• Progressive story: Great American Desert to Garden of the World.
• Declensionist narrative: natural garden to dust bowl desert.
• Alternative stories: native Americans, women, blacks, other animals.

• Land is absent of the hero
• The hero is transferred across space
• Combat between hero and villain
• The hero's receipt of a gift
• The victory of the hero

• The frontier is the absence of settlement
• Europeans are transferred across space in frontier lines
• Frontiersman combats wilderness and Indian
• The heroes receive gifts of free land
• The hero transforms the wilderness

• William Rainey, 1849

• George Caleb Bingham, 1845. French trader and mixed-race son.

• Fur Trade of the Rockies.
• John Jacob Astor.
• Westward settlement.

• The Parting of the Ways.
• Oregon Trail north.
• California Trail south.

• Chimney Rock.
• Kanesville Crossing.

10. Salt Lake Valley

11. James Beckwourth

• James Beckwourth, black mountain man who explored great plains and western mountains.
• Discovered Beckwourth Pass in California north of Reno; stopover for emigrants to California.

• Progressive narrative.
• Theory of environmental history: environment and technology.
• Environment as actor: limits European expansion westward.
• Arid; level; treeless land.
• 20" rainfall line at 100th meridian.
• Technological determinism.

• Longhorn cattle drives.
• Chisholm Trail.
• Abilene, Kansas, 1866.
• North-south cattle drives meet east-west railroad.
• Drought, 1883; panic 1884; blizzards, 1885-6.
• Decline; transformation by meat-packing; fences; stock-breeding.

• 5000 black cowboys drove cattle on the Chisholm trail in post Civil War era.
• Tended huge cattle herds; skilled hands.
• Nat Love, 1869, in Kansas; dubbed "Deadwood Dick," 1876, Dakota rodeo.

• Technologies that changed the plains.

• Technologies that changed the plains.
• Bonita Well.
• Made homesteading possible.
• Made fenced cattle and sheep ranching possible.

• Technologies that changed the plains.
• Steel plowshare scours heavy prairie soils.

• Technologies that changed the plains, 1869.
• F.F. Palmer, "Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way," 1869.
• Transcontinental railroad; market; immigrants.

• Technologies that changed the plains.
• Mechanized harvesting equipment.
• Monocultures of wheat and corn.

• Prairie house.
• Windmill makes gardens possible.

• Shore family, Custer County, Nebraska, 1880s.
• Exodus of 1879: black migration into Kansas of 20,000 poor blacks via Chisholm trail.

• Women as reluctant pioneers versus women as self-reliant homesteaders.

• Homesteader could be head of a family (e.g. widow or divorcee); twenty-one years of age (e.g. single woman).

• Gathering buffalo chips for fuel.
• Building sod house.
• Digging wells.
• Herding cattle.
• Cultivating fields.
• Preserving Food (Mason Jar).
• Teaching school.
• Raising children.

• Non-human nature/ecology
• Human production/ economy
• Human reproduction biological
• Human reproduction social
• Consciousness

• Nature as self-active; coyote/bison
• Hunting culture: foot and horse-based
• Steady state/impact of disease/warfare
• Tribal villages/councils/festivals
• Mimetic; animistic

• Non-human nature/ecology
• Human production/economy
• Human reproduction biological
• Consciousness

• Nature as active: droughts, storms
• Mercantile extraction beaver, bison, cattle, homesteading
• Population growth; immigration
• Written word; Bible, fatalism re: nature

• Non-human nature/ ecology
• Human production/ economy
• Human reproduction --biological, social, political
• Consciousness

• Nature as passive, controlled, watered
• Capitalist ranching; agriculture
• Demographic transition; urban; land speculation
• Analytic,quantitative,managerial,dualistic

• What new narratives can be told about the Great Plains?
• What is the future of the Great Plains?