A half-century ago—actually, a little more than that—I charted my course as a professional historian by choosing to specialize in Western Americana. Keep in mind, I was studying at a western land grant university that had not completely shed its skin as a cow college. When my peers and I were asked what field we were working in, we would say, “Cowboys and Indians.” Over time I focused more particularly on the Great Plains, home of both my academic and my agricultural interests, but also blew up the focus by cultivating offshore expertise in the temperate grasslands of other countries and continents. Without ever pulling up my roots on the prairies, where, I hope, my continuing engagement is evident as I talk with you here every week. And I thank you for the conversation.
Now, having settled into the determination to write a new history of the Great Plains, to tell their story for the 21st Century, I realize that the trajectory of this half-century career I am talking about has to do with making good on the original promise, in ways I could not have imagined originally. There are whole new topics on the table, and the old ones, they have many layers of complexity, encasing the original affections that drew me. I am in the process now of revisiting the old subjects, cowboys and Indians and all, questioning, affirming, revising, and often, tearing down for a rebuild. The chapter before me now is the range cattle industry, which I am slated to discuss in a few days at a meeting of the Agricultural History Society in Atlanta. Is there anything new to say about this?
I think so. First, despite the forests felled to publish books on the cattle industry of the plains, there are great bodies of material yet to be brought into the story. In my old home country of western Kansas, I have discovered the existence of a peculiar institution of the 1880s known as the cattle pool. The Smoky Hill Pool and others functioned just beyond the reach of agricultural settlement—my people, in other words; they hired rangers, put up fences, and resolved to hold the land against the farmers. They failed, but the manner of their failure is instructive.
Here in Dakota Territory, the untold story is sheep. Sheep arrived as soon as or earlier than cattle. When the NP Railroad arrived, vast flocks were shipped in and turned out under care of farm boys hired to stay with them in the unsettled wilds of Emmons or Dunn County. There are fabulous stories of nimble shepherds driving flocks on the Missouri River ice to ship out of Bismarck, a spectacle it makes my head spin to imagine. Then, with the collapse of the open range cattle industry in the late 1880s, the wooly secret of our northern prairies is that they were not cattle country at all; the country was largely given over to sheep.
Then, it is fun to bring crazy ideas to bear in rethinking this experience. Looking at our range cattle industry from a global standpoint, it’s obviously a manifestation of extensive pastoralism in the colonization of the great temperate grasslands of the world. In each such case there emerged a trinity of agency; humankind was only a part of the operation. Think cowboys, longhorns, and mustangs. Think Scottish shepherds, Merino sheep, and collie dogs. Hands, hooves, and paws, all dependent on one another.
Before I depart for Atlanta, I need to select an appropriate hat from my rack. Cowboy culture has always incorporated a good amount of symbolic interaction, and so headgear is important. Should it be an Australian Akubra? Or one of the Stetsons, and if so, should it be the Boss of the Plains, the open-crown favorite of early Texas cowboys, or a slouchy hat blocked campaign style, in the fashion of the northern ranges? There’s only room for one in my suitcase.
