Regional developments in technology commonly emerge parcel to other regional stories, such as the harvesting of small grains, or the provision of water in a semiarid region. Thus, picking up where the work of Erwin Hinkley Barbour left off a century earlier (Barbour 1899), T. Lindsay Baker offers a compendium of windmill models and technology pertinent to both livestock operations and crop irrigation on the plains (Baker 1985). Historians of irrigation (Green 1973; Sherow 1990; Opie 2000) inevitably bore deep into technology, whether it be the hydraulics of water diversion for surface irrigation or the logistics of pumping from underground aquifers. The same scholars reckon with environmental possibilities and consequences; surely the turbine pump and the center pivot have a lot to answer for—or perhaps it is those who deploy them heedlessly who must answer. John Opie declares (2000), “For more than three decades the plains irrigator has been persuaded to plow his fields and water his plants fencerow to fencerow to keep domestic prices low and feed the world… . Difficult choices … cannot be postponed forever.” Perhaps, then, it is best that Great Plains historians tend to serve up technological and environmental histories in parcels wrapped up along with recognition of human agency. Surprisingly, technological deployments on the plains in the twenty-first century to date have made petroleum available in seemingly unlimited quantities, while no solution for the finite nature of the Ogallala Aquifer is in sight. At risk is not only the entire regional agricultural complex of irrigation, feed grains, petrochemicals, feedlots, packinghouses, immigrant labor, and urban development but also the very natural systems of the plains. These issues want the application of holistic historians.
The more intractable problems of regional agriculture have generated multiple political movements centered in the farmers of the plains. There are several ways of explaining this. Early historians of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry and of the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party attributed the Granger and Populist movements of the plains to frontier deprivation and post-frontier disillusionment. They explained radicalism, or even unusual cooperation, by stretching the Turnerian blanket far enough to cover it. As the conception of the Great Plains evolved from one of frontier to one of region (Kraenzel 1955), regional disadvantage—sparseness of population and resources, remoteness, dependency, resentment of the metropolis—seemed a more generally applicable explanation. At the same time, some scholars looked inside the farm movements, attempting to divine their natures and rely less on external determinants.
Thus in Solon Justus Buck’s pioneering history of the Grange (Buck 1913), he locates the “center of agricultural discontent” in the “great prairie states,” where farmers “were from the first handicapped by the notion that they were to make their fortunes by raising wheat, and for a long time were unable to grasp the fact that conditions of soil, climate, and market facilities demanded a change.” Later, more definitive work on the Grange (Nordin 1974) does not so much reject the diagnosis of prairie discontent as distinguish the Granger movement, a political reaction to hard times, from the Grange as a fraternal order.
The issues of the Grangers in the 1870s became the issues of the Farmers Alliance in the 1880s and of its political offspring, the People’s Party, in the 1890s. What caused sturdy farmers to rise up and demand regulation of grain elevators, regulation and even nationalization of railroads, public sources of credit to ease mortgage debt, inflation of the currency, and the other items on what seemed a radical agenda? Again, Populism’s pioneering historian (Hicks 1931) insists the explanation lies in the demise of the frontier: “It was only as the West wore out and cheap lands were no longer abundant that well-developed agrarian movements began to appear.” Chapter 1 of Hicks’s The Populist Revolt is “The Frontier Background.”
As reconsiderations of the Populist movement unfolded, the hottest controversy in the historiography of Great Plains agriculture precipitated. Post-World War II scholars such as Richard Hofstadter (Hofstadter 1955) became suspicious of the motives of rural populist movements in general and the Populist movement in particular, considering it regressive, reactionary, and bigoted—not at all the progressive cause it had been made out to be. Its leaders were as incompetent as its constituents were misguided. The paladins of populism answered. In a defensive work that nevertheless has stood the test of time (Nugent 2013 [1963]), Walter Nugent decries the straw man of the “Populist as Monster” and methodically reiterates the constructive relationships between Populists and immigrants, while denying the movement was seriously stained by anti-Semitism. Norman Pollack assertively doubles down on the progressive nature of the “grass-roots world of Populism” in The Populist Response to Industrial America (Pollack 1962): response was not reaction, after all, and “Populism formulated an extraordinarily penetrating critique of industrial society.” Over time other thoughtful interpreters joined Lawrence Goodwyn (1976 ) in describing and analyzing the “movement culture” of the Populists. This line of analysis actually dovetails well with Hicks’s descriptions of Populist parades, picnics, and glee clubs singing “The Farmer is the Man.” Populism seems well and truly rehabilitated—except that anyone who studies the exuberant anthems of the Populist singing clubs will be troubled by their frequent pejorative allusions to Jewish financiers.
Populism may have sucked much of the oxygen from the study of agrarian radicalism on the plains, but recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the other early agricultural revolt of the prairies, the Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915. For more than a half-century Political Prairie Fire (Morlan 1955) stood as the standard reference on this North Dakota-centered organization that co-opted the Republican Party to assail big business and defend the family farm. Notably, the Leaguers, although not stridently collectivist, embraced targeted elements of state socialism. Their forward-looking farm credit programs did not last, but the state bank and the state mill and elevator they established still thrive. Terry Shoptaugh (1997) offers a critical review of the leadership exercised by Arthur Townley and the rest of what he calls the League’s “sons of the wild jackass,” while Michael J. Lansing (2015), after essentially doing for the Nonpartisan League what Goodwyn did for the Populists, detailing their progressive culture, goes farther: he commends their example for America in the twenty-first century. With this broadening of significance, we are not (just) in Kansas (or North Dakota) any more.
A continuing deficiency in the historical literature of agriculture on the Great Plains is lack of attention to gendered elements of agricultural life. Webb set a poor example with The Great Plains, paying not even lip service to women’s vital roles in agricultural life (or any other aspect of life) on the plains. A half-century later Glenda Riley addressed the deficiency with The Female Frontier (Riley 1989), arguing for the continuity of women’s lives in the move west to the plains on account of the constraints of separate spheres. Women’s lives, confined, presumably, to domestic matters, did not undergo the transformational interaction with the physical environment that defined regional life. Since then feminist historians have questioned this somewhat wooden assumption, but it was important to break the silence.
An outstanding contribution to the explication of gender roles on prairie farms are the works of Paula Nelson on West River South Dakota (Nelson 1986 , 1996). Gender is not the central subject of these books, but it is addressed in due course in grounded and perceptive fashion. The detailing of life routines for Carrie Miller in Butte County establishes her roles on the homestead not according to what she could not do but according to what she did—“Carrie Miller was never idle,” writes Nelson. “She managed all the indoor labor… . Her tasks went beyond the door of the soddy to the garden and the barn, and even to the field when she wished.” Moreover, Nelson’s research gives the lie to the determinisms of both Webb and Riley: environment mattered, and women changed rules, due “both to their roles as producers and to the region of the country where they lived.” They raised children differently, they navigated changing societal