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 whole idea of encouraging family farming there was questionable (Shannon 1968 [1945]; Gates 1954; Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo 2017 ). More recent study, especially that coming from a team of scholars associated with the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, reassesses the question, concluding that success rates were reasonably good. They argue, too, that matters of motive and context are important in reassessment, and they continue to pursue more detailed and localized studies that promise to rehabilitate homesteading in historical memory (Edwards 2017).
Debate about the merits of the Homestead Act does not detract from the more consequential elements of Euro-American agricultural settlement: the transformation of the land, the reestablishment of agricultural production, and the foundation of an agricultural society on the prairies. There were instances and localities, such as the Red River Valley of the North, where the expected mode of family-farm settlement was displaced by another mode entirely. Exploiting the lands granted by the US government to the Northern Pacific Railway, investors established bonanza farms of 5000 acres and more specializing in raising spring wheat (Drache 1964; Murray 1967). Such farms lasted little more than a decade. Industrialized wheat farming on such a scale was quite feasible, but, in the longer term, it gave way for two reasons: the drainage issues of the Red River Valley, which made spring seeding difficult, and thus dependence on spring wheat risky; and the desire of investors to sell their lands at profit to arriving family farmers. Thus Hiram M. Drache, the historian well known for his classic history of bonanza farming, The Day of the Bonanza, should also be remembered for its companion work, The Challenge of the Prairie (Drache 1970), which details the experiences of family farmers in the same general region.
What the historians of the Red River Valley and those of the larger Great Plains had in common with one another, as well as with the pioneers whom they chronicled, was a Turnerian sense of progress and, eventually, triumph. Everett Dick, with his “social history” of the “sod-house frontier,” provides little information on the sod house as a matter of material culture; rather it is to him a foil, a temporary recourse of settlers gaining their foothold on the way to the establishment of a full-blown farm society with families, schools, barn dances, flour mills—a fully articulated rural society, including progressive notions of social equality and grassroots democracy (Dick 1937). In a subsequent work Dick fills in technical details—we do learn how to build a sod house, fence a claim, fight a prairie fire—but all this is deployed toward “conquering” the “Great American Desert” (Dick 1975).
Gilbert C. Fite, a farm boy from South Dakota (he grew up on his mother’s homestead), was a child of the triumphal society profiled by Dick—but he had a clear-eyed retrospective view of his roots. Despite writing for the “Histories of the American Frontier” series, the very name of which connotes Turnerian progress, Fite methodically unpacks the process of settlement. Under the heading of “Destitution on the Frontier,” he writes, “Farming has always been a risky, uncertain, and sometimes heart-breaking business, but pioneer settlers on the upper Midwest and central prairie frontier were confronted with an unusual series of hardships” (Fite 1966). Nineteenth-century farmers persisted, or not, but in a sense prevailed, “for out of their experiences came a more accurate and realistic view of the region’s true nature and a recognition of the type of agriculture that could succeed there.” Thus the region’s most evenhanded settlement historian trims expectations.
Included in the catalog of lessons learned were fundamental adjustments attuned to environment. As recounted