Depending on who is telling it, the history of Euro-American farmers 
on the Great Plains has been a story of either agricultural triumph or 
ecological failure—an optimistic tale of taming nature for human 
purposes or a dire account of disrupting nature and suffering the 
environmental consequences.

    In On the Great Plains, author Geoff Cunfer poses an alternative 
scenario: that people were not the masters of nature on the Great 
Plains. Land use in America's vast interior prairies has stayed 
remarkably stable throughout the twentieth century, changing little 
as droughts came and went, as farmers shifted from horses to 
tractors, and as federal subsidies and fluctuating crop prices 
transformed the economics of farming. An equilibrium between 
natural and human forces emerged as farmers plowed and planted 
the same amount of cropland during most of this period, maintaining 
two-thirds of the Great Plains in unplowed, native vegetation.

    To support his theory, Cunfer looks at the entire Great Plains 
(450 counties in ten states), tapping historical agricultural census 
data paired with GIS mapping to illuminate land use on the Great 
Plains over 130 years. Coupled with several community and family 
case studies, this database allows Cunfer to reassess the interaction 
between farmers and nature in the Great Plains agricultural landscape.

_________________________________________________________

GEOFF CUNFER works in the department of history at the University 
of Saskatchewan in Canada. He is a former associate professor at the 
Center for Rural and Regional Studies at Southwest Minnesota State 
University in Marshall, Minnesota, and a former research associate at 
the University of Texas Population Research Center.


Number Twenty: Environmental History Series


What people are saying about this book

" . . . an important agricultural and environmental history of the Great 
Plains from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century. It is a 
complex story of adaptation and change. In contrast to most recent 
scholars who have political agendas and base their work more on 
ideology than research, Cunfer does not find individual, corporate, or 
governmental villains in the region's agricultural history. Precipitation, 
temperature, soils, and the prevailing winds determine what farmers 
have done and will do."—Canadian Journal of History, Fall 2007

" . . . Cunfer’s skillful use of new agricultural data and extremely 
readable prose will force environmental historians, agricultural 
historians, and historians of the American West to rethink once 
again the role played by non-human nature in the history of the 
Great Plains."—Western Historical Quarterly, Spring 2007

"Anyone interested in the history of the Great Plains, agriculture, and 
the environment should read this book. It is factually detailed at the 
county level, but clearly and directly written. This book is a major 
scholarly achievement. It will make a difference."—Canadian Journal 
of History, 2007

“This is an impressive book, the kind that comes along only once 
every decade or two.  It tackles a wide range of big issues, 
approaches those issues in innovative and original ways, and makes 
counter-intuitive arguments and suggestions that challenge widely 
held assumptions.  There is something here to provoke or inspire 
almost everyone.  More suggestive than definitive, as is almost 
inevitable in a book of this scope, On the Great Plains should be a 
gold mine of doctoral dissertation ideas.  Almost every chapter begs 
for a book-length treatment of its own.”—Agricultural History, Spring 
2007

“It deserves to be near the top of a short list of essential works on the 
Great Plains and has important implications for readers interested in 
other areas of environmental and agricultural history as well.”
—Agricultural History, Spring 2007

". . . a real and substantive work that will be on the bookshelves of 
every scholar of Texas history and prehistory for years to come."
—Southern Historical Quarterly, April 2006

". . . will make an important contribution to environmental studies of 
the Great Plains, and more generally it should make a splash among 
environmental historians of the United States."—Elliott West, 
University of Arkansas, and author, The Contested Plains

"Environmental histories of the Great Plains often have a glaze of 
ideology. Geoff Cunfer's account has the texture and grain of what 
actually happened, and it's a damn good read, too."—Alfred W. 
Crosby, professor emeritus, University of Texas at Austin.