Great Plains
Most Americans are not familiar with the Great Plains. They fly over them, perhaps, on their way from Boston or New York or Chicago or Atlanta to the West Coast. They remember them as long, boring drives over arrow-straight interstates. They may recall their grammar school geographies and history books, with the term “The Great American Desert” being applied to part or all of the area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, or they may vaguely associate the term with western movies, cattle drives, Wyatt Earp, and the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. This is the land once covered by vast short-grass prairies, the land where millions of buffalo were slaughtered, and the land which was mostly plowed under during World War I to grow wheat and then to fill the skies with dirt during the dust bowl days of the “Dirty Thirties.” This is the land which Ian Frazier has explored in person and through research for several years and which forms the subject of this engrossing account—part social history, part folklore, part travelogue, part poetry, part jeremiad.
In 1982, Frazier drove to Kalispell, Montana, where he lived for three years, a refugee of sorts from New York City. To research this book, he drove more than 25,000 miles north and south, east and west, across and up and down the Great Plains. He read local newspapers and many books on various aspects of the Plains, ranging from historical to geological to agricultural (sixty-five pages of notes support the text), and he visited with hundreds of the men and women who live and work there, connecting their present with the history and legend of the land and its earlier inhabitants.
In chapter 1, Frazier orients the reader by providing an “overview” of the Great Plains both as one might see parts of them from an airplane and as people have previously tried to conceptualize them: the states they include, the western, southern, and northern boundaries—all somewhat indeterminate—the eastern as corresponding more or less with the 100th meridian. What makes the book so extraordinary is Frazier’s capacity to experience this vast region and his ability to render that experience in a prose that is concrete, evocative, and powerfully effective. For example, in describing the many rivers of the region he notes how the cottonwoods, growing in the valleys, “lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase ... [their] bark as ridged as a tractor tire.” He relates images of the past that he sees in his imagination, fired by his reading and research, to his own personal experience of these prairie rivers. In the same poetic passage on the rivers of the Great Plains he imagines how it must have been when the buffalo would leave their winter coats ankle-deep in the river bottoms. Then he shares his view of a river when, “at sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.”
This is poetry, and it is among those characteristics of the book that move it beyond the genre of mere travel accounts and into the ranks of such literary predecessors as Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849), Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways (1982). Such lyrical passages are matched by Frazier’s portraits of the diverse people of the Plains:...
(This entire section contains 1930 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian working as a National Park Ranger at Fort Union; Jim Yellow Earring, a Sioux Indian who guided Frazier to the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin in South Dakota; Zona Lang of Turkey, Texas, the hometown of Bob Wills; “Moses McTavish,” a “buckskinner” at a black powder rendezvous near Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River; Ephriam Dickson, a young Crazy Horse scholar at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where Crazy Horse was killed; Alan and Lindi Kirkbride, ranchers and antiwar activists in Wyoming; Staff Sergeant John Swift of Malmstrom Air Force Base, who guides tourists through a missile complex; Kathleen Claar, the curator of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum; and many others, all of whom contribute their stories. These people, who live and work on the Great Plains, offer in the textures of their lives further testimony to the special quality of the region.
Frazier devotes a chapter to a summary of fact and legend surrounding the Native Americans, who successfully inhabited the Plains from the introduction of the horse and iron to the coming of the white man and smallpox and the railroad. He follows that with a chapter summarizing the influx of the white man, first as trapper and fur trader, then as buffalo hunter and railroad builder, as trail driver and rancher, and finally as settler and farmer. These overviews are animated by Frazier’s determination to connect the broad sweep of historical movements with the specific details of the daily lives of the individuals who made the history. The saga of Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala Sioux chief, is the focus of an entire chapter; here, Frazier finds an important symbol of the transformation of the Great Plains from idealized wilderness to land of tourist attractions, cheap plastic figurines, and state parks. In death, Frazier suggests, Crazy Horse “managed to leave both the real and the imaginary” center of the new world vision unbetrayed. The story of Crazy Horse, Frazier makes clear, typifies the entire saga of false promises and betrayal of the Native Americans by the Europeans, who were willing to go to any lengths to exterminate the Indian.
From the hunters of the Clovis period to the farmers and ranchers driven out by economic changes of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s, each wave of human inhabitants has left its spear points, its bone piles, its Masonic Lodge foundations, its roads and trails, its buffalo jumps, its decaying windmills, and its missile sites. Frazier’s awesome catalog of ruins takes the reader down back roads and over rutted trails; inside a carefully crafted cabin in Montana, the floor joints still tight as a gymnasium floor; to the site of Sitting Bull’s last cabin; to the home of the Clutters of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966); to the huge pits dug by strip miners in search of cheap energy, leaving “land thrown away.” In his description of strip mining, Frazier’s anger at this kind of land-use ethic breaks out in the violence of his images. He describes a strip mining machine as technology that “could eat the Madison Buffalo Jump-a one-in-a-million piece of ground which fooled buffalo for thousands of years—for breakfast.” Such destruction of the land itself is, he says, an insult to the future as well as the past because it destroys the physical record and “reduces the whole story of the Great Plains to: chewed up, spit out.”
Great Plains argues—most clearly in such passages—that increasingly severe plundering by avaricious Europeans and their descendants has stripped the region of its wildlife, its indigenous human populations, its topsoil, its subterranean water. Now the very record of its destruction is threatened with extinction. Frazier has found in the history of the region a large-scale example of the attitude that nature is here for man’s exploitation. It is possible to change this deeply held set of values, he suggests, if one travels the Great Plains, explores the land, its history, its people, thereby gaining an understanding of both the immediate and the ultimate cost of the exploitation ethic. It is ironic that early European explorers called the Great Plains a desert, because people coming after have gone a long way toward turning them into one. Yet, despite the destruction, the exploitation, the depletion, the Great Plains are bigger than any name people give them. They are enormous, bountiful, unfenced, empty of buildings, full of names and stories. They extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Their hills are hipped, like a woman asleep under a sheet. Their rivers rhyme. Their rows of grain strum past. They are the place where Crazy Horse will always remain uncaptured. They are the lodge of Crazy Horse.”
In such passages, Frazier’s style is deceptive. While he rarely resorts to overt devices of pattern or diction, the book abounds with images so sharply observed and crisply rendered that they bring the reader into an immediate experience of the event. To cite but one example, he describes flocks of mountain plovers rising before him as he crosses Montana: “The winter-wheat harvest had begun, and two-thousand-bushel grain trucks full to the top were spilling wheat along the roads. The birds came to eat the wheat. Lots of them had been run over, and rolled to parchment on the asphalt. No matter how flat they got, somehow one wing always remained upright to flap in the draft.”
Places, almost always places no ordinary tourist would ever visit, claim much of Frazier’s attention. His account of a visit to one such place—Nicodemus, Kansas, a village that is the only remnant of a huge exodus of perhaps as many as forty thousand African Americans who fled the oppression of Reconstruction—is the emotional center of the book. In Nicodemus, a village of perhaps fifty now, Frazier watches a founders’ day celebration that includes a parade “like a parade in someone’s living room” and a fashion show featuring the six dancing daughters of a local matron. There, he writes, he felt a “joy so strong it almost knocked me down.
And I thought, It could have worked’ This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness. For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and the Indians undestroyed, the prairie Unplundered.” The exaltation lasts for only a few pages; the joy gone, Frazier visits a missile site, one of many in the region, and as a result sings a bitter, ironic eulogy to “our two hundred years on the Great Plains”:we trap out the heaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara suck up the buffalo, bones and all—plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and bum it in power plants and send the power down the line drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which so much treasure came from.
The power of such a passage comes not only from the powerful action verbs but from the keen observation, the solid research, the sympathetic imagination that informs the writing in every paragraph. Great Plains makes an important contribution to the literature of travel and exploration of the United States, a tribute to the power of a curious mind and a good eye to discover vital truths about ourselves. It is also a subtle, carefully crafted book that celebrates the reality of a mythic “heartland” region and mourns its desecration, the losses that warn of yet greater losses if the ethic of mindless greed and exploitation is not replaced with an ethic that respects the land, respects all of its residents, contains the forces of destruction, and celebrates life, not death.
