Synopses & Reviews
Looking over the vast open plains of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska, where one can travel miles without seeing a town or even a house, it is hard to imagine the crowded landscape of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In those days farmers, speculators, and town builders flooded the region, believing that rain would follow the plow and that the and#8220;Rainbeltand#8221; would become their agricultural Eden. It took a mere decade for drought and economic turmoil to drive these dreaming thousands from the land, turning farmland back to rangeland and reducing settlements to ghost towns.
David J. Wishartand#8217;s The Last Days of the Rainbelt is the sobering tale of the rapid rise and decline of the settlement of the western Great Plains. History finds its voice in interviews with elderly residents of the region by Civil Works Administration employees in 1933 and 1934. Evidence similarly emerges from land records, climate reports, census records, and diaries, as Wishart deftly tracks the expansion of westward settlement across the central plains and into the Rainbelt. Through an examination of migration patterns, land laws,and#160;town-building, and agricultural practices, Wishart re-creates the often-difficult life of settlers in a semiarid region who undertook the daunting task of adapting to a new environment. His book brings this era of American settlement and failure on the western Great Plains fully into the scope of historical memory.
Review
"Something of the magic of the Great West -- its big skies and great rivers and prairies filled with game -- can be found in Peter Pagnamenta's compelling narrative of the mania for the prairie grasslands that swept British aristocrats in the middle of the 19th century. Grand solitary travelers came first and their tales of adventure brought scores and then hundreds of others -- lords and younger sons needing a way to live and retired military officers and men hoping to get rich and sportsmen who wanted a grizzly and dreamers who imagined a ranching kingdom might end boredom once and for all. It's an extraordinary story, told in with the kind of energy that makes you want to drop everything and go." Tom Powers, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of The Killing of Crazy Horse
Review
and#8220;David Wishart has discovered a rich lode of pioneer settler interviews from eastern Colorado, which form the heart of the book. . . . [He] skillfully retells the story of environmental misunderstanding through the eyes of the settlers who lived it.and#8221;and#8212;John C. Hudson, professor of geography at Northwestern University and author of Across this Land: A Regional Geography of the United Statesand#160; and Canadaand#160;
Review
"Vivid... a constant delight. Mr. Pagnamenta tells this story with verve and style. His love of tales of derring-do on the prairie matches his subjects." Judith Flanders
Review
"[A] lost--and deeply weird--world...has been lovingly excavated and brought back to life." Wall Street Journal
Review
"Entertaining.... A deeply researched and finely delivered look at what can best be described as a counterintuitive slice of American history." Miranda Seymour New York Times Book Review
Review
"A parade of colourful personalities and richly detailed scenes which entertain and, cumulatively, expose the violence of cultural imperialism." Scott Martelle Washington Post
Review
"Lively and accessible... skewers the delusion [of romance and heroism] with wit and charm." Times Literary Supplement
Review
andquot;
The Last Days of the Rainbelt offers countless insights into frontier settlement.andquot;andmdash;
Environmental HistoryReview
"By combining previously overlooked archival material with an informed understanding of the region, Wishart makes an important time and place come alive."and#8212;James R. Shortridge, Kansas History
Review
andquot;Wishart has constructed an account that, page for page, may provide as good a portrait of the region as those produced by authors such as Walter Webb, Donald Worster, or Mari Sandoz. Thanks to scholars such as David Wishart, this volume also shows that the New Deal is the gift that keeps on giving.andquot;andmdash;Richard D. Loosbrock, Nebraska History
Synopsis
From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class.
Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.
In fascinating and often comic detail, the author shows how the British behaved—and what the fur traders, hunting guides, and ordinary Americans made of them—as they crossed the country to see the Indians, hunt buffalo, and eventually build cattle empires and buy up vast tracts of the West. But as British blue bloods became American landowners, they found themselves attacked and reviled as “land vultures” and accused of attempting a new colonization. In a final denouement, Congress moved against the foreigners and passed a law to stop them from buying land.
Synopsis
The extraordinary story of the British aristocracy's encounter with American frontier life in the nineteenth century.
About the Author
David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraskaandndash;Lincoln. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains and Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians and the author of An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, all available from the University of Nebraska Press.