The Greater Plains Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories

About this book

The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world.

The Greater Plains moves beyond the narrative of ecological desperation that too often defines the region in scholarly works and in the popular imagination. Using the lenses of grasses, animals, water, and energy, the contributors reveal tales of human adaptation through technologies ranging from the travois to bookkeeping systems and hybrid wheat. Transnational in its focus and interdisciplinary in its scholarship, The Greater Plains brings together leading historians, geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists to chronicle a past rich with paradoxical successes and failures, conflicts and cooperation, but also continual adaptation to the challenging and ever-shifting environmental conditions of the North American heartland.

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction / Brian Frehner and Kathleen A. Brosnan
Part 1. Indigenous Grassland Adaptations over the Longue Durée
1. Before the Horse: Indigenous Food Systems on the Plains, 1300–1680 / Natale Zappia
2. Travois Trails: Mobile Lifeways of Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Women / Leila Monaghan
3. Bison Hunters and Prairie Fires: A View from the Northwestern Plains / María Nieves Zedeño, Christopher Roos, Kacy Hollenback, and Mary Hagen Erlick
4. To Know the Story behind It: Indigenous Heritage and Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains / Geneviève Susemihl

Part 2. Animals on the Great Plains
5. Kinscapes and the Buffalo Chase: The Genesis of Nineteenth-Century Plains Métis Hunting Brigades / Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall
6. Fauna and Flux on the Plains’ Edge: Animal Kinship, Place Making, and Cherokee Relational Continuity / Clint Carroll
7. Bison and Bookkeeping: Accounting for an Environmental Imagination in Great Plains Trading Posts / George Colpitts
8. An Uncommon Nuisance: Cattle Feeding, Nuisance Complaints, and Legal Remedies on the Southern Plains / Jacob A. Blackwell

Part 3. Modern Agriculture and the Transformation of the Plains
9. Measuring Expertise: Ralph Parshall and Watershed Management, 1920–1940 / Michael Weeks
10. A “Plow to Save the Plains”: Conservation Tillage on the North American Grasslands, 1938–1973 / Joshua Nygren
11. From Wheat to Wheaties: Minneapolis, the Great Plains, and the Transformation of American Food / Michael J. Lansing
12. “Nature Rarely Establishes Sharp Boundaries”: Settler Society Agricultural Adaptation in the Great Plains Northwest / Molly P. Rozum

Part 4. Energy Landscapes
13. Energy Heartland: How the Midcontinent Pipeline System Fueled and Fouled the Great Plains / Philip A. Wight
14. Places of Overburden: Strip Mining and Reclamation on the Northern Great Plains / Ryan Driskell Tate
15. Encountering Oil Cultures in a Prairie Town / Jonathan Peyton and Matthew Dyce
16. Blows Like Hell: The Windy Plains of the West / Julie Courtwright

Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Brian Frehner is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He is the author of Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859–1920 (Nebraska, 2011), winner of the Hal K. Rothman Prize, and co-editor of Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest.

Kathleen A. Brosnan is Paul and Doris Easton Travis Chair of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author or co-editor of a number of books, including City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History and Mapping Nature across the Americas.