what is similar to the great plains of north america

The Smashing Plains Region

"The Great Plains . . . experience at times like an almost forgotten region—and however there are wonders in it."

—Larry McMurtry

When we applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant to fund the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, reviewers wanted to know just where the region is located and what makes it special. This confirms Larry McMurtry'southward thinking, expressed in the above quote, that the Bully Plains is a forgotten region, but it was also a reasonable request, prior to dispensing coin, and we gear up nearly coming together the requirement.

Whatever region is both a real identify and an intellectual concept. In that sense, a region is the equivalent of the historian'due south flow: a region is the partition of space into identifiable units, merely as a flow is the partitioning of time into recognizable segments. Both are classification schemes, generalizations that assistance in the understanding of circuitous reality. The claiming is to identify the characteristics of the human and concrete environments that establish a region and to establish boundaries for that distinctive portion of the earth's surface. Even the South—perhaps the near readily recognizable North American region—lacks definitive boundaries. In the groundbreaking Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, for example, the editors make no attempt to circumscribe their region except to say that the Southward is wherever southern civilisation is found. In our case, such a creative evasion would not take satisfied the reviewers, and then we set about tracing the evolution of the concept of the Great Plains region, identifying the physical, historical, and cultural characteristics that together define its regional graphic symbol, and specifying boundaries which, if not difficult and fast, are logical.

In this introductory essay, written ix years subsequently, I proceed the framework of that original grant proposal, just I tin now add substance by cartoon from the vast storehouse of data and assay created by the most 1,000 scholars who participated in the making of the Encyclopedia of the Swell Plains.

The region now recognized as the Groovy Plains has been characterized in many means, non all of them laudatory. Part of the region was branded the Neat American Desert following the explorations of Zebulon State highway (1806) and Stephen Long (1820), though this aspersion was never widely accustomed by the American public. Labeling the Peachy Plains the "buffalo eatables," a failed agricultural experiment in a land that should be put dorsum in grass, continues the tradition of maligning the region, in the sense that it negates the people who call information technology home.

The actual term, "Neat Plains," has been used to describe the grasslands of North America since at least the mid-nineteenth century, simply information technology only gained widespread acceptance in the 1930s. In 1931, geographer Nevin Fenneman began his book, Physiography of Western United States, with a lengthy word of the "Great Plains Province," a physical region of great diversity, withal sufficiently distinctive from surrounding areas to merit split identification. Besides in 1931, historian Walter Prescott Webb propelled the Great Plains into the public imagination with his contention that the grasslands to the west of the ninety-eighth meridian—which he characterized as a treeless and largely unwatered land—demanded key changes in "ways of life and of living" before they could be settled by European Americans. In that aforementioned decade of the 1930s the Great Plains became known as a problem region, the domicile of the Dust Bowl. The region received more attention than information technology wanted in Pare Lorentz's documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains, fabricated for the Subcontract Security Administration in 1936, and in The Hereafter of the Great Plains, a report submitted to President Roosevelt in December of that aforementioned year. Through such publicity, the Great Plains became inscribed on the map of American regions, on a par with the Midwest, New England, and the South, and it has persisted. It is there in the geography textbooks, in the scholarly literature on American regionalism, in more pop works similar Ian Frazier'south Nifty Plains, and on the landscape throughout this vast area on billboards, motel signs, and business marquees.

What are the criteria for identifying the Great Plains as a region? One starting betoken is climate, specifically climatic variability. Rainfall varies from more than than thirty inches a yr in eastern Kansas to less than fifteen inches a year in the lee of the Rocky Mountains. Droughts of thirty-v or more than consecutive days tin can be expected annually, with frequency increasing from due east to west, and drought periods of lx to seventy days are experienced virtually every ten years. Extended periods of drought, such as in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s, take on the dimensions of severe natural disasters, causing agricultural failure and depopulation. Native Americans, as well as European American settlers, were confounded by such periodic drought, every bit in the dry, warm period between 1439 and 1468 when Upper Republican peoples were forced to abandon their agricultural villages in the Key Keen Plains. Similarly, the dry out years of the early 1890s caused the failure of many settlers on the western Plains, settlers who had just just arrived in the good years of the 1880s and had no reserves when the drought hit. Equally climatologist Charles Warren Thornthwaite explained in 1941, in the wake of the Dust Basin, it was this dubiousness that fabricated staying on the Not bad Plains difficult: "In a desert y'all know what to expect of the climate and plan accordingly. The same is true for the boiling regions. Men [and women] have been badly fooled by the semiarid regions because they are sometimes humid, sometimes desert, and sometimes a cross between the two." Add to this the other climatic hazards of loftier winds, tornadoes, extreme temperatures, blizzards, and destructive hail, and the tenuousness of settlement in this transitional region becomes understandable.

The transitional character of the physical environment of the Great Plains posed another problem for its inhabitants. Thin ribbons of woodlands trace rivers like the Missouri, Platte, and Saskatchewan out into the grasslands of the Great Plains, and the Canadian Prairies are girdled on the northward by the Parkland Belt, a mixed prairie and woodland zone that grades into the coniferous forests of the northlands. However, compared to neighboring regions to the e and westward, the Plains take few copse. This acquired difficulties for Native Americans similar the Pawnees and Omahas, who had to move their villages every few years as the local already sparse timber was depleted. It too acquired difficulties for early European American settlers who had to improvise past building houses of sod, hay, and clay, and apply buffalo dung for fuel. The problem persisted until the railroads were firmly in place, allowing the big lumber companies of St. Paul and Winnipeg to extend their marketplace areas to the west.

A third environmental challenge of the Great Plains was, and is, sheer distance. West of the Missouri in the U.s.a. and of the Not bad Lakes in Canada, the waterways were navigable only for the trappers' and Indians' bullboats and canoes. There were no convenient w-flowing rivers like the Ohio or Tennessee to channel settlers into the eye of the Slap-up Plains. The Missouri River was navigable for shallow-draft steamboats to the mouth of the Yellowstone after 1832, but there were frequent groundings and sinkings, and only the earliest American emigrants to the Dandy Plains (into eastern Kansas and Nebraska in the late 1850s and early 1860s and into southeastern Dakota Territory for a brief time in the 1860s) came by water. Indians partly overcame distance by adopting the horse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Americans had to look for the coming of the railroads in the 1860s earlier they could break costless from the Missouri River. Altitude remained a serious problem until the 1920s, when automobiles came into common apply, revolutionizing mobility and allowing a new flexibility in settlement decisions. But even today the friction of distance and the "social costs" of space (e.yard., providing pedagogy, electricity, and now broadband Cyberspace access to widely dispersed residents) are compelling features of Plains existence. Isolation is yet a reality of life, especially in the wide interstices between the main lines of transportation and settlement.

Of course to many Plains residents the wide-open spaces, even the isolation from neighbors and towns, are regional characteristics to be celebrated, non endured. In that location may be no md within fifty miles and no longer an available double-decker system, merely there is a close connexion to the land and a deep sense of place that is often absent in more than urbanized areas. Plains residents who take returned to the region later on living elsewhere oft speak of how much they had missed such elementary pleasures as existence waved to (more often than not a single finger barely lifted from the steering cycle) on the land roads.

The vast distances, the flowing grasslands, the sparse population, the enveloping horizons, and the dominating heaven (the Plains landscape is actually largely skyscape) convey a sense of expansiveness, even emptiness, which is another defining characteristic of the Great Plains region. Information technology's hard to capture a Plains scene in a photograph, for example, because, as Jonathan Raban puts it, there is "more space than place." Norman Henderson, like Raban, an astute contemporary explorer of the Plains, writes that it is difficult to capture the essence of the region in words on paper because "the grasslands are a feeling more than a view."

Novelists such equally Willa Cather and O. E. Rölvaag dwelled upon the impact of the overwhelming expansiveness on settlers. In Giants in the Earth, Rölvaag's epic novel of pioneer settlement in southeastern Dakota Territory in the 1870s, the woman of the household, Beret, is driven to distraction by the "nameless, blue-green solitude, flat, endless, all the same, with zip to hide behind." This was a common reaction of the European American settlers who came out of humid, forested environments; they called it "loneliness," a reaction to too much space and one's own meager presence in information technology. It is nonetheless a mutual reaction to the sweeping horizons of the Great Plains. Other peoples, yet, including the Kiowas, who migrated from the headwaters of the Yellowstone to southwestern Oklahoma, embraced the openness of the grasslands with a sense of emancipation, preferring plains to claustrophobic mountains and woodlands.

Population density in the Not bad Plains, past county and census division, in the U.s. (2000 demography) and Canada (1991 census)

Mod geographers have also identified the absence of features as an integral part of the regional grapheme of the Great Plains. To John Hudson, the essence of S Dakota is "captured by pictures of nothing—absolutely naught, except maybe a telephone pole sticking up over the grain-fields and perhaps a lone lift on the horizon." Yet on a smaller scale, between the observer and the horizon, there is a wealth of item. The Peachy Plains may well lack trees, but at that place is a rich and diverse array of grasses, forbs, and animal life. An acre of tallgrass prairie, for example, is home to approximately 100 species of grasses and forbs, and every square yard of that prairie teems with insect life, including millions of tiny spring-tails (Collembola) in the rich dark soil.

Despite the demanding environment, the Great Plains has long been a magnet for settlers. Paleo-Indians were attracted to the grasslands at to the lowest degree 12,000 years ago to chase such mammals as mastodons, mammoths, and bison. In the eighteenth century, the massive bison herds that thundered over the grasslands, and the horse, which immune more bison to be taken and their meat and hides transported, drew Native Americans like the Lakotas (Sioux) into the region. After the Civil War, when the bison herds were decimated, the void was filled by cattle driven upwardly from Texas and shipped in from elsewhere. The fertile promise of the soil made it worthwhile for farmers to take their chances with drought and loneliness: Per Hansa, Beret's driven married man in Giants in the Earth, saw not the desolation of an austere plain, simply soil so black and rich that he squeezed it in his hands and watched information technology fall through his fingers like golden. And indeed, the Great Plains is the granary of North America.

From the earliest Native peoples to contemporary populations, Plains residents take taken upward the environmental challenges and, in doing and then, have created over time a region with its own identity, its own item ways of life. No region, of course, is entirely distinct from surrounding regions, particularly in gimmicky North America where powerful leveling forces of mass media and corporate marketing are at work. Nevertheless, there are specific characteristics of human occupancy that permit the recognition of a detail Great Plains geography.

No other N American region was then fundamentally shaped by railroads. With the exception of the Selkirk settlement in the Scarlet River Valley of the North after 1811, the Texas Loma country in the 1840s, eastern Nebraska and Kansas in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and the Black Hills in the 1870s, European Americans and European Canadians followed the railroads into the Great Plains. The implications of this, as far every bit regional development was concerned, are many. The railroads accentuated the east-west orientation of Plains settlement, producing a series of economic hinterlands that were, and are, linked to cities mainly to the east of the region (east.thousand., Winnipeg, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Chicago). They were not only transportation lines conveying grain out and manufactured products in but likewise active agents of colonization. They recruited widely for settlers—German language Russians were particularly favored, considering they had prior noesis of how to farm the grasslands—to fill their large government country grants. They were the main determinant of the location, morphology, and landscapes of Plains towns, many of which have a characteristic T-shape, with the primary street bisecting the tracks. They also named the towns, towns similar Ismay, Montana, which was an amalgamation of Isabel and May, the names of the daughters of Albert J. Earling, president of the Milwaukee Road. The railroads were responsible for building as well many towns, many of which accept long since disappeared, or survive just as a single operating business, the grain elevator (which was also the business organization that got the towns started). Probably no other region of North America has so many ghost towns; at that place are an estimated 6,000 in Kansas alone. Finally, the railroads meant that Plains settlement, in one case started, was rapid. On the Canadian Prairies, for example (and the same could be said for other early-twentieth-century Plains frontiers in the Texas Panhandle and eastern Montana), communities, to use Paul Sharp's words, "sprang up near full-grown." They went into quondam historic period quickly besides, as rural populations thinned with agricultural mechanization, leaving principal street stores closed, their windows covered with paper.

Because the Canadian and American settlement of the Great Plains was tardily, post-obit the railroad, the region reflects the various ethnicity of immigrants who came to North America in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the kickoff few decades of the twentieth century. Local ethnic distinctiveness remains an important part of Plains regionalism, enriching the dominant stamp of native-built-in American and Canadian pioneers who followed generally latitudinal routes of migration into the area. Fully 71 per centum of Northward Dakotans were strange-born, or the children of strange-born, in 1910, mainly Norwegians, Germans, and German Russians. German Russians likewise came to Nebraska; Swedes to South Dakota and Kansas; and Doukhobors, Ukrainians, and Hutterites to the Prairie Provinces, to proper name only a few groups and a few places. Add to these African Americans, who get-go came in substantial numbers to the plains of Kansas every bit Exodusters in the 1870s; the s to north migration of Latinos, which gathered force in the tardily nineteenth century and continues today; and Chinese and Japanese settlers who originally entered the Plains from the westward. All these groups brought their item values and textile civilisation to the Bang-up Plains, with lasting furnishings on the mural, patterns of religion, foodways, and language. Although diverse ethnicity is an integral ingredient of the grapheme of many North American regions, especially in the large cities, no other extensive region in Due north America has the circuitous indigenous mosaic that distinguishes the Bully Plains, especially the Northern Great Plains and Prairie Provinces.

Nor does whatever other North American region, with the notable exception of the Southwest, retain the postage of the Indigenous Americans as emphatically as the Great Plains. Native peoples have continuously inhabited the Plains for at least 12,000 years. In the late eighteenth and early on nineteenth centuries, only decades before the advent of European American settlement, Indians from the eastern United States were nonetheless migrating to the Not bad Plains, first of their ain free will (the Lakotas and Crows, for example) so, in the 1820s and 1830s, under the force and duress of the removal policy, which made refugees of peoples like the Cherokees. In the Plains, these immigrants competed for space and resources with Ethnic peoples such every bit the Pawnees and Osages. When Native Americans, encircled by European American settlers, were forced to give up their bequeathed lands in the second half of the nineteenth century, they remained on the Groovy Plains, either on reservations that were remnants of their former territories, or amassed in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). In the Prairie Provinces, First Nations ceded their lands to the regime in a series of treaties between 1871 and 1877, before the main rush of immigration. Like their American counterparts, they retained reserves on the Plains and continue to be a major component of Plains identity. This is a component that will only increase in importance, because Native peoples are increasing faster than Plains population every bit a whole, and they are a young population, with growth built in to their demographic structure.

The listing of defining characteristics could become on. The region has been, and continues to be, mainly a producer of raw materials for others to refine. Furs were the get-go such product, then cattle, corn, wheat, oil, gas, and coal. There is meaning manufacturing on the Great Plains, mainly agriculturally based and generally small scale, just the percent of total employment in manufacturing is well below the national averages of Canada and the United States. The Great Plains tin can also exist divers by its demographic structure: no other region of North America has a college percentage of anile population. In many Plains communities, the young have departed, drawn to opportunities outside the region, leaving farms without the side by side generation and schools closed for want of students. This was not always the case, of course. The Great Plains was settled past young families, just the anile structure of Plains population at present makes the region more than dependent on government transfer payments (Medicare and social security, for example) than any other in North America. The Great Plains has also been a significant source of protestation, as in Due north Dakota in 1916 when the Nonpartisan League gained command of the legislature and temporarily wrested command of credit and elevators from Minneapolis corporate power. Three years later, while the Nonpartisan League was still in power in North Dakota, to the northward of the forty-ninth parallel one of the largest general strikes in Northward American history was staged in Winnipeg, shutting down factories, newspapers, telephones, and transportation. Protest in the Great Plains has come from all shades of the political spectrum: from socialist and communist activists like Oscar Ameringer and Ella "Female parent" Bloor, to right-fly constitutionalists like the Freemen of Montana, to ethnic insurgents like Métis leader Louis Riel, and legal challenges similar the landmark case, Brown v. The Lath of Pedagogy of Topeka. Protestation, of course, is not particular to the Corking Plains, merely at that place is a tradition in the region, and it is yet some other defining trait.

No region, of class, is a discrete entity, and the administrative lines on a map belie the reality of transitions and gradations on the basis. In fact when fifty different delimitations of the Keen Plains were mapped by Sonja Rossum and Stephen Lavin, the nebulous nature of regional boundaries became very clear. Yet we felt it was important to ascertain the boundaries of the purpose of this study—to specify the portion of N America that we recognize equally the Bang-up Plains. The western boundary, following the Rocky Mountain front from Alberta to New Mexico, is the least ambiguous limit of the Great Plains. Indeed, at that place are few regional boundaries anywhere that are every bit decisive every bit the discontinuity between plains and mountains in Colorado and Alberta. Merely even the western boundary is blurred in places: in the Wyoming Basin, for example, where the Great Plains rise to more than 7,000 feet and merge less perceptibly with the Rocky Mountains, or in Montana, where extensions of the Rocky Mountains, such as the Footling Rockies, interpenetrate with the Plains. Withal, differences in elevation, vegetation, and human occupancy (specifically, the widely discontinuous settlement patterns in the Rocky Mountains) demarcate the Great Plains from the regions to the due west.

The northern purlieus in Canada is likewise quite singled-out, tracing the line between the Parkland Belt of mixed woodland and grassland and the boreal wood of the northward. The Parkland Belt of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, since the time when Assiniboines and Crees followed bison herds, has been functionally integrated with the Prairies. This integration persisted through the fur-trade menstruum and into the subsequent era of agricultural settlement. Canadian scholars are in accord on this matter.

Scholars as well agree that at that place are more similarities than differences in country and life on either side of the twoscore-ninth parallel, marking the international boundary between the United States and Canada. Indians and fur traders crossed the border with impunity in the first half of the nineteenth century, and even afterward 1880, when the railroads connected the Canadian Prairies and the northern American Plains to their corresponding eastern control points (mainly Winnipeg and Minneapolis), parallel developments and common experiences were the norm. Country laws and settlement systems were like. Both sections experienced agrestal protestation movements and the drought and depression of the 1930s. Each had its open up-range cattle era, and the Canadian grasslands were largely stocked from Montana. Similarly, there was a large influx of Americans into the Canadian Prairies in the 2 decades preceding Globe War I. No doubt, the North American Costless Trade Agreement (nafta) volition result in fifty-fifty more interaction betwixt these two national components of the same geographic region.

A potent example tin can also be made for a distinctive southern purlieus of the Great Plains. Physiographically the Great Plains is pinched out at the Rio Grande by the convergence of the Coastal Plain and the Mexican Highland section of the Bowl and Range Province. Climatically the lands to the south of the Rio Grande are true desert. The southeastern border of the Great Plains is marked by the prominent Balcones Escarpment, which was, historically, too a cultural divide marking the western extent of the cotton belt and the Southward.

This leaves the eastern boundary of the Great Plains, which is not a sharply defined line simply an almost ephemeral transition zone from the more boiling South and Midwest. The difficulty in identifying the eastern entry onto the Plains was described by Robert Pirsig as he rode his motorcycle west from Minnesota into North Dakota. "There is no one place or abrupt line where the Key Plains [i.e., the Midwest] finish and the Great Plains begin," observed Pirsig. "It'southward a gradual change like this that catches you unawares, equally if you were sailing out from a choppy coastal harbor, noticed that the waves had taken on a deep swell, and turned back to see that you were out of sight of land." The key landscape prove for Pirsig was that there were fewer trees on the Great Plains and those that were at that place had been introduced. The "greenness" encountered farther east had also paled, the streets of the towns were wider, the buildings more run-down. Pirsig concluded that at that place was less concern with "tidily conserving space" on the wide-open Nifty Plains.

To compensate for this geographical nebulousness, Plains scholars have sought to define the eastern margin by an arbitrary line, generally the 98th meridian, less often the 100th meridian. Perhaps a better definition of the eastern purlieus would use a combination of physical, historical, and geopolitical factors. Our boundary follows the eastern edge of u.s. of Due north Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, including these entire units in the region. These states were organized and settled later than the adjoining states to the east, and their institutions and iconographies give them a coherence that should not be divided. The rationale for the eastern boundary in Manitoba is based on physical and economic geography: Eastern Manitoba is role of the Laurentian Shield and its orientation is to Northern Ontario, not the Prairie Provinces. Eastern Oklahoma and eastern Texas are too excluded from the Plains because of overwhelming prove that historically, environmentally, and culturally their orientation is to the Southward.

For some purposes in the encyclopedia, these boundaries volition exist transgressed to deal with particular features of side by side areas that have significance to the development of the Not bad Plains, or to include entries that are simply also tempting to be left out! Kansas Urban center, Missouri, for instance, a major command point for the development of the Central Plains, is included in the Cities and Towns chapter, and Kansas City Jazz and film director Robert Altman, both products of the Missouri side of the river, are also subjects of entries. Moreover, considering no region exists in a geographic vacuum, national and even international trends that have afflicted life on the Bully Plains are often taken into business relationship.

Yet our main concern is with the people, places, and events associated with the territory enclosed by the boundaries on the map. And what a rich tapestry of life that is. Five presidents of the United States and 3 prime number ministers of Canada accept come up from the Great Plains. Slap-up athletes similar Jim Thorpe, Jim Ryun, and Gordie Howe rose from Plains communities. Celebrated writers such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Wallace Stegner, Louise Erdrich, and Tillie Olsen were shaped past their years on the Plains. Movie stars, from Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks to Marlon Brando and Tommy Lee Jones, and musicians like Buddy Holly, Charlie Parker, Peggy Lee, and Neil Young spent their formative years in the Great Plains. Events of lasting historical importance, such equally the Wounded Genu Massacre, the N-Westward Rebellion, and the Tulsa Race Riot took place in the Great Plains. And Plains women, including Emily Murphy, Kate Barnard, and Annie Diggs, pioneered the struggle for women'south rights in Due north America.

What Ian Frazier says of the Plains—that "[t]hey're so big y'all can never know all there is to be known about them" is true. But with the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, the production of the knowledge of so many scholars, we can at to the lowest degree give the reader the opportunity to know much more than was known before about this fascinating North American region.

David J. Wishart, Editor University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Dawson, C. A. Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. Fenneman, Nevin Thousand. Physiography of Western United States. New York: McGraw-Hill Volume Co., 1931. Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989. Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: A History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Henderson, Norman. Rediscovering the Nifty Plains: Journeys by Domestic dog, Canoe, and Horse. Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Luebke, Frederick C. "Regionalism and the Great Plains." Western Historical Quarterly fifteen (1984): 19–38. McMurtry, Larry. Review of On the Rez, past Ian Frazier. The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2000, 26–28. Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1974. Raban, Jonathan. Bad State: An American Romance. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Rölvaag, O. E. Giants in the Earth. New York: Harper and Row, 1955. Rossum, Sonja, and Stephen Lavin. "Where Are the Groovy Plains? A Cartographic Analysis." Professional Geographer 52 (2000): 543–52. Precipitous, Paul F. "The Northern Great Plains: A Study in Canadian American Regionalism." Mississippi Historical Review 39 (1952): 51–76. Thompson, John Herd. Forging the Prairie West. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998. Thornthwaite, C. Warren. "Climate and Settlement in the Great Plains." In Climate and Human: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1941. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1941: 177–87. Webb, Walter Prescott. The Slap-up Plains. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931. Wilson, Charles R., and William Ferris. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Colina: University of N Carolina Press, 1989.

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Source: http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/intro.html

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