Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 193.
Abstract
This volume, a collection of the papers presented at an Agricultural History Symposium held at Texas A&M University in May 1980, brings together the work of twenty-six discussants on a wide variety of topics designed to illumine the Southwest as "a distinctive region, neither south nor west, but a cultural amalgam that is greater than the sum of its parts" (p. 1). Like most symposia, the Texas sessions provided an assemblage of papers uneven in both the subjects covered and the quality of research.
Major gaps in the survey of southwestern agriculture are evident in the absence of studies of the adjustment of the livestock industry to the introduction of deep-well drilling around 1900; the lack of any consideration of sheep raising; only brief comment upon the development of irrigation; still less reference to dry farming; and almost no attention to the westward shift of cotton, wheat, and citrus fruits, which the latter technologies made possible. While the Southwest was presumably defined to encompass Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, the concentration upon subjects relating to the last of these states is so pervasive that only a fifth of the papers ranges farther afield. Richard W. Etulain, speaking specifically of the "diversity of ... locations and experiences" represented in the literature (p. 30), points to the want of a sense of regional unity that characterizes this volume generally.
Scholars will neglect, however, such cross disciplined compilations of regional study at some hazard. Harry Shafer's summation of his findings on the Classic Mimbres phase of prehistoric agriculture in New Mexico provides new interpretation, as do the pieces by B. Byron Price on the activities of Charles Goodnight and other ranchers during the Civil War; by Robert C. McMath, Jr., updating his own earlier research on the origins of the Farmers' Alliance; and by James L. Forsythe, in exposition of Clinton P. Anderson's post-World War II agricultural policies. The adaptations from the recent publications by Manuel A. Machado, Jr. (The North Mexican Cattle Industry) and by William N. Stokes, Jr. (Oil Mill on the Texas Plains) also emphasize new material. The surveys of entrepreneurial history presented by Archie P. McDonald, on the "Lone Star Brand" of Texas Farm Products, and Ralph S. Newman, Jr., on the American Rice Company, although both clearly out of context in a volume on the Southwest, do bring significant innovational records to attention. The editors have failed to provide professional identification of any of the conference participants, but we shall look for further work of such scholarship with interest.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln