The Great Plains Agricultural Frontier and What Lay Ahead for Rural America

Abstract

After the colonial period of American history, survey courses with so much to cover usually give short shrift to rural history. Yet the study of the farming fron tier on the Great Plains is impor tant to American history. The first census in 1790 revealed a popula tion 95 percent rural. By 1870, 79 percent of the population still lived on the or in rural small towns and 53 percent of the nation's workers made their livings from agriculture. Settlement on the Great Plains after the Civil War expanded America's rural heritage into a new environment?level, treeless, and arid. Railroads, steel plows, barbed wire, windmills and other technol ogy would be required to subdue it, according to historian Walter Prescott Webb in his seminal study The Great Plains. The unique fea tures of the Great Plains coincide with the changes wrought by the industrialization of America and provide secondary school students with a unique perspective for studying late nineteenthand early twentieth-century America. But while many survey texts in clude an obligatory chapter on the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century?invariably focusing on Custer and the Seventh Cavalry meeting their fate at the Little Big Horn?the role of the farming frontier in western devel opment needs attention. Discussion of plains agriculture, moreover, re peatedly ignores American Indian agriculture. Almost every Ameri can school child knows that Squanto's corn saved the starving New England settlers, but Plains Indians, and particularly American Indian women horticulturalists, are completely ignored. In fact, many Plains Native American cultures subsisted with a combination of bi son and agriculture before the in troduction of the horse. The flood of white population carried by the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads among others destroyed American Indian ways of life and radically changed the Great Plains environment. Free land and the indepen dence it promised proved an irre sistible lure for white home steaders, as students readily com prehend. The view of independent citizen-farmers enjoying prosperity on their own land, however, does not reflect the development of the Great Plains described by historian