To most Americans the Great Plains are the Great Flyover,
or maybe the Great Drivethrough. Viewed from a window
seat the plains seem nearly devoid of interest, something
to get across enroute to someplace far worthier to explore
or live in. Yet anyone who has spent time on the plains
knows better. Walk around in western Nebraska or the
Texas panhandle and you will find a geography that is
mixed and surprising and sometimes disorienting.
Most people consider plains history much like the land
– flat, featureless, and undeserving of more than
a glance between sips of a soda. But spend some time
in that past and you will see that, like the plains
from 30,000 feet up, it has been literally over-looked,
and consequently misunderstood and underappreciated.
Seen up close, this history is thickly peopled, dense
with stories, and full of unexpected revelations that
feed a deeper understanding of Western – and American
– history.
If nothing else, the plains remind us that American
history, defined as what people have done on this continent,
began in the West. There is vigorous debate today about
the early peopling of the Americas – the when
and where and how of the first migration from Asia –
but the opinion is unanimous that the West was the first
region settled. There is also consensus that although
the West may not have been the earliest migratory route,
one of the first paths of migration was through a passway
in the glacial sheet to the north and then along western
edge of the Great Plains in the eastern shadow of the
Rocky Mountains. From this perspective, Interstate 25,
which runs north and south through Cheyenne, Wyoming
to Denver and Pueblo, Colorado, is arguably the oldest
road in America. A commuter stuck in one of its rush-hour
traffic jams might take some consolation from being
part of a tradition dating back about 12,000 years.
Great Plains lesson number one: American history is
very old.
Between the times of those first travelers and the coming
of Europeans, the Great Plains saw the rise and passing
of dozens of cultures. Through trial and error, the
peoples who were part of these cultures adapted to a
varied environment and to one of the most dangerously
erratic climates in North America. They farmed along
the eastern edges of the plains, hunted among the prolific
game of the high plains, and devised annual rounds of
movement that included forays to gather flint from the
Rockies and to conduct elaborate hunts at an altitude
of 11,000 feet, close to the Continental Divide. The
plains peoples were connected to worlds far beyond the
Great Plains through trade networks reaching to both
coasts and into Central America. A grave dug nearly
1,800 years ago in what is now Nebraska contained parrot
feathers from the tropics and shells from the Gulf of
Mexico. Peoples who traversed the plains subsisted by
taking what was there (and there was plenty, including
vast numbers of game birds traversing one of the world’s
great flyways) while exchanging some of that abundance
for other foods they needed to fill their nutritional
needs. For example, the bison herds gave the plains
people enormous supplies of protein craved by game-poor
settlements among Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande valley,
who in return offered corn to plains people who, apparently
unaware of the Atkins diet, craved that carbohydrate-rich
crop. Plains people worshiped using many cosmologies,
which included what is surely one of loveliest of the
American people’s many creation stories, that
of the Pawnees, who tell us that our world and all its
life were sung into existence by the stars. Great Plains
lesson number two: American history has always been
a cultural grab bag.
If nothing else, looking deeply into the plains past
broadens our appreciation of colonial history. Finally,
and thank goodness for it, historians nowadays are more
inclined to expand the colonial perspective to include
the French, Spanish, and other imperial experiences,
but, once again, they typically overlook what the Great
Plains has to teach us. There the Spanish, French, British,
and American empires converged on terms closer to equality
of power than anywhere else. French and English interests
reached into the plains from Canada and the lower Mississippi,
Spanish from the Rio Grande valley, and the United States
out of St. Louis, starting with Lewis and Clark, but
that famous expedition, often misrepresented as the
start of the region’s true history, came after
many decades of maneuvering by other rivals. All, including
the United States and its president, Thomas Jefferson,
considered the plains the key to controlling the western
two-thirds of the continent, and they acted accordingly,
making remarkable efforts to court and tease alliances
from native inhabitants. In what is today Nebraska,
Spain suffered one its great imperial disasters when
a command under Pedro de Villasur was all but annihilated
in 1720 by Indians supplied with guns by French traders.
Soon afterwards the French pressed their courtship by
taking a delegation of Indians to Paris, where Louis
XV entertained them and on their parting gave them jeweled
watches. That was eighty years before Lewis and Clark
entered this diplomatic arena with their own gifts and
medals. To block these cheeky newcomers Spain sent no
fewer than four military commands to turn back Lewis
and Clark – all obviously unsuccessful, although
the Spanish did arrest Zebulon Pike and his men, who
made that other, far less celebrated expedition that
first described the southern plains as an American desert.
Such episodes should remind us that we will have a much
better understanding of North America’s several
empires when we study how they came together in the
continent’s contentious center. Great Plains lesson
number three: American history has consisted of even
wider contests of more contingent powers than the struggles
we commonly hear about.
That point leads to another. In too many colonial histories
Indian peoples seem essentially pawns in elaborate strategies
directed by European chess masters, but as plains history
makes clear, Indians were anything but other peoples’
tools. They were the main power brokers until quite
late in colonial history, when the rising tide of this
nation’s numbers and influence began to roll beyond
the Missouri River. This is another way of saying that
American history can be truly viewed only from multiple
perspectives. Assume the viewpoint of the plains, from
the American center outward, and new stories suddenly
come to life.
One story might be called that of the other
American revolution – the rise of the horse culture.
It goes back much farther than even the region’s
ancient human history, fifty million years back, when
the earliest protohorse, Hyracotherium, appeared
on the ancient Great Plains, and then evolved into its
modern form. Some of these animals migrated across the
Bering land bridge to flourish in Asia while their American
cousins died off at the end of the last ice age. Domesticated
and spread across much of the Old World, horses finished
their globe-girdling odyssey when the Spanish used them
in conquering Mexico and finally, under Coronado, brought
them home to the plains in the 1540s, now not as wild
creatures but as animals bred for two or three hundred
generations as partners to humans in doing grand things.
After the Pueblo peoples drove the Spanish from New
Mexico in 1680, Indians across much of the West acquired
horses. Those on the high plains transformed their lives
by exploiting a horse’s ability to draw energy
from the Great Plains as Great Pasture, thus marrying
that animal’s grass-fed strength and speed to
human purposes and dreams. It was a great American story,
our version of a social, cultural, economic, and military
revolution that over five millennia had occurred in
central Asia, China, North Africa, and Europe. It unfolded
here at a breathtaking clip. Born sometime after 1680,
the plains horse culture was complete by about 1780,
as that other revolution was taking its course
in the Atlantic colonies. Great Plains lesson number
four: E unum pluribus: American history is
impoverished if confined to one narrative and to the
usual perspectives.
Tell enough stories about the same country, however,
and you are bound to uncover conflict. In this case,
the one revolution, the one we celebrate with fireworks
and cookouts, led within another century to the collapse
of the other one, the one we trivialize if we recognize
it at all. The revolution of Jefferson and Adams set
loose ambitions and dreams that would suffocate the
visions and snuff out the brief glories of the other,
that of the Comanches, Sioux, and Cheyennes. It’s
a prime example of how American history gets much messier
as we open it up and view it from various angles. The
final Great Plains lesson: Historical lessons, American
and otherwise, are ambiguous.
Once we take a closer took at plains history –
once we land the plane or stop the car, and walk around
and pay some basic attention to what is there –
things turn out to be far trickier than most would have
guessed, more convoluted and layered with experience,
more varied, dynamic, and shifting. Notice that everything
considered in this short piece happened prior to the
episodes normally associated with the region –
Lewis and Clark, the overland migrations and Indian
wars, building the transcontinental railways slaughtering
the bison and establishing homesteads, the cattle industry,
the Populists, the dust bowl, and the rise of agribusiness.
Follow these modern stories and you will find more unexpected
wrinkles that often resonate with the long, largely
unexplored earlier history. Parts of the Great Plains,
not either coast, have been the most ethnically diverse
parts of America, an echo of its splay of ancient cultures.
The region where Indians drew great power from the grass
is also one of other important natural resources. The
nation’s richest coal reserves are not in Appalachia
but in Wyoming and eastern Montana.
No one who views the Great Plains either historically
or as a part of national life today should take them
for granted. Take them instead as new terrain to explore
and as a chance to complicate creatively an understanding
of the West and America.
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