Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger, and: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger, and: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom Christopher Cumo Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger. Transcribed and with an introduction by Peter A. Rogerson. Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions, 2013, 190 pp, $19.95 Paper. Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2014, 144 pp, $44.95 Cloth. This essay examines two books connected by a focus on rural life in nineteenth century America. Lucas Barger's Life on a Rocky Farm originally appears to be a first-person account of rural life in eastern New York, where soils were thin and rocky, a feature this region shared with much of New England. David Danbom in Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains focuses on rural life on part of the Great Plains, a more fertile region than the lands near New York City. Danbom narrates a history of rural life whereas Barger supplies a case study of one individual. In the introduction to Life on a Rocky Farm, Peter Rogerson made his own attempt to defend the text as in essence a primary document. According to Rogerson, one learns that Barger drafted the text in 1839, the year of his death. In this text Barger recalls events from the American Revolution. The statement may be true, but memories tend to fade over time. The text did not end, however, with Barger's draft. Keen on publication from the outset, Lucas Barger gave his daughter, Flossie, the manuscript to transcribe. Also that year he wrote Flossie letters with instructions to change the text, possibly in substantive ways. Because Rogerson does not [End Page 282] provide these letters, the reader does not know how much of the text to ascribe to Flossie. To complicate matters, after Barger's death, Flossie created a number of other versions of the text. In addition, a member of the local historical society produced her own rendering of the text, including the letters to justify her edits. Which text is the real first person narrative? Rogerson selected Flossie's first typewritten account, though it is easy to envision this as a father-daughter collaboration. To be cautious, Rogerson probably should have chosen Barger's original handwritten manuscript. I will use the name Lucas Barger as the author of Life on a Rocky Farm even though there may be grounds to think that Flossie played an important role in shaping the text. To this point, even Rogerson admits that he reorganized the Lucas-Flossie text, making it a three-way collaboration. This editing may have been necessary because the text, even as it stands in this edition, lacks a formal beginning. Barger employed the method of the miniaturist, the master of the colorful anecdote and of the slice of rural life in eastern New York. At a minimum the events narrated are the product of memory not research of any kind. The memories, at least most of them, stem from Barger, but he was not a historian but a storyteller. By contrast David Danbom employs the methods of the historian. Danbom simplifies and narrows his approach wherever possible. Although Danbom admits that the western Plains extend from northern Mexico to southern Canada, he restricts his treatment to just four states: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. This may have value, but it seems striking to omit Minnesota at a minimum because of its proximity to North Dakota and the similarities in agriculture between these two states. This method of reductionism allows Danbom to examine a homogeneous environment. If one should omit Mexico and Canada because they are not part of the United States, Danbom also omits Texas, and by extension Oklahoma, so that he need not ponder the issue of slavery in the antebellum South. By his own admission, Danbom chose to focus on the whites who settled the four states enumerated above. This omission seems...