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The pioneer Western artist George Catlin once described the country between the Mississippi River and the Rockies as "a place where the mind could think volumes." In that single phrase Catlin captured something essential about the relationship between space and the human imagination. Distinguished American historian Elliott West extends that insight when he writes, "Places are defined in part when people infuse them with imagination."
Modern sensibility often connects what Western historian William Goetzmann calls "the West of the imagination" to the vertical thrust of the Rockies. Marlboro Country is always set in the mountain West. But both Catlin and West remind us that imagination and human creativity found (and continue to find) far more room to stretch and expand on the grassland table that rests on a tilt from Kansas and Nebraska to the Front Range. At various times humankind has called that expansive country a garden and a desert, the promised land and a wasteland. We now call this part of North America the "Great Plains" recognizing its sweep and power, its offer of possibility and its guarantee to humble human pride.
Walt Whitman, who crossed the plains by rail to Denver in 1879, declared this the most clearly American of all landscapes. Ever alert to the relationship between landscape and the power of words, Whitman called on writers and poets to fashion a new vocabulary—one that could match the promise of the plains. Catlin, Whitman, West, and a whole host of plains explainers know that to recount the stories of the Great Plains is to tell the fundamental American story. The Contested Plains takes one moment in the long history of the plains and makes that moment a revelation of human struggle, adversity, and the will to survive.
Conventional wisdom has it that the authentic history of North America's interior province be gins when Europeans—first the Spanish, and then in succession French, English, and Anglo-American newcomers—ventured into the sea of grass, the place where Spanish adventurer Pedro de Castaneda felt "surrounded by the sky." That traditional recitation makes its irresistible narrative way from explorers, fur traders, and buffalo hunters to railroad builders, land speculators, and sod-house farmers.
But what of those countless generations of native people who imagined the plains as their home? Most often they are relegated to some timeless, unchanging category called "pre-history" or brought on stage to play out futile acts of resistance against the inevitablities of democracy and the steam engine.
The notion that this heart of the continent was in fact imagined and shaped into being by the rival visions of Indians, goldminers, tramps, and teamsters may seem improbable. But as Elliott West explains in this splendid book, it was precisely those people and their dreams and nightmares that are at the heart of the country. West devotes the first of the book's three sections to a sensitive re-creation of the ways successive waves of plains Indians shaped their lives to what seemed the energy of the country. Using the Cheyenne people as his exemplar, West shows how the "called out people" envisioned themselves in a world of the horse and the buffalo— a world that seemed to promise endless wealth and the good life.
This part of the plains story is all too easily reduced to a version of Eden before the Fall. Many scholars have idealized Sioux or Cheyenne life, making the horse, the buffalo, and the tipi symbols of a paradise in the grasslands. West has none of that; The Contested Plains is no simple-minded elegy for a lost Indian golden age. West's Indians are fully human, suffering from the common sins of pride and arrogance. Without being fully aware of it, the Cheyennes and their neighbors violated Liebig's Law—the iron rule declaring that no organism, whether individual or social, can safely expand beyond the minimum availability of essential re sources. And as West carefully explains, the Cheyennes and other plains peoples succumbed to the temptation to grow beyond the limits of wood and water, pasture and shelter. That reaching beyond the limits came at the very time when drought and the sudden presence of thousands of hungry outsiders transformed the plains from a place of bounty to a starving ground.
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