemic disease was more destructive to sedentary peoples than warfare. The village farming way of life was more persistent than the nomadic equestrian.
To juxtapose the two in contrast, however, may be misleading. It also propounds an outdated conception of equestrian bison-hunters as living off the land rather than engaging in labor and husbandry. Recent major studies (West 1998; Hämäläinen 2009 ) of equestrian bison-hunting peoples lay the basis for an argument that they were, in fact, pastoral peoples engaged in animal husbandry. The Cheyenne and Comanche in the heyday of bison-hunting, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, accumulated and maintained horse herds so large that they placed destructive stress on the riverine corridors of the plains, thereby eroding their own resource base. Moreover, horses and their needs were, as Elliot West says, “complicated.” A horse had specific nutritional needs. “On this point a horse’s appeal became a hindrance; its hugely increased power came from a vastly greater hunger for energy, a craving Indians had to meet if they hoped to reap the benefits,” observes the historian. “An owner had to learn, understand, and respect an animal’s complicated needs if his breathing, eating tools were to do what was asked of them.” This sounds like a definition of animal husbandry—which is agriculture, and a sophisticated form thereof, too. No wonder that, as Peter Iverson has described (Iverson 1994), Plains Indians in the reservation period would take readily to handling cattle from horseback. Taking care of herbivores was in their lineage.
In the reservation era the Indian history of both crop and animal husbandry is checkered. Allotment of reservation land both took away the larger part of reservation lands and broke tribal control of remaining lands into individual parcels. On some reservations natives engaged in cattle raising, but agents often were not supportive of this, for they considered animal husbandry insufficiently civilizing. Boarding schools emphasized agriculture for Indian boys, and some individual Indians became proficient farmers, but they were a minority—especially after the 1940s, when the 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