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After a decade during which America was a nation which consisted of two seaboards and a Rust Belt, the High Plains are attracting attention again.
Part of the current publicity comes from centennial
celebrations: Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota all
entered the Union in 1889, and Wyoming in 1890. This year
also saw two Rutgers professors propose a
600,000-square-mile unpopulated Buffalo Commons
between the 100th meridian and the Rockies. Ian Frazier
published an enchanting book, Great Plains, which
hit the best-seller list. Newsweek just mentioned
America's Outback
on a cover blurb, with a four-page
article inside.
Most stories about the current state of the High Plains sound rather melancholy. The Plains produce coal, oil, wheat and beef. Energy and foodstuff prices have declined, so there isn't much chance of making money. The bright and ambitious kids see this, and they depart for good shortly after high-school graduation.
Before Europeans arrived on this continent, nobody lived
on the Plains. Indians ventured into the void to hunt, or
crossed the steppes to trade. But there were no Plains
tribes
until the Spanish brought the horse. The Sioux,
Cheyenne and Arapaho gathered rice by the Great Lakes, and
the Comanche lived in the forests of Idaho.
The Plains were utterly uninhabitable without the horse,
and even a mounted party had good reason to feel dismayed
and refer to the region as the Great American Desert
where not a speck of vegetable matter existed.
The High Plains offered more ways to kill, harass, and generally bedevil travelers and settlers than any other part of the continent.
Starvation was as common as water was uncommon. Such water as could be found was generally alkaline, or spread typhus and cholera. Summers were scorching and winters were brutal. To that dismal general climate must be added the seasonal specials. Spring thunderstorms provided not only flash floods and bruising fist-sized hailstones, but lightning that struck the highest point, and a horseman is as high as anything on the plains. Always there was wind, those dark rollers and blue northers.
The pioneers of the plains also faced flies, locusts, wolves, grizzlies, stampedes, prairie fires and isolation-induced madness.
It is no wonder that American settlement essentially jumped from coast to coast, and the High Plains were the last region to be occupied. As historian Walter Prescott Webb pointed out in The Great Plains, it was a region so unlike the known parts of the world that constant innovation was required -- a new horse culture for the Indian, the six-gun, windmill and barbed wire for the white eyes.
Perhaps that wasn't enough. Colorado promotes its mountain ghost towns, but the prairies are dotted with abandoned spots like Keota, a dry-farming remnant, and Deerfield, a one-time black colony.
Frazier's book harks back to a time when the Plains were
a land of opportunity that attracted the best and
brightest
in the way of generals, promoters,
speculators, developers, etc.
Now the Plains spokesmen are complaining that the opportunity is gone, that the ambitious children who grow up in prairie towns depart for good shortly after high-school graduation.
The complaint might be legitimate, but it's hypocritical. There wouldn't be anybody on the Plains now if, a century ago, people hadn't decided to abandon the places of their ancestors -- Ohio or the Russian steppes, for instance -- and go where they saw more opportunity for someone young and ambitious.
The youths of today are doing precisely the same thing that their great-grandfathers did. But instead of being lauded as pioneers, they're being denounced as some sort of traitors by the same people who can't say enough good things about their ancestors who left friends and family behind for a challenging life. Then it was on the Plains; now it's somewhere else -- but is there any real difference?
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