Other histories give a sharper edge to considerations of gender and to the idea of the family farm. Clearly, the rise of mammoth farming corporations such as the Campbell Farming Corporation in Montana (Fitzgerald 2003), which far eclipsed the fondest dreams of old-time bonanza farmers, created no such space for the definition of women’s roles as Nelson describes. Moreover, where family farming once flourished, women found, as the twentieth century advanced, that their possibilities and prerogatives were undercut by mechanization (which had been sold as a liberating influence) and by the social expectations and cultural pressures brought to bear by business models and agricultural education (Jellison 1993; Neth 1995). Even home extension work, welcomed by farm women for its social and educational opportunities, proved erosive of women’s roles and standing. Finally, there is the ethnic factor to consider. Vast tracts of the prairie landscape constituted what an assiduous scholar of immigrant farm settlements has termed a “prairie mosaic,” peopled almost entirely by farmers who spoke English as a second language, if at all (Sherman 2017 ). Generalizations about gender roles do not necessarily hold.
It is worth mentioning that every work cited in the preceding passages treating women and gender roles in Great Plains agriculture was authored by a female scholar—a good indication as to from what quarter the remedy to historiographic deficiencies in this subject area may be expected.
In 1935, Paul B. Sears wrote Deserts on the March, an instant classic of American conservation (Sears 1935 ), and Woody Guthrie wrote “Dust Bowl Disaster,” a powerful ballad of the great dust storm of April 14, 1935. Sears says, “The face of earth is a graveyard, and so it has always been.” Guthrie says, “We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom.” Neither commentator conveys much of the triumphalism that marked the earliest historical writing about agriculture on the Great Plains.
Nor do our historians of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The most evenhanded of them is R. Douglas Hurt (Hurt 1981). The work is dispassionate, detailing the circumstances and repercussions of this environmental catastrophe, but it eschews the blame game: Hurt catalogs contributing factors in the simple multiple-causation fashion of a working historian. On Hurt’s right hand sits the work of Paul Bonnifield, whose treatise on the Dust Bowl (Bonnifield 1979), written from the spindly grassroots of the Oklahoma Panhandle, minimizes the contributions of the federal government to disaster relief and valorizes the common folk who hunkered down and persevered. On Hurt’s left hand sits the work of Donald Worster, whose Bancroft Prize-winning history (Worster 1979) betrays no hesitation in laying blame: capitalism was the cause, and farmers were accomplices. The Dust Bowl was an unforced error.
Popular belief commonly traces the economic and demographic decline of the Great Plains to the Dust Bowl; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath compounds the confusion. That the shuttering of communities and the outmigration of youth were largely phenomena of the post-World War II era, reaching a nadir during the 1980s, does not gainsay the public impression that things have gone downhill for a long time, and the Dust Bowl looms as the memory trigger. This sense of long-term decline is what Geoff Cunfer recognizes as the “declensionist narrative” of Great Plains history.
In On the Great Plains (Cunfer 2005), a startling work of reinterpretation, Cunfer takes blame off the table by questioning all the given explanations of the Dust Bowl. His thorough examination of county-level data reveals that the great plow-up was less thoroughgoing than was thought; most of the Great Plains remains grassland. Contrary to popular tropes of instability in a harsh environment, Cunfer charts the long-term stability of land-use across the region—with wheat as “the quintessential cash crop of the plains.” All this is set-up for Cunfer to reconsider a question Malin had posed a half-century earlier: “What natural and human factors contributed to the dust storms of the 1930s?” In answer, he suggests that rather than lay all grief to “human ecological failure,” historians should accept the fact that dust storms “are normal forms of ecological disturbance” during extended drought. Cunfer never says husbandry and conservation do not matter—but he moves the baseline for explanation. The Dust Bowl may not have been the pivotal event in Great Plains agriculture history. The Great Plains may not be in the permanent grip of a declensionist narrative.
In 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