More Than Cowboys
Page 38
Chapter 15. The Sod-house Frontier
Given that the farming homesteaders were the first people to really settle the Great Plains, it is not surprising that aspects of their story occur in a wide variety of books, ranging from academic treatises through popular histories to privately published family reminiscences. A number of authors have contributed individual and informative chapters about the development of Western farming to The Oxford History of the American West. Everett Dick’s The Sod-House Frontier tells the story, but only up to 1890. Another interesting book is Nebraska by Frederick Luebke. Pioneers’ diary entries and their letters back home (in the original spelling) feature in 900 Miles from Nowhere - Voices from the Homestead Frontier by Steven Kinsella. Equally personal and engaging is Western Story - the Recollections of Charley O’Kieffe, 1884-98. Another personal account, reaching through to the hard times of the Great Depression, is George Shepherd’s West Of Yesterday. As one might expect, Dee Brown’s The Settlers’ West contains an informative chapter about early farming. Likewise, Walter Prescott Webb deals in some detail with the problems faced by the homesteaders (water, fencing, markets, transport, climate) in his The Great Plains.
There are a number of good texts on women’s experiences. The Nebraskan author Mari Sandoz has several informative “farming” chapters in her Love Song to the Plains, as does Martha McKeown in Them was the Days. Pioneer Women by Joanna Stratton is both a thorough and very readable book about the role and many hardships faced by Kansas pioneering women; it contains a short but entertaining chapter on the English families who founded the town of Victoria. Also to be recommended are Grit and Grace - Eleven Women who Shaped the American West by Glenda Riley and Richard Etulain, and The Women by Joan Reiter, with particularly good photographs. A fascinating anthology of diaries, letters and reminiscences by pioneering women is Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Hensley.
The English author Jonathan Raban (now living in Seattle) did detailed research into the lives and hard times experienced by one of the last waves of homesteading farmers in eastern Montana, presented in the very informative Bad Lands. Another review of lives and hard times, particularly during the Depression years of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, is the prize-winning The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Of course the best known novel to come out of the Dust Bowl years is John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath. More idiosyncratic is the detailed history of barbed wire and the way it changed the West, in The Wire that Fenced the West by Henry and Frances McCallum. Finally, the Oklahoma Dust Bowl is the subject of a famous documentary film of those times: The Plow that Broke the Plains, directed by Pare Lorenz in 1936; and I made a documentary myself for the BBC’s “World About Us” called Yellow Trail from Texas, on the American wheat harvest, from Texas to Alberta.
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