December 4, 2003

Plains Folk: Southern Plains Future

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Historian Dan Flores quotes the English poet W.H. Auden: "I cannot see a plain without a shudder; ‘Oh God, please, please don’t ever make me live there’!"

Then he quotes Deborah Epstein Popper on the plains: "This is terrible country! . . . There is nothing here. . . . It shouldn’t be allowed to exist!"

These quotes are in a fascinating new book from the University of Oklahoma Press entitled The Future of the Southern Plains, edited by Sherry L. Smith. The authors are all academics, and they focus on the country south of Colorado-Kansas, and so readers in other parts of the plains may ask what this has to do with them. The answer is, plenty.

Elliott West, one of the country’s best western historians, leads off with an exercise in long memory that puts the present situation, which so many view as the end game, into context. People on the plains, going back to first exploitation of the Alibates flint quarries, always have found and exported products in demand by more numerous peoples elsewhere. As demands have changed, or resource bases have collapsed, they have gone on to new things.

"While outside support has been vital," West says, "Plains people, as always, have cobbled together possibilities to muddle through a difficult passage. . . . And surely it is not overly naïve to hope that the people of the Southern Plains will adapt once again . . . to make a reasonable living and even to enjoy occasional surges of prosperity."

Good context also comes from John Miller Morris, who takes up the current dominance of corporations in regional life. We forget, he says, that corporations from the beginnings of European settlement dominated life on the plains and that corporations sometimes are tools to achieve stability in family farms and businesses.

I find the essay by Yolanda Romero hopeful in tone, too. She treats the migration of Mexicanos into northwest Texas, praising their mettle as "pioneers." It may be that the children of northern Europeans are abandoning the plains, but others are eager to call them home. (On the northern plains we would point to growing reservation populations as evidence that those who wish to have the country indeed one day will inherit it.)

Most of the middle pieces of the book, though, are about failure. Irrigation districts throughout the region of the Ogallala Aquifer, we learn from John Opie, have failed to stem the decline in water tables. Major petroleum companies, Diana Davids Olien notes, have abandoned the Permian Basin, leaving it to a generation of independents who soon will give way to "depletionists" who will extract the last fossils of fuel. Jeff Roche offers a wonderful essay on the rise of conservative identity and politics in West Texas, diminished by a conclusion that indicates he regards this, too, as something of a failure.

It is Flores who ultimately provides us with a frank diagnosis by which we might think about doing more than just "cobbling together possibilities." He points out that generally, Americans today just don’t like the plains, whereas they enraptured early explorers. This is because in our relentless pursuit of gain we have made the plains ugly and boring. We killed off the wildlife and made our fields into factories. No wonder people leave, and no wonder the people of the plains have lost the confidence of the nation as stewards of the land.

Across the country a movement for prairie preservation and restoration is crystallizing. It proposes to make the plains beautiful again. The problem is this movement envisions a land without people. Unless people who wish to live on the plains can fashion a vision and a plan for a Great Plains that will be beautiful and transporting, unless they can reestablish the romance of the landscape, that other vision surely will prevail.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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