Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 1985, pp. 207-20.
Abstract
In the central portion of the great American continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert which, for many a long year, served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Cordillera to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado in the south, is a region of desolation and silence . . . enormous plains which, in winter, are white with snow and, in summer, are gray with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery . ... In this stretch of country there is no sign of life, nor of anything appertaining to life. There is no bird in the steel-blue heaven, no movement upon the dull gray earth-above all, there is absolute silence. Listen as one may, there is no shadow of a sound in all that mighty wilderness; nothing but silence-complete and heart subduing silence.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
With these words, a nineteenth-century British author-who might better have stuck with the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories that made him famous-illustrated a conception of the American Great Plains that was, according to the conventional historical interpretation of American images of the interior, the dominant view of that region during the first sixty years of the 1800s. American historians and geographers have argued that the myth of the Great American Desert dominated the preCivil War view of the Great Plains and that it proved itself to be very hard to eradicate from American maps and minds.1 It was this conception of the plains as desert, according to the traditional interpretation, that caused the American folk migration westward to leap over the region during its drive to the Pacific in the 1840s and 1850s. Haunted by visions of broiling sands and blinding sun, Americans hastened across the plains between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to the more attractive regions of Oregon and California. The Great Plains were a barrier to be crossed with all possible speed during the migrations, and the settlement of the great western agricultural region was delayed several decades by the Desert image.
But this predominant view of the plains as Desert did not last forever-or so goes the conventional wisdom. During the years following the Civil War, the Desert image was replaced by a counter-myth, a rival fancy: a view of the plains as Garden of the World.
It is a museum of wonder and value .... Its surface was covered with fields of grain, whose market proceeds would more than pay for the land; and near the center was a spring and a grove which encircled a happy home filled with many tokens of prosperity and the merry music of children. Half concealed from view were barns, pens, coops, granary, shed for wagons, plows and machinery, all in good order, while farther away and central in a grass plat shaded by two friendly elms was a white school house. In the distance it looked like a pearl in an emerald setting.2
After the war, as Americans moved into the Great Plains, up the valleys of the Platte and Kansas and Missouri rivers, they began to rebel against the slanderous terminology of the Great American Desert proponents of the period before 1860. Followers of the traditional interpretation have eloquently recounted how the plains settlers replaced the myth of the Desert with the myth of the Garden.3 From earliest colonial times, Europeans and Europeans- become-Americans had seen the land of the Atlantic seaboard settlements as a New World Garden, long kept virgin to redress the overcultivation of the Old World. It was easy to extend this myth beyond the Mississippi and to view the plains, like the seaboard of earlier times, as a land of promise, an Eden of vacant and fertile land held back by the Creator until it was needed by his chosen people.
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln