Goodlands the west unbound: social and cultural studies Series editors: Alvin Finkel and Sarah Carter Writing about the western regions of Canada and the United States once turned on the alienation of the peoples of West from East. The mythology of a homogenized West fighting bravely for its rightful place in the sun deflected interest from the lives of ordinary people and from the social struggles that pitted some groups in the West against others—often the elite groups who claimed to speak for the region as a whole on the national stage. Seeking to challenge simplistic interpretations of the West and its institutions, The West Unbound focuses instead on the ways in which particular groups of Westerners—among them women, workers, Aboriginal peoples, farmers, and people from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds—attempted to shape the institutions and attitudes of the region. The series embraces a variety of disciplines and is intended for both university audiences and general readers interested in the American and Canadian Wests. series titles Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede Edited by Max Foran The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 Sarah Carter One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests Edited by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus Expansive Discourses: Urban Sprawl in Calgary, 1945–1978 Max Foran Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 1877–1927 Keith D. Smith The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region Edited by Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands Edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack Goodlands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains Frances W. Kaye Goodlands A Meditation and History on the Great Plains frances w. k aye Copyright © 2011 by Frances W. Kaye Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 isbn 978-1-897425-98-5 (print) 978-1-897425-99-2 (PDF) 978-1-926836-41-6 (epub) A volume in The West Unbound: Social and Cultural Studies issn 1915-8181 (print) 1915-819X (electronic) Cover and book design by Marvin Harder, marvinharder.com. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Kaye, Frances W., 1949- Goodlands : a meditation and history on the Great Plains / Frances W. Kaye. (West unbound, social and cultural studies series, issn 1915-8181) Includes bibliographical references and index. Also issued in electronic format. isbn 978-1-897425-98-5 1. Great Plains—History. 2. Indians of North America—Great Plains—History. 3. Agriculture—Great Plains—History. 4. Agriculture—Environmental aspects— Great Plains—History. I. Title. II. Series: West unbound, social and cultural studies F591.K39 2011 978 C2011-900923-4 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. To Howard Contents Acknowledgements | ix Introduction | 1 1 A Unified Field Theory of the Great Plains | 17 2 Exploring the Explorers | 45 3 Spiritual and Intellectual Resistance to Conquest, Part 1: Custer and Riel | 63 4 Spiritual and Intellectual Resistance to Conquest, Part 2: Messianism, the 1885 Northwest Resistance, and the 1890 Lakota Ghost Dance | 79 5 Spiritual and Intellectual Resistance to Conquest, Part 3: John Joseph Mathews’ Wah’Kon-Tah and John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks | 111 6 Intellectual Justification for Conquest: Comparative Historiography of the Canadian and US Wests | 127 7 Homesteading as Capital Formation on the Great Plains | 143 8 The Women’s West | 167 9 And Still the Waters | 185 10 Dust Bowls | 205 11 Mitigating but Not Rethinking: George W. Norris, Tommy Douglas, and the Great Plains | 217 12 Planning and Economic Theory | 243 13 Mouse Beans and Drowned Rivers | 265 14 Oil | 275 15 Arts, Justice, and Hope on the Great Plains | 291 Conclusion | 319 Notes | 333 Credits | 365 Index | 367 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Calgary, Alberta, during the 2001–2 academic year and to the Department of English and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a Faculty Development Fellowship during the same year. These fellowships made the research for this book possible. The libraries and staff of the University of Calgary and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and also the staff of the Local History col- lection at the Calgary Public Library, were invaluable. I am very grateful to my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, particularly to Sarah Carter, Don Smith, and Gretchen Albers (who read several drafts), as well as to Jane Kelley of the Department of Archaeology. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, I thank the Department of English, especially Joy Ritchie and Sindu Sathiyaseelan, my very kind research assistant and computer whiz, the Center for Great Plains Studies, espe- cially John Wunder, George Wolf, and Rick Edwards, and the Institute for Ethnic Studies. I am extremely grateful for the comments of two anony- mous reviewers, who helped improve the manuscript immeasurably, and for the hard work of my editors, Walter Hildebrandt, Pamela MacFarland Holway, and Joyce Hildebrand. I would also like to thank my friend Chris Garza for his encouragement, my brother, Robert Grey Owl, for the reality checks, my son, Joel Kaye, for the distractions, the dogs who have accom- panied me, especially Fireball and Autumn, and most of all, my husband, Howard Kaye. Introduction Wheat farmers hate gophers. The little critters cut the stalks and run off with the grain—particularly when the year is dry and the crop is light. Furthermore, to the disgust of ranchers, they dig holes in pastures, where large and commercially valuable animals like cows and horses can fall and break their large and commercially valuable legs. On the other hand, gophers are valuable members of midgrass prairie communities. In dry years, they strip the leaves and seed heads from the grasses, limiting above ground veg- etation that would otherwise transfer limited moisture from the perennial underground forest of roots and rhizomes to the air through transpiration. Gophers—and their allies in drought, the grasshoppers—invented the sum- merfallow, but they use it selectively, fallowing the most land in the driest summers. The grasses themselves co-operate—on tallgrass prairie, the big bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass grow eight feet high in moist years, while in dry years they fade back and let the little bluestem, the stypas, and the other “bunchgrasses” take over and hold the soil; thus, less foliage is exposed to transpiration and little ground to evaporation, again conserving 1 water for the perennial root forest.1 Wheat, on the other hand, is an annual grass. The gophers’ mowing may slow down transpiration, but there is no living root forest to benefit, only dead and shallow structures like frost- killed petunias in an urban flowerpot. Gophers’ incessant burrowing aer- ates the land and separates the root forest, thinning it out so it can breathe and grow, just as the urban gardener separates the rhizomes of iris. Gophers store their seed underground, and in the event of a long drought, these storehouses become one source for grassland regeneration after the return of the rains. Gophers are the messengers of Gaia, small piping indicators of the complex biofeedback mechanisms that mark the whole blue-green Earth as a single living organism of interlocked living systems. The Laramide orogeny of some 65 million years ago, the great col- lision of tectonic plates that raised the Rocky Mountains, set up the con- ditions for the grasslands ecosystem in the semi-arid rainshadow of the Rockies. The grasses and the gophers co-evolved with the buffalo and other even bigger ruminants, including something with a snout big enough to munch on Osage oranges. Badgers, ferrets, and hawks ate gophers, as did coyote, the trickster. Long cycles of glaciation and warming, drought and moisture, shaped the system. Rivers and wind lay down soil and stripped it away again. Dune systems grew and moved. Prairie pothole lakes formed in the remains of the glaciers, and waterfowl thrived. The long and short cycles of weather coiled past each other, and the gophers brought forth their young. When the first humans came onto the grasslands, whether emerging from the earth as the old stories tell or coming down from the north as more recent commentators would have it, they fit themselves into the cycles of the grasslands. It may be that they killed off the megafauna, or, more likely, that the cycles of cold and heat, moisture and drought no longer favoured the giant bison, the mastodons, and the others.2 But the grass and the gophers continued their dance through the processions of the equinoxes and the tilts in the earth’s orbit that change the name of the fixed star. At some point, the people began firing the grass, pushing the woody plants back to the verge of the creeks, and removing the overburden of dead plants. The young shoots showed improbably green on the scorched earth, and the buffalo and the gophers came to feast on bounty coming, like asparagus, from the deep and long-lived roots.