I’m on my way to St. Paul for the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society (yes, there really is such a thing, comprising an impressive community of scholars), where I’m supposed to present a paper entitled, “A Hidden Hand: The Significance of Climate Change in Great Plains History.”
The particular honor and pleasure of this presentation for me is that I am doing it in collaboration with two splendid scholars who happen to be students of mine: Blake Johnson, who just finished his PhD in Great Plains history, and Dakota Goodhouse, who is closing in on his. Guys like this illustrate why it’s important we have a PhD program in History in North Dakota. First, because they show we can attract great scholarly talent. More so, however, because having advanced graduate scholarship going on here gives us a voice in our own history.
Sure, people from elsewhere study North Dakota topics, and it’s important to have them working here, so that we get a full and honest history. Peer review, checks and balances, you know. But if you get all your history done for you from elsewhere, then you will always be an intellectual and historical colony of someone else. We have to import avocados, because we can’t raise them here. History, we should grow a good part of it for ourselves.
Last year Blake won the Morrill Prize for graduate research in History at NDSU. This year he nominated Dakota for the prize, and he won it. I’m in excellent company.
As for our subject, climate change on the Great Plains—it is fraught with contention, which says a lot about the state of the country. As both a farmer and a historian, I can tell you every farmer or historian with his head on straight knows climate change is real and profound. People get distracted by the blame game, who’s responsible for climate change or not. That’s not our subject. We’re talking about the history, and it’s a long history, of people dealing with, perhaps even prospering by, directional climate change on the prairies.
For about four hundred years people here and abroad lived under the conditions of what has been known since 1939 as the Little Ice Age, a climatic era that concluded in about 1850. The Little Ice Age is the reason people called this the Great American Desert. Before 1850 the climate was severely cold, on average, and also significantly drier than it is today. This meant long, cold winters, but largely open, not much snow cover. A relatively stable climatic regime.
Stability, open winters—these are the conditions that enticed open-range cattlemen to believe they could winter cattle on the range without shelter or supplemental feed. They weren’t crazy, but their climatic intelligence was outdated, as the climate had begun to warm about 1850.
Warmer, that’s good, right? Well, no. Warmer also meant more humidity in the air, thus more snow that covered available forage, and a catastrophic increase in meteorological oscillation, violent extremes of weather. Think the disastrous winter of 1886-87, Charlie Russell and Waiting for a Chinook.
Warmer and wetter, that tipped things toward field agriculture instead of herding, but the factor of catastrophic oscillation, that was the rub. As I said, I’m not only a historian, I’m also a partner in a family farm in the middle of a five-year drought rivaling that of the 1930s. We need history not just for scholarly interest. We need it to figure out how to live in this place.
