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may consult R. Douglas Hurt’s Indian Agriculture in America (1987) for regional content.

      The history of the range cattle industry was shaken by Robert R. Dykstra’s revisionist bolt, The Cattle Towns (1968), but in the long run, two works by historical geographer Terry G. Jordan do more to deepen our understanding of the business: Trails to Texas (1981) and North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers (1993). It falls to James E. Sherow in The Chisholm Trail (2018) to remind us there is still path-breaking work to do along this trail.

      On homesteading and settlement, Gilbert C. Fite’s The Farmer’s Frontier (1966) is another work that holds up well as a general survey. Skipping forward to the most current work on the subject, the research in progress on homesteading coming from Richard Edwards’s team at the University of Nebraska, of which Homesteading the Plains is first fruit (Edwards 2017), is an exciting revision of our knowledge of settlement. The best focused lines of work on a particular subregion of the Great Plains (all of which concentrate on wheat) are those of James C. Malin on the Golden Belt of Kansas (1944); Hiram Drache on the Red River Valley of the North (1964, 1970); and Craig Miner on western Kansas (1986, 1998, 2006). David Moon’s The American Steppes (2020) details the Russian contributions to Great Plains development in fascinating fashion. For an efflorescence in the commodity culture of wheat, see the two books by Thomas D. Isern on wheat harvesting (1981, 1990).

      The history of agricultural research and technology has had difficulty breaking free of the land-grant establishment and generating fearless interpretation specific to the region, but there is thoughtful work around the subjects of water and irrigation, beginning with Donald E. Green’s Land of the Underground Rain (1973). James Earl Sherow’s Watering the Valley (1990) focuses on the Arkansas River Valley, while John Opie’s Ogallala (2000) treats the deteriorating situation of the High Plains region underlain by the Ogallala Aquifer. David Vail’s Chemical Lands (2018) is a disturbing work talking about the elephant in the room of prairie farming since World War II: chemical agriculture.

      “Chestnut” being an ill-fitting metaphor for the plains, we may say the history of agrarian politics since Buck and Hicks has been the prairie turnip of regional agricultural history. Around the subjects of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, and downstream from Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955), taking Hofstadter to task have been a score or more historians, including ones mentioned in this chapter: Walter T.K. Nugent (2013 [1963]), Norman Pollack (1962), and Lawrence Goodwyn (1976). The last of these, by going beyond the defense of Populism to explicate its “movement culture,” seems most salient. On the Nonpartisan League, the old standard by Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire (1955), remains valuable, but it is substantially supplanted by the more sophisticated analysis offered by Michael J. Lansing in Insurgent Democracy (2015).

Glenda Riley’s The Female Frontier (1989) liberates regional scholarship on gender, farm women, and families from the stays of Webb’s environmental determinism, only to subject it to the doctrine of separate spheres. Thankfully, a cohort of feminist scholars has enlarged both the historical sphere of women’s lives on the plains and our scholarly understanding of them. Outstanding among these are Katherine Jellison in Entitled to Power (1993), whose subjects engage technology beyond the shelterbelts; Mary Neth in Preserving the Family Farm (1995), who exposes the ambivalence of liberating technologies that actually diminished women’s status; and Deborah Fitzgerald, whose Every Farm a Factory (2003) traces the imperilment of the very ideal of the family farm by modernizing technologies and values. For a genuine sense of gender roles on farms in one quarter of the plains, no one surpasses Paula M. Nelson in her two books on West River South Dakota: After the West Was Won (1986) and The Prairie Winnows out Its Own (1986).

      Another nexus of engaging scholarship is the Dust Bowl and attendant issues of land use, social viability, and soil conservation. Around 1980 emerged three quite different histories of the Dust Bowl: the most acclaimed work, Don Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979), which chalks up the environmental catastrophe to capitalist excess and situates farmers as its dupes; Paul Bonnifield’s The Dust Bowl (1979), which valorizes those Dust Bowl denizens who persisted at the eroding grassroots of the region; and R. Douglas Hurt’s The Dust Bowl (1981), which provides a sober, multi-causal analysis of the phenomenon. Fast-forward a quarter-century and Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains (2005), calls all previous analyses into question by documenting the persistence of grassland in the Great Plains landscape, arguing for the historic stability of Great Plains agriculture, and questioning assumptions of human agency lurking behind the black clouds of the 1930s.

      Despite the importance of agriculture to the Great Plains and their historical narrative, there is no overall, synthetic consolidation of historical scholarship on regional agriculture to serve as platform for a new generation of scholarship.

      Author Query Sheetc06: The Great PlainsQuery No Page No Author QueryAQ1 81 Does the original text spell ‘drouth’ or should this be changed to ‘drought’?

Chapter 7 POST-CIVIL WAR SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE

       Jeannie Whayne

      The survival of the plantation system and the emergence of sharecropping are the most important economic factors effecting the South’s agricultural sector in the post-Civil War period. Not only did the continuance of plantation agriculture impact African American freedmen, but it also proved detrimental to the economic future of South as a whole. As the national Republican Party turned its attention away from the process of Reconstruction in the South and toward its second industrial revolution, they left freedmen at the mercy of the very southern elite that had taken the South into rebellion and controlled the region’s Democratic Party apparatus. It also failed to promote the interests of non-plantation sector white farmers and hobbled planters with an institution—the plantation—that remained locked in the past. Three important and consistent themes run through the history of southern agriculture after the Civil War: race and the transformation of the labor system, from slavery to sharecropping to wage labor; environmental concerns, some of them of the South’s own making; and the growing role of the federal government, especially through the activities of the Cooperative Extension Service.

      The return of the Confederate elite to power and the restoration of plantation agriculture had their origins in federal policies implemented in captured southern territory during the Civil War. Federal policies were designed to accomplish two things: put self-freed people to work and salvage the cotton economy. Although the idea of furnishing freedmen with “40 acres and a mule” resonated with a few abolitionists and military commanders, northern financiers with an interest in the cotton market feared that an independent yeomanry of freed African Americans would not sustain the cotton economy, and the federal government balked at the notion that property could be seized from citizens. Thus, the federal government sponsored a contract labor system during and immediately following the war, and a new agency created in 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau—attempted to represent their interests by monitoring contracts. But Freedmen’s Bureau officials represented the interests of freedmen at their own peril, and many were complicit in practices that returned freedmen to another kind of slavery (Rose 1964; Daniel 1972; Foner 1988 ; Hahn 2003).

However, neither planters nor freedmen were satisfied with the contract labor system. After a spike in the market price of cotton right after the war, the prices declined, leaving planters with too little cash to pay wages. Freed-people, moreover, understandably resented the necessity of working gang labor, which was too reminiscent of slavery. The sharecropping system allowed them to move away from the old slave quarters and onto 25–30-acre parcels. Historians Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch argue that the arrangement might have been beneficial to freed-people but for the emergence of the commissary system (Ransom and Sutch 1977). Sharecroppers, paid only when the crop was harvested, needed to feed and clothe themselves in the period between harvests and thus found it necessary to secure “advances” from a merchant and, increasingly, from plantation commissaries. Southern legislatures enacted a series

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