The Last West: A History of the Great Plains of North America by Russell McKee

Abstract

Reviews 83 edly was a dark wind that drove them from their homes. This book could definitely be classed with those high-priced coffee table models which are displayed to impress people. But it is much more. Besides being beautiful, the photographs tell a story. The narration also tells a story and either pictures or text could stand alone. Together they become an adventure through time that is well worth the cost. CLIFFORD CAHOON, Utah State University The Last West: A History of the Great Plains of North America. By Russell McKee. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974. 312 pages, illus., appendix, biblio., and index, $8.95.) In The Last West Russell McKee provides readers with “a book of stories about people and their response to an unusual landscape.” The unusual landscape is the Great Plains, that strange and often misunderstood chunk of America which has been the touchstone for a variety of myths and emotions. McKee, in telling the story of the Plains from their geologic formation down to the present, employs a fresh and vibrant style, picturing details with the eye of a novelist. It should be understood that The Last West is a work of popular history aimed at general readers interested in the West. As popular history, narration and description take precedence over interpretation. Specialists in the field of Western American history will find little new here, yet those who are not professionally committed to a study of the West will find an interesting and well-written overview of the history of a very significant portion of North America. Though McKee stresses the relevance of the Plains as a region, he does not fall into the trap of regarding the Great Plains as an undifferen­ tiated sea of grass. For example, an excellent map on page 7 shows twentytwo different geophysical regions within the large area known roughly as the Great Plains. But, as the author points out, The name “Great Plains” is helpful, and can certainly be a common denominator if used with caution. No single set of conditions need be used to mark off the region, and the normal desire to reduce a definition to its simplest terms need not prevail here. A more useful understanding is to see the Great Plains simply as a central collective geographical region of our continent, much as we now speak of “The South,” or “The East Coast,” or “The West Coast.” The definition of the region, in fact, is the story this 84 Western American Literature book has to tell. It is a story about a piece of land and about the people, plants, and animals that have lived there and created a history for themselves (pp. 8-9). The story is a fascinating one, and McKee tells it with considerable skill. Some of the high points in the narrative are the chapters entitled “The Forgotten Plainsmen” and “A Trio of Canadians,” the former discussing the journeys of Bourgmond, la Harpe, Pedro Vial, and the Mallet brothers in the eighteenth century. And of the trio of Canadians, certainly the travels of Anthony Hendry and Henry Kelsey across the Northern Plains deserve to be better known than they are. In his final chapter, “Present Tense, Future Tenser,” McKee points to some of the problems that face “the most important single piece of agri­ cultural terrain in the world.” Wind erosion and drought, always serious, will become more so as world population increases and food supplies dwindle. On the South Plains, irrigation agriculture is in trouble now as wells have to punch deeper and deeper into the Ogallala Aquifer. On the Northern Plains, vast quantities of coal await the gigantic shovels of the strip miners. But in a windy, semi-arid, flat country the ecological costs of surface mining may be grotesquely high. So. at a time when more and more people are demanding food and energy, attention is going to focus much more on an often ignored portion of our continent. Knowledge of these problems leads to a kind of nostalgia in McKee’s book; it is, after all, entitled The Last West. But it is a reasonable nostalgia, I think. Somehow the over-riding insistence of...