Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

 Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

 6B:G>86CA6C96C9A>;:H:G>:Hҍ Wayne Franklin, series editor

 Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction Matthew J. C. Cella

foreword by Wayne Franklin

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2010 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by Sara T. Sauers No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cella, Matthew J. C., 1974– Bad Land pastoralism in Great Plains fiction / Matthew J. C. Cella; foreword by Wayne Franklin. p. cm.—(American land and life series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-907-0 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-58729-907-0 (pbk.) 1. American fiction—Great Plains—History and criticism. 2. Pastoral literature, American—History and criticism. 3. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Great Plains—In literature. I. Franklin, Wayne. II. Title. ps274.c45 2010 813.009’3278—dc21 2010005241

This book is dedicated to my wife and best friend, Laurie, and to our children, Cody and Lily

Contents

Foreword by Wayne Franklin ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Biocultural Change and Literary Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction 1

1 (Un)settling the Indi a n W ilder ness Tribal Pastoralism in Cooper’s The Prairie and Welch’s Fools Crow 15 2 Pastor a lism a nd Enclosur e Marriage and Illegitimate Children on the Range-Farm Frontier in Eaton’s Cattle and Richter’s Sea of Grass 55 3 H a r monious Fields a nd W ild Pr a ir ies Transcendental Pastoralism in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels 99 4 Patches of Gr een a nd Fields of Dust Dust Bowl Pastoralism in Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’s The Golden Bowl 135 5 Hea ling the Wounds of History Buffalo Commons Pastoralism in Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole and King’s Truth and Bright Water 171 Epilogue: Pastoral Art and the Beautiful 199 Notes 203 Bibliography 215 Index 227

Foreword Wayne Franklin

Stories work on us. One of the oldest tales I remember hearing as a boy was a prairie tragedy recalled from the youth of one of my relatives. Jim Shattuck had been born in New York’s Mohawk Valley in the 1880s, but did not stay there long. In the next decade his parents, Nettie and George, auctioned off most of their worldly goods and took their young son to homestead in extreme northwestern Kansas. They were aiming for the new settlement of Bird City, along the Nebraska and Colorado borders. Although they both seem to have worked in mills in the Mohawk Valley, and conceivably met each other there, both of Jim’s parents had deep roots in the countryside. Nettie would have recollected the hardscrabble farm in Westford, an upland town south of the Mohawk in Otsego County, where she had been born and where her father, James Holmes, had divided his time between small-scale agriculture and the manual trade of carpentry. Holmes, whose story I told some years ago in A Rural Carpenter’s World, had never earned much money building houses or making furniture, yet he did not follow other Westford carpenters to the developing cities in the nearby region, cities like the railroad center of Oneonta, when the rural population plummeted. He cast his lot with the neighbors who also stayed behind. He was to collapse and die one Sunday morning in 1895 while tending his cow in the small barn across the road from his house. His had been a life grounded on something more substantial than the bottom line. George Shattuck’s family had farmed, too, not in Otsego but in the Saratoga County town of Galway, which straddles the highlands between the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. His paternal grandfather Calvin was born in

western Massachusetts just after the Revolution and migrated in his young adulthood to Galway, where he married and raised a family. Although by 1850 Calvin Shattuck was running a clothier’s shop in the village of Galway, he probably had owned a farm earlier in life. Certainly his son Henry, born in 1820, settled down to farming in West Galway with his wife Julia and did reasonably well at it. They had several children, starting with a daughter named Lydia in 1851 and then George in 1853. The West Galway area at that time was sprinkled with Henry’s relatives. A town map from right after the Civil War shows several Shattuck farmsteads, including what appears to have been Henry and Lydia’s, located at the extreme western edge of the town under the steep, foreboding front of Kayaderosseras Mountain. Here, as in Nettie’s hometown of Westford, which was similarly dotted with Holmeses, people often lived close to other family members who could help out when they needed assistance. In what is a common rural pattern, their neighbors were often their kin. Looking at that old map, one might think that Galway offered George Shattuck a comforting, supportive environment. But many of his family members did not find that to be so in what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were just naming “The Gilded Age.” George and Nettie were married and set up housekeeping in the hamlet of West Galway in 1882, and the next year their son Jim was born there. Galway was just a stopping point for them, however, not a home. Already, George’s sister Delia, who married young, had spent some time in central Michigan with her husband, Delavan Stockley, and came back to fill her brother’s ears with stories of what was happening in the new states and territories far to the west. Soon the Stockleys would leave Galway once more, this time for Kansas, taking Delia’s now widowed father Henry with them. It was only a matter of time before George and Nettie would decide to risk emigrating themselves. Once on the plains in 1886, the couple at least had the benefit of kin nearby. Setting up a household in recently founded Cheyenne County, Kansas, in the 1880s nonetheless was challenging. There was virtually no timber in this part of Kansas, so for farm families such as the Shattucks underground “dugouts” and sod houses were common expedients. But the place did have a kind of showy promise. Bird City had been laid out by the Northwestern Land Cattle Company in the mid 1880s. (It was named not for any peculiar avian wealth, but rather for Benjamin Bird, the company’s president, who was not born here, did not die here, and never even visited the town.) The xҍ foreword

nearby soil was rich enough to support many grain crops as long as rainfall was adequate, and once farmers began arriving and breaking the sod, things seemed promising. The Kansas State Board of Agriculture, wishing to encourage fresh migration to the state, published a promotional pamphlet— in English, German, Swedish, and Danish—in 1883 and 1884. Maybe the Stockleys sent a copy of that pamphlet to George and Nettie. Probably they wrote about Bird City and its opportunities in letters dispatched to West Galway. The years 1882–1886 were prosperous ones for Kansas farmers, and the most recent severe drought had occurred long before, in 1860. Because Delia and Delavan Stockley would have much to boast about, George and Nettie probably approached their big move west as an adventure. It certainly seemed like that to young Jim at the time. He had just turned four when, the next spring, he came out of the family’s makeshift sod home and saw wildflowers blooming on its earthen roof. He was so taken with the discovery that he ran inside to pull his mother out by her hand and share it with her. It seemed to promise a blooming future, the perfect convergence of human desire and natural possibility. In reality, that was a rare pastoral moment in a narrative that soon turned grim. The rain gave out within a year or two, so that those rooftop flowers withered—as did the crops George Shattuck had managed to plant. He and Nettie had some money saved up, so they persisted on their farm until 1895, but that was about it. Deciding they had had enough, they returned to the Mohawk Valley. Jim was thirteen at the time. The failure in Kansas was to cast a long shadow over his spirit. He always acted as if he had little claim on life. Just being alive was enough. This was not just a personal defeat. It represented the break-up of the larger family. Delavan Stockley appears to have done well for himself in Bird City, where he owned a butcher shop by 1895 and doubtless had a timber house built for Delia and their children. Farms can die quickly, but the towns that serve as their go-betweens with the wider economic world tend to hang on longer. Farmers inherit the dust, but the banks in town get to keep the land until the next rainy season allows them to sell it again. Probably George and Nettie got nothing for their farm—probably they simply abandoned it. When things turned bad in Bird City, however, the Stockleys managed to sell out and move on. They show up next in Longmont, Colorado, just north of Denver, where Delavan told the census taker in 1900, when asked to declare his occupation, that he was a “capitalist.” Their prosperity allowed them foreword ҏ xi

to take old Henry Shattuck with them. He lingered for a few more years, finally returning to Galway in a casket in 1906. The last piece of ground he owned no doubt was the cemetery plot next to the one where he had buried his wife in 1881. George and Nettie Shattuck, after coming back to New York in 1896, may have worked in the mills again, although eventually they acquired or more likely rented an old farm. Probably young Jim’s experience resembled that of my own grandfather, who from the time he was seven until he married at the age of twenty-two had lived on twelve different farms rented by his parents. By 1920, though, he and his wife Pearl—she was my great aunt—were farming on their own in the hill town of Decatur, near Westford. Living with them were George and Nettie and Jim’s young twin brothers, John and Leroy. Both the boys and George were farm laborers, employed on Jim’s acreage. Jim built a modest dairy herd in these years, a hopeful venture, but in the later 1920s the animals were infected with tuberculosis and, at the order of the state, put down and buried on the spot. That wiped out the farm. In 1930, Jim and Pearl were living next door to her parents in the nearby village of Worcester. They paid eight dollars per month to rent their small house and Jim was working as a painter in a small manufacturing plant nearby. His last job, years later, was as a sexton in a Methodist church. Adversity made him devout, if nothing else. As Jim got older, the Kansas odyssey was the one experience he spoke about with an almost ritualistic insistence. It became hard, with the passing of years, to know whether this single narrative mattered more than any other to him, or it was simply the only one his failing mind could still comprehend. Whenever my family visited Jim he would eventually start rehearsing the Kansas tale. It was his epic, the explanation of who he was and what had made him that. The withered flowers on that sod house roof were the sign of his identity. That image was the only profit his family had reaped in Kansas. In his fine exploration of Great Plains fiction, Matthew Cella examines the way literary works codify and help institutionalize the values of a culture. In the United States, the emigrant tale is a staple myth. Much of what Cella studies, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, embodies that myth. It springs from the hope that life can take a turn for the better, that a person down on her luck can change her fate by xiiҍ foreword

changing her location. This is one of the deep stories of American culture. It goes all the way back to Jamestown and Plymouth—from which, passing through the villages of Jim Shattuck’s Mohawk Valley, it moved west to such places as Michigan or Kansas. In a susceptible reader, such a powerful story serves as shorthand for the great national longing for renewal, for a fresh start and a new day, whether in 1607 or 1886 or 2010. It also becomes a kind of wishful autobiography. The story opens up and takes a reader inside. It is not just a narrative—it is a promise, even a prophecy. Cella deals with more finished stories here than the one I remember Jim Shattuck telling. In the process, though, he uncovers the same deep human truth. If I had asked Jim whether he understood exactly what “Bad Land Pastoral” was, I’m pretty sure that he would have shaken his head. But if he listened to Cooper (whose Prairie he owned and probably read) or Cather or even more recent writers like James Welch, he would have understood. For the stories in their books are his. The novels have their moments of pastoral wonder, much as Jim’s tale of the flower-strewn roof surprises with its sense of nature crowning human hope. But the novels end, often enough, with a sense of let-down and disillusion. It isn’t so much that the land was bad, though—it was that we thought it something other than it was, and on the basis of that misperception we set out on journeys that were bound to turn out poorly. Having to go back home, after all, crestfallen and out-of-cash and bearing a story other than the one we had hoped to recite, is the worst sort of American fate. But this is not the end point of Cella’s argument. What he most wants us to see is that the tales we tell determine the world’s fate as well as our own. A better story is not one that brings bad designs to a good end. It is one that helps us to listen, to understand, to frame better hopes to begin with. At this critical moment in human history, as we labor under the threat of an environmental catastrophe of our own creation, we desperately need the will to find new stories for ourselves. By reading the old stories so well, Matthew Cella helps us to imagine what those new ones might be.

foreword ҏ xiii

Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of a long literary journey through the American West that I began while at the University of Connecticut; I owe much to the English Department faculty there as well as a very supportive network of friends and colleagues. I would particularly like to thank Robert Tilton, who, from the beginning, asked all the right questions that guided the evolution of this project. He also directed me toward Native American literature and the American historical romance, two fields of inquiry that have informed my research and teaching ever since. I would also like to express my gratitude to Veronica Makowsky, who has consistently challenged me to push my ideas further and who has influenced my development as a scholar through her meticulous attention to detail as the editor of both my writing and the journal MELUS. I want to also thank John Gatta, whose feedback in the early stages of this project encouraged me to ground my discussion in the ground itself, to let the land tell its part of the story. I need to especially thank Wayne Franklin, who was very supportive of my project and who offered advice and encouragement as I revised the book for publication. I am a great admirer of the American Land and Life series and am honored that this book is a part of it. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support of my whole family, though I want to particularly thank my wife, Laurie, who always believed.

 Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

 Introduction Biocultural Change and Literary Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Pastoral Conversion and the Community Concept Within the realm of literary studies, the word pastoral is likely to conjure up a series of related experiences revolving around the process of escaping: retreat, renew, refresh, and—sometimes—return. Whether it is Huck Finn “lighting out for the territories” of the trans-Mississippi west, Nick Adams fishing the Two Hearted River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or Jim Burden strolling the shaggy prairies beyond the town limits of Blackhawk, Nebraska, conventional pastorals in the North American tradition entail removal from a restrictive social community and a subsequent entry into an idealized rural sanctuary. In this sense, conventional pastoralism is tinged with a strain of misanthropy as it places nature and culture in an oppositional relationship in which the former is favored over the latter. The pastoral remove is almost always temporary and fleeting, a dream or fantasy with little long-term applicability in the “real” world (except, of course, if you are a shepherd!). A major contention of this book, however, is that pastoral experience, no matter how fleeting, can translate into pastoral practice. This is to say that literary pastoralism has the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on

stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment. A more mature, ecocentric pastoralism demands a dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature. This more advanced pastoralism moves beyond fantasy and dream; instead, the pastoral event—the human encounter with nature in myriad forms—becomes the basis for a long-term relationship, a kind of conversion experience that solidifies the convert’s ethical obligation to the place(s) she inhabits. Take, for example, the case of Frederick Philip Grove’s Abe Spaulding, the protagonist of Fruits of the Earth (1933). Abe is a prototypical prairie pioneer who is determined to craft an agricultural empire out of the North American grasslands. Early on in the novel, Grove informs the reader that Abe is a man of “economic vision” who is “possessed by ‘land-hunger’ ” and who “dreams of a time when he would buy up the abandoned farms from which all buildings have been removed” (12). This dream of development consumes him to the point at which he begins to lose touch with his family and becomes emotionally distant from his wife—even though his initial ambition was rooted in a desire of building a comfortable home for her. Through cunning, manipulation, and hard work, Abe achieves his empire and even enlists his children in the work of the farm. Around the midpoint of the novel, Abe’s youngest son and protégé, Charlie, is killed when he is crushed beneath the wheel of the wagon he is using to deliver his father’s grain to town. Charlie’s death is precipitated by his father’s haste to get the grain to market, and the fatal accident thus forces Abe to confront his monomaniacal pursuit of a financially successful empire of wheat and subsequently instills in him a desire for escape. It is after his son is killed that Abe undergoes a sea change, as the novel transitions from a focus on his selfish ambition to conquer all that he surveys to a chronicle of his steady awakening to his place within a broader matrix of human and nonhuman communities. This awakening is manifest most profoundly in the opening chapter of the novel’s second half, where Abe takes stock after Charlie’s death and reorients himself to the farm he inhabits. Rather than seeing “the prairie only as a page to write the story of his life upon,” he instead reads the stories that have already been written on the landscape (173); that is, Abe provides what William Least Heat-Moon calls a deep map of his farmland, imagining its deep geological past and its former human and nonhuman inhabitants. He thereby begins to see his work as part of an ongoing exchange between the natural environment and 2ҍ introduction

its human inhabitants. This deep mapping reveals to Abe the “mysteries of cosmic change” that demonstrate how he and his farm are mere interlopers in a great natural cycle of life and death. It is with this awareness that Abe reassesses his status as conqueror and moves toward a commitment to good citizenship. Grove explains: “[Abe] was changing his aim; that aim was now to live on, not in a material sense, through his economic achievement, but in what he did for the district and municipality” (174). While I do not want to overstate Abe’s conversion to ecological consciousness, what is significant here is that the accident that claims the life of his son forces upon him a process of reorientation that anticipates what Aldo Leopold famously calls for in his environmental manifesto, “The Land Ethic,” as he transitions from a “conqueror of the land-community to [a] plain member and citizen of it” (240). To acknowledge the limitations and costs of a purely economic engagement with the land may not necessarily lead toward an ethical treatment of the land-community, but it is a vital and necessary first step. Abe’s awakening allows him to locate a more nuanced and balanced language with which to converse with the natural world. His commitment to what Leopold calls the “community concept,” rather than his egocentric ambition, is confirmed at the end of the novel when, after repeatedly denying requests to run for political office, he steps up as a leader within his district and takes it upon himself to protect the community against a gang of ruffians who have been vandalizing the neighborhood. Abe’s pastoral conversion thus has power beyond the moment of awakening, altering his very way of being in the world. This process of calibration, as it is potently and powerfully dramatized in the literature of the Great Plains, is the subject of this book. I examine fictional narratives that chronicle the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains and that chart the shifting meaning of land use in the region. I explore literary treatments of a chronological succession of abrupt cultural transitions on the Great Plains, from the Euroamerican conquest of the “Indian wilderness” in the nineteenth century to the Buffalo Commons phenomenon in the twentieth. Ultimately, this study traces a strain of what I call bad land pastoralism, a persistent effort to both confront and transcend the losses accrued during the ongoing attempt to permanently inhabit a bioregion defined by motion and transience. Furthermore, I emphasize the social and ecological function of pastoral experience within the fiction of the Great Plains, which often features characters who undergo an Abe-like initiation introduction ҏ 3

into pastoral consciousness and move toward a more complex, multidimensional relationship with the land-community. This movement takes on epic status within this fiction primarily because the nature and history of the region are so volatile. The Great Plains presents a particularly interesting focus for an examination of the social and ecological benefits of literary pastoralism, especially as the bioregion has long been described as decidedly anti-pastoral. Geographically, the Great Plains is an immense region. By most accounts, it includes the short-, mixed-, and tallgrass prairies that extend west from the 98th meridian and the Canadian Shield to the Rocky Mountains. These prairies run north from the Texas Panhandle to an arc of land in the southern sections of the Canadian Prairie Provinces, and encompass large portions of ten states and three provinces: North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. There are subregions and diverse ecological niches within the area traditionally defined as the Great Plains: aspen parklands flank the grasslands in Canada; riparian forests abound throughout the Plains; and small mountain ranges like the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Wichita Mountains in Kansas, and the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan provide patches of forested refugia with distinct ecosystems. However, what by and large define the Great Plains as a bioregion, particularly within the North American imagination, are its relatively ubiquitous characteristics: flatness, treelessness, and aridity. Despite its seeming topographical monotony, the grasslands of North America, prior to Euroamerican settlement, embodied “one of the richest ecosystems ever to grace the earth” (Licht 2). The transition from rich ecosystem to the world’s breadbasket, with its patchwork of monocultural fields, defines the bioregion’s postcolonization condition. Diane Dufva Quantic identifies the foundational narrative of Plains literature as “the land’s transformation from wilderness space to usable place” (“The Midwest and the Great Plains” 641). Certainly, the relatively quick transformation of the wild North American grassland into celebrated grain country is in many ways the quintessential story of the region. The struggle to “tame” the arid land of the Great Plains, to settle a land so seemingly inhospitable to Euroamerican modes of emplacement, provides the basis for a number of celebrated literary narratives about the region, many of which were written between World Wars I and II. Novels like Fruits of the Earth and O. E. Rölvaag’s Dakota trilogy (1927–1931) 4ҍ introduction

focus on the human drama implicit in putting down roots in rough terrain; they codify paradigms of land use and cultivation in the region. These homesteading narratives, however, do not tell the full story of land use in the region. Buried under the surface of these pioneer epics is the wreckage of a pre-existing biocultural landscape that serves as a counterforce to the dominant narrative: descriptions of scattered buffalo skulls, Native burial grounds (like Per Hansa’s Indian Hill in Giants in the Earth), and fictional towns like Cather’s Blackhawk cannot help but reveal another version of the homesteading story. For the Plains tribes who inhabited them long before the Euroamericans arrived, the interior grasslands were not a wilderness or blank canvas at all, nor were they without use value. As the homeland for numerous nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, the Great Plains were already civilized and in use for hunting, village sites, and, for some tribes, mixed farming practices. In other words, what the Euroamericans, by most accounts, saw as a blank and useless slate, to be either improved or outright dismissed, the tribes of the Plains accepted as home; thus, before the Euroamericans even arrived in the region, the grasslands were already a storied, meaningful, and therefore valued biocultural landscape. From this perspective, the agricultural development of the region by immigrants and Euroamerican settlers enacts a process of erasure and removal. The legacy of Plains homesteading is also complicated by what followed the years of prosperity after World War I. With the devastation of the Dust Bowl as a touchstone, environmental historians, land-use planners, and scientists, particularly in the past few decades, have recast the cultivation of the Great Plains as “the largest, longest-running environmental miscalculation” in North American history (Matthews 14). In other words, the creation of “usable place[s]”—like farms and ranches—from the supposed raw material of the grassland wilderness is now more widely regarded as abuse rather than use. Richard Manning perhaps best documents this change of heart toward the Euroamerican settlement of the Great Plains. He argues that the eradication of the native flora and fauna of the prairies is largely the result of the conquest-driven mentality of what he calls “plow culture”: the 150-year “assault on [the grassland’s] whole” signifies a lack of understanding about the complex and dynamic nature of the grassland ecosystem (2). Even the environmental movement has primarily been a “mountain-and-forest movement,” for the most part ignoring the crisis on the Plains (6). Manning is joined by Dan Flores, Wes Jackson, Phillip Burgess, and Donald Worster, introduction ҏ 5

among others, in calling for an intellectual and imaginative reorientation toward the bioregion with the hope that the damage done by centuries of (agri)cultural conquest can be reversed.1 The disruption of Indian Country and the catastrophic event of the Dust Bowl provide just two examples of how the Plains biocultural landscape has been defined by disruption and change. In focusing on meditations about these changes as expressed in fictional narratives, I provide a literary history of the shifting shape of this landscape. Insofar as the novels I look at dramatize the effect of these changes on both the landscape and its inhabitants, both natives and newcomers, they offer an interesting and important subject through which to explore the conflation of land use, ecohistorical change, and the slow process of locating communities on the Plains. As John Price acknowledges, one must consult the “map of words” sketched out by those writers who have probed the contours—both natural and cultural—of the Great Plains to get a full understanding of the life of the place; a topographical or geopolitical map of the region simply does not tell the whole story (13). It is through consulting the map of words that a more nuanced reading of the biocultural landscape of the Great Plains is possible.

Multidimensional Land Use and Pastoral Discourse For economists and land-use planners, use is principally a socioeconomic term, connected with a litany of statistics like population density, soil distribution, commercial yields of grain or meat, market values, and so on. As Williams and Diebel document in “Economic Value of the Prairie,” the “use value” of the prairies as a land space derives from both consumptive (grazing, farming, and hunting) and nonconsumptive (recreation and education) uses (25–26). The use-value of any land space is determined by humanity’s economic engagement with the physical environment and is measured by how the land meets or otherwise fulfills “human wants or desires” (19). While more difficult to measure, the land-community also possesses “nonuse values”: Existence and option Aesthetics Cultural-historical and sociological significance Ecological or biological mechanisms Biological diversity (26) 6ҍ introduction

These benefits are connected to the intrinsic value of the physical environment. The nonuse value of the Great Plains inspires and even demands the ethical treatment of nonhuman nature. It is the recognition of such nonuse value that is the impetus behind Leopold’s “land ethic” wherein he calls for modes of inhabiting the natural world that respect and protect its intrinsic value and that issue forth from an awareness that our relationship with the nonhuman community runs deeper than our economic entanglements. As a cultural practice with environmental effects, land use represents one of the primary modes through which the relationship between economy and ecology is engaged. In his examination of an American georgic tradition, Timothy Sweet explains why it is necessary for ecocritics to turn their attention to landscapes altered by human use: “If we would save the environment for future generations, we must begin not with the part of it that is defined by its separation from us, the wilderness, but rather with that part in which we are already necessarily engaged, whether we realize it or not, as members of the human community” (2). The sites of these necessary engagements with the environment are predominantly agricultural, sites where “we must labor to produce our lives” (5). The georgic tradition deals with the “middle spaces” of the pastoral tradition—farms, ranches, gardens—but recognizes them as sites of labor and production, and not as escapist spaces of leisure. Georgic discourse, then, is concerned with the work of transforming nature, and it interrogates the relationship between economy and the environment. In other words, georgic discourse explores the fundamental question of what makes nature valuable, in terms of both market and nonmarket uses; this question is important, of course, because it shapes interactions between the human and nonhuman communities. Despite the necessary distinction Sweet draws between the georgic and pastoral traditions, a distinction with roots in Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues, pastoral discourse is intimately connected with the debate over value. The pastoral imagination—that part of our individual and collective imagination attuned to the aesthetic and nonmaterial value of nature— certainly influences the relationship between nature and culture. Cultivated fields exist not in a vacuum but alongside and surrounded by wild nature; rows of wheat, while a built, humanized environment, are just as much a part of the natural world as the mixed-grass prairie ecosystem they replaced. Thus, the relationship between cultivated and uncultivated nature is profoundly implicated in the dialogue between economy and introduction ҏ 7

ecology and is a formative factor in discourse which attempts to arbitrate this relationship. The nine authors I examine in this book share a concern for and an interest in the use and nonuse value of Plains space, particularly as they attempt to mediate these two kinds of valuation through their characters’ interactions with the landscape. Plains fiction writers, as artists, do not distinguish between use and nonuse values as an economist might. As expressions of the archetypal encounter between humans and their physical environment, the novels that I look at depict use more broadly as a multidimensional exchange between human culture and nonhuman nature where use and nonuse values are intimately related even when they are in opposition. To put it another way, what ties together the various expressions of bioregional imagination within Plains fiction is an emphasis on the psychological, spiritual, and social effects of the human relationship with the natural world. The producers of Plains fiction often emphasize the regenerative and spiritual effects of using and inhabiting the arid grasslands. While such illustrations can function as part of the machinery of imperial conquest and environmental degradation—early homesteading narratives in the United States, for example, often work in the service of the racial geopolitics of Manifest Destiny—they can also form the foundation of a “mature environmental aesthetic” (Gifford 148). The challenge of maintaining a “mature” and ethical orientation in the face of traumatic changes to the biocultural landscape and then translating this orientation into a commitment to place is a central conflict in the fictional narratives I investigate in this book. The works I explore all employ pastoralism to manage and make sense of this conflict. I use the term pastoralism in its broadest sense: a mode of thinking that probes the relationship between nature and culture; in other words, it is a discourse concerned with the human engagement—material and nonmaterial—with the nonhuman community. As I have already noted, traditional literary pastoralism is an imaginative form that charts a physical and imaginative retreat into innocent nature and away from the corrosive influence of the metropolis. Virgil’s Ecologues provide the most notable examples as they posit the rural life of shepherds as a nostalgic escape into a simpler, primitive, and therefore more innocent world. While such nostalgic expressions always reveal the anxiety implicit in modern, urban experience, as Leo Marx and Raymond Williams have shown, their inherent escapism 8ҍ introduction

has drawn censure from contemporary environmental critics for lacking social value and even promoting cultural hegemony. Recent attempts have been made to recuperate the significance of pastoral discourse in the age of ecology. In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell identifies the broad and multifaceted application of pastoral ideology through the ages, with a particular focus on the American pastoral tradition. He illuminates pastoralism’s malleability as an ideological framework. On the one hand, as scholars like Annette Kolodny, Raymond Williams, and Myra Jehlen have shown, pastoralism has been put in the service of an exclusionary agenda and has been motivated by an imperialist, male-based, antifeminist fantasy (Buell 34–35). On the other hand, pastoralism can also inspire environmental activism and provide the basis for an ecological ethic. Buell himself attempts to recover pastoralism’s oppositional potential—its ecological and social value—particularly as a form of response to environmental crises. For Buell, pastoral discourse can provide an effective means to recalibrate our relationship to the natural world in ways that are necessary to help protect and preserve it from further damage. Whether escapist and imperialistic or activist and dynamic, pastoralism is a form of discourse that acknowledges the inextricable links between nature and culture. Leo Marx has shown the ways in which pastoral discourse has been used to address, rather than simply avoid, social change. While a problematic escapism defines what he calls “sentimental pastoral,” “complex” pastorals incorporate and attempt to reconcile the historical forces that trouble the romantic idealization of rural life. Building upon Marx’s analysis of the social applications of pastoral, Glen A. Love further explains how pastoral discourse emphasizes “resemblances and points of accommodation, often drawing the opposing worlds of nature and society into that characteristic meeting point of cultured or humanized nature, the garden” (85). In this sense, pastoralism is fundamentally concerned with placing nature in context: built environments like gardens, farms, enclosed pastures, and even cities represent cultural transformations of the physical world. It is this power to contextualize and compartmentalize nature that distinguishes pastoralism as part of a process which civilizes nature. In his effort to wed the pastoral tradition to ecocriticism, Love applies the “revolutionary reconsideration of wilderness” achieved over the past few decades to his understanding of pastoralism’s potential to mediate the introduction ҏ 9

supposed nature/culture divide. He contends, “If the key terms for relatively untrammeled nature in the past were simplicity and permanence, those terms have shifted in an ecologically concerned present to complexity and change” (85, emphasis in the original). To acknowledge and appreciate the complexity of nature, with its dynamic and dialectical association with human use, is to see nature as context, to read the “grand narrative” of nature’s cycles as a formative and very real force. Terry Gifford identifies such a stance as postpastoralism, a term he uses to encompass the future possibilities of a renewed understanding of pastoral discourse in the age of ecology. The postpastoral moves beyond the “closed circuit of pastoral and anti-pastoral” to more fully explore humanity’s role in the nonhuman landscape and vice versa (148). In this light, pastoralism is much more than an escapist and nostalgic mode: it is a discursive mode capable of navigating and even scrutinizing the multidimensional interface between the human and nonhuman community. Furthermore, this complex pastoralism takes into account the positive and negative consequences of this interface: it issues forth from an understanding that human activity is part and parcel of any evolving ecosystem. With a focus on land use and biocultural change, my study examines Plains fiction through a postpastoral lens. I proceed with the recognition of the double-edged nature of pastoralism, its conservative and progressive tendencies, and build off the ecocritical trend, found in Buell, Marx, Love, and Gifford, toward uncovering its social uses and abuses. More specifically, the pastoral narratives I examine here confront the positive and negative effects of human engagement with the arid West and mediate the costs and consequences of a series of historical transformations to the biocultural landscape—transformations that were prelude to the mass cultivation of the arid grasslands and transformations that followed. The label bad land is fitting for this study because conventional Euroamerican attitudes toward land-use practices in the Great Plains have been shaped by the region’s predominately rural economy’s heavy dependence on agriculture, despite the bioregion’s defining characteristic, aridity—a condition obviously hostile to agricultural pursuits.2 Of primary importance to this study is the fact that the Great Plains lie west of the isohyetal line, which demarcates the mean annual amount of rainfall (twenty inches) necessary for agriculture without irrigation. For many of the writers I look at, including Cooper and Cather, bad land pastoralism involves an imaginative attempt 10ҍ introduction

to make this bad land good and to posit the arid West as a crucible for the development of the human imagination. For others, particularly James Welch and Thomas King, who both deal with the suppression of Native land-use practices by Euroamerican settler culture, pastoralism provides a way to reconcile a good land made bad through the imposition of an agrarian paradigm unsuited to the dictates of the physical environment. Interest in the Great Plains as a distinct literary region has increased steadily since the 1970s. While much has been written over the past few decades, there have only been four major book-length studies that examine the function of landscape in Plains fiction: Laurence Ricou’s Vertical Man/ Horizontal World (1973), Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country (1977), Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989), and Diane Dufva Quantic’s The Nature of the Place (1995).3 All four of these monographs investigate the unique relationship between nature and culture on the Plains and therefore inform this study as they each trace efforts at imaginatively adapting to the extreme landscape of the Plains. However, while the specific ecological and topographical realities of the Plains bioregion figure as major subjects in each of these studies, none specifically address the issue of land use. By exploring fictional treatments of multidimensional land use, I will illustrate how the use and abuse of Plains space has consequences for both the land and its inhabitants. As such use and abuse has defined the bioregion’s greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies, a close examination of land-use practices and their influence on the biocultural landscape within Plains fiction is certainly warranted. I also depart from these formative surveys of the region’s literary terrain by focusing on a more discrete set of texts. Each chapter deals closely with two novels that chronicle the same crisis within the Plains land-community and that demonstrate the potential for the pastoral imagination to make sense of the cultural and environmental consequences of biocultural crises. What I am interested in is how the ten novels I focus on tell stories about meeting, with various degrees of success, the challenge of locating a balance between socioeconomic needs and a more abstract, certainly harder to quantify, love of the natural world. In choosing among the hundreds of fictional narratives written about the Great Plains landscape, I settled on the ones that told interesting stories about multidimensional uses of the landscape. While some of my choices of authors might seem surprising—Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Tillie Olsen have never, to my knowledge, been introduction ҏ 11

classified as “Western” writers—all nine of the writers I concentrate on have produced fictional narratives that reveal a subtly consistent emphasis on the power of the pastoral imagination to confront social and ecological change. Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction provides a literary history of cultural and ecological upheaval in the arid grasslands as the book moves chronologically through a series of prominent transitional moments in the region. The first two chapters focus on changes wrought by the advancement of the Euroamerican agricultural frontier. The first chapter explores two ecohistorical romances about the Euroamerican conquest of the Indian wilderness. While acknowledging the significance of their divergent cultural perspectives, I highlight how both James Fenimore Cooper and James Welch address the disruptive environmental and cultural consequences of Euroamerican expansion into the hunting grounds of the Plains Indians. Through their manipulations of the Waverley model and incorporation of what I call tribal pastoralism, both authors posit the hunting grounds as a biocultural ideal that was disturbed by the arrival of Euroamerican settlers. In chapter 2, I explore how Eaton and Conrad Richter employ the metaphor of marriage and illegitimate children to negotiate the ideological, cultural, and ecological impact of enclosing the open cattle ranges near the turn of the twentieth century. The illegitimate children in their historical romances register both the tension and promise implicit in transgressive and transfrontier unions by rendering the range-farm frontier dialectic in flesh. The failure to wholly integrate these illegitimates, and the pastoral ideal they embody, into these romantic narratives further elucidates the vexed history of cultivating and settling the western grasslands of North America. Chapter 3 focuses on Willa Cather’s treatment of the rise and fall of the homesteading era, the signature land-event in the agricultural and commercial development of the Plains. In focusing on O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady, her first and last novels to deal with the legacy of Plains pioneering, I underscore the ambivalence of Cather’s pastoral imagination as she attempts to reconcile her persistent romanticism with a growing disillusionment concerning the future of rural Nebraska. Her ultimate inability to achieve this reconciliation translates into what I suggest is a conflicted environmental legacy. The final two chapters investigate novels that address two related social and environmental crises in the twentieth century spawned by the homesteading enterprise: the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the current depopulation of the rural West. Chapter 4 considers the catastrophic and unsettling effects 12ҍ introduction

of the severe drought and economic collapse of the Dirty Thirties. I examine two attempts to recuperate pastoral discourse as a mode of adjusting to the dystopian landscape of a region ravaged by severe drought and depression. Olsen and Frederick Manfred approach the crisis of the Dust Bowl from two separate angles but posit strikingly similar imaginative visions that locate a renewed hope in the pastoral ideal, even as they build upon and recognize the tragic failure of this ideal in a postfrontier context. The final chapter follows the story of Plains biocultural development up to the present as it analyzes how Annie Proulx and Thomas King draw on the metaphorical power of the Buffalo Commons proposal put forth by Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987. Both Proulx and King incorporate the return of the buffalo as a central trope in their narratives, moving the Buffalo Commons concept beyond the realm of cultural geography and regional planning, and employing it as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains. The two chapters in this section address how pastoralism provides an avenue to recalibrate inherited notions about what it means to inhabit the arid West; at the same time, the works in these final chapters acknowledge the Plains as a palimpsest defined by accumulated layers of change and response. Biological and cultural change in this arid bioregion has certainly been violent and abrupt, but it has also been accumulative and cyclical, imparting a mystical, epic quality to the biocultural development of the Plains. To see the larger pattern within the cavalcade of transformations is to understand the intricate interdependency of people and the places they inhabit. As the fiction I examine in Bad Land Pastoralism attests, this understanding is vital to the development and preservation of a commitment to the land-community. As Gary Snyder acknowledges in his plea for adopting a bioregional perspective: “To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in” (193). This book surveys fictional tales of individual and communal quests for wholeness on the Great Plains and considers the influence on land-use practices of achieving the kind of multidimensional awareness that is part and parcel of a mature pastoral imagination.

introduction ҏ 13

 1

(Un)settling the Indian Wilderness Tribal Pastoralism in Cooper’s The Prairie and Welch’s Fools Crow These great steppes seem only fitted for the haunts of the mustang, the buffalo, the antelope, and their migratory lord, the prairie Indian. —Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 1844

The Plains Frontier and the Indian Wilderness As a period of significant transition and transformation on the Great Plains, the Euroamerican conquest of tribal lands in the West provides a logical starting point from which to begin a discussion concerning the discursive power of bad land pastoralism. An examination of frontier contact from a land-use perspective illustrates the ways in which pastoralism may be employed to make sense of the cultural and ecological consequences of the major biocultural shift precipitated by the arrival of Euroamerican civilization. To uncover the literary-pastoralist response to this historic shift, I examine two historical romances of the “Indian wilderness” that approach the Plains frontier from divergent cultural and temporal perspectives: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827) and James Welch’s Fools Crow (1986).1 The points of divergence between these two novels are difficult to ignore, particularly as Welch is responding to and countering the tradition of the American frontier romance spearheaded by Cooper. Furthermore, each is writing from a distinct cultural moment that determines his perspective on

Plains frontier history. Cooper published The Prairie, his third installment of the Leatherstocking series, at a time when the future of the Great Plains and its indigenous inhabitants was still uncertain and when the “Indian question” was a source of public debate. Welch writes from a more distant vantage point temporally, which allows him to assess the implications of the Euroamerican conquest of the Indian wilderness. In addition, the two novels chronicle separate moments in the history of the Plains frontier: Cooper’s romance is set in the years following the Louisiana Purchase and thus examines Euroamerican settlement in its nascent stages; Welch dramatizes the events leading up to the Marias Massacre of 1870 on the Montana plains in the waning decades of what are generally called the Plains Indian Wars. While it is necessary to be mindful of these divergences, I want to foreground the more provocative convergences between these two narratives of the Indian wilderness. As writers who respond to essentially the same event—the Euroamerican encroachment upon and appropriation of Native lands in the arid West—Cooper and Welch attempt to reconcile the tragic consequences of unsettling the Indian wilderness. Both romances posit what may be thought of as a Native-centered pastoralism, which presents the hunting grounds of the various nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of the Great Plains as a biocultural ideal that is disrupted by the invasive advance of Euroamerican plow culture. These authors’ invocation of tribal pastoral discourse effectively confronts the two main Euroamerican assumptions about the arid wilderness that dominated nineteenth-century debate about the region’s potential: first, that the arid West was inferior to the moister environs east of the Mississippi and could therefore not support civilization, and second, that the presence of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in the area offered further proof that the region was uninhabitable by Euroamerican standards. The passage from Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies (1844) quoted in the epigraph succinctly addresses the consequence of this prejudice against the bad lands: the Plains are destined to remain an Indian wilderness, inhabited by wild beasts and the wilder men who hunt them. Such a prejudice relies on an ideological position grounded in conventional frontier rhetoric that devalues Native land-use practices in the West. Unlike grain agriculture or manufacturing, which presumably improve and impart value to nature, Native hunting practices were perceived as more primitive. The indigenous population of the arid wilderness was thus conceived as part and parcel of that wilderness; when 16ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

land-hungry Euroamerican settlers began to covet these lands following the Civil War, it was the Plains Indians who had to be cleared to make room for farms and towns, just as the forests had to be cleared in the East. Only then could the Great American Desert be redeemed from its savage condition to make room for progress and the growth of the American nation. Tribal pastoralism works against this ethnocentric perspective by illustrating how land-use practices on the pre-agricultural Plains—practices that evolved through an ongoing interaction between discrete tribal communities and particular environments—were not only viable but capable of sustaining families and communities.2 The so-called bad lands did indeed support a wide array of continually evolving tribal communities for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. The bison-hunting tribes of the West—Blackfeet, Assiniboines, Hidatsas, Mandans, Crows, Sioux, Arapahos, Kiowa, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees—encompass what James Wilson refers to as “classic” Plains culture, the manifestation of Native American adjustment to Plains space that reached its height at the time of increased contact with white civilization. As Wilson notes, this classic Plains culture was a relatively recent development, one which evolved when the horse was introduced in the North American grasslands by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. While the tribes of the arid West were already nomadic hunters, presumably abandoning agriculture because of the difficult climactic conditions, the “equestrian revolution” led to something of a cultural renaissance among the Plains Indians. Wilson explains: “A previously almost uninhabitable area suddenly offered an accessible, dependable, and—with an estimated total of sixty million or so bison—apparently boundless food supply. . . . At the same time—in an interesting reversal of the supposed direction of social development—many of the farming peoples on the eastern fringes abandoned their fields and villages and took to hunting full-time” (252–53). The classic Plains culture, then, grew out of a dynamic process of adaptation to the environment of the Plains. With spiritual, cultural, and economic customs that centered on the buffalo hunt, the indigenous communities of the Plains employed a fully developed and multidimensional system of landuse practices. This system fit well with the arid region, as the population explosion in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century suggests. Indeed, based on a paradigm of motion, the nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures of the Plains were well suited for the bioregion. In his extensive examination of the history, biology, and politics of the Great Plains, Richard Manning asserts (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 17

that motion is the defining characteristic of the physical environment of the Plains: “Always there is motion, retreat and advance. The record is clear: What endures on the grassland is motion. In the long view, in the short view, on micro and macro site, the grassland is a place of motion” (47). Thus, it is not difficult to imagine why the horse-based cultures of the Plains succeeded so well before the arrival of the Euroamerican settlers who, unlike their Spanish predecessors, brought with them a settler- and woodlands-based paradigm that disturbed the indigenous culture of motion by forcing the Native populations to vanish or stay put on reservations. Cooper and Welch commemorate the multidimensional nature of hunting as a land-use practice in the arid West and portray the tribally controlled hunting grounds as a fleeting pastoral ideal that was disrupted by the arrival and imposition of Euroamerican plow culture. Their romances thus resist the discourse of removal, which furnished legal and institutional support for the eventual conquest of the Indian wilderness on the premise that land belonged to those who would use it best. As Stuart Banner has shown, U.S. removal and reservation policies offered the same solution to the Indian question. Necessitated by an insatiable demand for land, the removal of eastern tribes to the sparsely populated West in the 1830s and the later confinement of all tribes to federally designated reservations were policies rooted in the myth of social progress and the related need “to clear Indians off white emigration routes” (230). These policies put into action what was an already perceived moral superiority over the indigenous population. From this moral viewpoint, the westward-advancing frontier, in all of its stages, was a progressive and cleansing phenomenon that replaced the silence of the primitive void with the noise and industry of Euroamerican civilization. By demonstrating how the presumably empty grasslands were in fact already domesticated and in use by Native peoples, tribal pastoralism provides an important reminder of how the frontier moved across “contested terrain.”3 In pointing to the ways that Cooper’s and Welch’s tribal pastorals overlap, I illustrate how they together navigate the complex cultural and ecological struggle at the core of Plains frontier experience. My purpose in locating moments of convergence between writers who might otherwise be considered antithetical is twofold. First, in sketching out the parameters of tribal pastoralism as defined and exhibited in their romances, I examine an important manifestation of bad land pastoralism, one that responds to and tries to make sense of a changing/changed biocultural landscape. Second, 18ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

it seems to me valuable to place Cooper and Welch, as respondents to the same general phenomenon, with all of its racial and ecological consequences, into dialogue and to highlight both what separates them and what brings them together. Cooper’s ambivalent contribution to American environmental thought and his questionable portrayal of Native peoples have received much critical attention, which I believe can and should be extended through the kind of approach I am taking here. To trace lines of comparison between Cooper and a more contemporary historical romancer like Welch suggests a level of continuity within the process of biocultural landscape formation that involves a constant rehearsal, from a variety of perspectives, of what it means to inhabit a particular landscape. If, as I will illustrate, Welch “corrects” much of what Cooper imagines about Plains Indian life, he also builds on textual ground charted by his predecessor. For both writers, this tribal pastoralism is embedded within a Native-centered historical romance that employs the epic pattern of the Waverley model in order to emphasize the heroic quality of Native communities on the Plains.

The Indian Historical Romance and Tribal Pastoralism The dramatic change to the Plains biocultural landscape wrought by Euroamerican appropriation of the buffalo hunting grounds is an apt subject for the historical romance, which focuses on the contest between what George Dekker terms “the principles of progress and reaction” (36). Building on work done by Georg Lukács and Harry Shaw, Dekker locates in the Romantic Revival an attitude toward the past that would ultimately find its expression in prose-fictional form in Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. The specific conflict in Waverley between the Stuart revolutionaries (with the “primitive” Highlanders as the most radical) and the Hanover successors is readily adaptable to address a myriad of cultural conflicts because at its core it dramatizes the more general conflict between social groups: one seemingly rooted in the past (the party of “reaction”) and the other with an eye toward the future (the party of “progress”). As the former declines, the latter advances, often appropriating the best cultural practices and spiritual principles of the group it is replacing. As Dekker notes, “working within the established political framework, the parties of progress and reaction struggle with each other to achieve, all unintentionally, a dynamic and life-sustaining equilibrium” (35). This balance is often achieved by a middling hero like (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 19

Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, who mediates between the old and new. This wavering hero finds himself at the nexus of a dramatic historical moment where passing and loss coincide with emergence and conquest. The temporal setting of historical romances in the Waverley tradition, then, fluctuates around what Dekker refers to as “poignant transitional moments” (44). It is in such moments of revolution and radical change that the principles of reaction and progress are juxtaposed in such a way as to highlight the symbolic significance of the conflict. Specific historical moments thus take on broader meaning as local manifestations of archetypal patterns. The sometimes harmonious, sometimes confrontational interaction of the parties of reaction and progress during these dramatic moments of historical change thus engenders a set of polar oppositions, including nature/ artifice, individual/community, light/dark, good/evil, and so on. This series of interrelated binaries, which can certainly be extended with any number of additional binaries, represents what is at stake and what is exchanged when the old and new collide. The historical romance dramatizes this exchange by chronicling the coming together of the otherwise divergent societies that encompass the cited polarities. It also makes possible the investigation, through narrative, of the effects of this confluence on representative individuals. Lukács puts it this way: “What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (42). Situated within an American context, the contest between binary forces is easily fit into the myth of the frontier where the progressive force of the ever-expanding Euroamerican civilization comes into conflict with the reactionary force of Native savagery, which fights to maintain its integrity. This is evident throughout Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels where the author laments the retreat and disappearance of the American Indian before the powerful forces of American progress. As the ambivalence of a frontier narrative like The Prairie demonstrates, the supposed purity of the conflicting parties is troubled by the murkiness of the middle ground where the two parties mutually influence one another. As the middling hero, Natty embodies this process of exchange to emerge as a cultural hybrid who elicits sympathy toward the fallen noble savage even as he retains his faith in the value of the advancing civilization; as he dies defiantly facing west into the “American sunset,” the novel forewarns the eventual erasure of much of what the Leatherstocking stood for (452). 20ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

That Natty, like his Indian companions, must retreat before the overwhelming force of progress illustrates the generally nostalgic tone of most historical romances. As Dekker notes, the masterpieces of the genre are “commonly skeptical about the blessings of progress” and often offer “fictional treatments of the losing sides” (42, 38). The ideal societies are therefore fleeting and typically live on only in spirit as the New World replaces the Old and the past blends into the future. This is to say that the victory of the new over the old is never a complete one, nor are the values inherent in the conquered society erased forever. Indeed, what David Mogen calls the “frontier archetype,” while largely employed by those in service of the historical victors, possesses a useful flexibility: it can as effectively measure the legacy of loss as it can calculate the gains of conquest implicit in any historical conflict. Welch is particularly instructive here. To negotiate the meaning of the heavy losses inflicted upon Native Americans during the Euroamerican conquest of the West, Welch regionalizes elements of the Waverley model in order to present a Native-centered perspective on the historic and mythological frontier. What he achieves by doing so is a critique of the dominant cultural narrative that celebrates the westward march of Euroamerican civilization. In conventional historical romances, the vanishing Native Americans are certainly treated with nostalgic sympathy, but are often relegated to the static role of tragic victims. While Fools Crow is undeniably a portrait of the losing side in the clash between the Plains Indians and the Euroamericans, it is far from being a nostalgic novel. Welch portrays a community that was historically on the losing side, but he does not present them as victims of progress, as a conventional romance might; in this way, he breaks down and renders obsolete the primitive/advanced dichotomy. He revises what it means to be victorious and creates a tragicomic hero, Fools Crow, who is triumphant in defeat and therefore works against the essentialist implications of the frontier archetype/Waverley model that problematically insists that as one nation rises, another must fall. Cooper, of course, is often counted among the perpetrators of this essentialist history; indeed, Welch’s novel directly addresses the problematic conventions established by the “American Scott” by foregrounding the Native voices often marginalized by Cooper. Cooper’s sympathies aside, his Native American characters typically hover on the fringes of a national drama of growth and expansion whose principal actors are of European descent. This marginalization is apparent in The Prairie, which is framed by two (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 21

Euroamerican arrivals on Plains space: the novel opens with the entrance of the Bush family and closes with the arrival of Middleton, the novel’s hero who returns to the region to chart prairie and presumably open it for development. The main trajectory of the novel therefore presages the oncoming settlement of the region and a continuation of the pattern established on previous frontiers—a pattern that inevitably results in the depletion of indigenous hunting grounds and the growth of Euroamerican farms and towns. While this trajectory affirms Cooper’s commitment to an ethic of taming the Indian wilderness, I argue that an implicit, essentially buried, tribal pastoral discourse in The Prairie resists this same ethic and thereby complicates Cooper’s assessment of Plains space. Cooper’s tribal pastoralism is embedded within an internal Indian historical romance found in a minor though significant plot that traces the interaction between the two principal tribes who occupy Cooper’s Platte valley, the Pawnees and Sioux. By foregrounding an otherwise subordinate plot, I reveal how Cooper employs the conventions of the historical romance in this internal plot to challenge the imperialist agenda of the novel’s main narrative. More specifically, the violent, diplomatic, and romantic engagements between the Pawnees and the Sioux establish Native use of the arid land as a valid and sustainable foundation for continued occupation of the region, a point most clearly manifest in Cooper’s idyllic portrait of the Pawnee village at the end of The Prairie.

Romance within the Romance in Cooper’s Hard-Heart Tale Cooper occupies an interesting position in the literary history of Great Plains fiction. As the author of the first major work of fiction set in the region he was a literary trailblazer who opened up the trans-Mississippi West as a subject for fictional narrative. However, if Cooper were alive today he might be surprised to find himself so frequently and prominently featured in literary histories of the Great Plains.4 It is surprising because Cooper never actually visited the region that is the setting for The Prairie. As Orm Överland points out in his book-length study of the novel, The Prairie is the first of Cooper’s works set in a place with which he had no experience to draw on (42). Cooper’s detachment from his setting has provoked much debate from his critics about the function of the landscape in the novel, and most concur that his prairie setting is largely a symbolic one. Henry Nash Smith, for example, compares Cooper’s prairie to an “Elizabethan stage” where 22ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

representative members of the various phases of society come together and commingle (Introduction ix).5 Ultimately, the desert wilderness in The Prairie serves to heighten the author’s lifelong consideration of civilization’s confrontation with the savage wilderness and the accretion of national values that emerge from this confrontation. To separate the novel from the context of the pentalogy (or, for that matter, Cooper’s other frontier romances) and to read it instead as the first instance of Plains fiction is thus something of a dubious task: as most critics suggest, Cooper’s choice of setting, while topical and drawing on contemporary interest in the New West, was largely arbitrary and put to the service of his broader thematic goals. Insofar as the novel is deeply ensconced in antebellum thinking about the Great American Desert, it provides important insight into how the region was perceived in the decades preceding agricultural settlement. While those following the critical tradition established by Mark Twain might scoff at Cooper’s fantastical embellishments, it is difficult to deny his contributions to the textual landscape—the “topographic map of words,” as Heat-Moon says (15)—which are as much a part of the place as the grama grass and magpies. The Prairie, in other words, pulls together the material, social, and physical components of the Great Plains frontier as they existed in written accounts and, more broadly, in the Euroamerican imagination. As a bookish student of the region, even though an outsider to it, Cooper provides a rather nuanced and complex dramatization of the frontier myth as it specifically applies to the Great Plains. In this sense, I share Geoffrey Rans’s notion that Cooper is as much a “historical realist” as he is a mythmaker; his Leatherstocking novels in general and The Prairie in particular give “great prominence to the word ‘civilization,’ insisting on its virtues” through his mythic formulations, but his work also “brings the countervailing view before the reader” by calling into question, both directly and indirectly, the claims that civilization lays on the already settled ground beyond the western frontier (132, 136). The Prairie expresses an ambivalent vision of the Plains, as Cooper oscillates between an aesthetic and romantic appreciation for the Indian wilderness and a prophetic vision of the agricultural and commercial development of the region. In one respect, the conflict between the Sioux and the Pawnees within The Prairie serves to heighten the dramatic effect of the trials suffered by Middleton and Inez, Paul and Ellen, and the Bush clan; in this regard, the (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 23

Native characters provide the local hues to the broader color palette of the national narrative of the frontier. On the other hand, the emergence of HardHeart and his conquest and incorporation of the Sioux can be read as a self-contained romance narrative that works to challenge the nationalist discourse communicated by the primary plot. If Cooper’s prairies are in fact an Elizabethan stage as Smith suggests, then the Hard-Heart narrative is the play within the play that appropriates the form of the master narrative to comment upon that same narrative. Like Hamlet’s Mouse-Trap, which reenacts the details of his father’s murder in order to expose his uncle’s guilt, the Hard-Heart narrative follows the pattern of the romance to expose the disruptive violence against indigenous people and habitats that frontier advancement performs. It is important to recognize that Natty and his Euroamerican companions mediate the unfolding of The Prairie’s internal Indian romance, and the Native perspective is therefore filtered through a distant, if sympathetic, outsider gaze. In this sense, the play within the play functions to reflect the attitudes of the Euroamerican characters who bear witness to the drama as captives or distant observers of the Indian actors. In the end, the effect of the Pawnee performance on these observers—particularly Middleton, Inez, Paul, and Ellen—ultimately overshadows the dynamic equilibrium that Hard-Heart and his people achieve; nevertheless, the sublimated Indian romance haunts the master narrative and grates against the ethic of development implicit in Euroamerican frontier expansion. If one pieces together the fragmented moments involving the Pawnees and Sioux that Natty witnesses and participates in, the recognizable pattern of the Waverley romance emerges: As a foreign presence threatens to usurp and transform their world, the Sioux and Pawnees must locate strategies for adapting to the changing environment. The tension produced by this “poignant transitional moment” further polarizes these already contentious tribes as they respond differently to the threat posed by the encroaching white civilization. The reactionary Sioux, under the militant leadership of Mahtoree, choose the path of violent resistance, while the progressive Pawnees, under the influence of the noble Hard-Heart, choose the path of accommodation and adaptation. As the wavering hero, Hard-Heart must reconcile those elements that align him culturally with his ancient enemy, Mahtoree, and that part of him which recognizes that the fate of his people depends on maintaining peace with the “stranger[s]” (391). After killing Mahtoree, 24ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

Hard-Heart achieves a “dynamic equilibrium” (Dekker 35) through his marriage to Mahtoree’s widow and through the incorporation of the surviving Sioux into the Pawnee tribe. In the end, the parties of reaction and progress manage a harmonious unity that establishes a new Native world order even as that order continues to be threatened by the oncoming swarm of white settlers. That this new order is founded on acts of accommodation reveals a bit of wish fulfillment on Cooper’s part: the hostile tribes are erased in favor of a pan-tribal consortium that maintains some sovereignty though it acquiesces to the force of progress by befriending the agents of that progress, Middleton and Paul. The violence on the Plains frontier as Cooper imagines it in The Prairie is between factious indigenous tribes and is not perpetrated by the whites. When the Bushes arrive on the scene of the epic battle between the two tribes, their weapons merely finish off what the Pawnees started. Hard-Heart’s victory over Mahtoree ultimately makes possible and even welcomes peaceable expansion into Native territory. Thus, though Cooper claims in the introduction that “the power of the republic has done much to restore peace” to the “wild scenes” of the Great Prairies, his novel suggests that this process of calibration was initiated by the Indians themselves (xxv). In this way, Cooper’s Indianization of the Waverley model relies on the hostile/noble savage dichotomy that appears elsewhere in his frontier romances. Cooper’s Indians in The Prairie, as a group, are rather twodimensional: a composite of stereotypes rather than an accurate description of actual communities. It has been noted by many critics that Cooper grafts onto the prairie landscape the Delaware/Mingo dichotomy he utilizes in The Last of the Mohicans, transforming these eastern tribes into the Pawnees/ Sioux of the West.6 Cooper’s depiction of “classic” Plains cultures is no doubt stereotypical, and when read on this level it is difficult to divorce the sublimated Indian romance from Cooper’s more conservative, ethnocentric agenda. The flatness of his Native characters, however, should not be grounds for dismissing the possibility of a more complex reading. One must remember that as types, the Pawnee and Sioux fulfill the role of any character in a historical romance, regardless of race: their actions and reactions register what Cooper saw or unconsciously felt was the probable response of an indigenous people confronting looming changes to their environment. Furthermore, just as Cooper elsewhere follows the pattern of waxing nostalgic for the (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 25

losing side in the epic clash between whites and Indians on the frontier, so too does he follow this pattern as he chronicles the collision between the Sioux and Pawnees in the Platte valley. While Mahtoree and Weucha’s duplicity is never questioned—and even accentuated by the reptilian metaphors Cooper uses to describe them—the vanquished Sioux also evoke sympathy as the nobler elements of the tribe are preserved and passed on to the victorious Pawnees who literally and spiritually incorporate the Sioux nation into their tribe. Thus, while the Pawnees and the Sioux are diametrically opposed in a way that draws on the good Indian/bad Indian dichotomy, their likenesses are equally emphasized. If the Pawnees emerge as the triumphant nation in the novel’s internal Indian romance, the powerful Sioux occupy a greater part of the action in The Prairie. Indeed, Hard-Heart does not enter the scene until the second half of the book, and his fellow Pawnees do not make an appearance until the battle between the two tribes in the closing chapters. The Sioux constantly disrupt the movements of the white settlers as captors and thieves and their actions are consistent with their ferocious reputation. Cooper explains, “From time immemorial the hands of the Sioux had been turned against their neighbors of the prairies; and even to this day, when the influence and authority of a civilized government are beginning to be felt around them, they are considered a treacherous and dangerous race.” The aggressive maneuvers of this “false” tribe against their Indian and white neighbors and their quest for dominion over the “remote and unprotected regions” of the trans-Mississippi West mark the Sioux as a hostile tribe (38). Their savage, imperial nature as a nation is manifest individually through their demonic behavior. When Natty, Paul, Ellen, and Obed are first ambushed by a band of Sioux led by Weucha, Cooper describes how they “resembled demons rather than men” (34). As I have already noted, this resemblance is stressed through Cooper’s repeated use of reptilian metaphors to depict the movements of the tribe. For example, as they move toward the Bush camp to loot their possessions, they “worm” their way through the grass “like so many treacherous serpents stealing on their prey” (49). The animalizing of the Sioux casts them in a primitive light and suggests that they are inseparable from the wilderness itself. While Mahtoree, the Sioux chief, is not described in such animal terms, his inseparability from the wilderness is ever evident in his appearance, where “every article of exterior or heavy clothing” suggests his adornment in the “garb of nature” 26ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

(48). His link with nature is therefore communicated in typical fashion that underscores the indissolubility of the Indian wilderness construct within the antebellum imagination. That the scenes involving the Sioux are replete with references to snakes and serpents not only suggests their primitive nature but also reveals the characteristics that make the Sioux particularly savage: their greed and lustfulness. This revelation is significant to Cooper’s presentation of the Sioux as the most primitive tribe on the Plains. Their indiscriminate violence is motivated primarily by opportunism. Mahtoree fluctuates between making peace and making war with the Bushes depending on what he wants from them. His first encounter with the family involves a raid on their property (54–55), while a later truce with Ishmael is commenced to set up a favorable bargaining position, as Mahtoree hopes to possess Inez and Ellen (334). The trade that Mahtoree proposes to Ishmael further highlights the debased status of the Sioux as Cooper presents them. Willing to give up his young third wife, Tachechana, Mahtoree offers to exchange her for Inez. This offer is significant on a number of levels. First, the reaction that it provokes from the Americans underscores the looming threat of miscegenation on the frontier and the consequent contamination of the American nation.7 This sexual threat, which expands the implications of the serpent metaphor, confirms the presumed unassimilability of Mahtoree’s animal appetites. Acting as translator, Natty can barely get himself to interpret Mahtoree’s proposal. Ultimately, no translation is necessary: “The look [Mahtoree] has given, and the signs he has made are enough” (338). Mahtoree’s lust for Inez is encoded through his physical movements: his body more so than his words communicates his desire. The impropriety of Mahtoree’s offer is compounded by his easy abandonment of Tachechana. Because she is a prototypical Indian maiden who is identified by her fawnlike attributes (her name, Cooper tells us, means “the Fawn” [333]), Cooper takes pains to describe the courtship between the chief and his youngest bride. The daughter of a “distinguished brave,” Tachechana rejects numerous other suitors in favor of Mahtoree. She represents an otherwise good union within the Sioux community, while Mahtoree sees in Inez the opportunity to trade up. His double violation of the marriage bond—his dismissal of his own marriage and his implied rejection of the significance of Inez’s bond with Middleton—not only displays how “his morals were accommodating and his motives selfish” but also underscores his incivility (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 27

(334). His loose attitude toward the marriage bond divorces him from the ideological structure of a more advanced society that relies upon the institution of marriage and family for stability. As the following chapter further demonstrates, the link between family and nation is paramount in frontier romances, as the forging of permanent communities on the Plains requires the social cohesion that marriage provides. Ultimately, Mahtoree’s rejection of his own family undermines his otherwise valiant attempt to defend the sovereignty of his people. That is, insofar as nationness is linked to the family, Mahtoree’s indecent proposal plays into antebellum stereotypes that dissociate tribalism and nationhood. Such dissociation, as Maddux explains, helped to justify Indian removal: “When one speaks of civilization . . . one can also speak of nations; but when one speaks of extinction, the compatible terms are tribe or race” (emphasis in the original) (9). In retaining tribal custom where possession of Inez is concerned, Mahtoree rejects white civilization and dooms himself to extinction. Mahtoree’s demonic and lascivious quality is consistently set in contrast with the heroic stature of Hard-Heart. When Hard-Heart first appears in the novel, his entrance is almost magical. He springs from a “bed of leaves and brush,” as if emerging from the earth itself. In contrast with the Sioux’s snakelike and hostile ambush of Natty and his companions, the Pawnee warrior’s appearance highlights the positive effects of a primordial connection to the earth. As the ensuing description of the warrior substantiates, HardHeart more than fulfills the Noble Savage type, with his “fine stature and admirable proportions.” More than this, the detailed portrait that Cooper provides to “furnish some idea of the personal appearance of a whole race” distinguishes the Pawnees as the more progressive prairie tribe. While his war paint, scalp lock, fringe of human scalps, and “dressed deer-skin” bear the markings of his primitiveness—and thereby parallel Mahtoree’s natural garb—Hard-Heart’s wardrobe also reveals his “communion” with the advancing civilization. His leggings provide evidence of this contact with the “traders of the Pale-faces,” which, combined with his Romanesque lineaments suggest the potential of adaptation and survival for “this wronged and humbled people” (213–14). Although his dark skin betrays his “Asiatic origins” and his exotic Otherness, his Romanesque features and his “Apollo-like” valor offset this Otherness (213, 319). Besides ennobling Hard-Heart, Cooper’s emphasis on his cultural flexibility also functions to align the Pawnee chief with the party of progress. 28ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

While, like Mahtoree, Hard-Heart questions the lawfulness of the whites’ intrusion into the tribal hunting grounds, he openly welcomes the intruders and forms a companionable alliance with Natty and his party. In the pivotal battle between Hard-Heart and Mahtoree, this alliance is tested when Mahtoree asks him to join forces against the Americans before it is too late. Although he is temporarily drawn in by the Sioux chief’s rhetoric of resistance, Hard-Heart immediately dismisses this violent request: “Teton—no! Hard-Heart has never struck the stranger. They come into his lodge and eat, and they go out safely. A mighty chief is their friend! . . . No, Teton; his arm will never be lifted against the stranger” (391). Hard-Heart’s defiant defense of maintaining peace with the whites is motivated by mixed feelings, as his schizophrenic characterization of the settlers as both “friend” and “stranger” reveals. However, his bond with the whites is fortified by a sense of hospitality, neighborliness, and honor, as he is able to transcend differences to form coalitions with potential enemies. The contrast between Hard-Heart and Mahtoree is nicely encapsulated in their divergent reaction to Inez. Whereas Mahtoree’s sexual appetite leads him to reject his own wife with the hope that he can possess Inez, HardHeart, who is equally drawn to the Spanish woman, never oversteps the threshold of propriety. This is no small point, as it serves to solidify the bond between the Pawnees and the Americans. Despite Hard-Heart’s valiant defeat of Mahtoree and his equally valiant defense of the Americans, Middleton remains suspicious about the Pawnee’s motivations, particularly in regard to Inez. As the Americans get ready to return to the settlements in the penultimate chapter, Middleton gives “secret instructions” to his men to arm themselves in order to prepare for any possible uprising. Cooper notes, “The admiration with which Hard-Heart regarded Inez had not escaped [Middleton’s] jealous eye, any more than had the lawless wishes of Mahtoree. He knew the consummate manner in which a savage could conceal his designs” (430). When Hard-Heart waxes poetic about the “charms of Inez” in his farewell speech, Middleton comes close to giving the execution order (431). As a hero who must negotiate a future in which the Americans will play a large and decisive role, Hard-Heart passes the test and preserves Middleton’s “manly pride” by not “betraying any solicitude in behalf of the weaker sex” (432). That his true feelings, whatever they might have been, are “veiled behind the cold mask of Indian self-denial” illustrates how the chief emphasizes diplomacy over personal passion, a choice that establishes (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 29

his merit as a leader of the Pawnee nation. Mahtoree’s failure to make this same choice ultimately led to his downfall. His “lawless” proposal fractured an alliance with the Bush clan that may have preserved the Sioux; instead, it is Ishmael and his brood that seal the fate of Mahtoree’s people as they join the otherwise outnumbered Pawnees to finish off what remains of the Sioux. Hard-Heart’s true feelings toward Inez are never revealed so that this “test” is less about his struggle with personal passions than it is about debunking Middleton’s racial prejudices. This is to say that it is likely that Middleton’s suspicions are the product of his own distrust of the moral capacity of the Natives. To this point, despite all the experiential evidence that suggests otherwise, Middleton lumps Hard-Heart and Mahtoree together: savage nature is savage nature. When Hard-Heart and his tribe act with honor and display their peaceable intentions throughout the farewell ceremony, Middleton chides his own suspicions and leaves the prairies as a champion of the Pawnee nation. Insofar as Middleton is the hero of the novel’s primary romantic narrative—the man who will rise through the ranks of the American government and give shape to the growing nation—his support, within Cooper’s imagination, could potentially pay dividends for the Pawnees as they face the changes wrought by American expansion. As Natty explains to Hard-Heart on their first meeting, Middleton and his companions are the “peace-runners” who have arrived in advance of the “warriors” of America and who “wish to be friends” with their “red neighbors” (222). Hard-Heart’s strategic coalition with these peace-runners thus presumably puts him on better footing for future negotiation with the advancing civilization. The expansion of white civilization into the Indian wilderness thus poses two choices for the original inhabitants as they face the prospect of traumatic change to the biocultural landscape: violent resistance or peaceable adaptation. Natty’s reluctant admission that “might is right” where ownership of the land is concerned suggests the futility of Native resistance (216). In vanquishing the leader of this resistance and aligning with the whites, Hard-Heart improves the chances for the long-term survival of his people. On the other side, Mahtoree’s reactionary stance leads to his erasure. Rather than make concessions to the invaders, he insists that the encroaching whites adapt to Sioux cultural practices and not the reverse: he claims Inez based on tribal customs and from his perspective this claim is within his rights as captor. While Mahtoree’s means are questionable, his motivation is no different from anyone’s whose traditional life 30ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

is endangered by outside influence. In this way, Mahtoree fulfills the role of the declining party within the Waverley romance, and thus draws parallels to Scott’s Highlanders or even the more general Indian type in any other conventional frontier romance. He epitomizes the struggle to preserve the integrity of his social group in the face of white encroachment. Thus, while his treachery is highlighted throughout the novel, Cooper is careful to provide a balanced portrait of the Sioux warrior in a way that evokes sympathy for his cause. Cooper achieves this balance by troubling the very division between the hostile/noble tribes on the Plains that he himself sets up. The parallels between the Pawnee and Sioux reinforce Hard-Heart’s position as a wavering hero, as these parallels demonstrate how he preserves elements of his tribal identity even as he makes cultural concessions necessary to carry his people into the future. While the antagonism between the Pawnees and the Sioux is everywhere evident in the insults each casts in the other’s direction, there are a few key moments where the warring tribes are conflated. As I have already noted, the two tribes enter the action of the narrative in similar fashion, emerging from the prairie grass as if born from the earth. These entrances share another even more striking element: they both involve performances that attempt to take advantage of American racial ignorance. When Weucha tries to ascertain the cause of the palefaces’ intrusion on the prairies, he pretends to be a Pawnee with the hope that negotiations will go smoother. Less dramatically, Hard-Heart masks his true motivation for being far from his village—he is tracking the Sioux—by adopting the pose of a husband hunting bison to feed his family. In both instances, these artifices are immediately detected and foiled by the prairie-savvy Natty who from experience knows how to read the Native body. These performances highlight the ways in which the Pawnees and Sioux are linked in their suspicion of the whites and their shared fear of the threat whites pose to Native sovereignty. Weucha’s act of playing Pawnee, that is, underscores—or makes literal—the close ties between the two tribes; despite their ancient rivalry, they hold in common an anxiety toward the advancing palefaces. Although Natty is not duped by the performances of Weucha or HardHeart, he later confuses the Sioux and Pawnees when he mistakes a group of mounted Sioux hunters for Pawnees. This error reveals Natty’s internal bias toward the “good” Indians, but also forms the crux of Cooper’s tribal pastoral discourse. As a man of the wilderness, Natty is drawn to the biocultural (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 31

ideal proffered by the Native hunting grounds. In particular, he equates the Pawnee hunting grounds with an earthbound Eden. He informs his companions, “When we get lower into the hunting-grounds of the Pawnees . . . we shall find the buffaloes fatter and sweeter, the deer in more abundance, and all the gifts of the Lord abounding to satisfy our wants” (281). For the Indians in the novel, as for Natty the converted Plainsman, the buffalo represent the supreme grassland harvest, as the mounted buffalo hunt epitomizes the Euroamerican fantasy of the Noble Savage. As the chief actors in this fantasy, the Pawnees presumably best embody Natty’s aesthetic ideal. When, at the midpoint of the novel, Natty and his friends—Paul, Obed, Ellen, Middleton, and Inez—bear witness to an actual buffalo hunt this ideal is made clear. The “perfect solitude” of the open plain is soon transformed “as it were by magic” into a “sudden exhibition of animal life” (228). This scene leaves its observers dumbfounded and awestruck by “this spectacle of wild and peculiar grandeur” (229). The scene is completed by a “glorious chase” (228), which takes place when a group of “some fifteen or twenty horseman” take down a “noble bull” that is finished off by the “lance of a powerful Indian” (234). Natty observes the scene with “evident satisfaction,” as he is perhaps reminded of his own days as a hunter in the forests of New York (234). The buffalo hunt, which is executed with skill and artfulness, fulfills Natty’s wilderness fantasy. It is a primal encounter between humans and nature that presents a desirable alternative to the work of the “choppers” of the settlements. That these hunters turn out to be the hostile Sioux and not the noble Pawnees as he had suspected, demonstrates the ways in which the two tribes are aligned in their mode of inhabiting the prairie wilderness. The hunters’ tribal affiliation ultimately makes little difference, as the hunt typifies the social and cultural practices of the Indian wilderness and is what binds the otherwise inimical tribes together. In this way, Natty’s conflation of the two tribes underscores the deep ties between the Sioux and Pawnees that betray their surface animosity. This fundamental trans-tribal bond is rooted in a shared approach to the arid land-community. In partaking of the buffalo as the fruit of the land, the Pawnees and Sioux show themselves to be at one with the Great Plains environment. The buffalo, that is, signifies the landscape itself. As the mouthpiece for Cooper’s romantic inclinations, Natty verifies the association between the buffalo and the Plains landscape when he prepares and shares a feast of buffalo meat with Paul and a very reluctant Dr. Battius. After tossing a 32ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

piece of the meat to his dog, Hector, Natty asserts the dichotomy between wild and domestic when during the buffalo hunt he compares buffalo to domesticated cattle: Can the proudest governor in all the States go into his fields, and slaughter a nobler bullock than is here offered to the meanest hand; and when he has gotten his sirloin or his beefsteak, can he eat it with as good a relish as he who has sweetened his food with whole toil, and earned it according to the law of natur’, by honestly mastering that which the Lord hath put before him? (229) The nobility of the buffalo and the equal nobility of the buffalo hunt are here read as a manifestation of the “law of natur’.” Harvesting buffalo, as opposed to raising cattle, is proper and honest work that elevates even the “meanest hand” above the spiritually impoverished governor who seeks his food by seemingly more artificial means. The buffalo hunting grounds exist as an idyllic space where its inhabitants engage with a divinely ordained wilderness. And while the Plains are elsewhere denigrated in the narrative as bad land unfit for permanent Euroamerican settlement, this denigration is balanced against a portrait of the Plains as a flourishing biocultural landscape where the harvests are sweet and work is honest.8 The “fields” of the eastern settlements are depicted as impoverished compared with the open plains of the arid West. In asserting his preference for the beasts of the Plains wilderness, Natty subverts the desert myth and makes “the States” seem like the barren desert. Whereas the desert label belies a Euroamerican perspective as it reads the arid wilderness in terms of what it lacks, the characterization of the region as Sioux and Pawnee hunting grounds establishes a biocultural paradigm that suggests the “Western Indian” (58) is the most apt inhabitant of the region. The buffalo/cattle dichotomy nicely images the land-use issues at the core of the Plains Indian frontier experience. The cattle brought from the East by the interloping Bushes snub the grasses of the Plains “as food too sour for even hunger to render palatable” (4); the buffalo, on the other hand, obviously thrive. This contrast further enhances the subversive discourse implicit in Natty’s commemoration of the Indian wilderness: it is the squatters who are unfit for the place, and not vice versa. This idea is most fully articulated in a subtle and yet significant scene in which Mahtoree rejects the Bush cattle as he plunders their camp. As he is “worming himself ” through (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 33

the camp as the family sleeps, his thievery is delayed as he investigates the penned-in cows and assesses their value. Cooper writes, The weary creature, perhaps conscious through its secret instinct, that in the endless wastes of the prairies its surest protector was found in man, was so exceedingly docile as quietly to submit to the close examination it was doomed to undergo [at the hands of Mahtoree]. The hand of the wandering Teton passed over the downy coat, the meek countenance, and the slender limbs of the gentle creature, with untiring curiosity; but he finally abandoned the prize, as useless to his predatory expeditions, and offering too little temptation to the appetite. (55) The submissiveness of the domesticated animal is the result of its displacement on the Plains; its docility represents the weakness and softness of the settlements, which is further emphasized when thrown into contrast with a buffalo who, during the buffalo hunt described above, takes an “obstinate hold of life” despite being “the target for a hundred arrows” (234). Mahtoree abandons the cow because it is “useless” within the economic structure of the buffalo-hunting tribes, and its flavor is weak in comparison to the beasts of the plains. This abandonment reveals, in subtle fashion, how the frontier is a double-edged sword of negation: while the advancing guard of Euroamerican civilization rejects the bad lands of the Plains as unfit for settlement, the Native inhabitants of the region are equally doubtful about the land-use practices being imported into the region by the invaders. Ultimately, the squatters and their cattle are obviously out of place relative to the Sioux and Pawnees who possess customs and land-use practices that coincide with the dictates of the natural environment. The cattle and the buffalo thus represent two paradigms of land use which collide on the Plains Indian frontier when the Bush clan comes into contact with the Sioux and Pawnees: the former would have the desert turned into a garden, while the latter desire to protect their hunting grounds from the invaders. The cultural and ecological significance of this collision is fortified through the metaphorical discourses of the two frontier parties: Cooper’s Sioux and Pawnees speak often in terms of buffaloes, just as Ishmael often infuses his dialogue with agricultural allusions. For the Indian characters, the buffalo signifies important cultural values, largely through its association with the natural environment and the masculine prowess needed to 34ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

maintain a connection to this environment. This link is manifest most idealistically through the speech of the Native characters. Upon their first meeting, Natty asks Hard-Heart if the Sioux and Pawnees have become friendly cohabitants of the grasslands, and he vehemently denies it, claiming that the Great Prairies belong to the Pawnees alone because “the plains and buffaloes are for men!” (223). Mahtoree shares this view and similarly underscores Sioux superiority by associating his people with buffalo and the Pawnees with rats: “If the earth was covered with rats, which are good for nothing . . . there would be no room for buffaloes, which give food and clothes to the Indian. If the prairies were covered with Pawnees, there would be no room for the foot of a Dacotah. A Loup is a rat, a Sioux a heavy buffalo; let the buffaloes tread upon the rats, and make room for themselves” (359). Buffalo here are associated with usefulness and bounty and convey a sense that the land belongs to the Sioux. Thus, though they compete over the land space for dominion, the representative characters from the warring tribes use the buffalo as a sign of rightful occupation and use of the land. Conversely, agriculture is equated with unmanliness and cowardice. In response to Natty’s suggestion that the Sioux “bury the tomahawk,” Mahtoree tells him, “The Big-knives are very wise, and they are men: all of them would be warriors. They would leave the Red-skins to dig roots and hoe the corn. But a Dacotah is not born to live like a woman” (243). To give up the hunt and to concede the hunting grounds to the Big-knives would be to relinquish his identity as a Dacotah male. Likewise, when Mahtoree dubiously pitches a pact of peace to Hard-Heart before they do battle in the novel’s climactic scene, Hard-Heart responds vehemently, “The Sioux would rob the warrior of his fame! He would say to his young men, Go, dig roots in the prairies, and find holes to bury your tomahawks; you are no longer braves” (390). Again, digging roots and making peace means eradicating what it means to be a Pawnee warrior: whereas the buffalo are a sign of traditional (if masculinist) lifeways on the Plains, plowing the prairies signifies the annihilation of these lifeways. As the Indian hero, Hard-Heart is most fully associated with the buffalo. Hard-Heart’s own manliness and nobility are emphasized when he figuratively becomes a buffalo, hiding under and emerging safely from a buffalo hide when a prairie fire overtakes him (296). He further confirms his identity as a genuine Pawnee warrior when he turns down an offer from La Balafré, an esteemed Sioux chief, who asks to adopt Hard-Heart. Hard-Heart exclaims respectfully, “[La Balafré] is very (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 35

old, but he has not yet looked upon everything. . . . He has never seen a buffalo change to a bat. He will never see a Pawnee become a Sioux!” (364). The buffalo becomes shorthand for an unblemished collective identity: to be like the buffalo is to be natural and pure, whole and complete. The hunting grounds are thus presented as a biocultural and tribalpastoral ideal: the Sioux and Pawnee are bound to the Plains culturally (through language and custom), economically (as a means of tribal subsistence and transfrontier exchange), and even spiritually (as the gift of Wacondah, the Great Spirit). Thus, though they are at odds—embroiled in a tribal conflict that is itself a manifestation of their shared need for access to the same land—the Pawnee and Sioux share a need to preserve the hunting grounds against the forces that would disrupt the integrity of the biocultural landscape. This is why the dialogue that precedes Hard-Heart’s triumph in battle over Mahtoree is so significant. As the reactionary, Mahtoree makes a plea with Hard-Heart for them to band together against the whites, whom he sees as the true enemy of the Native people: If a Red-skin strikes a Red-skin for ever, who will be masters of the prairies, when no warriors are left to say, “They are mine?” Hear the voices of the old men. They tell us that in their days many Indians have come out of the woods under the rising sun, and that they have filled the prairies with their complaints of the robberies of the Long-knives. Where a Pale-face comes, a Red-man cannot stay. The land is too small. They are always hungry. See, they are here already. (390– 91) Mahtoree presents the immanent paling of the prairies as a process of erasure: as the whites arrive, so must the Indians vanish. He claims ownership through indigenousness and understands that the arrival of the squatting Bushes—whose tents he points to as proof of what the future holds—is part of a continuous wave of American advances and Indian removals. Mahtoree here acknowledges the incompatibility of white and Native modes of occupying the prairies; the stationary white settlers would break up the culture of motion that the buffalo-hunting cultures rely upon. In light of his own greed, Mahtoree’s accusation against white land-hunger is somewhat ironic and the genuineness of his pan-tribal plea is questionable. However, I follow Rans’s assessment that Mahtoree’s request, although it is rejected vehemently by Hard-Heart—in fact gives voice to a rhetoric of 36ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

dissent that Hard-Heart himself gestures toward in other moments in the novel—particularly when he challenges the legitimacy of the Louisiana Purchase: “Is a nation to be sold like the skin of a beaver?” (215). It is only when Mahtoree proposes violent means for maintaining possession of the land that Hard-Heart refuses to join forces with his traditional enemy. Although he must vanquish his foe, it can be argued that Hard-Heart absorbs the spirit, if not the method, of resistance embodied in the Sioux chief. Combined with Natty’s endorsement of Native rights and his decision to live his final days among the Pawnees, Mahtoree’s resistance reveals the “countervailing view” that turns a critical eye against the progress of civilization that the Leatherstocking series reluctantly condones (Rans 132). Rans writes, “Cooper’s determination that the readers not lose sight of the continuing process [of Indian removal] constructively damages our view of the civilization he desires” (162). This determination lends an ambivalent tone to the Leatherstocking novels as a whole as Cooper tries to reconcile split sympathies toward the advancing and declining cultures on the frontier. If Cooper is not able to consciously resolve this historically unresovable cultural dilemma, as Rans argues (165–68), the climax of the novel’s sublimated Indian historical romance does tender a fantasy solution in the form of the final pastoral image of the Pawnee village. With the violent factions conquered, the survivors of the party of reaction—the less hostile members of the Sioux tribe—are incorporated into the Pawnee tribe. In this way, HardHeart actually accomplishes a version of Mahtoree’s pan-tribal community, though he continues to insist upon peaceful interactions with the whites. As some critics have noted, the Pawnee village provides an idyllic scene for the death of Natty and the closing of the novel’s primary romantic narrative, with all its nostalgic effervescence. Within the internal Indian romance, this pastoral scene takes on added importance as it posits a peaceably maintained biocultural landscape: The sun was beginning to fall, and a sheet of golden light was spread over the placid plain, lending to its even surface those glorious tints and hues, that the human imagination is apt to conceive, form the embellishment of still more imposing scenes. The verdure of the year yet remained, and herds of horses and mules were grazing peacefully in the vast natural pasture, under the keeping of vigilant Pawnee boys. (442–43) (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 37

Edwin Miller underscores the quite explicit “pastoral atmosphere” of the village (204), while Överland reads the setting as a sign of a significant reversal where the prairie desert has become a garden (171). While the pastoral undertones of the scene are clear, it is equally important to note that Cooper specifically crafts a bad land pastoral in this passage, one which reflects his overarching ambivalence about the future of the Indian wilderness. The scene reflects an ideal society caught in the amber of time, the epitome of the novel’s internal, Native-centered mythology that runs counter to its nationalist discourse and that finds its culmination in the offspring of Hard-Heart and Tachechana, the cast-off Sioux wife of Mahtoree. Thus, in a fashion not uncommon in frontier romances, the Pawnee chief fuses together the warring tribes through marriage and presumably sustains this new world order through procreation. The thriving Pawnee village, with children playing and animals grazing, presents an image of a nation at peace. Significantly, the Pawnee village that we witness in the final scene works, at least partially, against the notion of a vanishing and static Native culture. The progeny of Hard-Heart and Tachechana, who, by extension, are the grandchildren-in-spirit of Natty (who adopts Hard-Heart), suggest a paradigm of continuity and intertribal coalition that undercuts the myth of the Vanishing American. The masculinist paradigm that characterized the Indians’ early figurations of Plains life and experience—the idea that the grasslands are a place for buffalo and men—is replaced by an image of domestic accord, where marriage, children, and village life convey a settled existence. The collision of the novel’s internal Indian romance with its more explicit, conventional frontier romance, announced by the return of Middleton to the Pawnee hunting grounds, suggest the inevitability that the settled existence achieved by Hard-Heart is doomed. While the “vast natural pasture” with its herds being overlooked by their caretakers echoes an image we might find in Virgil, the scene’s deviations from the Virgilian tableau remind us that this is still the Indian, and thus savage, wilderness. It is horses and mules that are grazing—signs of a nomadic people who rely on the hunt for subsistence. The vast natural pasture is still the Pawnees’ hunting grounds, guarded by and watched over by “vigilant Pawnee boys.” The effect of the passage is mixed. The juxtaposition of a Euroamerican pastoral image with the reality of Native use casts the Plains as both an attractive site for future agrarian development and as the already viable and harmonious hunting grounds 38ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

of the Pawnees. While the close of the novel finds the latter still intact, the encroachment of the former suggests that the Euroamerican pastoral impulse will soon make its mark on the region and render the idyllic Pawnee village and hunting grounds obsolete. That is, the image of domestic accord that is manifest in the union of Tachechana and Hard-Heart is irrevocably upended by the narrative’s projections of Euroamerican ascendancy; after their victory over the Sioux, Cooper informs us, the Pawnees felt obliged to acquiesce to the force of Euroamerican progress and “disposed to consult the most trifling wants of that engrossing people who were daily encroaching on their rights, and reducing the Red-men of the west from their state of independence to the condition of fugitives and wanderers” (428). Cooper’s introduction to the 1832 edition of The Prairie acknowledges the likely success of America’s taming of the Indian wilderness, as railroads and the endless caravans of white settlers replace the “national feuds” among tribes like the Sioux and Pawnee. As the “final gathering-place of the red men,” the Pawnee village can be read in this context as a microcosmic expression of the fate of the Native biocultural landscape (xxv). Hard-Heart is thus charged with negotiating a future for his people in this changing landscape; while his peace with the whites—and Middleton in particular— makes secure the Pawnees’ physical survival and protection, their spiritual and cultural survival remains a challenge to be met in the face of traumatic changes to be wrought by the cattle and plow as the whites will continue to make inroads into the great prairies. How to meet this challenge is beyond the purview of Cooper’s narrative—indeed, at the time of his writing and revision of the novel, the fate of the western Indian was still being decided. Negotiating the legacy of loss implicit in the conquest of the Indian wilderness is better addressed in Welch’s Indian historical romance which, I argue, continues the story of Hard-Heart through his literary heir, Fools Crow.

The Legacy of Loss in Welch’s Fools Crow Written from a historical vantage point that allows him to take in the whole sweep of America’s conquest of the Plains Indians, Welch’s Fools Crow is infused with a postfrontier consciousness. In the novel Welch adopts the conventions of the Indian historical romance, internalized in Cooper’s The Prairie, in order to more explicitly address the myth of the American frontier. Welch undoubtedly presents a more nuanced reading of Plains Indian (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 39

experience than Cooper by incorporating historical and ethnographic research as well as Blackfeet mythology and firsthand accounts of the Marias Massacre. Indeed, Welch’s primary motivation is to present as fully as possible the Blackfeet view of the violent biocultural upheavals of the late nineteenth century. It is important to keep in mind that, like Cooper, Welch is a textual synthesizer: at a significant temporal remove from his subject, Welch culls from a variety of sources to construct and contribute to the ongoing development of the Plains textual landscape. While the depth and breadth of his sources might be greater than Cooper’s, Welch is essentially engaged in the same process of imaginatively reconstructing the Plains Indian frontier. So, while I want to elucidate the ways in which Welch expands the parameters of the Indian historical romance, I am also interested in how his narrative complements the strategies employed by Cooper a hundred and sixty years earlier. Because Welch knows how the story of the Plains Indian wilderness ends, so to speak, he can recast the Hard-Heart narrative to write beyond this ending; that is, in Fools Crow Welch extends the purview of Cooper’s tribal pastoralism to address how an Indian romance hero might preserve the spirit of the Native biocultural landscape in a postfrontier context. Ultimately, Welch provides what James Cox would call a “red reading” of the frontier romance by focusing on the spectrum of responses toward white encroachment within the Blackfeet community and by privileging the Native point of view.9 Just as in Cooper’s internal Indian romance, the central tension in Fools Crow is not that between the Indians and the whites. Indeed, direct contact between Indians and Euroamericans is limited to seven minor encounters: a brief visit from Captain Snelling and another unnamed officer to the Lone Eaters’ camp (154–58); the killing of the “white waster” by Fools Crow (164–71); the murder of Frank Standley by Owl Child’s gang (216–17); the murder of Yellow Kidney by a white who wants to avenge Standley’s death (241–46); the meeting with General Sully (273–84); the murder of the whiskey runner by Owl Child’s gang (289–94); and the visit of Sturgis, the doctor, to the smallpox-infected Lone Eater camp (300–307). Outside of these few violent or diplomatic meetings, all other interaction between the Indians and whites is related secondhand. While the encroachment of the whites into Blackfeet territory is indirectly the source of the novel’s central conflict, the focus of the dramatic tension is instead on the conflict among the Blackfeet themselves, concerning their attitudes 40ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

toward the Napikwans (whites). Inasmuch as Welch adapts and inverts the most typical variant of the frontier archetype—the progress of American civilization through the savage Indian wilderness—he is able to address his particular, revisionist concerns. However, his focus on the Blackfeet community does not go against the grain of the Waverley model. Dekker observes how historical romancers “typically have a strong commitment to a particular ‘patria’ and its people, and, as a rule, regionalize the ‘universal’ conflicts characteristic of the genre” (6). This is exactly what Welch does as he focuses on how the vast forces of change during the mid to late nineteenth century affected the Blackfeet community. Thus, although Fools Crow offers a “red reading” of the Waverley model, it still incorporates the model’s broader concerns. The frontier paradigm in Welch’s novel is directed inward because he explores the spectrum of concerns among the various Pikuni bands and creates Fools Crow as an epic hero who negotiates these variant concerns.10 The extreme progressive position among the Blackfeet is most evident through the figure of Heavy Runner, the unfortunate leader of the band massacred on the Marias. During the meeting with General Sully at the “Four Horns agency,” Heavy Runner articulates the essence of his attitude toward the Napikwans: “It is good for the Pikunis and Kainahs to get together with their brothers, the Napikwans. I, Heavy Runner, one of the major chiefs of the Pikunis, speak for all, with a good heart. It is our desire to live in peace with the Napikwans, and so shall it be, for we know that peace is in the heart of our brothers” (276). This stance translates into action, as Heavy Runner is the first to make the impossible promise to kill Owl Child and bring back the whites’ horses. He does not “speak for all,” but his desire for peace at all costs does represent the basic hope among the Blackfeet to have their people survive. He informs Sully, even as he acquiesces to the general’s demands, that it has been a “difficult winter” and that his people are cold and starving (280). It is through peace with the whites that Heavy Runner means to help his band. His intentions are no different from those of any of the other chiefs, though his faith in the potential of assimilation as the means to his desired end is unique. Despite his friendship with the whites, Heavy Runner gets nothing from Sully to relieve the hardship of his people. This illustrates Heavy Runner’s naïveté and the frailty of his position of peace by any means necessary. The problem with Heavy Runner’s position is that it is perhaps shortsighted. He is too eager to “treat” with the whites, and fails to realize the lasting effects that assimilation would have on Blackfeet culture. His eagerness (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 41

earns him the ridicule of his fellow chiefs and a reputation as the white man’s lackey. At one point, Rides-at-the-door remarks, “Heavy Runner would have us give away everything for a few blankets and a tin of the white man’s grease” (254). Despite Heavy Runner’s good intentions, his position of assimilation to Napikwan culture is viewed as detrimental and dangerous to the Blackfeet insofar as treating with the whites threatens to unravel the fabric of the Native biocultural landscape. In this manner, Heavy Runner parallels the other peace chief mentioned in the novel, Little Dog. Little Dog is remembered both “fondly and sadly” by Mad Plume (96), chief of the Black Patched Moccasins, because he had gone too far in his efforts to make peace with the Napikwans and learn agriculture. His own people killed him because, as Fools Crow remembers, “he had put the interests of the Napikwans before those of the Pikunis” (97).11 Among the Blackfeet, Heavy Runner and Little Dog stand as representatives of a problematic apex within the spectrum of attitudes toward the whites. They demonstrate a willingness to accept wide-scale changes for the future well-being of the Blackfeet. The other extreme is one of violent resistance to the encroaching force of the Napikwans. Delineating this extreme are reactionaries like Owl Child and Three Bears who desire to preserve the old Blackfeet way of life at all costs. Although he is an outcast among the Pikunis, the youthful warrior Owl Child most consistently and clearly articulates this position of rebellion against the whites. He condemns those Indians like Heavy Runner who see anything positive in treating with the whites. In an attempt to justify his murder of Malcolm Clark, the event that ultimately spells the doom of the Blackfeet, Owl Child considers, “To think that many of the Pikunis had disapproved of Owl Child’s revenge. They were the women—letting the Napikwans steal their lands, kill off their blackhorns, marry their women. They thought that by humbling themselves they could appease the whites” (209). Owl Child’s fundamentalist ideology is manifested on two levels here. First, his justification of his revenge indicates his adherence to Blackfeet conventions. As Welch notes in Killing Custer, Malcolm Clark had insulted Owl Child in front of his people, and the Blackfeet understood that though it would cause trouble with the whites “such an action requires revenge” (27). To withhold himself from his rightful revenge to appease the whites would contradict Owl Child’s sense of what it meant to be a Pikuni. Second, in this passage he identifies three of the immanent threats to traditional Blackfeet 42ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

culture: the loss of their land, the loss of the buffalo, and the breakdown of the homogenous Blackfeet community through interracial marriages. His fear of these changes exemplifies his divergence from the assimilationist peace chiefs. It is also notable that Owl Child ensconces his resistance of white encroachment in terms that echo the language and violent aggression of Mahtoree. Just as Mahtoree hopes to maintain his sovereignty by enforcing the Sioux custom of taking possession of his captives, Owl Child refuses to be shackled by white civil law in the administration of what he sees as the just killing of Malcolm Clark. Owl Child more fully executes his resistance than Mahtoree by engaging in guerrilla warfare in an effort to drive the whites off the land. In addition to the Malcolm Clark incident, Owl Child and his band of rebels are involved in the murder of a group of woodcutters, Frank Standley, and a whiskey runner. This is what “real Pikunis” do, Owl Child explains to Three Bears, because “someday, old man, a Napikwan will be standing right where you are and all around him will be grazing thousands of the whitehorns. You will be only a part of the dust they kick up. If I have my way I will kill that white man and all his whitehorns before this happens” (Welch, Fools Crow 61). His apocalyptic vision of the Pikuni future stands in sharp contrast to the perspectives held by Heavy Runner and Little Dog, who would welcome and accept the replacement of blackhorns with whitehorns if it meant peace. In his article on images of cattle ranching in Welch’s novels, Seth Bovey examines the viewpoints toward the “whitehorns” portrayed in Fools Crow. He notes how Owl Child’s disdain for efforts to treat with the whites reveals “the dynamics of the historical situation by associating the blackhorn with Blackfeet tradition and whitehorns with the destruction of that tradition” (131). The presence of cattle signals the very real disruption of the Native biocultural landscape that white encroachment ushers forth: Owl Child’s violence is thus a desperate act of defiance that parallels Mahtoree’s willingness to abandon an ancient feud with Hard-Heart in order to join forces against the invaders. Just as Heavy Runner and Little Dog are admonished for their extremist positions, Owl Child too is rejected. Although his intentions are to preserve the purity of Pikuni tradition, his decision to pursue vigilante tactics marks Owl Child as an outcast. Early on in the novel, Yellow Kidney acknowledges the threat that Owl Child’s reactionary methods pose to the Blackfeet. Thinking about Owl Child’s recent violent encounter with a party of woodcutters, Yellow Kidney considers, “It would be only a matter of time (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 43

before the Napikwans sent their seizers to make war on the Pikunis. The people would suffer greatly” (16). Not unlike the perceived threat of complete assimilation to Euroamerican “civilization,” Owl Child’s violent rebellion will cause the Blackfeet suffering. Yellow Kidney’s prediction does come true, as Owl Child’s actions are tolerated by neither the people of Montana nor the United States Army. It is one of the tragic ironies of history that Owl Child’s extreme position of resistance leads to the massacre of Heavy Runner and his otherwise peaceful band of Pikunis. Although Owl Child is an outcast among the Pikunis, the leader of the Lone Eaters band, Three Bears, more officially represents the spirit of his reactionary disposition within the Pikuni community. Three Bears counsels against peace with the whites if it means sacrificing the integrity of Blackfeet culture and does so drawing on the same cattle/bison dichotomy that distinguishes the language of Cooper’s Sioux and Pawnees: We will not become like the whitehorns that these white people herd from one place to another. . . . If the Napikwans do not respect our lands and our people, I will lead the first war party against them. I am an old man and I see things I do not like. It is clear to me that our days of following the blackhorns where we choose are numbered. I see the signs all around me. . . . It is bad for our young people and it will get worse. The Lone Eaters are lucky. We live many sleeps from these places of ruin. But the day will come when our people will decide that they would rather consort with the Napikwans than live in the ways our long-ago fathers thought appropriate. But I, Three Bears, will not see this day. I will die first. (256) Three Bears’s speech illustrates not only his similarity to Owl Child, but also the very real threat that the white(horn)s pose to the Native biocultural landscape. The language here echoes that of Owl Child, particularly regarding the symbolic, though no less real, threat of the whites and their cattle. This speech stresses the way this reactionary spirit of dissent crosses generational lines, though as “an old man” who is in touch with the ways of the “longago fathers,” Three Bears is even more deeply rooted in the traditions of the Blackfeet than Owl Child. His desire to fight or die clarifies the strength of his conviction, as he admonishes those Pikunis who would “consort” with the Napikwans. Three Bears wants the Blackfeet to survive as Blackfeet, with all of their traditions intact: it is the old way or no way. 44ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

In Welch’s novel, the poles of reaction and progress are thus more explicitly fleshed out than they are in Cooper’s internal Indian romance; this is because Hard-Heart plays a double role in The Prairie. That is, he essentially straddles two frontiers: insofar as he is opposed to Mahtoree and the Sioux, he is an assimilationist in the vein of Heavy Runner who rehearses the benefits of making peace; as a man who must confront the dangers of white encroachment, Hard-Heart also adopts a resistant stance (which, as noted previously, he shares with Mahtoree) toward the interlopers, even as he hospitably welcomes them. Wavering between these two frontiers, Hard-Heart achieves a dynamic equilibrium that mediates the reactionary and progressive poles and that culminates in a Pawnee pastoral ideal. For Fools Crow, the ideologies of assimilation and resistance play out within his own tribe, and when the massacre on the Marias makes him the leader of the Pikunis his ability to reconcile these conflicting ideologies establishes him as a frontier hero. Even before he receives his new name, a mark of his rising importance and rank within the Lone Eater band, Fools Crow recognizes the atmosphere of change that surrounds the Pikunis. On his journey to inform the various Blackfeet tribes about Heavy Shield Woman’s vow to be the Sacred Vow Woman at the summer ceremony, Fools Crow “remember[s] the stories told by his grandfather of the origins of the constellations. He had been young then and it all seemed simple. There were only the people, the stars, the blackhorns. Now his grandfather was dead and the Napikwans were pushing their way into the country” (93). This description nicely dramatizes Fools Crow’s sense of the imminent cultural storm that threatens the sanctity and purity of the Blackfeet biocultural landscape. The simple times of isolation are being replaced by white encroachment, a change marked in part by the death of his grandfather. Fools Crow’s awareness of this change and his desire to answer the question “What would happen to the Pikunis?” (93) represent an important step in his development as a romantic hero. Indeed, the first burden that he must contend with is that “now, each decision meant a change in [the Blackfeet] way of life” (314). As a frontier hero, Fools Crow responds to this moment of drastic change by attempting a balance between Blackfeet tradition and the modifications introduced by the Napikwans. The diplomatic approach to such change is first outlined by Fools Crow’s father, Rides-at-the-door. He tells his two sons, (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 45

It will only be out of desperation that we fight [the Napikwans] . . . You must remember that the Napikwans outnumber the Pikunis. Any day the seizers could ride into our camps and wipe us out. It is said that already many tribes in the east have been wiped away . . . For this reason we must leave them alone, even allow them some of our hunting grounds to raise their whitehorns. If we treat wisely with them, we will be able to save enough for ourselves and our children. It is not an agreeable way, but it is the only way. (90) Rides-at-the-door’s outlook on the whites is pragmatic. He accepts the inevitability of loss and wants to balance between dealing with the whites and maintaining Blackfeet cultural integrity. Above all else, he stresses survival. He wants to provide for the children. In this regard, Rides-at-thedoor’s intentions are no different from those of the New World peace chiefs and the Old World warriors; indeed, Three Bears admires him because he has “the blood of a warrior in a peace-talker’s body” (254). That Ridesat-the-door sees fighting as an act of desperation and that he is willing to concede only some of the land to the whites, shows that his means to this end are distinct from theirs. He seeks a careful equilibrium in order to avoid the extremes of assimilation or almost certain annihilation. Ridesat-the-door’s position within the spectrum of Blackfeet attitudes toward the whites is clarified when Gates informs General Sully that he is “somewhere in the middle” of the hostile Mountain Chief and the peaceful Heavy Runner (278). While Rides-at-the-door outlines this “in between” position, his elder son more fully realizes and embodies it. As a leader, Fools Crow resolves to embrace the “poignant transitional moment” and do what he can to help the Blackfeet persevere in a time of great loss. When he visits the site of the Marias Massacre at the end of the novel, he recognizes the futility of resisting inevitable change: Now [Fools Crow] knew his father had been right all along—the Pikunis were no match for the seizers and their weapons. That the camps were laid low with the white-scabs disease did not even matter. The disease, this massacre—Sun Chief favored the Napikwans. The Pikunis would never possess the power to make them cry. (383) 46ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

Fools Crow’s anger at the massacre scene does not translate into a hunger for revenge, as it might have for Owl Child or Three Bears. In a changing world where the Napikwans greatly outnumber the Blackfeet, the conventions of revenge and dying a “good death” must be left aside in favor of survival: not an agreeable way, but the only way. This scale of change is inevitable, and it is Fools Crow’s intention to not lose everything. Although he rejects Mountain Chief ’s and Three Bears’s method of war, Fools Crow does share the chiefs’ desire to have the Blackfeet endure as Blackfeet, at least to as great a degree as possible. His instructions to Curlew Woman, one of the survivors of the massacre, reveal this point: It is good that you are alive. You will have much to teach the young ones about the Napikwans. Many of them will come into this world and grow up thinking that the Napikwans are their friends because they will be given a blanket or a tin of the white man’s water. But [at this massacre site], you see, this is the Napikwan’s real gift. (385) Here, he warns against the purely assimilationist attitude held by Heavy Runner and Little Dog. The Blackfeet may have no choice but to treat with the whites, but they must do so while remaining aware that the Napikwans are deceitful and that too much reliance on the Napikwan way will mean the destruction of Blackfeet culture. If fighting the whites is futile and if the transformation of the Native biocutural landscape is inevitable, then survival must come in the form of storytelling and the passing down of traditions to the children of the survivors. For Fools Crow, genetic and spiritual endurance are both necessary to maintain some stability in the face of a dramatically shifting biocultural landscape. As with Hard-Heart, this perseverance comes in the form of Fools Crow’s marriage to Red Paint and is fortified through the birth of their son, Butterfly. His commitment to his family distinguishes him from his friend Fast Horse—a would-be hero who fails to strike a balance between adaptation and preservation. Fast Horse demonstrates vast positive potential at the beginning of the novel. He is strong and handsome and boasts often of his strong medicine. It is his boasting in the middle of the Crow camp that ruins the horse raid and leads to the capture of Yellow Kidney. More than this, though, Fast Horse loses faith in the Pikuni way when he is unable to locate (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 47

a spring pointed out to him in a dream about Cold Maker. After this, Fast Horse chooses to leave the Pikunis without making the necessary sacrifice to Cold Maker to make up for his failure. Fast Horse’s break from tradition and the subsequent act of joining Owl Child’s gang serve to illuminate Fools Crow’s tribal responsibility. As he searches for Fast Horse in an effort to bring him back to the Lone Eaters, Fools Crow confronts the temptation that Fast Horse’s way of life presents: “It was this freedom from responsibility, from accountability to the group, that was so alluring. As long as one thought of himself as part of the group, he would be responsible to and for that group. If one cut ties, he had the freedom to roam” (211). After he finds Fast Horse, this temptation to be free fades and Fools Crow begins to miss his wife and the Lone Eater camp (236). For Fools Crow, it is better to suffer with the people than to wander the plains alone, hunting Napikwans. Thus, Fools Crow’s rise as hero emphasizes the importance of tradition and the family bind. Barry notes, “Fools Crow, by trusting to dream/vision ritual, passes several trials that lead him to maturity. His heroism emerges when he passes these trials by living within the restraints of Pikuni values in his roles as warrior, husband, and hunter” (6). His acceptance of these restraints is rewarded as Fools Crow grows stronger throughout the narrative, from having “little to show for his eighteen winters” (3) to bearing the burden of responsibility for the Blackfeet at the end of the novel and becoming their spiritual leader. He gets help along the way from Raven and his animal helper, from Mik-api and Feather Woman, which illustrates the significance of his adherence to the Pikuni way. Through his awareness and appreciation of his heritage, Fools Crow is able to embrace the future. His desire to pass this heritage on to his child, who is born at this “poignant transitional moment,” represents the important link between the past and the future, the old and the new, that Fools Crow is charged to establish. Thus, with heavy emotion he tells his wife, Red Paint, that their son “must survive” (369). His future-mindedness is an essential element of his heroism, as he must maintain the balance between tradition and survival and succeed where the other Pikunis have failed. Welch’s careful presentation of Fools Crow’s emphasis on physical and cultural survival both parallels Cooper’s portrayal of Hard-Heart and takes the narrative of endurance to another level. Written when the process of Indian removal was in its nascent stages, Cooper’s pastoral vision of the 48ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

Pawnee village at the end of The Prairie represents an uncertain spatialtemporal middle-space between the end of one biocultural feud (between competing tribes) and the emergence/threat of another (between the whites and Indians); Welch’s pastoral vision, on the other hand, incorporates the tragic aftermath of Manifest Destiny and bridges the gap between the frontier and postfrontier identity of the Blackfeet. Fools Crow’s ability to harmonize loss and survival situates him as a successful postfrontier hero; this heroic balance culminates in his dream-quest which ties him intimately to Blackfeet sacred history and which charges him with the responsibility to lead his people into the next, darker phase of Blackfeet experience. That is, the closing sequences of the novel, including Fools Crow’s vision of the yellow skin and the Marias Massacre, magnify the ways that the old and new worlds intersect to form a new tragicomic heroic order that has the power to transcend the traumatic shift in the Native biocultural landscape. His entrance into the dream-realm of the Summer Land presents what amounts to a complex pastoral: an escape into an isolated and lush natural realm that ends up being a counterforce that awakens Fools Crow to the stark reality of the changes that are in store for his tribe. Thus, while his dream journey momentarily takes him away from the swirling forces of change, it also instructs him how to navigate this change for himself and his people. The pastoral experience solidifies his status as a romantic hero. When Welch links Fools Crow to Blackfeet mythology in part four of Fools Crow, he accentuates his hero’s role as intercessor between the Blackfeet’s past and future. In this section of the novel, the threat of an attack from the white soldiers is imminent and is compounded by a new outbreak of smallpox. As these threats hover around his band’s winter camp, Fools Crow is instructed in a dream by Nitkosan to ride east for three days and three nights. At the end of his journey he comes upon a dream-realm, a large bowl in the middle of the mountains where it is perpetually summer. It is here where he meets Feather Woman, a central figure within Blackfeet mythology whose fate is tied up with the Sun Dance ceremony. At the Sun Dance (near the end of book one), Ambush Chief tells the story of how Feather Woman was banished from the heavens by her husband Morning Star. She is sent down to earth because she could not overcome her temptation to dig up a sacred turnip, after she was specifically instructed not to do so. Forced to return to her earth-family, Feather Woman eventually dies of a broken heart, pining to rejoin her husband in heaven. Meanwhile, her son, Scar Face, (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 49

who was banished along with his mother, is allowed to return to Morning Star after Feather Woman dies. In heaven, Scar Face redeems himself to his father after he protects him from an attack by seven birds while they are out on a hunt. As a reward for Scar Face’s brave act, his father removes the scar from his face and charges him with the task of returning to earth to instruct the Blackfeet in the ceremony of the Sun Dance. This ceremony ties the people to the landscape and imparts a spiritual and cultural value to their bison-based subsistence economy. When Fools Crow encounters Feather Woman in his dream vision, he enters directly into the sustaining mythology of his people. In an article exploring Welch’s use of the Feather Woman myth, Nora Barry notes the parallels between Fools Crow’s development as a hero and the story of Scar Face. She writes, “Like Scarface, [Fools Crow] is sent on a vision/quest journey to a place between earth and stars where . . . he receives a powerful but harrowing vision of the Blackfeet future of starvation and cultural exile” (4). There is much to be said for this comparison, as the Scar Face/Fools Crow parallel stresses the significance of tradition and survival. As the deliverer of the Sundance ceremony, Scar Face is an important agent between the Blackfeet and their gods; that is, he provides the Blackfeet a means of survival and a ritual which heals the breach that Feather Woman’s fall causes. Likewise, as Barry points out, Fools Crow himself serves as mediator between the human and spiritual world through his vision. This correlation emphasizes an important link between the ancient past and Fools Crow’s contemporary reality. Indeed, Fools Crow tells One Spot, “Of all the Above Ones, [Scar Face] is most like us” (Welch 262). This likeness illustrates the potential of healing and purification for the Blackfeet people, as Scar Face provides the hope, indicated by the removal of his scar, and the means, ritual, and ceremony, of recovery. Fools Crow accentuates this hope through his faith that his people are the chosen ones who will and must survive. While this parallel between Fools Crow and Scar Face is important, it is incomplete. Barry underestimates Fools Crow’s similar doubling with Feather Woman, a mythic figure who reinforces the hope of redemption, like Scar Face, but who also personfies the suffering and loss that is so integral a part of the Blackfeet’s future. Fools Crow’s encounter with Feather Woman presents a significant revision of mythology that serves to underscore Fools Crow’s heroic managing of the legacy of loss. When Ambush Chief first relates Feather Woman’s story at the Sun Dance ceremony, as I have already 50ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

recounted, it is revealed that the separation she suffers because of her sin causes her to die of a “broken heart” (111). In this scenario, she represents nothing more than a fallen sacred being. Fools Crow at first acknowledges her as someone who was not even mourned when she died (350). However, when she tells her own story, it is apparent that she stands for much more. The crucial difference is that she does not die of sorrow; instead, she survives in this pastoral realm and continues to bear the burden of her sorrow and the knowledge that her sin is linked with the suffering of the Blackfeet. Her misery becomes linked to their misery, as she is the source of “sickness and hunger, Napikwans and war” (352). When Fools Crow receives his vision from Feather Woman, he becomes integrated into this larger scheme. Like Feather Woman, he must bear the burden of the forthcoming sorrow and desolation of his people. Both Fools Crow and Feather Woman are “powerless to change [this fate]” (358), but they each illustrate the significance of survival amid these overwhelming forces of change and suffering. In this manner, Feather Woman, even more so than Scar Face, is “like” Fools Crow and the Blackfeet. She represents their new reality and conveys the kind of strength they will need to overcome the threat of assimilation and the annihilation of their traditional mode of inhabiting their homeland. In this sense, she is more “real” than Scar Face, a trait Fools Crow notes before he learns her identity (335). Indeed, when Fools Crow mentions the power of Scar Face to Feather Woman and the hope he represents for the Blackfeet, she responds with a “look of alarm” (353). It is at this point that Feather Woman gives Fools Crow his harrowing vision on the yellow skin. Through the vision, Fools Crow learns that the sanctity and purity of the rituals Scar Face represents will not prevent change nor provide for future generations in the manner he and his people had hoped. While it is important for him to pass down the stories and traditions of his people, he must also resolve himself and his people to locate new ways to provide for their children. Feather Woman instructs Fools Crow through his vision on the yellow skin how to be a frontier hero who can teach his people how to cope with the harrowing changes wrought by the arrival of the whites and their whitehorns. She forces him to confront the forthcoming harms to Blackfeet culture by projecting these harms as images that appear on the skin: the reemergence of the “white-scabs” disease (353–54); the forthcoming massacre on the Marias by the white seizers (355); the disappearance of the buffalo and (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 51

the starvation of the Blackfeet (356–57); and the despair of the reservation Indians at the white school (358). It is fitting that these images of loss play across a blank canvas: Welch subverts the Euroamerican convention of presenting the Plains as a blank page. The yellow skin vision belies the pioneer myth about filling the prairie void and reveals instead how Euroamerican frontier expansion actually sterilized what was a bountiful biocultural landscape. This process of negation is most evident in the astonishing revelation of the forthcoming depletion of prairie wildlife: “There were no blackhorns. And there were no long-legs and no bighorns. There were no wags-his-tail or prairie-runners. It was as if the earth had swallowed up the animals, now there were none. To see such a vast, empty prairie made Fools Crow uneasy” (356). Combined with the destruction wrought by smallpox, the violence perpetrated by the U.S. Army, the degradation of the reservation system, and the assimilationist disruptions of the Indian schools, the emptying of the prairies forecasts the end of the Blackfeet’s traditional way of life. Although “much will be lost,” Feather Woman reassures Fools Crow that “they will know the way it was. The stories will be handed down” (360). At this moment, memory and hope become synonymous in the person of Fools Crow: as storyteller, he will bridge the gap between the past and the future. Whatever it is the Blackfeet were being punished for, it is Fools Crow, as a new cultural hero somewhere in between Scar Face and Feather Woman, who will redeem them. Fools Crow’s encounter with Feather Woman situates him as a Scar Face for a changing world, someone with the potential to transcend the legacy of loss and carry his people into the future. The strikingly uplifting final scene of the novel, following on the heels of the brutal massacre on the Marias, reinforces the significance of the new heroic order that Fools Crow has established with Feather Woman’s help. Despite the bleakness of his vision, which reminds him of the legacy of loss that he and his people must overcome, Fools Crow feels a sense of elation: “He felt in his heart, in the rhythm of the drum, a peculiar kind of happiness—a happiness that sleeps with sadness. And the feeling made his head light and he was removed from the others, dancing alone, singing a song that had to do with his life in this world, and in that other world he had visited in his vision. . . . For even though he was, like Feather Woman, burdened with the knowledge of his people, their lives and the lives of their children, he knew they would survive, for they were the chosen ones” (390). His song signals the balance he has achieved. It fuses hope and memory, 52ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

happiness and sadness, loss and survival. As the bearer of this burden of knowledge, Fools Crow emerges as a spiritual leader for his people who wants to ensure that what is essential in their past will be passed on into the future, however desolate, through stories and song. Thus, he achieves an essential equilibrium between the adaptation and preservation that translates into the cultural survival of the Pikuni way. While Fools Crow admits to a desire to escape his burden, to return to Feather Woman and her “green sanctuary between earth and sky” (360), the novel’s final image emphasizes the theme of endurance implicit in tribal pastoralism that resists the dominant culture’s frontier narrative that casts the story in terms of an alpha/omega phenomenon. The return of the “blackhorns” to the “rain-dark prairies” and the claim that all was “as it should be” resonate with tragic irony when the sentiment of this final phrase is set against the yellow skin vision. The most striking contrast lies in the disjunction between the vision of a “vast, empty prairie” (356) devoid of blackhorns and the “rivers of great animals” (390–91) described at the end of the novel. What Fools Crow sees on the yellow skin the contemporary reader of Welch’s novel already accepts as a given in the historical record of the Great Plains: the return of the buffalo to the prairies in the days following the Marias Massacre is only temporary. The vast herds of buffalo will soon be depleted by the high demand for buffalo furs in the late nineteenth century and by the extermination policy of General Philip Sheridan. Indeed, within the Euroamerican imagination, the story of buffalo and Indians on the Plains is a story of endings and loss, of an open-space wilderness transformed into the raw materials for nation building. Within this context, the buffalo-filled prairie presents an unlikely image. The return of the blackhorns, however, also tells another story that subverts this narrative of vanishing Indians and buffalo. The final image in Fools Crow emphasizes seasonality and the endurance of cycles, an endurance highlighted by the “sleeping calves” and the blackhorns’ seasonal molting. The image preceding this one in the book involves Pikuni children playing in the rain and a young puppy running cheerfully among the survivors of the massacre; the juxtaposition of these images with the returning buffalo underscores the theme of the novel: where there is loss and death, there is also renewal and survival. To focus on the cyclical return of buffalo to their grazing ranges, rather than highlight their tragic decline, functions as a potent part of Welch’s overarching revision of the Plains frontier narrative. (un)settling the indian wilderness ҏ 53

He focuses on continuity rather than on catastrophic change, emphasizing, as David L. Moore suggests, “the longer view of history” (75). This longer view suggests that even as the biocultural landscape undergoes significant changes, the spiritual and cultural value of the Native interface with the grasslands can be preserved through memory and story; indeed, these memories and stories are embedded in the landscape as part of the cultural palimpsest that is the Great Plains. Both Cooper and Welch use the Waverley model to make sense of the spiritual, ecological, and aesthetic consequences of the fundamental shift from Native bison-hunting ranges to Euroamerican agricultural communities on the Plains. To different degrees, their frontier narratives address the power of tribal pastoralism to preserve elements of the Native biocultural landscape, even as this landscape is threatened or depleted by the encroaching agrarian civilization. The Pawnee village at the end of Cooper’s novel fosters an image of cultural stability in sea of change that posits the inevitable dissolution of the Native hunting grounds as a tragic erasure of a harmonious and sovereign biocultural ideal. Likewise, the returning buffalo at the end of Welch’s Fools Crow suggest that, despite the unsettling of the Native biocultural landscape by the Euroamerican colonizers, its spiritual and cultural legacy will continue to thrive in the hearts and minds of the Blackfeet and will remain as a permanent part of the palimpsest of the Plains.

54ҍ (un)settling the indian wilderness

 2

Pastoralism and Enclosure Marriage and Illegitimate Children on the Range-Farm Frontier in Eaton’s Cattle and Richter’s Sea of Grass Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends, Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends. One man likes to push a plough, The other likes to chase a cow, But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends. —Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma, 1943 The cattle range is a womanless country. The farming country is a land of homes. Society is built up of homes, and the laws of society will sooner or later trend in favour of the man with the home and the yoke, the more willing or the more helpless slave.—Emerson Hough, Story of the Cowboy, 1897

Raising Cain and Avenging Abel in the Arid West In some ancient wilderness, so the story goes, two brothers— one a herdsman and the other a tiller of the soil—made offerings to their god. This god looked favorably upon Brother Herder’s offering and in turn rejected the humble fruits of Brother Farmer’s labor. Indignant and envious in the face of this slight, Brother Farmer went out into the fields the next day and murdered his competition. Needless to say, this act did not help his cause in the eyes of his god. As a result, and against the dictates of his agrarian

vocation, Brother Farmer was made to wander the earth all the rest of his days, haunted by the ground that was soaked in the blood of his brother. Although he would go on to sire a harvest of children, even this crop would eventually wither away in only a few generations; his trademark example of sibling rivalry, however, would reemerge eons later in the North American West as the Herder and the Farmer who would clash once again in a duel central to the legacy of land use on the Great Plains. Often couched in the language of this biblical tale, the conflict between the rancher and the farmer in the arid West is a part of the cultural fabric of the region, a master narrative immortalized in Hammerstein’s playful lyric calling for the Cains and Abels of Oklahoma to forget their differences for the good of the Territory. In the late nineteenth century, when the arable lands of the West were comfortably settled and the arid pasturelands were all that was available for the ploughman, agrarian boosters raised Cain to once again sound the death knell for his ancient enemy, now manifest in the so-called cattle kingdom. The once mighty barons of this short-lived empire of beef, like Abel, would send their cries to the heavens in response and demand justice for the mutilation of the grasslands—their transformation into fields of wheat, corn, and flax—and the untimely death of the open range. This justice came in the form of the cyclical droughts that would force the farmer to roam until lands more suitable for grain agriculture could be found. By the turn of the twentieth century, the battle lines were clearly drawn in the competition for the Great Plains; over time, this historical collision between the ploughman and the cowman entered the realm of myth, embodying a series of opposing cultural, economic, and ecological paradigms that reflect the complex story of land use in the region. This clash has been well documented by western environmental historians, most notably by the Turner-influenced Walter Prescott Webb, and to some degree the conflict between the rancher and farmer is something of a regional cliché that serves as a backdrop for retellings of the grandest of all western narratives: the taming of the “wild” West. In terms of land-use practices, the range-farm frontier is crucial. Insofar as it manifests a series of binaries that reflect the complex makeup of western identity as it has evolved over the past century and a half (and continues to evolve) the formulaic confrontation between the rancher and the farmer, as it is articulated in fiction, deserves closer inspection. The range-farm frontier, that is, evinces a sequence of interrelated polar oppositions: primitivism and acculturation, 56ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

wildness and domestication, open range and fenced enclosures, masculine and feminine landscapes, and so on. Depending upon what end of the ideological dividing line one is on, the range-farm frontier can be read as a progressive, regressive, or simply nostalgic phenomenon. This frontier, like the Plains Indian frontier, juxtaposes competing visions of how to successfully inhabit the region: one that imagines a semi-wild empire of grass and another that engages the dream of making the bad land good. The plow’s eventual conquest of the arid West in the early part of the twentieth century established clear victors and victims in this regional drama, as in a few decades the open range gave way to a checkerboard of enclosed grain farms. The significance of this transition for the land and cultures of the arid West has been the source of continuous debate. As David H. Breen notes in his study of the Canadian ranching frontier, the victory of grain over grass has often been read with an agrarian bias that “immortalized the sturdy westward-moving pioneer farmer as the emblem of democracy and progress and characterized cattlemen as autocratic and obstructionary” (51). Like the nomadic Plains Indians before them, western ranchers provided a barrier to North America’s Manifest Destiny. As Breen goes on to argue, the “true picture [of the range-farm frontier] is hardly so black and white. Apart from the basic question of the region’s suitability for agriculture, ranchers had a number of legitimate complaints” (51). This point is made visible in more recent attempts to reclaim ranchers as environmental saints compared with farmers.1 From a post–Dust Bowl perspective, the pioneer farmers were rapacious and greedy, failing to heed— as the original cattlemen apparently did—the region’s unique climate and ecology. The earliest Euroamerican assessments of the region’s economic potential claim that the grasslands were suited more for pasturage than for grain agriculture. The cyclical droughts that struck the Plains—in the 1890s and again in the 1930s, for example—seemed to pronounce divine judgment on the farmers, forcing them to retreat east or west in the face of failure. Taken together, these divergent readings of the Plains agricultural frontier —one celebratory, the other demonizing—reveal the tensions implicit in Euroamerican attempts to find a mode of inhabitation suitable for the arid West. This tension is further revealed and codified in historical fiction that dramatizes the conflict between ranchers and farmers. This chapter investigates how the range-farm frontier—as a cultural, economic, and ecological phenomenon—functions in two historical romances written pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 57

in the decades after the end of the open-range era: Winnifred Eaton’s Cattle (1924) and Conrad Richter’s Sea of Grass (1937). Both of these texts extrapolate the generic elements of the Indian frontier romance, as outlined in the previous chapter, and inscribe them onto the range-farm frontier, positing the latter as a site where competing Euroamerican paradigms of Plains inhabitation come into conflict. This conflict is seemingly resolved through the narratives’ romantic couplings, though the resolution in both cases is a tenuous and rather ambivalent one. What separates Eaton’s and Richter’s novels is what makes them useful for a comparative analysis of the range-farm frontier in historical fiction: their narratives dramatize the frontier conflict from opposing sides of the ranch/farm divide. Whereas Eaton’s popular romance demonizes ranchers in favor of her agrarian protagonists, Richter’s novella is narrated by the nephew of a cattle baron who clearly sympathizes with his uncle’s approach to the lands of the arid West. While separated by their points of view, both Cattle and Sea of Grass contain the figure of a deceased illegitimate child who is the product of a transfrontier coupling, a textual ghost that haunts the otherwise joyous (re)unions that occur at the end of both narratives. These illegitimates, that is, function as symbolic repositories for the dangers and tensions implicit in the attempt to define and sustain a uniform biocultural identity in the arid West. These deceased children simultaneously register the loss of the pioneer era and immortalize the passing of an epic age. While somewhat tangential to both novels’ overall plots—the dead infant in Eaton’s novel seems to have been forgotten by even the author in the final chapter—the figure of the illegitimate child nonetheless provides an effective lens through which to read how the Cain and Abel conflict is adapted into regional narratives that contain a vital expression of bad land pastoralism.

The Historical Romance and the Range-Farm Frontier In the vacuum created by the attempted extermination of the buffalo and the subordination of the Plains Indians, the open-range era commenced in the years following the Civil War as ranchers took advantage of the free grass that everyone else had dismissed as bad land.2 The arrival of the railroad in the West, coupled with the birth of cattle towns like Abilene, Kansas, where the southern proprietor and the northern buyer could “meet upon equal footing” (Webb 220), supplied access to the markets that was necessary to 58ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

make the ranching industry successful. Thus, in the period between 1866 and the mid-1880s, the cattle kingdom, as Webb calls it, spread throughout the Plains on both sides of the 49th parallel and “during that period . . . men, cattle, and horses held almost undisputed possession of the region” (225). This “empire of grass” extended north of the 49th parallel in the 1880s, beginning with small ranches operated largely by members of the North West Mounted Police and then eventually expanding as a “product of federal intervention and promotion” (Thompson 64). The presence of the police on the ranching frontier, as Breen notes, contrasted with the largely lawless ranges south of the border, imparting to the Canadian industry a sense of law and order. Furthermore, a conservative government helped encourage the development of cattle raising in the West through an amendment to the Dominion Lands Act in 1881 that allowed ranchers to lease up to 100,000 acres of public grassland for a twenty-one-year term. This legislation opened up the dry land of Palliser’s Triangle to investors who could afford the lease fees, creating an absentee ranching community made up mostly of influential and wealthy individuals from eastern cities and as far away as Britain; such federal intervention diverges from the American cattle industry, which relied largely on the practice of range rights, whereby grazing and water rights were held by the first cattlemen to enter a particular region.3 While the grass was not necessarily “free” in the same sense that it was south of the border, legal loopholes kept the Canadian Plains a relatively open range with large tracts of land possessed by a small number of people. The semi-mythical figure of the cattle baron, the monarchical ruler of a vast cattle domain, is thus a vital dimension of the range era on both sides of the international boundary. Historical conditions in the transborder region put the arid grasslands in possession of ranchers and investors who took advantage of a unique economic opportunity provided by a distinct physical environment. The agricultural settler, however, challenged this possession once railroad promoters, irrigation boosters, and dry-farming innovators in the 1880s and 1890s proclaimed the arid West conquerable.4 Encouraged by a series of wheat bonanzas throughout the Plains, the farmers soon had dominion over the arid region and began to cut up the open range with barbed-wire fences, invented in 1874. With the infiltration of these settlers, backed by a string of laws that promised them land, the days of the open range were soon over. As Rodman Paul succinctly puts it: “As soon as farmers were attracted to the neighborhood, fights developed” (195); while such fights were often pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 59

physically violent, particularly south of the border where eruptions like the Johnson County range wars were not uncommon, the contest was also ideological, as the nomadic and semi-barbaric rancher was pitted against the home-seeking heir of Jefferson’s yeoman. Despite some desperate last attempts by the cattlemen to preserve their hold on the region, the home seekers were triumphant, thanks largely to the financial, legal, and intellectual support provided by the federal government. In January of 1887, the Laramie Sentinel thus “congratulated Cain, ‘the tiller of the soil,’ for killing Abel, ‘the stockgrower’ ” (qtd. in Emmons 191). What the homesteader began nature soon finished: the open-range era was ultimately terminated by the hard winters and blizzards of 1886–1887 and 1906–1907 with the destruction of thousands of head of livestock. As quickly as it rose the cattle kingdom collapsed, being reduced “from an adventure into a business which is today carried on with as much system as farming or manufacturing” (Webb 240). In addressing this era of economic transition, romancers of the rangefarm frontier provide a record of the ongoing attempt to grapple imaginatively with the value of the arid grasslands. Culturally, the range-farm frontier posits yet another collision between nomads and settlers, between the primitive and presumably more natural institutions of ranching and the advanced, civilizing influences of grain agriculture. Economically, the frontier highlights two institutional approaches to land use in the region—both dependent on and tied to an industrial market—and two ways of locating value in the land. Ecologically, ranching and farming present two modes of inhabiting the bad lands predicated on alternative notions of the nature/ culture relationship: the former perceived as adaptive and passive, the latter as transformative and active; both ranchers and farmers, however, claim a spiritual connection to the land and defend their mode of inhabitation as being ideally suited to the Plains environment. The cultural, economic, and ecological dimensions of the rancher/farmer conflict mutually inform one another and provide the rhetoric used by both parties as they attempt to stake a claim on the arid West. For example, the booster and anti-booster rhetoric that intensified in the 1880s posited, respectively, farming and ranching as a great regional and national mission. The argument of the agricultural boosters tapped into an agrarian dream rooted in the colonization of North America itself and promoted the Great Plains as a final frontier for God’s chosen people, the farmers. As Emmons documents 60ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

in his study of Western booster literature, the farmer had much to gain from and much to offer to the arid environment besides economic prosperity; promoters insisted that “the Plains were being conquered, not by nomadic stock growers or miners, but by the American farmer. It was with missionary zeal that they set about informing the world of this fact” (77). On the other hand, defenders of western ranching and “dissenters” to the agrarian mission on the Plains, like John Wesley Powell in America and William Pearce in Canada, argued that agriculture as practiced in the East stretched too far the limits of the arid country.5 Unlike grain farming, grazing was a land-use practice suited to the dictates of the natural environment, a fact proven by the recent success of the cow’s four-legged predecessor, the buffalo. The ranchers thus argued “the cow could survive on the Plains—people could not” (Emmons 190). This debate, which played out in pamphlets and newspapers as well as in the halls of the federal government, illustrates how the struggle to possess the arid West was engaged on both physical and ideological lines.

Marriage and Procreation in the West While physical violence was a historical condition of the range-farm frontier, the conflict between the rancher’s culture of motion and the farmer’s culture of settlement is most interestingly worked out through the trope of marriage and family. Marriage and children, that is, signify a movement toward stability and permanence, as well as progress from a wild to a domesticated West. As an institution, marriage supports and legally sanctions a standard of rootedness; it endorses a mode of inhabiting space that stresses continuity and endurance, which is confirmed and sustained through procreation. William Handley demonstrates how marriage as a metaphor provides a useful device through which to work out the social dynamic implicit in the frontier experience in the North American West. “Literary marriages in the American West,” he argues, “carry in themselves a nation’s anxious wish . . . to perpetuate a civilized genealogy in a region not known for American civility during western conquest and settlement” (3). Identifying marriage as a nation-building institution, Handley distinguishes three characteristics that make it an effective metaphor in narratives about the American literary West: first, western stories focused on marriage offer an “important revision of the optimistic story of frontier individualism” (4)—they image an arc pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 61

of progress from frontier solitude to stable community; second, intra- and extramarital strife shifts the narrative away from the Indian/white conflict on the frontier and centers it instead in the “civilized” home and “serves to bring the violence [into the] home” (4); and third, the marriage/nation pairing posits a useful dialogue between the personal and the political, and the literary and the historiographical (5). Although Handley does not deal specifically with marriages on the range-farm frontier, his outline nicely applies to unions across the land-use dividing line, as marriage offers a site through which to engage the cultural clash inherent on the agricultural frontier, which is presumably aligned with the maturation of both region and nation. Hough’s characterization of the open range as a “womanless country,” cited in this chapter’s epigraph, suggests how marriage can be viewed as either a disruptive or progressive phenomenon, as it introduces women and the cult of domesticity (with its twin implications of progress and development) into an region otherwise defined (if problematically) as a masculine domain. Marriage is most often seen as an inevitable and necessary sign of progress. Such, for example, is the theme implicit in the prototypical romance of the West, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), which Handley discusses at length. The marriage of the Virginian, the quintessential cowboy, is viewed suspiciously by the novel’s narrator as it initiates the termination of the Virginian’s bachelorhood, and by association spells the end of an imagined bachelor West. Molly Stark fetters a force that the narrator believes should remain unrestrained. The image we find at the end of the novel—the Virginian’s son riding his father’s faithful steed, Monte, on the family ranch—ultimately juxtaposes conflicting views of the end of the open-range era: on the one hand, it signifies the end of a way of life in the West; on the other hand, it registers an appreciation for and fostering of a future-minded vision of stable families on enclosed property. Although what it reproduces is significantly transformed—the open range becomes the Virginian’s enclosed ranch—the frontier experience, with its incumbent aesthetics and values, is preserved through the genetic and spiritual heirs of the heroic cattleman and his more “civilized” wife from Vermont. In many other narratives of the range-farm frontier, the family unit is instead cherished as something in need of protection against the antisocial forces of the rancher and his Wild West. This, of course, is the subject of Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), in which the title character arrives magically and mysteriously out of the ether to defend the Starrett family against a cattle 62ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

baron, Fletcher, who desperately and violently clings to his hold on the open range of Wyoming. Joe Starrett defines his position clearly as he speaks out against Fletcher’s control and use of the land: The thing to do is pick your spot, get your land, your own land. . . . [Fletcher’s] got range rights on a lot more acres than he has cows and he won’t even have those acres as more homesteaders move in. His way is wasteful. Too much land for what he gets out of it. He can’t see that. He thinks we small fellows are nothing but a nuisance. (73) Fletcher’s wasteful ways are linked to his greedy profiteering: his desire is not for land, but for unimpeded free range for his cattle, which translates into financial gain. In the novel, the plight of the “small fellows,” with their families and enclosed properties, is pitted against the outdated and doomed culture of the open range. When Shane takes up the cause of the farmers and becomes the Starretts’ hired hand the case seems settled; though it requires the heroic skills of a gun-wielding stranger, the homesteading community is sustained when violence puts an end to the threat embodied in Fletcher and his cronies. Although he disappears after eliminating this threat, Shane imparts to the Starrett family a sense of permanence. Joe’s wife, Marian, who has fallen in love with Shane but who remains faithful to her husband and family nonetheless, proclaims, “[Shane’s] not gone. He’s here in this place, in this place he gave us. . . . We have roots here now that we can never tear loose” (270, 271). Schaefer’s novel thus pivots on the clash between paradigms of motion and settlement, and regionalizes this conflict through dramatization of the heroic triumph of the “small fellows” over the cattle barons. The lasting effect of Shane’s sacrifice for the homesteaders is located in the Starretts’ son, Bobby, who, as an adult recounting his hero’s arrival in 1889, is the novel’s narrator. As the physical and spiritual manifestation of the novel’s love triangle, Bobby is in many ways a hybrid figure who incorporates the values of the novel’s principal characters: his parents and Shane. As the offspring of Marian and Joe, he provides a way for the Starretts’ genetic line to endure. Bobby’s admiration for his father and presumably the ideals he represents—“There would never be anyone quite to match him. I wanted to be like him, just as he was,” he tells the reader—is interestingly balanced by his awe for Fletcher and his men. Bobby explains his urge to “ride the range, to have my own string of ponies and take part in an all-brand round-up and pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 63

in a big cattle drive and dash into strange towns with just such a rollicking crew and with a season’s pay jingling in my pockets” (134). Although not born of a rancher-farmer marriage, Bobby still incorporates the polarities of the range-farm frontier. Bobby’s character is further shaped by his relationship with Shane, who becomes something of a surrogate father. Like his mother, Bobby is also infatuated with Shane and stands as a witness to the stranger’s heroic power and, through the novel, shares this power with the wider world. Shane himself is a hybrid hero: a potentially violent frontiersman who defends the values of agrarian civilization but who belongs to an older order of unattached, nomadic roamers. Although his work on the Starrett farm converts him to a faith in the agrarian ideal, it is clear that Shane is as spiritually akin to Fletcher as he is sympathetic to the homesteaders’ plight. His potential in-betweenness is manifest in the description of Shane’s arrival: He came steadily on, straight through the town without slackening pace, until he reached the fork a half-mile below our place. One branch turned left across the river ford and on to Luke Fletcher’s big spread. The other bore ahead along the right bank where we homesteaders had pegged our claims in a row up the valley. He hesitated briefly, studying the choice, and moved again steadily on our side. (62) Shane’s hesitation here is telling: there is a sense that, unattached to either side, he could have turned in either direction. Although he ultimately moves steadily on the side of the homesteaders, there is little question—and the novel confirms this—that Shane cannot remain with the homesteaders, that his wanderlust and violent past link him to the cattlemen on the other side of the river. What Bobby is drawn to are the heroic qualities of the mythic cowboy as they are manifest in Shane: freedom, justice, rugged individualism, and an intimate connection with the primal power of Nature gained from a life lived in open space. Shane also imparts to Bobby a love of the land; for Shane, this love is cultivated through a direct experience with undomesticated nature, but he convinces Bobby that there is a vital connection between land and home, one that Shane himself can never realize: “It’s a lovely land, Bob. A good place to be a boy and grow straight inside as a man should” (250). Bobby is thus a complex admixture of various elements to be 64ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

found in the range-farm frontier dichotomy: he encompasses and sustains the home-building instinct but also remains connected to the inveterate power inherent in the cowboy ethic. As a child, Bobby represents an idealistic commingling of the best qualities of the range-farm divide, though it is important to recognize that children may also figure the destructive and corruptive consequences of intermarriages. In her study of the image of the child in modern and contemporary literature, Ellen Pifer discusses the cultural ambivalence projected in and through the figure of the child: Widespread polarization of the child’s image into a demonic or angelic figure may help to prove the point concerning adults’ deepseated ambivalence. What makes the child so powerful an image of creativity and potential . . . is exactly what makes our darker visions of the child’s mysterious nature and origins so terrifying. In both cases, the child represents the other side—original or shameful, beautiful or monstrous, forgotten or repressed—of the adult self. (16) A child represents positive and negative potential as the carrier of genetic legacies, but because children are also “not yet complete” and “not yet fully clothed, or formed, by culture” their development—their very process of individuation—is unpredictable (19). This “paradoxical condition” of being genetically determined yet unacculturated makes children effective literary images, as they “serve as a nexus between details of narrative structure and the wide-ranging cultural issues that each text calls into question” (19, 2). Insofar as children are linked to the family unit and are products of the institution of marriage, they mediate the multiple values of their parental heritage while at the same time they reflect or deflect the values of their immediate social milieu.6 When the cultural issue called into question is land use, it is not difficult to see how the figure of the child codifies the “pastoral impulse” (Kolodny 27). If western marriages signify the institutionalization of this impulse and endorse the transformation of untamed space into cityscapes and middle landscapes, then the children who are the products of these unions even more fully convey the consequences of the pastoral impulse. As Handley shows, marriage figuratively confers the right to inhabit and cultivate land, to trade a paradigm of motion for one that stresses permanence. In Kolodny’s terms, the pastoral impulse condones the “mastery” of a “maternal landscape” pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 65

and promotes such mastery as a consensual act necessary for progress (27). It follows then that children figure the effects of this mastery and forecast what the future holds for the conquered land, a vision which oscillates between utopia and dystopia. Like the figure of the child, the land is both whole unto itself—its shape and makeup determined by intrinsic biological and ecological processes—and a thing yet unformed by the machinery of culture. The child and the land hold in common this essential duality: they are both sovereign entities and clay waiting to be formed. Illegitimate children certainly change or eschew this essential dynamic, as they are already subversive figures created outside the perimeters of socially endorsed institutions. Their presence as potentially unassailable entities can be disruptive to any attempt to locate a harmonious order; however, as children who often embody cross-fertilization between racial, cultural, and land-use boundaries, “bastards” still present a composite image of all the positive possibilities of hybridization. Building from Handley’s work on western marriages, I argue that illegitimate children register both the tension and promise implicit in transfrontier unions by reckoning the range-farm dialectic in flesh. It is therefore not surprising that both Eaton and Richter employ the figure of an illegitimate child to foster the ideological implications of the romances of the range-farm frontier. The illegitimates in both texts emerge as ambivalent figures that reveal the possibility for restoration and reconciliation in a postfrontier environment even as they haunt their respective narratives as specters of the frontier’s negative associations.

Stunted Harvests in Winnifred Eaton’s Cattle Winnifred Eaton, a Canadian American of mixed-race descent (Chinese and British), gained a literary reputation at the turn of the twentieth century by producing a prolific number of widely popular romances set in Japan. Publishing under the pen name of Onoto Watanna, a Japanese pseudonym, these romances—beginning with Miss Numè of Japan (1899)—employed stereotypes about Asia and gainfully tapped into a flourishing interest in America for images of the exotic East; mysterious Japanese men and submissive Madame Butterfly–type women abound in these narratives and proffer an image of Asia as a place primitive, ancient, and romantic. As Jean Lee Cole and Sara Eddy document, Eaton’s two relatively ignored Alberta novels— the final books she would publish—represent a significant departure from 66ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

the author’s previous works, set as they are on the rural Plains and focused primarily on Euroamerican subjects. It is also significant that Cattle (1924) is the first work she published under her Anglo name, with “Winnifred Eaton” appearing on the title page and her former pen name, “Onoto Watanna,” appearing in smaller script underneath. As Eddy notes, Eaton provocatively drops the Japanese pseudonym altogether in her second Alberta novel, His Royal Nibs, so that “readers not following her output carefully might . . . have lost track of the supposedly Japanese author altogether, and . . . may have assumed both His Royal Nibs and Cattle were written by a ScottishCanadian author” (209).7 I would extend this argument by suggesting how Eaton’s adept appropriation of the conventions of the rural western romance further highlights her shape-shifting abilities. As the author takes up a conventional western plot—the battle between homesteaders and cattle barons on the range-farm frontier—and dons a “man’s hand” by writing in a maledominated genre, she engages the historical development of the Canadian Plains and attempts to expose, though she ultimately condones, the racist and misogynist implications of this development. In Cattle, Eaton projects the oppositional ideologies of the range-farm frontier through the principal characters and the places they occupy. As the first lines of the novel tell us, “four Alberta ranches” provide the scene for the narrative: “three quarter sections of land in Yankee Valley, and . . . the vast Bar Q, whose two hundred thousand rich acres of grain, hay and grazing lands stretched from the prairie into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains” (1).8 The parameters of the conflict are made immediately clear. On the one hand, the three quarter sections—and, as I will show, their three occupants—embody the agrarian ideal, representing the 160-acre allotments made available to Canadian citizens and immigrants through the Dominion Lands Act of 1872. This act was modeled on the American Homestead Act of 1862, a land policy deeply attached to the vision expressed in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia of yeomen becoming ideal citizens through the cultivation of manageable and geometrically divided plots of land. The occupants of these homesteads—Nettie Day, Angella Loring, and Cyril Stanley—are all intent on pursuing the agrarian dream: to “prove up” their quarter section and thereby establish permanent roots (a home) on Canadian soil.9 Set against these smaller homesteads is the immense range of Bill Langdon, known as “the Bull,” who possesses both pasturage and grain lands that together have one purpose: to provide fodder to fatten his many head of pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 67

cattle. With his beef renowned all over the world, Bull establishes himself as the Cattle King of Alberta in the course of only a few short years and becomes a millionaire. Thus, Eaton establishes a cultural dividing line—the eastern prairie farms and the western foothills/prairie ranches—that sets the prototypical agrarian dream against the primarily market-driven agribusiness of big-scale ranching.10 It is clear from the outset that the Bull embodies every negative stereotype associated with western ranching during the open range era: he is barbaric, domineering, feudalistic, rapacious, and ecologically destructive. A man of “gigantic stature, with a coarse, brutal face,” the Bull is described by Eaton as a “primitive savage” (3). His nickname clearly reveals his character: The name “Bull” had been given to him because of his bellowing voice, his great strength and his driving methods with men and cattle. Tyrannical, unprincipled, and cruel, Bull was hated and feared. He had fought his way to the top by the sheer force of his raging, dominating personality, and once there he reigned in arrogance without mercy or scruple. To him cattle and men were much alike. Most men, he asserted, were “scrub” stock, and would come tamely and submissively before the branding iron. (4) This passage underscores the Bull’s disreputable nature, which is tied in specific ways to his occupation as a cattle baron; indeed, that the Bull views his environment consistently through a cattleman’s eyes provides the basis for an extended metaphor, which serves to highlight the villainous attributes tied to ranching. The Bull is the feudal, Machiavellian lord of the Bar Q ranch whose approach to people parallels his approach to his livestock: to maintain power and control he must make both men and cattle submit before his “raging, dominating personality.” He thus executes what Worster has called an imperial stance toward the natural world, whereby he sees the nonhuman (and human) community as something to be dominated (or branded) through might and sheer force of will. A fugitive from Montana who “flouted the laws of his native land,” the Bull got his start in Canada by rustling cattle, taking them from the farms of pioneer families and trading with “renegade members” of the Indian reserves who sold their calves for whiskey (2). Besides taking advantage of the Indians’ need for drink—a sign of their deflated postfrontier 68ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

condition—Bull covets and freely uses tribal lands (1). As his herd increases, the Bull “acquired life-long leases upon thousands of acres of Government land—Forest and Indian Reserve,” exerting his influence, newly gained no doubt from his increasing fortunes, to gain ultimate control over the lands in the public domain. The Bull is an opportunistic entrepreneur whose means are aggressive and criminal, and who, more importantly, victimizes both the Native inhabitants of the place and the pioneer families who occupied the Plains before his arrival. Just as the immensity of his landholdings prevents the potential fomentation of yeoman families on the Plains, the Bull’s personal approach to women and family is equally hostile and antagonistic. While the Bull admits some potential in his fellow men—recognizing that some thoroughbreds exist, as do the even rarer, though respectable, wild mavericks—he holds nothing but contempt for womankind who are “all scrub stock, easy stuff that could be whistled or driven to home pastures” (4). His deep-seated misogyny is reflected in his marriage to Mrs. Langdon (whose first name is never mentioned), a “gentle girl” from Ontario whom he managed to woo through “diabolical traps more ingenious than the Squeezgate in which a girl’s unwary feet might be ensnared” (5). A nurturer, Mrs. Langdon is weakened spiritually and physically by an annual rite of miscarriages that plague her in the decades following her marriage to the Bull. Neglected by her husband as a heifer who has already been branded, Mrs. Langdon ultimately plays second fiddle to the Bull’s early “dream of conquest and power” (6). As a result, her medical needs are ignored and Bull habitually refuses to send his wife to Calgary where she might more successfully give birth. When the Bull does become financially secure, Mrs. Langdon is too old to have children and is forced to redirect her motherly instincts toward her neighbors’ children. If the Bull’s association with a big cattle spread aligns him with the antifamily social forces of ranching as viewed from the agrarian perspective, his treatment of his own wife and family makes more literal the threat the Bull poses to the homesteading enterprise. The Bull’s misogyny is also seen in his relationship with Nettie Day, the eldest daughter of a homesteader who embodies the essence of the agrarian dream. The Day ranch, known locally as the “Dan Day Dump” (DDD), is rendered defunct when Nettie’s father dies and leaves behind an insurmountable debt accrued through years of poor crops and owed mostly to the Bull. The Bull literally purchases Nettie at the Day auction under the guise that pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 69

she will help his wife in the ranch house; his real motivation, as it becomes increasingly clear, is his desire to possess Nettie sexually. At the auction, he looks her up and down and appraises her as if she were a head of cattle (45). This attitude, which parallels his “courtship” with his wife, is verified shortly after Nettie comes to work on the Bar Q. The Bull puts his “personal brand upon that maverick” (68) by overpowering Nettie and raping her while his wife sleeps upstairs. When Nettie leaves the Bar Q—after Mrs. Langdon dies from the shock of finding out what her husband has done—the Bull becomes even more obsessed with his “gell” and becomes progressively more insistent on branding his “stray head of stock” (211); when he finds out that Nettie has given birth to their child, for example, he tells one of his ranch hands, as he leaves to pursue her, “I’m going to a round up [to collect] a purebred heifer with a calf at heel. . . . They’ve got my brand on them” (214). His desire for possession and utter control over his wife and Nettie is continuously ensconced in the language of ranching, as Eaton draws on the range-farm dialectic to add metaphorical weight to her moral drama. Running parallel to the naturalistic plot highlighted by the Bull’s rape of Nettie is a romance narrative that occurs within and among the three homesteads that are adjacent to the Bar Q’s eastern border. The occupants of these three homesteads uphold the agrarian dream that honors the transformative, civilizing, and progressive implications of raising and harvesting crops. Eaton explains how homesteaders like Nettie, Cyril, and Angella represent the “solid, plodding type . . . tempted by the cheapness of the land and the richness of the soil. These are the backbone of the country” (261). Whereas the Bull’s approach to people and place is characterized by an impetus to possess and dominate, the farmers are interested in carving a home in the wilderness and growing from and with the land. In an odd and isolated first-person diary entry that follows the rape scene, and which interrupts the novel’s otherwise omniscient narration, Angella Loring articulates what is at the heart of the agrarian vision. She foremost expresses the transformative effects of tilling the prairie soil: In the spring, our land is excessively fragrant. The black, loamy soil fairly calls to one to lay the seed within its fertile bosom. Anything will grow in Alberta. It’s a thrilling sight to see the grain prick up sturdy and strong. When first my own showed its green head above the earth, I suffered such exhilaration that I could have thrown 70ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

myself upon the ground, and kissed the good earth. Those tiny points of green, there on the soil that I myself had plowed, disked, harrowed and seeded. I suffered the exquisite pang of the creator. . . . I love the earth. When I die, I do not want to be cremated. I want to go back to the soil. (87) The sexual imagery here is unmistakable, but even more significant is the correlation between harvesting and procreation; farming is essentially a (pro)creative act through which loving and working the earth yields the “tiny points of green” that anchor the farmer to the “good earth.” The beckon ing “loamy soil” of spring is transformed into a field of grain, and this middle landscape produces the “exquisite pang” of creation. It is clear that to plant and harvest is more than an economically motivated labor: homesteading possesses an aesthetic and spiritual dimension. Within Angella’s agrarian formulation, she is the harvester and the harvested, the creator and, upon her death, part of the loamy soil from which creation springs. So, while the Bull represents a violent threat to his own offspring and to the familial ideal in general, the homesteaders are inexorably linked to fertility. Angella’s description of farming as a procreative act is bolstered by Eaton’s repeated use of agrarian language to describe Nettie, the novel’s central heroine. While the Day ranch is a poor example of a farm—bad soil and bad management doom it to fail—Eaton assures the reader that the true harvest of the DDD farm is the Day children who, like Angella’s grain, continually “shot upward, and seemed, hungrily, to clamor for their place in the world” (9). Nettie, in particular, is linked to the land, described often as a “wild flower” (12), with “hair as gold as the Alberta sun” (16), and with thick braids glowing in the sun like “ripening grain” (39). She has no other aspiration but to be a farmer, as the agrarian life is all she has ever known. Ranches and cities are foreign and exotic to her, and though she knows that yeomanry is “one unceasing struggle against the hunger and cold,” she also understands that homesteading will provide her access to her domestic dream: “A clean, small cabin on a quarter section of land; a cow or two; a few pigs; chickens; fields of grain, oats, thick and tall; gleaming silver barley; the blue-flowering flax; waves of golden wheat” (11, 40). While the fields of “gleaming” and “flowering” grains represent a level of economic success, the financial stability she longs for is connected to a stronger desire to put down roots in the land and cultivate a home on the Alberta soil. pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 71

Nettie’s attempt to fulfill this dream, and the many barriers she must confront in her pursuit, form the central plot of Eaton’s romance. The clearest path to her dream emerges in the form of Cyril Stanley, the “friendly face” that always appears in her daydreams about her future home (40). If Eaton’s narrative focused more squarely on Cyril, he would be its fitting wavering hero as he moves successfully between the range-farm divide. He is the Bar Q’s best ranch hand, handpicked by the Bull to accompany him as he tours the United States and Canada to promote and show his prize cattle. Unlike the Bull, though, Cyril exudes all the positive traits normally associated with ranching and embodies all the mystical qualities implicit in the cowboy mythos. He is independent and possesses a natural wisdom culled from his roaming adventures over the wide-open spaces of Alberta. Nettie is drawn to him because of his Albertan cowboy gaze: “He looked very straight out of clear eyes, eyes often seen in western Canada where men are ever gazing out over great distances, eyes that seem to hold the spirit of the outdoors and the freshness of unspoiled youth” (17). His gaze thus connects him with the best that can be found in spirit of the wild, “unspoiled” land; whereas the Bull’s association with the uncultivated range wilderness accentuates his brutality, Cyril’s roaming positions him a hero in the vein of his frontiersmen forebears. The difference between the Bull and Cyril is made clear in their treatment of the cattle: where the former uses force and anger to control his stock, the latter uses a “curiously hypnotic influence” to calm the animals when they get a little wild (99). Cyril’s impetus to tame rather than overpower also shapes his deeper desire to be a farmer. Although he excels as a ranch hand, he shares with Angella and Nettie their dream of being rooted to the soil, a dream that can be fulfilled only through farming. Eaton writes, “Though the best rider and roper of the Bar Q, . . . Cyril’s faith was in the grain land, and he purposed to develop his homestead. . . . He had the heart and home hunger of the man in the ranching country, who has come little into contact with women, yet craves their companionship” (21). Cyril’s “home hunger” separates him from the Bull and links the young hero to the ideal of family associated with the agrarian dream. When Cyril and Nettie first meet on the DDD, the other Day children flock to him and Eaton provides an image of Cyril with a “ ‘kid’ on either knee” (19), underscoring his status as a fatherly figure. Nettie and Cyril soon become betrothed and Cyril’s faith in homesteading is literally and figuratively confirmed when he trades the few head 72ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

of cattle he has been building up so that he can purchase lumber to build a house for him and Nettie on his own quarter section (26). Beyond sharing the homesteader’s dream, Cyril and Nettie are well matched because their association with cultivation and home building does not necessarily negate their connection to uncultivated, wild nature. That is, they hold in common a love for the land that is expressed both through an aesthetic appreciation for the wide-open (and presumably more “wild”) rangeland and through the art of cultivation. Just as Cyril’s personality was forged through his roaming over the unenclosed spaces of western Canada, Nettie too is linked to wildness. The Day children’s experience with the “rough environment” of untamed Alberta helped them to “grow up like Indians,” instilling in Nettie a “yearning” for the wild foothill country and drawing her toward the romance inherent in uncultivated land (9, 14). That the romance between Cyril and Nettie is wrought in wildness, though it tends toward domesticity, is nicely imaged in the scene of their first kiss: they embrace in a deep coulee on the fringes of the Bar Q ranch house where “wild raspberries and gooseberries grew in profusion” (57). The site of their consummating moment (which goes no further than a kiss) is Edenic, a natural garden that is both wild and cultivatable. The lovers’ agrarian dream is not surprisingly interrupted by the Bull’s exploits, as he purchases, rapes, and impregnates Nettie in his attempt to claim ownership of her. Deeply ashamed of her condition, Nettie breaks off her engagement to Cyril, explaining only “I ain’t the same” (115). Using the language of western ranching, Cyril surmises “someone’s cut me out”; when his dream of a home seems shattered he is overcome with a desire “to roam from place to place” and to be “free again on his native soil” (117, 170). Here, Cyril’s inclination to roam is not an expression of his deep-seated connection to the physical environment, but rather a sign of his rejection of the home-building instinct. When he finds out months later that Nettie has given birth, he becomes distraught and in his desperation burns down the house he had built for his future bride and family (182). The Bull thus once again proves disruptive to the familial impulse inherent in the homesteading enterprise, as he threatens the ultimate consummation of the Nettie/Cyril romance and reduces their dream to a pile of smoking embers, which Eaton sentimentally posits as a sign of their love lying “ruined on the prairie” (182). Where a conventional plot might furnish a child from the Nettie and Cyril union who incorporates and sustains the best qualities to emerge from pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 73

the range-farm frontier, Eaton instead underscores the Bull’s unsettling presence through the two bastard children he sires. Although minor characters in the novel’s overall plot, these illegitimate children are integral to the meaning of Eaton’s romance, revealing both extant and buried discourses that provide crucial insight into the ideological and mythic conflict that adheres in the range-farm frontier. The Bull’s first illegitimate son, the half-blood Jake Langdon, provides a template for how one is to read the bastard trope in Cattle. The reader is first introduced to Jake in the opening chapter. Eaton presents him as evidence of both the Bull’s lascivious and demonic nature and of Mrs. Langdon’s gifts as a nurturer, for it is the latter who looks after Jake when his father rejects him. Jake is the product of an affair between the Bull and an Indian woman of unspecified tribal origin who dies on the Indian Reserve when Jake is a young boy. When the motherless Jake arrives at the Bar Q to reunite with his father, he is beaten mercilessly by the Bull and suffers brain damage. Thanks to the “gentle influence” of Mrs. Langdon, the “half-witted illegitimate son” of the Bull is allowed to remain at the Bar Q as a ranch hand, “doing the chores and the wood chopping and the carrying of water” (6–7). Prone to epileptic seizures and rendered essentially inarticulate because of mental impairment and a severe speech impediment, Jake is a marginalized and relatively pathetic character. As Cole notes in her book-length study of Eaton’s works, Jake is an ineffective character who exhibits “all the prevailing stereotypes of the ‘half-breed’ ” (110). Although he almost magically appears any time there is trouble—including appearances at the rape scene and when the Bull kidnaps his and Nettie’s son—Jake’s infirmities prevent him from offering any aid; instead, he frequently comes off as a babbling and incompetent child. His inability to communicate makes him a dubious messenger, and his weakness and cowardice prevent him from standing up to the Bull even though revenge against his father is one of his repeated fantasies. While his presence haunts the majority of the narrative, he does little more, as Cole suggests, than provide comic relief as an “earnest but flawed” character (112). Cole finds Jake particularly disappointing because she reads him as a potentially useful vehicle through which Eaton might have voiced her concerns regarding race and racism in North America. As a biracial author, Eaton might have employed her Metís character for more heroic purposes, rather than present him as a clownish figure. Cole argues, “Eaton’s 74ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

sympathy for the ‘half-breed’ prevents her from portraying him in purely conventional terms, yet she is also unable to break free from the racist implications of those conventions. . . . Jake’s voice . . . is a haunting, unfinished presence that points to a world outside the narrative, a world that Eaton herself may not have known how to depict even as she lived within it” (112). As such Cole reads Jake as an “ ‘uncanny’ presence” who disturbs Cattle’s “seemingly closed, codified story . . . of agrarian expansion and settlement” (112–13). While I agree with Cole’s assessment of Jake, I would argue that it is precisely his ability to disrupt the narrative of frontier expansion that makes the illegitimate half blood so important to the narrative, even if he is otherwise silenced and ineffective in his roles as witness and messenger. Although he fails to communicate directly with the characters within the novel, his mere presence conveys an important message to the reader as it suggests the correlation between the Bull’s rapacious brutality and the imperialist agenda of frontier expansion. Jake’s origins establish him as an in-flesh product of the frontier. More specifically, his birth and subsequent abandonment by his white father reveal the hegemonic nature of Euroamerican expansion into the Indian wilderness. Indeed, it is vital to remember that Jake’s ineffectiveness is not the direct result of his status as a half blood; instead, he is rendered inarticulate and half-witted from the “blow Langdon had dealt him on the day when, as a boy . . . he had come to the Bar Q and ingenuously claimed the Bull as his father” (6–7). It is thus the violence implicit in frontier expansion, as embodied in the Bull’s desire for power and control, which restricts Jake’s agency within the novel. Jake functions as a reminder that the Plains frontier remains a contested terrain: not only does the Bull stand as a barrier to the kinder and gentler grain frontier, but he is also a usurper and colonizer of the Indian wilderness. Jake’s illegitimacy uncovers a buried discourse that posits the illegitimacy of the Bull’s claims on the Bar Q land. This discourse is subtly fostered throughout the novel when the Indian reserve, like Jake, repeatedly, if indirectly, asserts an influence as a counterforce to the Bull’s self-generated myth about his cattle empire; through their mere presence, the reserve and Jake expose the buried elements of the Bull’s sexual and economic conquest of the Indian wilderness. As I have already pointed out, Eaton makes it clear that the Bull rose to prominence by stealing from the Indians and by asserting “the right of way over the Indian lands” (1). His siring of Jake thus serves to materialize pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 75

the Bull’s colonizing practices. A neglectful federal government that lazily gives in to the Bull’s power and neglects to protect the Indians and their land aids these practices. This same neglect and the racist politics behind it fittingly give rise to the novel’s other big threat, a plague that sweeps through the province and kills thousands: The state of things in the Indian Reserve was appalling. The Indians were dying like flies, their misery forgotten by their white protectors. In their ignorance and helplessness, they sought help at the farms and ranches, only to be turned away, and often carried the plague into places which had been immune until then. (237) While, like Jake, the Indians are depicted as pitiful figures, their “appalling” state is directly related to their treatment by the frontier victors who themselves ultimately become the victims of a plague because they cannot establish fruitful relations with their Indian neighbors. Although the Bull himself survives the plague, the Bar Q is ultimately ruined as most of the ranch hands are killed or choose to abandon the ranch. The neglected Indians thereby circuitously destroy the very thing that severed their connection to the land. Insofar as Jake highlights the negative dimension of frontier expansion— its ultimate human cost—Eaton insists on confining its violent and problematic features to the ranching frontier; in other words, the novel clearly posits the Bull as the sole perpetrator in the subordination of the Native population. When the homesteaders arrive on the scene, the Indian wilderness is already a thing of the past because the Indians are confined to poorly managed reserves; by usurping the Bar Q and its ranching environs, the homesteaders are initiating a kinder and gentler phase of frontier expansion, a point made manifest in their supplanting of the tyrannical cattle baron. That Jake is ultimately absorbed into the homesteading community, that he aligns himself with Angella and Nettie and becomes a frequent visitor to their farm, underscores this very point. They adopt him as one of their own, and he dutifully does what he can to help their cause. Set against the Bull’s violent treatment and the federal government’s general neglect, the kindness that the homesteaders show toward the half blood serves to bolster the community-oriented aura of the agrarian enterprise. Angella and Nettie provide for Jake the very object that the Bull takes away from him and his mother’s people: a home. 76ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

In light of Jake’s inarticulateness, it is notable that he is the only character to ever utter the name of the Bull’s other illegitimate child, Bobby. It is fitting in the sense that both Jake and Bobby are the products of transfrontier aggression, the offspring of the Bull’s rapacious (and racist) violence. Like Jake, Bobby’s illegitimate origin threatens to render him homeless. Nettie rejects her son in part because she sees Bobby as a reminder of her fallen condition, but largely because she is unable to reconcile his evil genesis. She fears his demonic potential as the Bull’s offspring: “At the thought of its father, she would shudder and tell herself she hated it because it was his” (196). As a result of her fear, Nettie neglects to feed or nurture the child so that Bobby becomes “undersized and frail”: “There was something pitifully unfinished about it although it was in no way deformed. It had simply been forced into the world before its time, and denied the sustenance of its mother’s breast . . . it made slow progress” (184). Bobby’s stunted growth and near-deformity registers what is at stake in the conflict between the cattle baron and the homesteaders who are slowly encroaching on his domain. Just as Jake’s infirmities underscore the Bull’s brutality and savagery, Bobby’s weakness highlights the dangerous and disruptive potential of the rancher’s frontier, as it stands as a barrier to the home-building project behind the agrarian pastoral ideal. Together with Jake, Nettie’s son embodies the destructive tendencies of frontier expansion; however, as a child yet unformed by his surroundings, Bobby is also a hopeful figure who represents the promise of the uncultivated wilderness. Although ignored by his mother, Bobby is adopted by Angella, who takes both mother and child into her humble homestead. Her desire to care for and nurture an essentially orphaned child once again demonstrates the regenerative power of the agrarian vision. Without her assistance, the child surely would not have survived long. Because he does survive, Bobby eventually awakens in Nettie her suppressed nurturing instinct. Left alone with him when Angella is out working in the fields, Nettie finally picks up her child, which unleashes pent-up emotions: Almost unconsciously her hand touched her baby’s tiny hand that clung at once to her finger and at that warm contact a flood of emotion overwhelmed Nettie’s heart. It was as if tentacles had reached out and fastened upon her very soul; the little curled up fist seemed to scorch her with its mute reproach and appeal for her affection. (189) pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 77

Although the moment is short-lived—Nettie quickly pulls her hands away and proclaims, “I don’t want to love him. . . . He’s his” (189)—it illustrates the latent redemptive influence of nurturing for both the nurtured and nurturer. Tended to by his makeshift extended family, Bobby grows “into a beautiful child, with his mother’s fair skin and blue eyes, and his blonde hair curled in tiny ringlets all over his small, round head. He was the soul of good humour, and though not robust, his health was rapidly improving” (266). Likewise, as Bobby gains his strength, the mother forgets her shame and begins to restore herself physically and mentally; she throws herself into her work, and lifts herself out of her melancholy. Bobby’s status in the novel thus reflects the broader cultural issues at play in Eaton’s overall consideration of homesteading in the Canadian West. Ultimately, the child’s demonic potential, the weight of his paternal heritage, is erased because the homesteaders take an active role in cultivating his angelic essence. While he is the artifact of the aggression of the ranching frontier, Bobby more significantly illustrates the transformative and positive influence of the grain frontier by demonstrating the recuperative consequences of cultivation, whether of hearts or land. This becomes evident when Bobby’s recovery from the brink of fatal frailty coincides with Angella’s and Nettie’s efforts to cultivate both Angella’s quarter section and the fields abandoned by Cyril in his jealous rage. The work of harrowing, seeding, fertilizing, and harvesting “diverted Nettie’s mind from its obsession of sorrow”; the notion of salvaging Cyril’s land has a redemptive influence on her as well (194). Just as Bobby must struggle against the tragedy of his paternal heritage, the two women homesteaders must struggle against the untamed land in pursuit of their ultimate dream: a lucrative harvest. To this end, Angella demonstrates an innate ability to listen to the dictates of the land, and seeds six inches deep as “a precautionary measure against a dry year” (194). Their faith in and knowledge of the soil combined with their hard labor make the two homesteads fertile: Billowing waves of golden wheat, going forty bushels or more to the acre, lay spread out before [Angella], barley, glistening, and silvery, oats as tall as a man and thick and heavy, the grain, like living creatures, stirring and murmuring drowsily in the sunshine as the warm wind passed over it. “Come, we are waiting to be reaped,” it seemed to chant. “Gather us in.” (197) 78ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

With this bountiful harvest, Angella’s and Nettie’s dreams are fulfilled, and the growth of the grain parallels Nettie’s growing attachment to her child, who joins them, sleeping away in the fields. The development of the land mirrors the growth of the child, and in both cases what begins as an uncertain canvas becomes an artful and fulfilling masterpiece. The transformative effects of cultivation and domestication on the cultivators are revealed through the changes that take place in Angella as she nurtures both the land and Bobby. A social outcast with misanthropic tendencies, Angella initially revels in the isolation that her prairie homestead affords. Wronged by a man back in her native Scotland, she swears off men and even transforms herself into a man: she cuts her hair, wears men’s clothes, and labors on what Dr. McDermott calls a “mon’s land” (85). Her adoption of a conventionally masculine role draws the ire of the surrounding community—they jokingly refer to her as “Mr. Loring” (31)—but it more significantly demonstrates how taming the wild land imparts a level of independence and agency to any who choose to wrestle with the soil. In her diary, Angella proudly proclaims how “I broke my own land. I’ve put in my own crop. I hayed and chored, fenced and drudged, both in house and upon the land” (84). The independence she gains from her agrarian pursuits suggests a protofeminist discourse that flows just beneath the surface of Eaton’s novel: the fruits of laboring on the land are confined to neither gender. The power and independence that Angella gains, however, is problematically self-contained, and her misanthropic disposition cuts Angella off from the broader communal promise that is vital to the agrarian vision. This is to say that while the strength of Angella’s revolutionary voice, as Cole points out, is to be lauded for its ability to disrupt the otherwise masculinist grand narrative of frontier expansion, her antisocial behavior, in the context of the novel, is as much a threat to the familial agenda of homesteading as the Bull’s misogyny.11 When she takes over the care of the rejected illegitimate child, however, Angella’s gifts of husbandry are channeled toward a more cooperative venture that ultimately makes possible the novel’s happy, if disappointingly conventional, ending. As Bobby’s surrogate mother, Angella becomes increasingly feminized. The domestication of the wild land, in other words, is accompanied by the “feminization” of Angella. Eaton writes, “Life had assumed a new meaning for the woman recluse and the change was reflected in her expression. The defiant look was almost gone from the bright eyes, pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 79

the lips were no longer bitterly compressed; with a faint color in her cheeks, and her soft gray hair curling about her face, Angella Loring was almost beautiful, as she held the baby close in her arms, and murmured foolish endearments over it” (267). Her aesthetic transformation, signaled by the appearance of “curling” instead of cropped hair, is bolstered by her status as nurturer. She even takes up a mirror for the first time, and overcomes her tendency toward self-denial by acknowledging her feminine, corporeal existence (186). This transformation enlivens the romantic chemistry between her and Dr. McDermott. While Angella initially rejects McDermott, as she rejects all men, their mutual concern for Bobby draws the two together. The illegitimate child is thus the catalyst for one of the novel’s unions and thereby helps to preserve the home-building, familial orientation of the grain frontier. Caring for Bobby initiates a process wherein Angella’s vibrant energy finds a productive, if conservative vessel that stabilizes the agrarian community’s hold on the otherwise wild, bachelor/maiden West. Before this union can come to fruition, however, Eaton provides one more example of the violent and tragic force that is the ranching frontier. When the Bull finds out that he has a son living on Angella’s quarter section, he aims to disrupt the homesteaders’ efforts and reclaim his heir. After being turned away once by a gun-wielding Angella, the Bull gains the upper hand by unleashing a herd of half-starved cattle that break through the homesteaders’ fencing and devour the sheaves of harvested wheat. In lieu of more direct violence of the type seen during the Johnson County range wars, desperate cattlemen often used their cattle as weapons to destroy farmer’s fences and mow down their fields of grain (Breen 151). The Bull’s act thus reinforces his own desperation, as the fenced and enclosed farms of the expanding agrarian frontier increasingly threaten his open-range empire. Besides destroying their crop, the Bull is also able to gain possession of Bobby, kidnapping him by overpowering Jake. By taking the child, the Bull deflates the spiritual essence of the farm, the embodiment of what farming stands for beyond its material dimensions. Bobby is ultimately killed as a direct result of the Bull’s violent treatment, another victim of the cattle baron’s inclination to treat all humankind like cattle to be subdued. He proclaims, “Kids ain’t no different to cattle. Feed ’em and keep ’em warm. That’s all they need” (273). Handled roughly, Bobby is dead within hours of being kidnapped, and the Bull once again proves inimical to the aims of the homesteading frontier, destroying both its human and grain harvests. 80ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

Eaton’s historiographical reading of the development of Alberta assures the reader that despite the twin tragedies that the Bull inflicts on his enemies, the homesteaders will ultimately rule the day. While Bobby is powerless to defend himself, he indirectly fosters the demise of the Bar Q ranch as the Bull’s monomaniacal desire to possess his son and Bobby’s mother leads him to neglect his already troubled ranch. In this way, Bobby is a Christ figure who is sacrificed so that the values implicit in the agrarian vision can overcome the barrier presented by the open range. His status as a sacrificial lamb is suggested by Angella’s references to Nettie’s “exquisitely madonnalike” beauty and her “Madonna face” (91, 162). Although Bobby’s birth is far from immaculate, Nettie’s association with the Virgin suggests that the stain implicit in his birth can be ultimately eradicated through the proper cultivation of his soul. Angella confirms this when she insists, “There’s not a trace of that wild brute in our baby” (221). When set against the Bull’s treatment of the child, the regenerative power of the women’s nurturing is clear and is ultimately, if tragically, repaid when Bobby is sacrificed so that the homesteading enterprise might flourish. Bobby’s death is avenged when the Bull’s prize bull, Prince Perfection Bar Q the IV, is unleashed from captivity and pursues his longtime tormentor through the Alberta countryside, finally goring him to death. This act of “master vengeance” makes the Bull the victim of his own beastly behavior, as his own violence toward others is reflected back upon himself (291). He notably dies within inches of the fence that marks the boundary of the Indian Reserve, where he was hoping to seek safe haven. He is prevented from seeking safety among the people he has wronged. In the aftermath of the Bull’s death, the novel concludes with a brief chapter that happily (if unsettlingly) stresses the triumph of the homesteaders and transforms the narrative from a tragedy to a comedy. Nettie has redeemed herself by working as a nursing aide to Dr. McDermott as he administers to plague victims, and she becomes engaged again to Cyril who, finding out what the Bull had done to her, forgives her immediately. Although the home Cyril has built for them is destroyed when he burns it to the ground, Angella gives the couple her homestead as a wedding gift because, newly engaged to Dr. McDermott, she plans on moving to her future husband’s farm. The transformation and domestication of Angella is thus complete and coincides with a renewed hope in the promise of building a life in “sunny Alberta.” The romance ends conventionally with two unions that point to the ascendance pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 81

of the new agrarian order, with the homesteaders’ dream of a home on the prairie soil realized, and with the threat posed by the domineering cattle baron removed. As Cole rightly points out, the modern reader would likely find the sentimental ending of Eaton’s novel disappointing. She argues, “although Eaton presents the possibility of cross-race and cross-ethnic mixture as well as depicting a vision of self-sufficient female companionship on the AngellaNettie homestead, by the end of the novel, the various characters are sorted out by nationality and group, and the more anomalous characters drop out of the narrative altogether” (118). The two most notable absences in the closing chapter are the novel’s two illegitimate sons, Jake and Bobby. Although the reader bears witness to Angella’s emotional encounter with her deceased adoptee, Nettie’s reaction goes unrecorded and the trajectory of her growing mother love is not seen through. Jake and Bobby thus provide compact and complex pastoral symbols: on the one hand, their presence through most of the narrative logically bolsters the arc of progress that Eaton dramatizes in her novel; on the other hand, their absence at the end haunts the text and functions as a reminder of the violent origins of Euroamerican settlement of the Plains.

Richter’s Revisionist West in Sea of Grass Eaton’s focus is ultimately on the ideological conflict implicit in the clash between ranchers and farmers on the Plains frontier, and not on the ecological consequences of the transition from cattle ranching to grain farming. Published during the height of the Dust Bowl in 1937, Conrad Richter’s Sea of Grass incorporates a defense of the open range on ecological grounds and thereby troubles the ideological thrust of Eaton’s agrarian romance. As with Eaton, however, the murky middle ground of the range-farm frontier, and all its attendant and potential meanings, is manifest in and negotiated through the tragic figure of an illegitimate child. Sea of Grass is Richter’s first novel, one of four books set on the southwestern frontier.12 When Richter moved to New Mexico in 1928 for the sake of his wife’s health, he began collecting data from local sources—newspapers, folklore, interviews with local residents—and immersed himself in the culture and history of his adopted region. As Edwin W. Gaston Jr. notes, this immersion transformed Richter as a writer in two ways: first, he moved from 82ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

“writing as a means merely of earning money” to wanting to create “the best fiction of which he was capable” and, second, he found that “historical fiction offered the best promise” (40). The “vanished past” of the Old West provided the subject matter that anchored Richter’s turn toward more serious fiction, a turn that was both lucrative and critically acclaimed.13 It was the pioneer myth in particular that sparked Richter’s imagination, and as Marvin J. Lahood notes: “Like his favorite author, Willa Cather, he mourned the passing of the frontier precisely because he, like her, saw it as a challenge that produced a race of giants” (11). The termination of the open-range era serves as the backdrop to Sea of Grass, producing a crisis that challenges the pioneer “giant” at the center of the story, Colonel Jim Brewton. Through the course of the novel, the Colonel must wrestle with the forces of change as his vast Cross B ranch is infiltrated by the coming tide of homesteaders. The poignancy of this historical moment is captured after the fact through the first-person narration of the Colonel’s nephew, Hal, who is sympathetic to his uncle’s plight and nostalgic for his “lost sea of grass” (Richter 20). The events of the novel occur roughly between 1880 and the turn of the twentieth century, encompassing both the heyday of the range frontier and its years of decline. Hal is a contemporary of Richter’s who is recounting these tumultuous decades fifty years removed from the beginning of the drama. As Gaston wisely notes, this “middle-distance technique”—Hal is both close to the events and people described in the novel and separated from them in terms of distance and time—“affords . . . the perspective dictated by the materials [Richter had] gleaned from oral sources and documents: [Richter] is approximately the same distance removed from the action as his narrator. . . . Moreover, the middle-distance narration provides both immediacy and historical perspective” (51). The immediacy of Hal’s emotional connection to the people and places of New Mexico and the historical distance from which he views them establish him as a romantic narrator whose chronicle registers the power and complexity of the range-farm frontier and is also colored by his own nostalgic desire to repossess a past he imagines as golden. The setting of Sea of Grass is Jim Brewton’s ranch, situated in the heart of the arid West, on the San Augustin plains between central New Mexico and eastern Arizona, where the Great Plains meet the desert Southwest.14 Like the Bull’s Bar Q, the Cross B is immense in proportions, “stretching a hundred and twenty miles north and south along the river, and rolling as pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 83

far into the sunset as stock could roam—a ranch larger than Massachusetts with Connecticut thrown in” (Richter 3). The immense lands of the Cross B belong to the Colonel via range rights and are his precisely because his cattle were the first to graze upon it. Hal’s emphasis on the natural boundaries of the Cross B—with the river and the horizon forming the eastern and western limits of the ranch—reinforces a notion that open-range ranching was somehow an organic industry, what Webb calls a “natural institution, something new, something without antecedents, something willing to conform to all the laws of necessity” (228). The Colonel’s hold on the land is first challenged with the arrival of the homesteading frontier, represented by Lutie, whose appearance in Salt Fork from St. Louis opens the narrative action and initiates, in Hal’s eyes, the beginning of the end of his uncle’s empire. She has come to marry Jim and her arrival disrupts the masculine energy of the “free wild life” of the bachelor West that for Hal was “the life of the gods” (4). The conventional masculine/feminine dichotomy of the range-farm frontier is repeated here, as the otherwise “womanless country,” to use Hough’s phrase, must come to terms with the advancing and allegedly feminine agricultural frontier. Initially, Hal views his aunt as a foreign and unwelcome presence bound to change his world for the worse, forever: “I was only a boy whose face had never known a razor . . . that early fall day I rode with rebellious young back to Salt Fork to be shipped off to Missouri to school before my uncle would fetch back to the ranch the scarcest article in the territory, a woman” (5). He identifies Lutie as the reason for his being shipped off to school; so, as the inbound train heralds the arrival of civilization from the east in the figure of a bride, the outbound train will commence Hal’s education and own “easternization”—a double taming that Hal finds regrettable, but which he eventually adjusts to and profits from. Although urban bred (the Colonel meets her in Kansas City), Lutie identifies almost instinctually with the homesteaders who are slowly crowding onto and claiming Jim’s rangeland. When Hal picks her up from the train, Lutie requests that she and Hal walk through Salt Fork to find his uncle. That they choose to walk rather than ride horseback provides a sign of things to come, as Hal associates walking as “the mark of a hoeman” (10). The first thing they pass as they make their way in the general direction of the Cross B ranch house is the corpse of a freighter who had been shot and whose murderer, lynched by the teamster’s friends, is swinging from 84ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

the water tower. The corporeal evidence of mob justice serves notice that Salt Fork is still the Wild West, a place on the fringe between law and lawlessness, where vigilante justice overwhelms any attempt to maintain a more rigid structure of law and order. Lutie ignores the sight, but her “soft live arm tighten[s]” on Hal’s arm (10), offering a subtle suggestion that her arrival, like her “soft live arm,” will usher in a kind of stability that will tighten its grip on the reckless and lawless frontier. As Hal and Lutie reach the edge of town, they come upon the “vast, brown, empty plain” with an “indistinguishable cloud shadow” marking the “general location of the distant ranch house”—an immense landscape that stops Lutie in her tracks “as if she had run into barbed wire” (11). This is the open range, measured from Lutie’s perspective for what it lacks and the sense of isolation that it imparts. This isolation is soon broken as they come upon “the white village of tents and covered wagons of the emigrants’ camp nearby, where life busily goes on” (11). Lutie is immediately taken with the homesteaders, waving to the children and talking to the parents about where they have come from and how they hope to settle the land. The movement from lawless frontier, to semi-wild ranch, to makeshift homesteading village underscores what is at stake with Lutie’s arrival, as the chaotic motion of the open land and frontier town gives way to more rooted farms and the institutional permanency they represent. Lutie’s status as a civilizing agent is revealed not only in her kindness toward the emigrants but in the aesthetic, social, and environmental changes she brings to the Cross B ranch. The simple, utilitarian décor of the Colonel’s ranch house, “bare of furniture as a garret” (3), is replaced by Lutie’s various domestic touches. Hal explains the changes on his first visit after being away at school: “I saw with dull anger that the familiar mountains of flour and coffee had vanished and the buttes of dried fruits were gone, so that I hardly knew the room with a Brussels carpet on the floor and tufted horsehair chairs and sofa around the walls and a square piano with legs curved and lid polished” (23). Lutie’s modifications signify the thrust of civilization, as the plain adornments of the ranch house are upgraded aesthetically to reflect eastern tastes; even Lutie’s hair, Hal notes, is “done up in the latest St. Louis fashion” (23). The transition from a garretlike outpost to a fashionable home parallels what the settlers hope to do to the open range. As Norman P. Ross notes in the preface to the novel, “Lutie sets out to domesticate the house as the homesteaders set out to tame the land” (x). pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 85

The Brewtons’ prettified home becomes the site not only for their growing family, but for numerous social gatherings and dinner parties that Lutie hosts. Lutie thus cultivates a community on the formerly isolated ranch and brings eastern civilization and a “feverish brilliance” to the bachelor West that Hal cannot help but admire. Hal explains, “I soon found out that scarcely a day was intended to pass without midday dinner guests or guests to stay the week. And most of them crocheted or embroidered, laughed or sang, played charades or whist, and were agreeable to almost anything except to ride out and visit the roundup, which Lutie Brewton kept finding charming excuses to miss” (24). Women are no longer the “rarest article in the territory” (5), and Lutie serves as a catalyst for a major shift in the social and cultural fabric of the Cross B. That dinner parties, crocheting, and embroidering replace the spring roundup—the quintessential cultural event on the open range—accentuates Lutie’s domesticating presence, as it illustrates a shift from the land to the home as the site and source of social activity. Lutie’s most notable change is to the landscape itself, as she plants a “dense wall” of cottonwoods and tamarisks around the ranch house to provide shade and, as Hal later surmises, to shut out the open prairie (25). This tree planting is significant on a number of levels. It serves as yet another example that links Lutie with the homesteaders because the planting of both trees and grain in the arid region can be viewed as an attempt to impose an eastern landscape paradigm on the western wilderness, which is characterized by its treelessness.15 Insofar as the trees form a wall that shuts out the range grasslands, they fittingly prefigure the closing of the frontier and all its mythic associations. In his study of the effect of the closed frontier on American literary tragedy, Harold Simonson points out that the metaphor of the closed wall emerges in corroboration with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 announcement in his “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” that the frontier era had ended (7). Essentially, the closed wall compels individuals to examine themselves and their ideals; in literary tragedies it becomes a metaphor for the nation’s or an individual’s coming of age. As a regional manifestation of this broader turn toward tragedy, the wall of trees signals the end of Hal’s “life of the gods” and its implicit wildness and freedom. For Lutie, however, the wall of trees is meant to shut out the open and isolating grasslands that she so despises and fears. It is Lutie’s desire to shut out and turn away from the “plague” of open space that drives her away 86ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

from the Cross B, and toward the east and its champion, the lawyer-turnedjudge, Brice Chamberlain. Indeed, Lutie plays a vital role in the personal drama that encapsulates the broader trend of progress couched in the flooding tide of emigrants, as her romantic entanglements with the Colonel and Brice convey her shifting loyalties toward the warring factions on the range-farm frontier. The battle lines of the range-farm conflict are drawn at the opening of the novel in the Salt Fork Courthouse, the site of a trial against two of the Colonel’s ranch hands who are accused of shooting at and driving away a farmer who has filed on a quarter section of the Colonel’s range. The trial pits range rights against homesteading law, vigilante action against legal procedure, and, on a personal level, Jim Brewton against Brice Chamberlain, the district attorney who has “sworn new justice for emigrants in all his district” (6). The trial itself is something of a joke, as the jury is biased in favor of the influential Colonel, but afterward the two men engage in an argument that rehearses the ideological conflict implicit on the range-farm frontier. For Chamberlain, the fate of Andy Boggs as an individual is inconsequential compared with that of the settlers in the emigrant camp who await the verdict. He explains exactly who and what he is defending: Not single men, but . . . families, from babes at the breast to grandmothers. They have given up their homes in the East, driven their wagons more than a thousand miles across the plains, and left their dead from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande—all with one purpose of finding homes for themselves in this great territory. . . . I want to ask in the names of these families if you won’t let them settle undisturbed on a few acres out of the million or more of government land on your range? (18) There is much that is familiar about this plea: it is the standard defense of the yeoman dream and an assertion of a model of settlement centered on a fixed home. It is what Cyril, Nettie, Angella, and McDermott struggle for in their confrontation with the Bull. Chamberlain eloquently employs two rhetorical strategies to make his case in favor of the homesteaders: he dramatizes the sacrifices made by the settlers and he undercuts the Colonel’s claims to the land. In documenting the losses accrued by the settlers in their epic journey through the middle of America, Chamberlain implies a kinship between the Colonel and the homesteaders; they share “pioneer pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 87

blood,” as Hal might say, and hold in common a desire to merge their pioneer spirit with the pulse of the land (3). After establishing this implied kinship, the young lawyer makes his plea, which is actually an accusation: as the Colonel has no binding legal claim to the land—most of it belongs to the government—his insistence on disturbing the efforts of the settlers can only be read as a hostile act. The Colonel admits a kinship with the pioneer farmers, but counters Chamberlain’s subtle claim of hostile intent by raging against the farmers’ hostility toward the land: I hope I have a little charity for the nester who waited until the country was safe and peaceable before he filed a homestead on someone else’s range who fought for it. But . . . when that nester picks country like my big vega, that’s more than seven thousand feet above the sea, when he wants to plow it up to support his family where there isn’t enough rain for crops to grow, where he only kills the grass that will grow, where he starves for water and feeds his family by killing my beef and becomes a man without respect to himself and a miserable menace to the territory, then I have neither sympathy nor charity! (19) Here, Jim reiterates the claims of a score of Euroamerican explorers and travelers who asserted that the land was not fit for agriculture. He also echoes the warnings of Powell whose Report on the Arid Region of the United States, published in 1878, calls for sweeping land law reforms that would take into account the aridity of the western public lands and that would correct the unsustainable model of 160-acre quarter sections promoted by the homesteading law. As Stegner says in his introduction to Powell’s report: “[It] was a sober and foresighted warning about the consequences of trying to impose on a dry country the habits that have been formed in a wet one” (xx).16 While the Colonel has a vested, economically motivated interest in the fate of the land, he is also fighting to conserve the land as it is by defending a land-use system that he believes maintains the native vegetation and preserves the wildness of the Plains landscape. From his perspective, the “nesters” are the disturbing presence on the land. Their insistence on homesteading in a land of little rain will ultimately ruin both them and the land they plow. During the course of this argument, Lutie glances back and forth between both men as they plead their cases. Throughout the debate she remains by 88ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

the Colonel’s side, her arm entwined with his; her loyalty seems to be with her husband whose power and presence she admires. However, she cannot help but be drawn to Chamberlain: they are both educated eastern socialites and, more importantly, they share a deep and abiding sympathy for the plight of the homesteaders. That Lutie will take the side of Chamberlain and eventually choose him as an extramarital lover is foreshadowed when at the end of the opening trial she takes the wild yerba de viobra she had picked and pinned to her coat during her walk with Hal and throws the “bright yellow blossoms” to the ground in unstated disgust (20). Her ideological and aesthetic loyalties are clear, as she favors the fecundity of “farms and schools” over the untamed beauty of the native grasslands. The personal and archetypal tensions implicit in the novel’s love triangle find their fullest expression, with all the brilliant ambivalence of the rangefarm frontier, in the figure of Brock, the illegitimate son of Brice and Lutie. As his paternal heritage is concealed, Brock is absorbed into the Brewton family as its third child and becomes a favorite of the Colonel. Brock’s character is forged in the crucible of nature and nurture, shaped by the blood of Lutie and Brice and the formidable influence of the Colonel (which becomes all the more formidable when Lutie leaves the ranch for a period of fifteen years). Brock is therefore a double hybrid figure. Insofar as he incorporates the best elements of his dual paternity—one genetic and the other spiritual— he is a comic figure who illustrates the dynamic potential of the range-farm frontier; his inability to reconcile the conflicting elements of this double paternity, however, establishes him, as most critics agree, as a tragic figure. The secretive affair between Brice and Lutie that produces Brock represents a union of like-minded individuals that would seem to echo in theme the homesteader marriages found at the end of Eaton’s Cattle. As the progeny of this union, Brock fortifies his biological parents’ ideological tendencies and assimilates their fascination with the accoutrements of advanced, eastern civilization. This fact is physically manifested in the features that Brock shares with his mother, including exaggerated feminine qualities like delicate skin and “hair so white and soft it turned and ruffled like a feather” (27). Brock’s skin is so “transparent” that Lutie declares “God had intended [him] to be a girl” (30). His physical likeness to his mother is confirmed later in the novel when the ailing town doctor, whose mental faculties are failing him, sees Brock and asks, “When did Mrs. Brewton come back?” (87). It hardly needs to be reviewed that these feminine qualities align Brock with the pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 89

feminizing and domesticating influence of the progressing agrarian frontier. This alliance is substantiated in Brock’s insistence on making friends with the nester children, while his older siblings stand at a distance. Hal recalls, “It made me think of the time Lutie Brewton had run and shouted with the emigrant child” (66). Brock thus embodies and continues his parents’ contributions to the homesteading community. The influence of Brock’s biological parents is purely genetic because he is ultimately abandoned by both of them. When Brock is just a child, Lutie leaves the ranch house and returns to the East, pursuing the vibrant life of civilization. Her absence for fifteen years (her whereabouts are shrouded in mystery and the source of much gossip in Salt Fork) is significant on two levels. First, it establishes the Colonel as Brock’s primary caregiver, nurturer, and father figure. As I will show, this fact contributes to the fractured nature of Brock’s personality. Second, when read in terms of land-use tropes, Lutie’s retreat to the East undercuts the conventional progressive paradigm implicit in her union with Brice. Unlike Nettie and Cyril in Eaton’s novel, the breakdown of the Brice-Lutie-Brock family unit suggests that the ideologically sanctioned union within the homesteading faction cannot last in the arid country nor can it do the work it is supposed to, which is to establish rooted communities in the West. Lutie, in particular, is out of place in the region; her transplantation from the city fails. When she announces her plan to return to the East, Hal notes how she seems re-energized at the prospect and “almost at once she was like a flower rooted again in rich wet earth with that unaccountable power we call life flowing through her” (32). The wetter soil of the East literally and figuratively provides the grounding from which Lutie can thrive. She is not suited to the prairie soil in ways that Nettie and Cyril find fulfilling. While everyone expects Brice to join Lutie—he is promoted to a high position in Denver in the days leading up to Lutie’s departure—he betrays his lover and decides instead to accept an appointment to be the judge of the Salt Fork district court. The motivation behind his decision to abandon Lutie is never revealed, leading some critics to dismiss Brice as a poorly drawn character. Lahood writes, “Chamberlain is not drawn well enough for a reader to be able to decide if this desertion is characteristic or not,” though he apologizes for this flaw because “in a story that covers years in one hundred and fifty pages, and in which the land itself is as important as the characters, it is not too surprising that some character would not be well 90ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

drawn” (40). Gaston Jr. sees Chamberlain in the context of Richter’s other villains who “always emerge short of being fully dimensional” (56). Certainly, it is difficult to get a good read on the young lawyer: he is charming and eloquent, and his defense of the settlers’ cause is impassioned, but what he gains from this defense is uncertain. I would argue, however, that Brice’s flatness is a byproduct of Richter’s stylistic choices. First, it is important to remember that Hal shapes how the reader understands Brice Chamberlain and the narrator’s biases are clear throughout the novel. Indeed, the novel’s three section titles remove Brice as a significant player in the drama, favoring “Lutie,” “The Colonel,” and “Brock” as the foundational figures in his epic. Second, as a type within an historical romance, Brice purposefully embodies one aspect of the broader social forces at play in the “poignant transitional moment” being dramatized. He is ultimately an ambivalent figure who professes the glory of the agrarian vision even though he is separate from it: a verbal champion of pioneer yeoman, he knows nothing about what it means to toil on the earth nor what is required to make a successful crop. In this way, Chamberlain embodies the figure of the booster, espousing promotional tract rhetoric and promising gardens where desert grasses grow. That Brice cannot reap in reality what he has sown in words is revealed in his inability to properly “cultivate” his own child. Although he remains in New Mexico during Lutie’s exile, Brice is only a marginal presence in Brock’s life. When he does intervene, it has more to do with staking a claim on Brock and Lutie than it does with exercising his paternal instincts. After Brock is arrested for shooting Dutch Charley during a poker game, Chamberlain, now district judge, arranges for his release and dismisses the ensuing trial as long as Brock reports to him on a regular basis. Hal notes, “It was as if I had seen the long arm and white hand of Brice Chamberlain . . . reaching across all Salt Fork county in front of the nesters and the livery-stable loafers, in front of the town ladies, the ranchers’ wives and the dance-hall women, to pin a final ugly red brand on the gay, slender figure of Lutie Brewton” (93). Such an act suggests again that Chamberlain is an opportunist focused more on his career than the well-being of those under his charge. Through Lutie’s exile and Brice’s abandonment of Brock, the Colonel remains a doting father to and stable presence for Brock, despite the fact that, though the Colonel never mentions it, he knows Brock is not his own flesh and blood. The Colonel’s influence runs counter to the home-building instinct that is incumbent in Brock’s biological heritage; as the purveyor of pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 91

the pioneer spirit, Jim imparts to Brock a strain of rugged wildness. Brock’s dual heritage thus produces in him a series of contradictions upon which Hal reflects: All the baffling memories I had of the boy kept turning over in my mind. Young Brock playing he was priest and singing mass in his high soprano to a herd of grazing longhorns. And young Brock playing posse with the nester children and hanging the outlaw, which was a stray dog, to a nester gate-post. Young Brock leading the half-starved nester youngsters over to the ranch house for sourdough biscuits and vinegar pies. . . . Young Brock’s white hands galloping gracefully over Black Jack Davey and The Gypsy Maid on the keys of Lutie Brewton’s square piano. And the same white hands keeping a tomato-can rolling at fifty feet with the thirty-caliber, rimfire five-shooter my uncle let him carry because it was hard to get the odd-sized cartridges. (85–86) Brock’s “conflicting ways” (89) suggest an internal struggle to reconcile an external phenomenon, as his actions oscillate between and often juxtapose the poles of the range-farm divide: he sings sermons to the Colonel’s cattle, combining the role of the cowboy among his semi-wild herds with that of the missionary priest who is part of the advance guard of civilization that would bring order to the chaos of the wilderness; he shares his mother’s affection for the nesters, but he plays outlaw with them and even herds the children to biscuits and pie like so many cows to grass and water, thereby subverting the association between agrarian settlement and civility; and his “white hands” can both create and destroy, produce music and engage in savage violence. Brock can never fully resolve the contradictions implicit in his dual heritage. His adolescent life reflects a tragic decline into uncontrollable violence and criminality: wanted for the murder of Dutch Charley, he becomes a semi-mythical outlaw who roams the countryside and terrorizes local establishments—a wild existence that ultimately costs him his life. Tracked down by a posse of local vigilantes, Brock finally dies of gunshot wounds in an abandoned shack on the prairies south of Salt Fork. While his downfall and death are tragic, the effect of Brock’s death provides a different kind of lens through which to read Sea of Grass. Brock’s death provokes a series of reconciliations that accomplish a version of the dynamic equilibrium that Brock could not achieve in life. The scene of Brock’s death is itself fraught 92ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

with images that suggest a subtle turn toward comic resolution. This reconciliatory and restorative turn is interestingly signaled by an image of Christ from a newspaper, hanging on the only spot “untouched by bullets” in the shack where Brock is killed; it is this image that Brock is fixed upon as he dies. This association between Brock and Christ is further suggested by Hal’s recollection of how a townswoman once gave Lutie a look as if she “had seen the Blessed Virgin” (110). Like Bobby in Eaton’s Cattle, Brock’s conception was far from immaculate; the Madonna and Child link, however, upends the conventional tendency to read Lutie as a fallen woman. Richter’s subtle typology suggests a theme of redemption rather than sin. Like Bobby, Brock also emerges as an unlikely Christ figure whose death is offered as a rehabilitative sacrifice that brings about three noteworthy resolutions. The first resolution involves the notable absence of Brock’s biological father, and the equally significant presence of the Colonel, as Brock lies bleeding to death in the abandoned shack. Chamberlain deserts his son, leaving on a train to Santa Fe instead of heeding the sheriff’s request that he use his position and influence to talk Brock into giving up his fight against the posse. Thus, Chamberlain fails to extend his earlier promise to help Brock with his legal and personal troubles and again reveals his dubious motivations. The Colonel, on the other hand, is able to gain access to Brock and to administer emotional comfort as Hal, now the town doctor, attends to his physical needs. Although Brock is beyond saving when he arrives, the Colonel’s presence at his deathbed signals reconciliation between a son and his “Spiritual Father” (Gaston 54). Before becoming an outlaw, Brock had rejected the Colonel as his father under the false perception that Brice offered him a better quality of life and more freedom; he even adopts his biological father’s surname, and it is as “Brock Chamberlain” that he gains notoriety as an outlaw. After Brock’s death, the Colonel confidently and finally reclaims his son by placing “Brock Brewton, son of James B. and Lutie C. Brewton” in “unequivocal letters” on Brock’s tombstone (117). Once an icon of the bachelor West, the Colonel reveals his adaptive and hybrid nature in this move: it is ironically he and not Chamberlain who remains most faithful to the familial vision supposedly intrinsic to the homesteading enterprise. It is the cattle baron who ultimately displays a dedication to family and endurance. Brock’s tombstone signals the second resolution for which Brock’s death is the catalyst: that between the Colonel and Lutie. After a fifteen-year pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 93

absence, Lutie returns to Salt Fork on the very day that her third son is killed. Although she arrives too late to reconcile herself to the son she abandoned, Lutie is escorted once again by Hal back to the ranch house to rejoin her husband as they are reunited in their grief. There is a sense that Brock’s death redeems Lutie: the product of her sin, Brock, through his death erases the evidence of her fall and allows for the possibility of forgiveness; as Gaston suggests, Brock suffers “as if in expiation of the sins of [his] parents” (52). That Lutie even requires forgiveness, however, is never revealed in Hal’s narrative. The Colonel never verbally expresses his forgiveness nor does he exhibit a need to forgive; when he does approach the subject of his wife’s infidelity, Lutie disarms him with a charming flow of stories and questions. The Colonel quickly acquiesces to Lutie’s vibrant energy and welcomes his wife back into the fold of the family without a word about the past. In just a few short hours after their reunion, Hal notes, a “chemical change” takes place “in the ancient walls” of the “massive old ranch,” imparting to it the “elusive scent of violets high on the peaceful fumes of cigar smoke” (116). The chemical change reflects a broader equilibrium that has been reached on what remains of the Cross B ranch as balance has been achieved on multiple levels: between Jim and Lutie; eastern and western modes of civilization; cultivated and uncultivated space; and feminine and masculine energy. Much has changed on the San Augustin plains since Lutie first departed the Cross B ranch. The Salt Fork region in many ways is as barren and desolate as when she first arrived, but her return, whatever the motivation, rekindles what remains of the pulse of the ranch and stabilizes the Brewtons’ attachment to the place. The Brewtons still have two remaining children; indeed, their daughter is already married, suggesting the achievement of genetic permanence even in the face of economic decline. The site of Brock’s death, an abandoned nester shack, also reinforces the final resolution between the land and its inhabitants. As a whole, Brock’s death links personal and biocultural tragedy, as it fuses together the twin losses that the Colonel suffers. The deserted nester shack, a “symbol of all that [the Colonel] hated and that brought him pain” (107), images the story of the land that runs counter to the narrative of progress upheld by Chamberlain and the nesters. The supposed triumph of the settlers over the openrange ranchers is ultimately undercut by a severe drought that forces most of the farmers to abandon their homesteads. Hal reads the drought as confirmation of his uncle’s ecological defense of ranching and describes the coming 94ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

of the “old mysterious cycle” of weather as a divinely sanctioned judgment against the homesteaders: At the time I thought it only the way the cards happened to fall. But when I look back on it now, it seems immutable and fixed as a chapter out of Genesis or Exodus, with the nesters safe on their Promised Land; with my uncle pushed back with his cattle on a thousand hills; with Brice Chamberlain in the seats of the mighty and all the time the red eye of God watching from the burning bush, not to see that what was to come would be humane and sweet and according to progress, but that it should be cruel and just and true according to the book of destiny which blinds a man from properly reading it until those who would dictate it are dead and fifty or a thousand years have passed. (73) Here, the land’s destiny is not manifest in the westward progress of agriculture and civilization, but with the eastward retreat of defeated homesteaders and settlers. The red eye of God envisions a world that corroborates the Colonel’s earlier proclamation that plowing the prairie would spell its ruin. When Lutie returns to Salt Fork, it is not a naked wilderness that she must turn her eyes from, but a land scarred and marked by the detritus of failed settlement, with “all the nester sores and scars” (113). The blown out and scarred prairie wilderness signals the tragedy of the range-farm frontier: though the defeat of the homesteaders’ dreams by severe drought would seem to establish the Colonel as the victor in this story, the ruination of the range wilderness reminds the reader that there are no real victors when the land is damaged. As Gaston Jr. succinctly puts it: “Out of the success of the farmers in obtaining free-range lands a second corollary develops: the duality of civilization that is at once good and evil. . . . Neither farmer nor rancher profits. The whole abortive experience makes a great historic change in the Southwest—the passing of the free-range land” (53). That Brock dies on a ruined farm illustrates this very point as it tempers the notion that the Colonel has gained anything from the “great historic change”; on the contrary, this change has brought him nothing but pain and loss. His reunion with and forgiveness of Lutie, however, reveals what is most heroic about his character: that he accepts and adapts to change. Despite heavy losses, the Colonel remains on the land as the nesters abandon it. The Colonel thereby achieves the state of permanent attachment to the pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 95

land normally accorded to the homesteading enterprise precisely because he understands that any roots he might establish on prairie soil represent only one chapter in the ever-changing story of the land. When the Colonel claims Brock as his own, he is also claiming a major thread in the overall narrative of the arid West. Insofar as Brock is tied to the land and its fate, his tragic decline suggests the irreconcilability of the two modes of habitation that collide on the range-farm frontier. Wildness and domestication, Brock’s life implies, cannot coexist in a postfrontier world. This does not mean, however, that they cannot eventually be blended into something new; the Brewtons’ ability to salvage a life from the wreckage of the Cross B anticipates the emergence of a new biocultural paradigm predicated on stewardship and with a basis in maintaining tenure on the land. The Colonel’s respect for the dictates of the land establishes him as an ecohero, even if the glue that binds him to the land is economic prosperity. With the end of the open-range era, the Colonel must readjust his relationship to the land, as his vast Cross B empire is reduced from a range wilderness to an enclosed ranch. How the Colonel fares with this adjustment is outside the bounds of Hal’s narrative; all we know is that fifty years after the fall of the Cross B, and likely decades after the deaths of Jim and Lutie, the ranch house is broken. The reconciliations that close out the action, however, suggest the possibility that a living might be eked out in the arid region. The ubiquitous presence of ranching in the contemporary Great Plains attests to this fact. While Jim Brewton is tied to the era of the free range and all its implied values of freedom and motion, he is also loyal to the principles of family and longevity. Claiming Brock as his own—the illegitimate son who also incorporates the poles of motion and permanence—establishes a heritage for the Colonel and the Cross B that connects the golden age of the past with what lies ahead.

Frontier Ambivalence and the Pioneer Spirit Both Eaton and Richter end their narratives on a note of restoration and redemption. In Cattle this redemption is signaled by two reunions that both result in marriage, while Richter’s Sea of Grass features a recovery of a marriage after a fifteen-year separation. The couplings in both novels signify the arrival of a new order that parallels the biocultural transition from open ranges to enclosed farm-units. While the future looks brightest for Eaton’s 96ҍ pastoralism and enclosure

homesteaders—with their ancient enemy vanquished and their homebuilding dreams fulfilled—the Colonel’s moral victory in Richter’s novel, like that achieved by Welch’s character Fools Crow, establishes him as also triumphant, even in defeat, because he is ready to adjust to and accommodate the next chapter in the story of his beloved San Augustin plains. The hard-won successes of the protagonists in each narrative, however, follow on the heels of irrecoverable losses that underscore the darker dimensions of frontier advancement, including the violence implicit in conquering new land and the irreconcilability of the poles of motion and permanence in the overarching grand narrative of Euroamerica’s taming of the Wild West. As hybrids in the process of being formed by their environment while realizing their genetic inheritance, Bobby and Brock (and even Jake) embody the potential for incorporating the better elements of their dual biocultural heritage. The conditions of their births, however, threaten any balance that might be achieved and establish them as transgressive and tragic figures whose inauspicious origins haunt the otherwise comic arcs of both romances. Despite the heroic efforts of their caretakers to avert tragedy, the deaths of these illegitimates project a less-than-hopeful trajectory for the postfrontier West. Furthermore, as metaphors for the story of land use on the arid Plains, these heirs of Cain and Abel reflect once again the ambivalence at the core of bad land pastorals. They also emblematize the challenge implicit in imaginative and physical attempts to settle Plains space insofar as they dramatize the struggle to reconcile an appreciation for undomesticated wildness with a desire to cultivate, improve, and redeem that same wildness. Although the situations of their deaths are drastically different, the loss of Bobby and Brock raise questions about the consequences when what is there, in terms of the land, collides with our visions about what should be there. The answers to these questions, as far as these two romances are concerned, are inconclusive, as suggested by their tragicomic endings. As the survivors continue to wrestle with what is ahead in the wake of loss, they illustrate how the effort to settle the arid West involves a constant process of letting go and adapting. What is ahead for Eaton’s homesteaders and Richter’s Brewtons, of course, is a rapidly changing biocultural landscape and the enclosure of the open-space wilderness. The transformation of the semi-wild Indian and range wilderness into squared sections of grain and pasture in the opening decades of the twentieth century, rendered in the glorious harvest achieved pastoralism and enclosure ҏ 97

by Angella and Nettie, is in many ways the central land-use narrative of the Great Plains. In the following chapter, I explore this narrative in more detail through an examination of Willa Cather’s Nebraska fiction. The ambivalence that characterizes the treatment of the Plains frontier by Eaton and Richter resounds throughout Cather’s work as well, particularly as she moves to resolve conflicting loyalties to the “original” grassland wilderness and to the yeoman pioneers who forever altered that wilderness.

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 3

Harmonious Fields and Wild Prairies Transcendental Pastoralism in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels For us it is a farm with a different kind of harvest. We are farmers who cultivate a different sort of crops. Our fields are unplanted. But they are not unused. The yield for us is made up of observations and memories, of greater understanding and little adventures by the way. —Edwin Way Teale, A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, 1974

Willa Cather’s Homesteading Muse The homesteading success of Angella Loring and Nettie Day in Eaton’s Cattle provides a microcosmic expression of a broader bioregional and literary phenomenon that is most readily associated with Willa Cather. Indeed, Cather certainly warrants special attention here, as her Nebraska fiction provides a comprehensive literary record of the profound changes wrought upon the Plains by the Euroamerican homesteaders and road makers of the West. To begin my exploration of Cather’s contribution to bad land pastoralism, I want to examine two moments in her most widely recognized novel, My Ántonia (1918), that, when juxtaposed, reflect well the conflicted nature and ambivalent legacy of the homesteading enterprise and chart her own shifting attitude toward the meaning and value of this enterprise. The first occurs after the narrator, Jim Burden, has returned to the little town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, after years of study in both Lincoln and Boston. On

a trip out to visit Ántonia, who has been abandoned by her fiancée and left to raise a child as a single unwed mother, Jim comments on the vast changes to the rural Nebraska landscape that have occurred since the days when he lived on his grandparents’ farm: The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. . . . The windy springs and blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed the flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or idea. (145) No doubt inspired by his diligent, if misguided, reading of Virgil, under the tutelage of Gaston Cleric, Jim’s view of the transformed Plains romanticizes the work of the pioneers.1 The elements of wind and sun conspire with the hard work of the farmers to produce an agricultural masterpiece, a beautiful and harmonious work of art wrought from the soil of the tableland. The ordered fields, however, reflect a model of progress from prairie grass to pastureland to grain farm that ultimately upsets Jim’s pastoral imagination. On a succeeding visit to Blackhawk, this time after a twenty-year gap which takes him all around the world, Jim becomes restless in the rural town and only finds comfort when he escapes out to the wild, unbroken land surrounding it: “I took a long walk north of town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again” (174–75, emphasis added). Once out among the uncultivated stretches of grass, Jim imagines other wilderness excursions he will take with the Cuzak boys to the “Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water” (175). Ensconced in the modernized and developed urban world as he is, Jim develops an intimate spiritual and emotional attachment to the wild and original prairies he remembers from his childhood. Both of these moments are refracted through the lens of Jim Burden’s “romantic and ardent disposition” (2), and, as many critics have pointed out, the novel is largely a study of Jim’s imagination—about his creation of Ántonia as an embodiment of the “ ‘primal warmth’ of a feminine landscape” (Goggans 156). While it is important to separate Cather from her 100ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

narrator, it is also necessary to examine where author and character intersect. When these two scenes from My Ántonia are set against each other, the central dilemma of Cather’s Nebraska novels is revealed. Within her work there is a profound conflict between her impetus to heroicize the process of transforming the wild prairies and her equally strong aversion toward the ultimate consequences of this transformation. For Jim, the transition from shaggy grass to fields of grain represents the apex of human imagination and achievement; implicit in this achievement is a paradigm of economic development and progress that leads to an undecidedly disappointing materialism from which Jim longs to escape. This conflicted attitude toward development characterizes Cather’s ambivalent pastoral discourse as it plays out in her Nebraska novels. Like Jim, Cather oscillates between romantic appraisals of cultivation—the formation of self and community out of the “raw material” of the Plains landscape—and a modernist nostalgia for this lost rawness, which was refined out of existence by the cultivating hand of man (My Ántonia 6). While Jim’s biocultural schizophrenia nicely captures Cather’s own ambivalence toward the homesteading enterprise, I will focus more squarely on her movement between, and dialectical engagement with, the poles of romanticism and modernism through a comparative analysis of two of her Nebraska novels: O Pioneers! (1913) and A Lost Lady (1923).2 While the former work commemorates the achievement of the Plains pioneers, the latter revisits the legacy of the pioneers through the lens of a postpioneer consciousness, which is shaped in the crucible of a closed frontier. In many ways, Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers! and Niel Herbert of A Lost Lady represent the split emotional response of Jim Burden to the transformed prairie wilderness. As the quintessential pioneer, Alexandra embodies the romanticism implicit in cultivating the grasslands, as her ability to coax a bountiful garden out of the barren wastes is cast in epic terms. She survives personal tragedy and overcomes extreme loneliness to establish secure and lasting roots in Nebraska. Niel, on the other hand, comes of age at the “end of the road-making West” so that he can only experience the pioneer spirit secondhand by absorbing the life narrative of Captain Forrester and upholding his ideals. Furthermore, Niel’s rejection of what the development of the Plains has wrought, embodied in the person of Ivy Peters, propels him away from his home region as he follows the migratory impulse of so many of Cather’s characters (and Cather herself) to head east. harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 101

Thus, these two characters represent an arc of disillusionment that parallels Cather’s growing ambivalence toward the conquest of the prairie wilderness and the consequences of this conquest on both the physical landscape and its inhabitants. While the transition from romantic embellishment to modernist rejection of Plains development is made obvious through Alexandra’s decision to stay and Niel’s choice to leave, I want to complicate this trajectory by emphasizing some of the fundamental parallels between O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady. In doing so, I want to highlight both Cather’s progressive pastoralism—how she anticipates paradigms of sustainability that characterize ethical agrarianism—and the ultimate shortcomings of her pastoralism. Both Alexandra and Niel share a sense of the spiritual and aesthetic power of engaging with the Plains biocultural landscape. Through an emphasis on these spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of Plains pastoral experience, Cather articulates the value of a commitment to place predicated on both material and nonmaterial interfaces between the human and nonhuman community. A Lost Lady, however, reveals her inability to locate ways to maintain this commitment in a postfrontier context. As revealed by Niel Herbert’s abandonment of Sweet Water, Cather’s ambivalence toward the region’s coming of age as a viable agricultural and commercial force leads to a paralysis that compels her, too, to abandon the pioneer mythos as a subject for fiction.

Cather’s Environmental Imagination To uncover Cather’s complex bad land pastoralism, it is necessary to first outline the critical debate concerning her environmental imagination and her perceived place in the overall canon of North American nature writing. As a writer within the romantic tradition, Cather occupies an important position within the canon of environmental fiction, though her status as a “nature writer” has long divided critics who have focused on her work both within the general context of the American environmental imagination and the more specific context of Great Plains studies. The crux of the debate over Cather’s environmental imagination has rightly centered on her reputation as immortalizer of Plains pioneering, a reputation articulated best by Thacker, who traces Cather’s development as a writer of “first rate fiction of the prairies” (146). Cather’s pastoralism pivots on the triumph of the human will and imagination implicit in the Euroamerican conquest of what was 102ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

deemed throughout the nineteenth century as the Great American Desert. Joseph W. Meeker’s assessment is typical of those who point to limitations within Cather’s environmental imagination based on the paradigm of conquest in her Nebraska novels: There is no environmental ethic that emerges from her work, but rather an ethic of development that supposes land fulfills its destiny when it is successfully farmed. The land provides a background for her stories of human growth and development, but it is not loved and studied to find its own integrity and value, let alone its own story. The land is raw material in the hands of Cather’s muse, and it is the setting where the plow and pen come together. (88) Cather’s Nebraska novels certainly posit the homesteaders as “conquerors of the land-community” rather than “plain member[s] and citizen[s] of it” (Leopold 240), and therefore lack grounding in a complex land ethic. Indeed, the Homestead Act of 1860, which opened the Plains to agricultural settlement, was predicated on this ethic of development: the task of the homesteader was to cultivate his 160 acres, to “prove up” by improving the land from its wild condition, and to transform the land from raw material into viable commodity. On the surface, Cather’s treatment of Plains pioneering fortifies the philosophy behind the Homestead Act by celebrating the victory of human economy over ecology. However, while the pattern of human triumph over wild nature in Cather’s pioneer novels is unmistakable, this pattern certainly does not represent the whole of her environmental imagination. Weighed against the discourse of development in her fiction—the conventional discourse of the agrarian myth—is a romantic perspective concerning the value of a spiritual engagement with the natural world in its cultivated and uncultivated forms. Equally present in Cather’s oeuvre is the sense that nature is a crucible which shapes and acts upon the human imagination. Susan J. Rosowski, who has been the leading proponent of Cather’s romanticism, traces a trajectory of Cather’s developing “ecological aesthetics” that progressively places the farmer-artist in a symbiotic relationship with the physical environment (“Comic Form” 104). She notes how for Cather, “life is an everlastingly full and continuing stream, art is form given briefly to life, and the artist is a vessel.” Nature inspires within the artist a transformation from “ego to eikos” (“Comic Form” 112). In this sense, the Catherian artist figure culls much harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 103

from the physical landscape—draws on it as Muse for inspiration and creativity—but also gives back to this landscape and becomes conjoined with it.3 This is an essentially romantic view of biocultural landscape formation, as the labor and imagination of the individual draws from and contributes to the land-community. The final image of O Pioneers! provides the clearest manifestation of this phenomenon as Alexandra’s love and labor on the land is given back through the procreative profusion of grain: human labor and spirit and natural bounty combine to form the distinctive landscape of the Bergson family farm. The divergent perspectives of these two critics speak to the overall ambivalence of Cather’s pastoralism, an ambivalence that is partly a product of her own conflicted imagination and partly the result of the conflicting enterprise of Euroamerican settler colonialism of the Plains. Ultimately, Meeker’s claim about Cather’s anthropocentrism and Rosowski’s praise of the author’s ecocentrism are both equally viable responses to Cather’s romanticism. Cather’s ideas about the Plains environment comes out of the American romantic tradition, stretching back to Cooper; however, it is important to recognize that her sense of the relationship between nature and culture is also shaped by her equally romantic or, as I describe below, transcendental inclination to conceive of nature as both a crucible to the human imagination and as a canvas upon which this imagination acts. Insofar as Meeker focuses on the nature-as-canvas paradigm in Cather’s work, he perhaps overlooks her emergent bioregional perspective; likewise, insofar as Rosowski emphasizes the crucible paradigm, she minimizes the potentially destructive and exploitative force behind Cather’s romantic musings. A more complete understanding of Cather’s environmental imagination and her subsequent contribution to the development of what I am calling bad land pastoralism must take into account the doubleness of her romantic tendencies and her growing struggle to reconcile this romanticism with her modernist sensibilities.4 The two novels I focus on in this chapter, published a decade apart, represent a concentrated effort on Cather’s part to mediate the economic and ecological dimensions of the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains. What she maintains through both works is a romantic theory of development where an artist-figure (be it a farmer, road maker, or architect) interacts with the natural world in a way that is fulfilling for each. Threatening this symbiosis in both novels is the materialism of modernity, with its emphasis on utilitarianism and spiritless interfaces between the human and nonhuman 104ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

community. The overarching skeptical and critical tone of A Lost Lady reveals that though Cather sustains a belief in the efficacy of nonmaterial engagements with the physical environment, she becomes gradually more doubtful about realizing such an ideal in the real world.

Transcendental Agriculture in O Pioneers! That O Pioneers! draws on Whitman’s influence is widely recognized, as the title is taken from one of Whitman’s poems, but what I am interested in here is how Cather builds upon a transcendental pastoral tradition that is articulated most succinctly in Emerson’s “Farming,” an essay published in 1870.5 In an album in which Cather recorded her likes and dislikes when she was fifteen, she noted Emerson as her “favorite prose writer” (Bennett 112). Few scholars, however, have made connections between the two American writers. Merrill Skaggs traces Emerson’s influence on four of Cather’s late novels, but to date no one has explored the Emersonian elements of her Nebraska fiction. The correlation between Emerson and agriculture within Cather’s imagination seems particularly ripe for exploration when one considers how, as Bennett notes in her biography, Cather once wrote to a friend that she believed farmers “understood Transcendentalism as well as or better than most university students” (paraphrase by Bennett 32). The epigraph to Emerson’s “Farming,” which was first given as an address at the Middlesex “Cattleshow” in 1858, provides a largely romantic description of the farmer and his labor: They fight the elements with elements, And by the order in the field disclose The order regnant in the yeoman’s brain. . . . He planted where the deluge ploughed, His hired hands were wind and cloud; His eyes detect the Gods concealed In the hummock of the field. (673) For Emerson, the yeoman is part laborer, part artist, and part prophet: he toils against the “elements” while mastering those same elements—the “wind and cloud”—to reshape the land so that it reflects the ordered fields of his imagination. This aesthetic anticipates Jim Burden’s observation, which harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 105

I discussed at the outset of this chapter, of the “beautiful and harmonious” fields of grain crafted by the wind and sun and brought to life through the farmers’ efforts. For Emerson this crafting takes on a divine aspect: attuned to Nature through his labor, through the creative acts of planting and harvesting, the yeoman uncovers the “Gods concealed” and thereby achieves a level of transcendence. Throughout “Farming,” Emerson further delineates the role and status of the farmer. At the conclusion of the essay his rhetoric of the farmer’s divine position reaches its apex: “He is a person whom a poet of any clime—Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes—would appreciate as being really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of Nature as much as these” (681). The farmer’s labor in Nature, that is, situates him as a natural person, and therefore, within Emerson’s epistemology, concomitant with the “Gods concealed / In the hummock.” Insofar as the yeoman adds to landscape, she/he executes what Meeker calls an ethic of development; however, Emerson imagines farming as a dialectical and therefore natural act. Because within Emerson’s romantic epistemology man and nature are both infused with the spirit of what he elsewhere calls the Over-Soul. Set against this spiritual dimension of farming is a decidedly practical one: human sustenance. Emerson acknowledges that his poetic impulse to elevate the status of the farmer, to “paint him in rose-color,” ultimately overlooks the fact that the farmer mainly deals in the bare necessities of human physical existence. He notes: “Whilst these grand energies [of Nature] have wrought for him and made his task possible, he is habitually engaged in small economies, and is taught the power that lurks in petty things” (677). In this sense the farmer embodies the typical transcendental dilemma: how does one reconcile the physical, social, and spiritual dimensions of Nature, both human and nonhuman? As Stephanie Sarver lucidly points out, Emerson’s farmer reaps overlapping and not incompatible rewards from working the land. While the farmer’s intimate connection with the natural world may provide opportunities for spiritual transcendence, farming for Emerson is also “implicated in the larger community and marketplace” and thus “its potential to figure as a spiritual practice is always at risk, existing as it does between the often conflicting forces of unmediated nature and civilization” (28). Like Emerson’s ideal poet, the farmer must be able to transcend the materiality of lived experience to cultivate a double harvest: one that provides physical sustenance and the other that provides spiritual sustenance. 106ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

Emerson’s farmer-artist both improves and is improved by Nature as he joins with and participates in the “great circles in which Nature works” (676). He becomes, as it were, naturalized. As Sarver acknowledges, Emerson’s view of the farmer in Nature is problematic because it presents a largely mechanistic model: the earth is something to be manipulated for the physical, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual amelioration of humankind. But the agricultural dialectic that informs Emerson’s view of the farmer does emerge out of an attempt to mediate our economic and more ecocentric involvements with the physical environment, because he enumerates the various practical and romantic values of these involvements. Part of the challenge for Cather is that in her Nebraska novels she must ground the transcendental pastoral in a particularized locality, one that tests the agricultural enterprise. The transformation of the mixed-grass prairie, deemed unfriendly to agriculture because of a lack of rainfall, becomes for Cather a testament to the indomitable spirit of humankind. Indeed, the agricultural development of the Plains in the early decades of the twentieth century takes on a romantic cast in Cather’s Nebraska novels because such fecundity contrasted sharply with her experience of the widespread drought that struck the region in the 1890s. While Cather’s celebration of the Plains environment is often noted, it is important to point out that much of her early short fiction, written in the decades before she published O Pioneers!, reflects a view of the bioregion that is relatively negative and decidedly anti-pastoral. In “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” (1901), for example, she describes both the wild and cultivated landscape in unsympathetic terms: “It was a country flat and featureless, without tones or shadows, without accent or emphasis of any kind to break its vast monotony. . . . The flat plains rolled to the unbroken horizon vacant and void, forever reaching in empty yearning toward something they never attained. The tilled fields were even more discouraging to look upon than the unbroken land. Although it was late in the autumn, the corn was not three feet high” (294). The scathing rebuke against the physical and psychological wasteland of the Great American Desert is evident in the ironic title—clearly, this is no golden land of milk and honey. Indeed, this bleak and barren landscape of the drought-stricken Plains posits a wholly different image of the region than that which is found in the agricultural epics that would establish Cather’s reputation as the Muse of the Great Plains. As Thacker demonstrates, it was only after leaving the region and reflecting harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 107

upon her Nebraska experience that Cather could romanticize the arid grasslands in her fiction (147–49). It is the drought of the 1890s which provides the backdrop for the opening of O Pioneers! and which sets the stage for the heroic achievement of the novel’s protagonist, Alexandra Bergson. The town of Hanover, which serves the surrounding farm community, is an image of impermanence, lacking any significant human landmarks. The houses are strewn about the prairie sod and the town as a whole seems overwhelmed by the strong prairie winds and the “somber wastes” of the open plain (10). The effort to cultivate the Plains has largely failed, a failure that provokes the young Carl Linstrum to lament in the opening chapter that “men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength” (10). Carl is the prototypical wanderer who leaves Nebraska when his family fails to meet the challenge of subduing the land’s “fierce strength.” In many ways, Carl is the precursor to the nomadic heroes found throughout Cather’s Plains fiction, including Jim Burden, Thea Kronberg, Claude Wheeler, Niel Herbert, Marian Forrester, and Lucy Gayheart. Unlike these consummate Catherian heroes, however, Carl’s migratory nature is not the central focus of the narrative. Of all of Cather’s Nebraska novels, O Pioneers! is the most focused on those Midwestern pioneers who chose to stay, despite widespread agricultural failure. Even for these settlers, like the Bergson family, the seeming immutability of the Plains looms large, always threatening to overcome its human inhabitants. At the beginning of the second chapter of “The Wild Land,” for example, Alexandra’s father, John Bergson, lies on his deathbed staring with disgust at the poor state of his fields. He observes, like Carl, how “the record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings” (13). Both Carl and John focus on the unmarked landscape and both imagine farming and community making on the Plains as a battle with Nature that cannot be won. This antithetical positioning of pioneers against an immutable Nature becomes for the dying John Bergson a kind of dark romanticism. Defeated and beleaguered by the enigmatic land, John dreams of becoming one with the “unescapable ground” (13) through death: “He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him” (16). 108ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

He echoes Carl’s sentiments here: the failure of human efforts to make a mark on the Nebraska landscape translates into a deep respect for the forces of Nature. Carl and John develop a backhanded land ethic. Faced with a force greater than the human imagination, they concede defeat and adopt an almost misanthropic view of a natural world unsullied by humans, where Nature is “let alone” to reclaim what little has been disrupted by human strivings. The failure that Carl and John witness is only a passing phase within the overall context of O Pioneers! The “Wild Land” section commences in the early period of the pioneer era, and the years following John Bergson’s death find the pioneer community in the bust phase of the first major agricultural cycle on the Plains. After “three years of drouth and failure,” the settlers are discouraged and many leave the region, either to head east “to Iowa, to Illinois, to any place that had been proved habitable” (31) or to find steadier jobs in cities like Chicago. The Linstrums are among the first families to leave, and even the Bergson boys, Lou and Oscar, want to desert the family farm. Lou takes as confirmation of the land’s inhospitality the exodus of the majority of their neighbors: “Now they’re beginning to see this high land wasn’t never meant to grow nothing on, and everybody who ain’t fixed to graze cattle is trying to crawl out. It’s too high to farm up here” (37). Lou is also concerned that after successive years of drought the land has lost its value; whereas for his father the failure to cultivate the Plains reflected a breakdown of the human spirit, for Lou this failure is primarily economic. Cather’s depiction of this bust phase sets the stage for the impressive achievement of Alexandra, who inherits the farm upon her father’s death. Besides inheriting the property, Alexandra also adopts from her father a spiritual and aesthetic orientation toward the land. She inherits, that is, Bergson’s “Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable” (14). It is because of her faith in the land and her desire to maintain a hold on the family homestead that her father charges Alexandra with the responsibility of managing the farm. He recognizes that his two sons will be easily discouraged—as he himself was—by the challenges that the dry region imposes, and that their main impulse will be to sell out and leave the farm behind. Alexandra is also chosen because she embodies her father’s romantic disposition and has a similar desire to make a mark on the land, to join her work with the larger work of Nature’s cycles. Unlike her father, however, Alexandra does not take an antagonistic approach to the Plains environment. For her, the harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 109

indeterminately scratched landscape is not a sign of Nature’s hostility, or the unfriendly Genius of the Divide, but a canvas upon which she, as an agriculturalist artist, can exact her vision of a pastoral ideal. The transition between the end of “The Wild Land” section and the beginning of book two, “Neighboring Fields,” provides the fullest articulation of Alexandra’s epic feat. The second section opens after a typical Catherian gap, this one sixteen years in duration. The feeble scratches of the plow have now become broad paint strokes, as the wild and presumably hostile grasslands have been transformed into “a vast checkerboard, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light” (49). With this transformation comes a shift in the overall imaginative orientation toward the land. John Bergson’s tragic resignation becomes Alexandra’s triumphant pastoralism: The rich soil yields heavy harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow. (49–50) The sexual imagery of the yielding earth here is unmistakable and certainly recalls Kolodny’s thesis concerning the “inevitable tension . . . between the initial urge to return to, and join passively with, a maternal landscape and the consequent impulse to master and act upon that same femininity” (27). For Cather, however, this “inevitable tension” is resolved through an overarching transcendental union between the land and its cultivators. This union is signified in part by Alexandra’s repeated, somewhat ambiguous dream of being figuratively harvested by a strong and swift man who was “yellow like the sunlight” with the “smell of ripe cornfields about him” (131). But Cather’s transcendentalism is most fully articulated in Alexandra’s function as a farmer-artist who negotiates the material and spiritual value of the land she cultivates. While Alexandra’s designs on the land are driven by an economic impulse to maintain her hold on her family’s homestead, she achieves success only after she gives herself up to the Genius of the Divide and expresses her faith in the dry highland country that so disgusted her 110ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

father. As a dutiful daughter, Alexandra’s stubborn belief in the land initiates from a desire to keep her promise to her father, but her faith is solidified when, in making a tour of the neighboring farms, she decides of her own volition that the high dry land is more desirable than the more productive land along the river bottoms. In the often-quoted conversion moment at the end of “The Wild Land” section, as Alexandra looks up at the stars after she has decided, despite her brothers’ objections, to expand the family’s landholdings, Cather’s transcendental discourse peaks: It fortified [Alexandra] to reflect on the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. . . . She had never known before how much the country had meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring. (45) Her feeling of being “down there,” joined to the Divide, echoes her father’s dream of a burial beyond the reach of the plow. As a whole, however, Alexandra’s “new consciousness” of the land is more reciprocal. She imagines a relationship with the country rather than a battle against it. By giving herself up to the impersonal and powerful Genius of the Divide Alexandra adapts to and ultimately transcends the material conditions of the Plains environment and taps into its spiritual and aesthetic value. Alexandra is not simply acted upon by the Genius of the Divide, however. Cather makes it clear that what separates Alexandra from the less-successful and less-fulfilled pioneers is her romantic disposition. The fields of the Bergson homestead become the canvas upon which she enacts her romantic ideals. Like Emerson’s yeoman, Alexandra is something of an artist-figure who values the land for its aesthetic appeal. She derives great pleasure from her ability to create something out of the raw material of Nature. As the narrator explains: “Alexandra’s house is the big out-of-doors, and it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” (Cather 54). The cultivation of the soil is akin to a creative act through which the farmer-artist improves the wild landscape harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 111

and redeems it to the human imagination. That Alexandra inhabits the outof-doors as a home—the eikos to her ego—suggests a level of conjoining that establishes her farm as an ideal biocultural landscape. On a more practical level, Alexandra’s environmental imagination emerges out of her experiences with and sympathy for “Crazy Ivar,” her deeply spiritual Norwegian neighbor who embodies the transcendental ethic that Alexandra employs as she takes up the task of transforming the grasslands. Matthias Schubnell identifies Ivar as the moral center of O Pioneers! He writes, “Ivar functions as a prophetic voice, castigating the rise of a rapacious and intolerant generation at the end of the pioneer era on the Great Plains and is thus one of Cather’s early proponents of environmental ethics and social tolerance” supporting a paradigm of “reciprocity rather than domination” (41, 43). Ivar’s land ethic is visible in that he has lived on the land for three years “without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done” (Cather, O Pioneers! 24). He models for Alexandra the importance of one’s spiritual orientation to the landscape, manifest in his gifts as a horse whisperer, in his detestation for hunting and violence against animals, and, most potently, in his sense that the “Bible seemed truer to him [in his wild homestead]” (25). This influence translates into the faith Alexandra develops in her own land and in its future. Ivar’s wild homestead, however, represents an unrealistic ideal. While Schubnell is right to point to Ivar’s influence on Alexandra, it is important to recognize that the Bergson farm is nothing like Ivar’s. Indeed, Ivar’s homestead is entirely impractical, and Alexandra ultimately has to take him in after his farm fails. Ivar’s methods are ethically viable, but economically impossible to maintain. To balance her spiritual connection with the land and the financial responsibility that comes with managing it as property within a capitalistic society, Alexandra must reconcile Ivar’s ethics to her role as a businesswoman. Ultimately, Alexandra is quite prosperous. After the majority of her neighbors abandoned the Plains during the drought of the 1890s, Alexandra bought their land in anticipation of its future productivity. As a result, Alexandra’s farm complex becomes “one of the richest on the Divide” (54). Her financial success comes in large part from her willingness to adapt to the conditions of the place, utilizing her new consciousness of the land to achieve productivity where others had failed. She reads farm papers, studies 112ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

the mistakes of her neighbors, and keeps up to date with the technology being developed at the State University in Lincoln. As William Conlogue compellingly argues, Alexandra’s aggressive management of her farm complex separates her from the nineteenth-century agrarian tradition, emblemized by Jefferson’s yeoman. Alexandra models the principles of the New Agriculture, a modernized agrarianism that approaches farming as an industrial occupation. Conlogue writes, “Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! presents us with a successful agrarian heroine of almost mythic proportion who models her farming on urban industrialism to transform an unproductive land into a lush breadbasket” (80). Alexandra achieves success, Conlogue suggests, through her mediation of Crazy Ivar’s preservationist-spiritual stance and her brothers’ more market-conscious, though exploitative, land-use practices in order to establish a precisely and efficiently managed “profitable farm that systematizes nature” (75). Thus, for Cather, successful farming is about possessing and executing a vision of the land’s productivity. Conlogue’s astute reading of the discourse of agriculture in Cather’s first Nebraska novel rightly points to Cather’s adept rendering of the paradigmatic shift toward the New Agriculture that occurs around the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, he overstates Alexandra’s business acumen at the risk of understating the transcendentalist dimension of her agricultural achievement. While her academic-inspired innovations, like using the silo and growing alfalfa, are largely responsible for her success, Alexandra attributes the drastic transformation of the Plains to the land itself. When Carl, upon his first visit to Nebraska in sixteen years, marvels at her success, Alexandra tells him: We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. (74) Implicit in this assessment are market fluctuations influenced by numerous factors, not the least of which was the end of the drought. And certainly she is being modest here about her role in not only investing in the land at the right time, but in learning how, unlike her father before her, to “work it right.” What this statement more importantly reveals, however, is an underlying harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 113

sense of a reciprocal relationship between Alexandra and the Nebraska land space: Alexandra receives the richness of being a part of the land and the land gets an admiring witness. Alexandra’s idea about the land enriching itself and its inhabitants also echoes Emerson’s view of the practical dimension of farming, where the farmer is the “minder” of the machinery of Nature: “The earth works for [the farmer]; the earth is a machine that yields almost gratuitous service to every application of the intellect” (“Farming” 675, 676). Within Alexandra’s imagination, the land’s productivity and fecundity is a manifestation of the “new consciousness” toward the Plains that she feels during the conversion moment at the end of book one. The land woke up because it was finally approached with “love and yearning” (42) by the human community. Alexandra’s interpretation of the land’s little joke reveals a problematic “ethic of development”: the land-community fulfills its destiny only when it becomes productive by human standards, only when the mixed-grass wilderness becomes the ordered fields of wheat, corn, and pasture. This is the pioneering model, a kind of environmental manifest destiny. The almost magical transformation of the landscape between the first and second books emblematizes Cather’s commemoration of the pioneers’ ability to wrest a lucrative living from the dreary wastes of the Great American Desert. This is the core of Cather’s “ethic of development” as Meeker identifies it: by producing such wealth for its human cultivators, and only by producing such wealth, can the land achieve its destiny. Meeker’s assessment, however, is too extreme. When we place Cather’s pastoral discourse within the context of an emergent strain of environmentalism and bioregionalism in Great Plains fiction, we see, in O Pioneers! especially, an attempt to explore our obligatory engagements with nature in the ordered fields of corn and wheat. Development and land use are inevitable aspects of the agricultural experience that should be scrutinized, but Meeker ultimately overstates, as Conlogue does, Cather’s celebration of Alexandra’s material success. What distinguishes Alexandra’s view of farming from the other models presented in the book is that, for her, agriculture is as much an intellectual and spiritual enterprise as it is a physical and material one. As a result of her spiritual connection to the Divide, Cather implies, Alexandra reaps rewards that transcend market values. Insofar as Alexandra improves the arid grassland, she is equally improved by it, rewarded with a transcendental dissolution into the impersonal spirit of Nature. 114ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

The paradigm of reciprocity implicit in Cather’s transcendentalism is most evident in the concluding chapter of the novel, what I call the comic coda. It is in the final section, “Alexandra,” that Cather most completely presents an ecocentric perspective that complicates, though does not resolve, the ethic of development in O Pioneers! This concluding section follows the tragic climax at the end of book four, “The White Mulberry Tree,” wherein Alexandra’s brother, Emil, and his lover, Marie Shabata, are shot to death by Marie’s husband, Frank, after he finds them embracing in the Shabata orchard. The romance between Emil and Marie comes to the fore after the “Neighboring Fields” section. Sharon O’Brien has pointed out the unity behind the novel’s narrative structure by demonstrating how the two primary plots—Alexandra’s pioneering and the romance between Emil and Marie—represent competing types of passion: impersonal and romantic. Of the two plots, O’Brien argues: “Each is a parable about passion: Alexandra Bergson’s taming of the soil chronicles the heroic results of passion regulated and channeled, whereas the lovers’ doom records the destructive outcome of sexual passion indulged and unleashed” (“Unity” 158). While Alexandra also struggles with sexual passion, as revealed in her dream about the bronze lover, she overcomes this passion and “like the admirable characters in Cather’s other fiction, . . . ‘dissolves’ the self into something ‘complete and great’ by surrendering her ego to the land” (“Unity” 164). As O’Brien suggests, the tragic plot of Emil and Marie underscores Alexandra’s heroic ability to channel her passion into the creative act of pioneering, and to herself become a “part or particle” of the divine land. While this lesson about the destructive consequences of unregulated sexual passion is certainly one aspect of the Emil/Marie plotline, their deaths also reinforce the link between nature and mortality that leads to more mature understanding. With the murder of her younger brother, Alexandra is understandably shaken and distraught, but in the final section of the novel she locates a level of peace and resolve about her place in the broader scheme of nature’s cycles. There is a gap of a couple of months between when Ivar discovers the murdered lovers in the orchard at the end of “The White Mulberry Tree” and the beginning of the “Alexandra” section, so the reader sees Alexandra already far into the process of mourning Emil. The final book opens with Ivar retrieving Alexandra from the Norwegian graveyard where her brother is buried, just as a thunderstorm moves in. The storm and the visit are purifying for her, as she tells Ivar: harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 115

Ever since Emil died, I’ve suffered so when it rained. Now that I’ve been out in it with him, I shan’t dread it. After once you get cold clear through, the feeling of rain on you is sweet. It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can’t see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren’t afraid of them. (182) Alexandra’s graveyard epiphany grants her a perspective in which death and life are intertwined. Through the stark confrontation with mortality forced by Emil’s passing, Alexandra resigns herself to the cycle of creation and destruction that is an essential aspect of the natural world. The oncoming thunderstorm nicely images this very point: the hard rain and slashing lightning are to be feared for their awesome destructive power, but this same rain can also be “sweet” and is necessary to sustain and create life. The death of Emil and Marie awakens in Alexandra a receptivity to what Gifford designates as one of the main aspects of a mature pastoralism (what he calls postpastoralism), which is “the recognition of a creative-destructive universe equally in balance in a continuous momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay, ecstasy and dissolution” (153). While Alexandra is disillusioned by the tragedy of vibrant youth interrupted, it also fortifies in her an awareness of her place in the overarching scheme of the “great operations of nature.” Just as John Bergson’s death initiates Alexandra’s commitment to the land, the deaths of Emil and Marie give meaning to that commitment by placing it within the broad context of the creative-destructive universe. This becomes clear in the final chapter of the novel, when Alexandra, with a look of “exalted serenity,” explains to Carl her model of stewardship and what it means to “own” the land: The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brothers’ children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while. (198) Within this construction, true “ownership” is marked not by titles and deeds, but by entering into a covenant with the land-community. Her comment 116ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

about the land belonging to the future echoes her conversion moment from “The Wild Land” section where she feels the “future stirring” in the shaggy prairie grass (45), but there is a subtle shift toward an environmental ethic in Alexandra’s statement at the end of the novel. Whereas the act of pioneering encompasses an “ethic of development” that equates land value with future productivity, the accent on cycles in Alexandra’s latter comment replaces the pioneer emphasis on linear progress (prairie grass to grain farm) with a paradigm that highlights the permanence of nature’s cycles and the comings and goings of human communities on the Plains land-space. Those who take care of and “love” the land for the “little while” that they own it, Cather implies, will be rewarded not only with material success but, more importantly, with a sense of belonging and emplacement. Alexandra’s commitment to the family farm culminates in an awakening to and participation in the rhythm of the natural world. The romantic hyperbole of the closing lines of the novel reveals this very point: “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” (199). By giving herself up to the Genius of the Divide, Alexandra becomes a part of the natural cycles of birth and rebirth and therefore part of the region’s ongoing story. That she was able to wrest a lucrative living from the difficult environment, for Cather, is only one aspect of her epic achievement. The sense of belonging to and participating in the grand operation of nature is Alexandra’s ultimate reward. Taken together, this mixture of material and nonmaterial rewards represent a spectrum of land valuations that are ideally reconciled in the novel. The dialectic of economy and ecology is resolved through Alexandra’s transcendental union with the Plains landscape.

The Ethic of Development in A Lost Lady The hopeful ending of O Pioneers!, with Alexandra’s comic resolution to settle down and become one with the “yellow wheat” and “rustling corn,” gives way a decade later to Cather’s more cynical portrait of the rural Plains’ future in A Lost Lady (1923). A famous remark she made in 1936 about how “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” provides a benchmark date that many critics have used to delineate a new phase in Cather’s writing (qtd. in Barillas 79). Barillas notes how My Ántonia signals the end of Cather’s “first harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 117

period as a novelist,” which was “characterized by celebration of America’s past and optimism for its future” (79). Such a rigid division of Cather’s career overlooks the relatively consistent ambivalence of her work, the tragicomic tone that infuses much of her work and particularly her Nebraska novels. The idealism and commemoration of the past in O Pioneers! is undeniable, but the novel’s focus on death and change betrays also a nascent modernism that develops in the decade between O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady alongside her persistent romanticism. With its focus on reconciling the gap between an idealized past and an uncertain future, an implicit part of the modernist project, Cather’s first Nebraska novel is prelude to the narrative reconciliations found in My Ántonia and A Lost Lady. As I have already suggested, Jim Burden, the protagonist of Cather’s most widely recognized prairie novel, My Ántonia (1918), is in many ways a transitional figure, a hybrid of the romantic and modernist protagonist. His idealization of Ántonia, the “country girl”–turned–Earth Mother, is rooted in the doubleness of his consciousness. On the one hand, he admires Ántonia’s connection to the primordial earth, her rootedness in the natural world that finds its creative expression in the profusion of children, fruit, and grain that characterizes the Cuzak farm. The Cuzak farm, that is, represents Jim’s pastoral ideal and provides an opportunity to reenact the process of dissolution into “something complete and great” that he achieves in the pumpkin patch (12). In this way, Jim’s Ántonia—his construction and possession of her as an imaginative ideal as articulated in his manuscript—is a romantic expression of a desire to locate this completeness and connection to place. On the other hand, throughout the course of the novel Jim does not seem to arrive anywhere, a fact that establishes him as a migratory modernist. He is made homeless through the death of his parents, and his relocation to his grandparents’ house in Nebraska is just the first in a series of movements that include “arrivals” in Blackhawk, Lincoln, Cambridge, New York, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Prague. In the introduction, we find Jim crossing Iowa, a legal counsel for “one of the great Western railways” (1). Thus, his professional life requires him to lead a kind of vagabond existence. Jim’s movement between “earth and sky” erases him and allows him to remake himself. His nomadic mentality echoes the inherent message of the American Dream myth: if you do not like who you are, simply keep moving. In this way, Ántonia embodies a stability and permanence that presents a significant contrast to Jim’s nomadism. Indeed, Ántonia seems immutable. 118ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

Her life and environment at the end of the novel are little changed from her situation at the beginning: she labors on a farm, lives in a sod house, reverts to speaking her native language, and dreams of the Old World. The reader witnesses her through Jim, and he needs to glorify her in order to make up for the disappointments of his life, like his unsuccessful marriage. His idealization of Ántonia is thus infused with a sense of loss, the shadow of a dream of belonging that has eluded him. As an artist-figure—as the creator of the “My Ántonia” manuscript—Jim Burden’s “naturally romantic and ardent disposition” (2) links him to Alexandra; whereas she cultivates a harvest of grain, Jim cultivates a harvest of words. What separates Jim from Alexandra is what demarcates Jim as a hybrid figure: he leaves Nebraska. Alexandra is able to reconcile the industrialist paradigm of the modern world to her overall commitment to the Bergson farm and is therefore able to maintain a romantic ideal of development in the face of traumatic change: as Conlogue shows, she even incorporates technological change into her agricultural enterprise. As a developer, Jim conversely exhibits a modernist theory of development that incorporates the romantic ideal Alexandra embodies but that is detached from any specific place. The original introduction to the novel characterizes Jim as the archetypal Western booster: besides being connected with the railroad—the ultimate icon of Plains development—he also is involved in a number of projects: He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden’s attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. (2) If farming is easy to romanticize as a land-use strategy, mining, logging, and oil drilling have a much more ambivalent reputation as extractive enterprises. As described here, Jim Burden epitomizes the conflicted pastoral impulse as Kolodny outlines it. O’Brien reads this passage as an example of Jim’s desire to possess the landscape and to turn “natural riches into capital” (Introduction 15). Jim is therefore guilty of the very process of development that propels him to walk beyond the Blackhawk town limits and experience in the unbroken prairie what Thoreau calls the “tonic of wildness” (Walden harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 119

211). In fact, his romantic longing to experience the wild translates directly into the commodification of this same wildness: his excursions into the new canyons and parks are masked business meetings that result in the further development of public lands. It is interesting that Cather extracted the earlier quoted passage in her 1926 revision of the novel, an editorial move that preserves Jim’s romantic purity and heightens his status as a literary heir to Alexandra Bergson. While the subtraction of these details does not absolve Jim’s status as a modern man—the revised introduction retains his position as a railroad lawyer—it does obfuscate a lineage that might connect him to other less favorable western boosters in Cather’s work, like Ivy Peters, who personifies a movement toward materialism occasioned by the closing of the frontier and the general financial success of the Plains. Ivy embodies everything that a romantic would reject. What Cather rejects about the post-1922 world is further articulated in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, One of Ours (1922). This World War I narrative establishes a context for the fallen landscape of the postfrontier Plains that figures largely in A Lost Lady. Claude Wheeler’s rejection of the provincialism of rural Nebraska spurs his own desire to possess something greater by leaving his roots behind. What he denounces is the changes that material success has wrought: With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended to so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it. The people themselves have changed. He could remember when all the farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now they were continually having lawsuits. (85) Gone from the Plains agricultural enterprise are the nonmaterial dimensions that made it a romantic and fulfilling endeavor: pride of place, careful tending to the land and harvest, and community. In place of these qualities is the pursuit of economic opportunity. Although adaptation to change accentuates Alexandra’s heroism, the type of changes that Cather’s modernist protagonists must contend with are wholly different. In Claude’s modernist imagination, change is a corrosive element; if this corrosiveness is suggested 120ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

by the actions of Claude’s neighbors, it culminates in the person of Ivy Peters, the mechanical opportunist who is the dark blotch on the history of Plains development as Cather characterizes it in A Lost Lady. The general tone of A Lost Lady, particularly with regard to Cather’s treatment of the pioneer era, is dark and pessimistic. The narrative is fraught with losses and endings: the demise of Sweet Water; the collapse of the once mighty Captain Daniel Forrester; and the corruption of his wife, Marian, the “lost lady” of the title. Indeed, the novel as a whole charts the tragic passing of the pioneer era and the dissipation of the pioneer spirit as embodied in the Captain, who made his fortune as a railroad man and land developer. Critics have commonly characterized A Lost Lady as a eulogy for a bygone time, a passing made all the sadder because the achievement of pioneers like Alexandra Bergson must give way to the superficial enterprises of unscrupulous businessmen like Ivy Peters. One of the fundamental crises in A Lost Lady involves what Cather sees as the increased difficulty of achieving the pastoral ideal in a climate as shallow as the one Claude Wheeler describes in One of Ours. That is, in this novel Cather struggles with the following problem: once the creative work of crafting ordered fields out of wild prairies is complete, what is left to inspire the agriculturalist to see beyond her economic relationship with the land? The prosperity of the early decades of the twentieth century, coupled with the closing of the frontier, seriously limited the transformative and creative aspect of the agricultural enterprise. The pioneer experience, as it is memorialized in O Pioneers!, allowed for a complex and balanced engagement with the land-community, with its tacit material and spiritual benefits, because the pioneers were essentially crafting something out of nothing. Not only were the prairies a canvas upon which the “order regnant in the yeoman’s brain” could be inscribed, but the intimate connection with wild nature that such inscription required provided pioneers with an opportunity to commune with nature on a profound level (Emerson “Farming” 673). While A Lost Lady unmistakably echoes the romantic ideal posited in O Pioneers! there is also something more complex going on within the later novel that reveals the growth of Cather’s environmental imagination and at the same time underscores the ambivalent legacy of her transcendental pastoralism. Much of the plot, and subsequently much of the criticism concerning the novel, focuses on Marian Forrester. Rosowski, for example, calls the novel a “classically romantic” exploration of “the experience [and] the harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 121

effect of Mrs. Forrester” (“Comic Form” 116). In terms of the novel’s pastoral discourse, however, it is more important and fruitful to focus on the figure of the Captain and his influence upon his disciple, Niel Herbert, particularly as this influence is paralleled by and contrasted with the emergence of Ivy Peters. Thus, while much of the criticism about the book looks at the crucial relationship between Niel and Marian, the importance of the Captain’s complex heritage as developer of the grasslands must not be overlooked. The Captain is significant because he embodies a limited and problematic ethic of development even as he impresses upon Niel, his spiritual heir, the nonmaterial value of the land-community. I do not mean to imply here that the primary critics of A Lost Lady ignore the Captain’s role in the novel, but for the most part he is seen as a marginal character whose importance diminishes as the novel progresses. Rosowski, for example, views him as a static, ineffective character who mostly serves as a backdrop to highlight Marian’s active, adaptable spirit. It is my assessment that while the Captain’s physical stature clearly dwindles with time, he maintains his efficacy through the power of the myth he constructs. The opening chapter of A Lost Lady establishes the status of the Forresters in Sweet Water, a once promising frontier town, and emphasizes the correlation between the Captain and the pioneer ethos. The omniscient narrator, speaking “thirty or forty years” after the events of the novel have taken place, informs the reader that there were then “two distinct social strata in the prairie states”: the “homesteaders and hand-workers” (the heirs of Jefferson’s yeoman) and the “bankers and gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to invest money and ‘to develop our great West’ ” (3). As someone who had “built hundreds of miles of road for the Burlington” (4), it is clear that Captain Daniel Forrester belongs to the latter class. The Captain’s founding of Sweet Water and his construction of an Eden-like home serves to exemplify his ideals of personal manifest destiny and social mobility, the kinds of ideals that originally attracted so many people, like Niel’s parents, to the town of Sweet Water. The description of the Forrester home, a central symbol of the Captain’s success, reveals its, and by association his, mythic stature: The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a mile east of the town. . . . It stood close into a fine cottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the hillside 122ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by rail, and the last thing one saw on departing. (Cather Lost Lady 4) The house is “placed on the hill” so that all eyes, those of the town and its visitors, are drawn to it. Figurative and literal, the Forrester place endures as a representation of the town’s aspirations; the Captain’s identity becomes synonymous with the identity of Sweet Water. Embraced by the “fine cottonwood grove,” the Captain’s home appears to be a natural part of the landscape, as if it had always been there upon the hill. It is the aesthetic appeal of the Sweet Water environment that draws the Captain to the spot as he crosses the plains of Nebraska surveying for the railroad. In a story that achieves the status of a creation myth, the Captain explains how he found the spot for his Sweet Water home. In his early career for the freighting company that transported supplies across the plains, he located the hill while he was out exploring and was “greatly taken with the location” (42). He staked his claim and promised himself one day he would return to build his house. After many years of being separated from the spot— the willow stake he uses actually grows into a tree—he does finally buy the land from the railroad company and returns to build his home on the hill. Even as he builds his home and even as the bustling town of Sweet Water and its surrounding farms grow up around the hill, Daniel is adamant about preserving the vast marshland that encircles his property. The narrator explains, “Anyone but Captain Forrester would have drained the bottom land and made it into highly productive fields. But he had selected this place long ago because it looked beautiful to him, and he happened to like the way the creek wound through his pasture, with mint and joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks” (5). He preserves the marsh primarily because of its aesthetic value. It is a beautiful thing to look upon, a natural masterpiece to be viewed from the prospect of the Captain’s house on the hill. The marsh has value because it is a sacred place connected to the Captain’s personal history, which intersects with the broader romance of the western frontier. Through its association with the settling of Sweet Water, the marsh is a snapshot of the past—the prairie canvas frozen in time. In this sense, it comes to represent Cather’s pastoral vision and the moral ideal implicit in Plains pioneering. The Captain’s participation in the settling of the West convinces him that all one needs to achieve happiness and success harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 123

are a dream and a good work ethic. He concludes his creation myth with the following moral: “A thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean . . . is already an accomplished fact. All of our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader’s and the prospector’s and the contractor’s. We dreamed the railroad across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water” (44–45). From the Captain’s perspective, the marsh is an emblem of his dream of home founding and, considering its uncultivated state, a paradoxical image of the development of the West. The narrator is quick to point out that, as a wealthy man, the Captain can afford not to drain the marsh. Because of his large acreage, which is “half pasture land, half marsh” (5), he can put his land to multiple uses. His being an independently rich gentleman rancher who does not need to make his land produce means his engagement with the land-community, at least before the collapse of his Denver bank, is undisturbed by financial constraints. Even the stock he raises on his pastureland are more significant as trophies of his pioneer successes than as a source of income: “it gratified him to hear [visiting] gentlemen admire his fine stock, grazing in the meadows on either side of his lane” (5). The marshland does possess a market value because it is a part of the Captain’s property; the Captain can better appreciate the nonmaterial value of his land, however, because he does not need to commodify it. He can indulge his nostalgia-based fantasy of turning his land into a spectacle, a living museum that pays homage to the frontier past. Like Alexandra’s conversion moment on the high prairie land, the marshland also functions as a site for spiritual communion with the physical environment. Its association with Edenic purity and innocence in the second chapter of the novel, when Niel Herbert and the boys from town frolic playfully among the reeds and bluegrass, designates the marsh as a place for religious reverence. For Niel, who is taken with the aesthetic and historical value of the Forrester land, as was the Captain, the marsh inspires a transcendental awakening. In a scene that echoes Alexandra’s emergent consciousness of the Plains, Niel achieves his awakening as he is walking through the marsh: “There was an almost religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them. There was in all living things something limpid and joyous. . . . Niel wondered why he did not often come over like this, to see the day before men and their activities had spoiled it” (70). As Niel takes in the “religious purity” of the wild marshes, unspoiled by “men and their activities,” he locates what 124ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

Emerson asks for in Nature: an “original relation to the universe” (3). Niel’s experience is not restricted by any economic commitments, so he can more fully appreciate the nonmaterial value of his engagement with the physical environment. Nonetheless, this scene illustrates Cather’s persistent effort to document the transcendental dimension of our experience with nature. Niel’s moment in the marshland is, on the surface, free from any concern about its use-value; he is not an agriculturalist and he seeks transcendence in the unaltered landscape. While this fact disqualifies him, in a sense, as a developer, he does embody, like Alexandra and the Captain, Cather’s romantic pastoral ideal as applied to Plains development. Besides being entranced by the “religious purity” of the marshland, Niel’s imagination is fully invested in the Forrester myth of development and the pioneer ethos. As a member of the postpioneering generation, Niel’s experience with the romance of the Plains pioneers is largely secondhand, related primarily through the Captain’s Sweet Water creation myth which imbues the Forrester land with a deep cultural value. Niel’s love for the marshes, like his attachment to the Forresters, is fostered by their link with the pioneer achievement. The aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual value of the uncultivated prairie is made all the more precious to Niel when it, and the pioneer ethic it represents, are threatened by the emergent materialism of turn-of-the-century America. Within this context, the preservation of the marsh represents a last stand against the encroaching tragedy of the closed frontier. When the Captain goes broke after his bank collapses, he is forced to lease out his marshland to Ivy Peters, one of the “promising young business men” who “never dared anything, never risked anything” (75, 90). Ivy drains the marsh and plants wheat to make a quick profit. Niel perceives this action as not only an affront to the Captain’s legacy but as an indication of the growing materialism of the postpioneering generation. For Niel, the commoditization of the protected marshland is as unscrupulous and unethical as Ivy’s other business practices, which include cheating Indians out of this land. The draining of the marsh signals the end of an era and the debasement of the Plains frontier. From Niel’s perspective, Ivy is corrupt not only because of his questionable business tactics but because he fails to pay homage to the pastoral ideal implicit in the Captain’s creation myth. His entrance into the Forresters’ Garden of Eden represents a clear threat to Daniel’s mythic stature. As James Woodress writes of Ivy’s arrival, “Evil has entered the garden with the appearance of this character” (Willa Cather 344). Most critics agree harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 125

that Ivy embodies the despoiled values that took root following the physical and financial demise of Captain Forrester and which blossomed with the increased financial prosperity of the turn of the century. He achieves the kind of social mobility that the Captain’s creation myth promises, but does so with “rascality” (Cather, Lost Lady 106); that is, he builds his wealth using unethical methods rather than the dreaming and hard work that the Captain’s myth prescribes. Although Ivy’s success affirms the Captain’s vision of the American Dream as the process of someone making something out of nothing, his methods problematize the moral values implicit in that vision. His stiff, arrogant stride makes it look as if he had “a steel rod down his back” and freckles like “rust spots” (13, 14): these descriptions of Ivy’s physical appearance align him with the up-and-coming industrialist generation of postfrontier America. Niel’s negative judgment of Ivy is made clear immediately after Niel first hears that Ivy has planted the marsh over to wheat. He pontificates to himself: The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood strong in attack but weak in defence, who could conquer but not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters. . . . They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders. The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest. All the way from the Missouri to the mountains this generation of shrewd young men . . . would do exactly what Ivy Peters had done when he drained the Forrester marsh. (89– 90) This passage reveals the crux of Cather’s attempt to reconcile her romanticism to the conditions of modernity. Niel establishes a clear dichotomy here between the “princely” and “great” pioneers, which he imagines as a bonded community (a “courteous brotherhood”) tied by a common and magnificent goal, and the “shrewd” and “petty” postpioneering generation who selfishly destroy the delicate tapestry of the pioneers’ agricultural achievement. Niel associates Ivy’s draining of the marsh with an industrial ethic of 126ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

development, aligning the cultivation of the prairies with the stripping of the primeval forest. What Ivy lacks most of all is the moral and aesthetic imagination of Daniel and Niel: profitable bits mean more to Ivy than “morning freshness” and the “great brooding spirit” of the land. While Niel’s assessment of Ivy’s profiteering affirms this split between the old and new generations, the language of his inner monologue about the splintering of the primeval forest reflects a subtext that runs throughout the narrative. This subtext ultimately undercuts Niel’s glorification of the pioneer enterprise by drawing clear links between him and Ivy. As much as Niel separates himself from Ivy—and they are morally polar opposites—he has more in common with Ivy than with the Captain. Niel is a part of the same generation as Ivy, is in fact a couple years younger than him. Like Ivy, Niel was a victim of the “hard times” that drove Ivy and his like to “petty economies.” The “generous, easy life” belongs no more to Niel than it does to the shrewd young men he despises. In other words, Ivy’s experience is closer to Niel’s reality than is the Captain’s creation myth. This connection, which Niel overlooks, belies the fact that the Captain’s vision of the American Dream is not necessarily the town’s reality. While the plush setting and hilltop location of the Forrester home do make it seem like a fairytale ideal, some of its other attributes speak more directly to its isolation from the town proper. The Forresters’ property is a mile east of the town and one must cross two creeks to get to their home. The physical distance between the Forrester place and the town signals the disparity between the Captain’s vision and the experiences of the townspeople. The house’s placement upon the hill further signifies its detachment from the Sweet Water community. Even within the narrator’s description of the Forrester home as an emblem of pioneer prosperity, Cather begins to expose the cracks in the legacy of the pioneer enterprise. Daniel’s physical isolation from the town proper leads him to repress consideration of the town’s actual condition. The contrast between his ideality and the town’s reality is most evident when one conflates the Captain’s dream with the real experiences of the homesteaders in Sweet Water. As the novel progresses it becomes increasingly apparent that Sweet Water is no longer a promising settlement; indeed, the town and its surrounding farms are steadily on the decline. While the Forrester place may stand as a beacon to Sweet Water’s potential affluence, the reality is that many of the townspeople are failing and leaving “disillusioned about the West” (Cather, harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 127

Lost Lady 24). The Captain’s faith in his creation myth blinds him to the difficult challenges linked to the agricultural efforts of the homesteaders, challenges that in the end are posed by the Plains themselves. As with “The Wild Land” section of O Pioneers!, the main events of A Lost Lady take place during the hard years of the 1890s. The narrator explains, “The town of Sweet Water was changing. Its future no longer looked bright. Successive crop failures had broken the spirit of the farmers” (24). While the exodus of the 1890s is largely glossed over in O Pioneers!, swept away in the yawning Catherian gap between the novel’s first and second sections, the decline of Sweet Water emerges as the focus of Cather’s revisitation of Plains pioneering. The contrast between the Captain’s mythic stature and the reality of the failure that surrounds his house on the hill functions as a reminder of the socioeconomic forces that work to disrupt the ideal presented in Cather’s first Nebraska novel. These “hard times” are behind Ivy’s attitude toward the land, just as they are responsible for the abandonment of the Plains by Niel’s father and hundreds of farmers like him who could not make a living off the arid grasslands (99). Niel’s father, one of the first to fail and leave Sweet Water, serves as an example of what the more common western experience was like. The Herbert home, in stark contrast to the Forrester place, is a “frail egg-shell house, set off on the edge of the prairie where people of no consequence lived” (21). This description highlights the distance between the prosperous, aristocratic ideal and the real-life conditions of the “homesteaders and handworkers” (3). Mr. Herbert was clearly a dreamer who had come West, despite his wife’s reluctance, to make his fortune. In spite of his effort to turn his dream into a reality, he ultimately loses his property and disappoints his proud son, who comes to associate his father with failure and defeat (22). Mr. Herbert acts as a foil to the Forrester myth; he is a homesteader whose attempts to reify his dream of success were futile. By placing the experience of Niel’s father in the context of the overall exodus of the people from Sweet Water, Cather suggests that Mr. Herbert’s experience is more representative than that of the Captain. When Niel commemorates the pioneers’ ability to “conquer but not hold” (89) and when he thinks about the territory that they “won” (90), he further reveals problems at the root of the Captain’s creation myth. It is not only the separation of classes that the Forrester myth makes invisible. Joseph R. Urgo convincingly demonstrates how the Captain’s philosophy and heroics 128ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

are bolstered by his selective memory about what really happened during the settling of the West. He argues, “[The Captain’s] apotheosis is the result of the context in which his history is told. His heroic stature is the result of what is unsaid, or left out, of his history, and by what is selected as significant, worthy of narration, and expressed in language” (“Context” 185). The story about the discovery of the Forrester place, as the Captain narrates it, exemplifies this point. The claiming of the hilltop property occurred back in “Indian times” (Cather, Lost Lady 41), when Daniel Forrester came West after serving in the Civil War. The Captain’s beloved spot first draws his attention because of an “Indian encampment” that stood along the banks of the Sweet Water. The Captain’s version of the mythic founding of Sweet Water, then, encapsulates a type of narrative subversion that hides the cracks lying beneath the pioneer enterprise. One of the most crucial aspects of Western history that the Captain glosses is the dispossession of the Plains Indians. While the record of this subjugation is relatively absent from Cather’s pioneer novels, an absence that is itself problematic, Michael Fischer and Melissa Ryan have recently uncovered how the imperialist agenda of westward progress works as subtext within Cather’s narratives. Fischer draws a link between Cather’s pastoralism and imperialism, contextualizing her narratives by documenting how the darker side of the pioneer story echoes throughout My Ántonia. He notes, for example, how the often-cited image of the plow against the setting sun is juxtaposed to a tale Jim tells about Coronado’s colonizing of the West, demonstrating how “plowing, in Nebraska, is inextricably intertwined with the sword. . . . There can be no Eden in Nebraska, because its origins are not innocent” (37). Ryan extends Fischer’s analysis of Cather’s buried discourses to O Pioneers! She examines how three sites of enclosure in the novel—like the asylum to which Lou and Oscar want to send Ivar and the state prison which confines Frank Shabata—reveal that “the removal of native populations to reservations—the confinement upon which the ‘moral victory’ of the pioneer depends—constitutes the most deeply disavowed layer of meaning embedded in Cather’s motif of enclosure” (278). Such subtexts, Fischer and Ryan argue, undermine the celebratory tone of Cather’s pioneer novels and provide a self-reflexive, if unconscious, critique of the very act of conquest and transformation that informs her novels’ epic ethos. Fischer’s and Ryan’s analyses can easily be extended to A Lost Lady. Both Urgo and Nina Schwartz focus on the fact that the Forrester property was harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 129

already inhabited before the Captain “discovered” it. That the Captain claims land once occupied by Indians is revealing, but more so is the way in which the Captain’s story is told, which minimizes the significance of the appropriation of the Indian encampment in favor of justifying the Captain’s sense of a personal manifest destiny. He is “greatly taken” with the land and dreams of owning and developing it according to his plan, but he also greatly takes land that is not his or, at least, is only his because the railroad wrestled it from its prior occupants. The story of the founding of Sweet Water becomes just another glorious tale about the taming of the arid West. It is told as another successful conversion of the Euroamerican dream of civilized progress into reality, rather than as a narrative of the conquest of already-inhabited land. It is suggestive that the Captain finds his future property while he helps lay the “first railroad across the plains” because the railroad was an important functionary in the carrying out of America’s national program of Manifest Destiny. Thus, the Captain’s founding of Sweet Water is representative of the much larger pattern of Euroamerican migration and the inevitable displacement of the indigenous peoples. Urgo notes that the repeated references to the Captain’s work in and near the Black Hills creates a historical context through which the reader gets a sense of the Captain’s Euroamerican bias. The Black Hills resonate with specific meaning; they recall an epoch of American history that is laden with confrontations between Indians and white settlers. The reference to the Black Hills implicates what is unsaid, or merely hinted at, in the Captain’s narration; it fills in the gaps of his story (Urgo Novel Frames 169–70). The building of the railroad was more than just good business: it triggered a series of broken treaties (like the Laramie Treaty of 1868), led to a number of Indian wars and massacres (Sand Creek, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee), and essentially dispossessed the Native Americans of their lands and their traditional culture. The Captain’s exact role in the physical displacement of the Indians is uncertain; that is, we do not know if he participated in the violence against the “hostiles.” His way of telling the story excludes these kinds of details. In his narrative, the land is his because it was destined to be. Yet the myth he creates about his personal story of migration and settlement can also be seen as a kind of dispossessive act. In constructing his narrative as one of triumph and dream fulfillment, Captain Forrester represses the Native American perspective on the same story. As Richard Slotkin argues, “Mythological 130ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

narrative does not admit a multiplicity of perspectives” (83). Because the Captain is the “winner,” he is able to shape history in such a way that he remembers only what justifies his position of dominance. His transposition of history into myth amounts to what Nina Schwartz calls an “invention of innocence,” a process of distillation that filters out the countervailing elements (50). Cather’s own storytelling restores these elements and therefore presents a more ambivalent version of the pioneer narrative. The negative effect of the Captain’s myth-making project and its inherent paradigm of conquest is made manifest in Ivy Peters. In repressing key elements of the past, the Captain’s myth allows for the possibility of future transgressions; what he leaves out of his history supports the repetition of acts of dispossession. Thus, when Ivy displaces the Captain by taking over most of his land, he is only continuing the Captain’s legacy. In essence, Daniel instigates his own displacement. Furthermore, when Ivy cheats the Indians and gets land from them “for next to nothing” (Cather, Lost Lady 105), he is only repeating, though perhaps more blatantly, what the railroad company and the Captain did before him. What the connection between Ivy and the Captain suggests, Schwartz argues, is that the “transformations that the ‘dreamers’ wrought in the American landscape were always aggressive, brutal, materialist, from the very beginning” (49). Ivy’s draining of the Forrester marsh represents a figurative debunking of the ideals of the Forrester myth. It is important to recognize that his action essentially continues the work of development implicit in the pioneering enterprise. This is to say that what Ivy does when he drains the marsh and plants it over to wheat is not at all different from what Alexandra does when she transforms the arid grasslands into the “checkerboard of wheat and corn”; nor is it different from what the Captain does as a builder of railroads or as a banker who fosters the rural economy through loans to farmers. While Ivy is clearly a crooked villain, it is thus important to recognize that he is essentially following in the footsteps of his developmentoriented predecessors. Indeed, the subtext of A Lost Lady reveals that the connections between the villainous Ivy and the heroic Captain are more significant than they might otherwise appear. It is through these connections that Cather raises questions about the trajectory of Plains development, which is just as likely to produce an Ivy Peters as it is a Niel Herbert or Alexandra Bergson. If the “petty” economy of the modern, industrial, and, for Cather, broken world produces a harvest of modernist nomads, harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 131

the seeds of this harvest were sown when the first claim was staked on already-inhabited land. Thus, the postfrontier pastoralism in A Lost Lady hinges on the tension between Cather’s desire to immortalize the accomplishments and moral fortitude of the Plains pioneers and her impetus, if sometimes buried, to question the destructive consequences of their success. As a figurative heir to the Captain’s legacy, Niel, in his romantic effort to get back to and reclaim what Emerson would call “an original relationship” to the prairies—to relive the pioneer experience in spirit—reveals Cather’s persistent attempt to assert the efficacy of the romantic imagination in a world defined by change. Although Niel and Alexandra share a spiritual perspective concerning the Nebraskan biocultural landscape, what separates Niel from her is that on the postfrontier Plains he has no creative outlet that allows him to establish a commitment to place that Alexandra achieves. Niel heads east and the western landscape becomes only a precious memory to him, the focus of his nostalgia for his “long lost” lady and his “long lost” home.

Catherland It is interesting to note that the subject of Cather’s pastoral discourse shifts in the decade between the publication of O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady from the venerated “checkerboard of wheat and corn” to a remnant of the uncultivated prairie amidst this sea of grain. This shift takes us back to the disjunction within Jim Burden’s conflicted pastoral imagination. It epitomizes not only Cather’s own ambivalent environmentalism but also the ambivalent nature of Cather’s legacy. On the one hand, her work posits a distinct ethic of development, as Meeker suggests; while she idealizes this ethic as it is embodied in Alexandra Bergson and Captain Forrester, she laments the trajectory this ethic follows as it gives rise to a materialist like Ivy Peters. Historical hindsight shows us the logical outcome of this trajectory, as the aggressive development, the great “plow up” of the Plains, gave rise to the Dust Bowl, which, as I discuss in the following chapter, presented its own assault on Plains pastoralism. On the other hand, through an examination of Cather’s manipulation of transcendental pastoralism, we can locate the root elements of a sophisticated and complex land ethic with its inherent belief in the importance of cultivating one’s spiritual orientation toward the nonhuman community. 132ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies

Such a belief implies that when it comes to our engagement with the environment, orientation matters; this notion is at the core of conservation and preservation movements, is the basis for paradigms of stewardship, and is a major impetus behind the pursuit of sustainable agricultural practices. What ultimately separates Niel from Ivy is that his engagement with the landcommunity is predicated on his perspective concerning the land’s multidimensional value rather than Ivy’s one-dimensional approach to land use in which land equals profit. Ultimately, Niel Herbert is the character who most self-consciously inherits Alexandra Bergson and Daniel Forrester’s pastoral ideal, which encompasses the aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural value of the land-community. Although Niel is part of the generation that eventually replaces the pioneers, he remains loyal to the professed virtues of their era. For Niel, the Forrester myth represents an ideal, a set of principles that should direct future action. He represents how one properly uses myth in conjunction with an awareness of the past in order to construct a possibly better future. This future is an uncertain one: while Niel internalizes the pastoral ideal manifest in Alexandra’s epic achievement, his status as an architect—a builder of towns and cities—takes him away from rural spaces. As one of the last adherents of the pioneer spirit, his leaving certainly does not bode well for the future of the rural Plains. A Lost Lady thus ends on a more doubtful note than does O Pioneers! Even as Cather reaffirms the vitality of the pioneer mythos as it is upheld and defended by Niel, she recognizes it as dissipating with the dominance of Ivy Peters and the materialist model.6 While O Pioneers! articulates a transcendental pastoral ideal that mediates economy and ecology by charting the emerging relationship between Alexandra and the Great Plains, this ideal is undermined in A Lost Lady as it is bifurcated into the superficial materialism of Ivy Peters and the detached spiritualism of Niel Herbert. Ultimately, the Catherian pastoral, which is tied to the pioneering enterprise, gives rise to two trajectories: the escalation of exploitative practices based on an implicit ethic of development and a model of stewardship that demands a relationship with the land-community that transcends our economic attachments. These disparate trajectories, grounded in the overarching ambivalent heritage of Plains pioneering as a whole, are wonderfully captured in the two predominant icons of Catherland, the region in and around Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up: the prairie and the plough. The Willa harmonious fields and wild prairies ҏ 133

Cather Memorial Prairie, nearly 600 acres of preserved grassland located a few miles south of Red Cloud, was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 1974 and dedicated to Cather in the following year. The Memorial Prairie stands as tribute to her reputation as the preeminent Muse of the bioregion. The symbol for Cather country that welcomes visitors to Red Cloud and that is ubiquitous throughout the town, however, is the plough. The plough is a fitting image for Cather’s Nebraska novels because in them she deals so lovingly with the feat of the pioneers who settled the region. The disjunction between these two images is obvious, yet both the uncultivated prairie and the tool that symbolizes development make sense as representations of Cather country and as embodiments of her biocultural legacy. The often conflicting aspirations to preserve or to cultivate the Great Plains are equally parts of Cather’s legacy, a legacy that is integral to the overarching development of Plains pastoralism. Her thoughtful probing of the process and consequences of transforming the wild grassland, as well as her recognition of the uniqueness of this beautiful and challenging bioregion, solidify her status as a major voice for the Great Plains.

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 4

Patches of Green and Fields of Dust Dust Bowl Pastoralism in Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’s The Golden Bowl Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely in a piled-up car. They ain’t alive no more.—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Leaving, Staying, and the Tragedy of Dust The human and ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl as a land-event throws into relief the ambivalent heritage of land use on the Great Plains and provides a catalyst for renewed and revised articulations of bad land pastoralism.1 In many ways, the Dust Bowl is the consummate “bad land” event. It is a dramatic human and environmental tragedy that simultaneously registers the dusty reality of what is there and exposes, through its loss, the romantic fantasy concerning what might have been. As attempts to rectify the gap between the reality and the fantasy, bad land pastorals dramatize moments of transition that beg questions about what it means to adapt to and inhabit a place. To this point, the transitional moments or land-events that I have looked at have crystallized around land-use frontiers, documenting the very process of transforming the landscape and recounting the tragicomic nature of the pioneer experience. As the previous chapter has shown, the ambivalence that characterizes Cather’s Nebraska novels emerges from the author’s doubts concerning the postfrontier moment.

With the “original” prairie all but depleted, how does one sustain a multidimensional connection to the landscape? Without the magical, transformative effect of pioneering as a creative and spiritual act how does one achieve the kind of transcendent conversion that the early settlers achieved? The example of Ivy Peters seems to suggest that land use on the Plains can easily become one-dimensional and disintegrate into a purely economic engagement with the physical and social environment. This is the central paradox of frontier experience, one which Cather could not fully reconcile beyond embracing, like Jim Burden, the “immemorial past.” The Dust Bowl raises these same questions though the stakes are decidedly higher. That is, Dust Bowl narratives must more fully confront the meaning of the postfrontier Plains as well as resolve the negative effects of Euroamerican frontier experience. In this manner, Dust Bowl pastorals extend and build upon manifestations of bad land pastoralism that deal with the Plains frontier, even as the crisis of dust forces a reconsideration of what it means to inhabit the region in the wake of the closed frontier. The conditions that define the Dust Bowl—depression, drought, and depopulation—compel one to recognize that in a postfrontier context the cultivated and uncultivated poles of the conventional pastoral are no longer separated. The natural world no longer provides an escape from the complexities of civilization, and the frontier is no longer a safety valve for the downtrodden. The problems of the city become the problems of the countryside.2 First, the malevolence of nature, in the form of drought and wind and dust, suggests that the environment is not only not a refuge, but part of the problem. Whether read as a judgment against “the plow that broke the Plains,” or as a tragic reminder of the bad land quality of the environment, an event like the Black Blizzard challenges any attempt to romanticize the landscape; at the very least it demands a reassessment of former modes of romanticization. Second, the emergent proletarian discourse during the Dirty Thirties helped to emphasize how the natural world, like the laborer, is part and parcel of the matrix of exploitation perpetrated by the structures of industrial capitalism. The struggle of the tenant farmer and small independent farmer to overcome the challenges thrown up not only by the land but also by abstract entities like “the bank” and “the government,” as well as by competition from agribusiness conglomerates, serves to illustrate how various socioeconomic forces aligned to undercut the agrarian myth. Although the celebrated pioneers of the frontier era embody an ethic of development grounded in the capitalist enterprise, and are in many 136ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

instances, like Captain Forrester, the forebears of industrial farming, the rawness of their supposedly direct experience with the native prairies redeems and spiritually transforms them. Largely stripped of this experience, the Dust Bowl and Depression era rural laborer must face alienation from nature as one more dimension of her suffering. The attempt to recover and renegotiate a connection to nature in the face of dystopian conditions is at the core of bad land pastorals that engage the Dust Bowl. The two fictional narratives I examine in this chapter, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) and Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl (1944), approach the biocultural crisis of the Dust Bowl from two separate angles but posit strikingly similar imaginative visions that locate a renewed hope in the pastoral ideal even as they build upon and recognize the tragic failure of this ideal in a postfrontier context. In this way, the Dust Bowl narratives of Olsen and Manfred present a form of social and historiographical critique; in addition, they refashion the promise of pastoralism to fit the contours of a fallen and ruined biocultural landscape. As tragicomic narratives, that is, these representative Dust Bowl pastorals begin the work of assessing the postfrontier Plains.

The Dust Bowl as a Tragicomic Biocultural Event In many ways, the spectacle of the Dust Bowl merely images the same old story on the Plains, providing another example of the specific challenges that the bioregion throws up against Euroamerican paradigms of inhabitation. While perhaps more severe and prolonged than previous droughts experienced on the Plains after Euroamerican settlement, the Great Drought of the 1930s that created the Dust Bowl was just another manifestation of the bioregion’s relatively predictable cycle of wet and dry seasons. What makes the Dust Bowl such a significant event in the overall pattern of “bad land” events from the Euroamerican perspective is the scale of the crisis and the severity of its physical and spiritual consequences. The greatest human tragedy of the Dust Bowl was the massive depopulation of the Plains and the forced displacement of thousands of families. Paul Bonnifield notes how “in the main, the region’s economic life fits into the general trends of the national depression. Times were ‘hard’ everywhere” (105). In this sense the economic crisis of the Dust Bowl was merely a regional symptom of a national, and even global, phenomenon. The collusion of national trends and regional patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 137

experience produced a perfect storm of forces that challenged the values and principles at the core of the biocultural development of the Plains. To lose an attachment to place that was hard won, that seemed to defy the odds in the first place, bespeaks a particular kind of tragedy, one that provokes sympathy toward the uprooted even as it indicts the very process of putting down roots on marginal land. Stories of turning back from the Great Plains are as common as those that forecast the triumph of the pioneers. One need only remember the eastward retreat of the first fictional family to inhabit the Great American Desert, Cooper’s Bushes. The return of Middleton and his expeditionary forces at the end of the novel, however, signals a commitment to taming the arid West that recasts the Bushes’ retreat as a temporary setback in the nation’s attempt to fulfill its Manifest Destiny. Even narratives that recount the mass exodus during the 1890s come to reaffirm the belief that making the bad land useful is indeed a heroic feat. For example, Alexandra Bergson’s investment in her neighbors’ abandoned fields translates into an empire of wheat that more than satisfies her father’s failed ambitions. In other words, the successes of the early decades of the twentieth century elevated the status of the Plains pioneer, and the blooming fields of grain seemed to come as a reward for the pioneers’ faith in the land. Images of migration and displacement during the Dust Bowl changed the parameters of this teleological narrative and recast the pioneer epic into a tragic cautionary tale.3 Suddenly, the Bush family, and not the Bergsons, seemed to more accurately broadcast the reality of life in the dry West. The tragedy of displacement in a postfrontier context is further heightened by a forced acknowledgment of the failure of the golden dream: the attainment of the roots that the Bushes never actually put down. The tragedy of displacement is most famously rendered in the image of the migrant Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Muley’s point about the deep correlation between “folks” and the “place where folks live,” quoted in the epigraph, is made literal when Grandpa Joad dies shortly after he is taken from the land: to be torn from place is the equivalent of stripping away one’s identity, which can only lead to the physical and psychological death of the self. The image of the Okie illustrates the greatest cost of the Dust Bowl crisis: the interruption of prolonged attachment to place. Detachment from place has long been a part of Plains experience, particularly when one considers the region’s status as a safety valve for the 138ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

many immigrants flooding into both Canada and the United States at the turn of the century.4 The loss of this safety valve in the context of a closed frontier is what makes Dust Bowl migration especially catastrophic. The hope of relocating and transplanting one’s roots in another area is severely limited; to move from one marginal farm to another is only a lateral move. The spectacle of the drought-inflicted grasslands lacks the signs of promise that the Plains canvas once held. Unlike past Plains exoduses, the Dust Bowl takes on a particularly tragic light that is exacerbated by the sense of enclosure and cultural claustrophobia produced by the elimination of this frontier promise. As I have documented in the preceding chapters, the legacy of the closed frontier is something with which characters like Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady and Hal Brewton in Sea of Grass must wrestle and their only recourse is to turn toward nostalgia. Dust Bowl residents and migrants must not only reconcile themselves to the closing frontier, but must also meet head-on the failure of the frontier as it is writ large upon the landscape in dusted-over farms, abandoned homes, and buried tractors and plows. Dust Bowlers also had to reconcile themselves to the natural world, which seemed to turn against them in the form of fierce dust storms, plaguelike swarms of grasshoppers, and extreme heat. During the Great Drought, the land was worse than “bad”: it was downright malevolent. Besides dealing with the elements, those who stayed on the land had to confront accusations from the government, in the form of newly created agencies like the Soil Conservation Service and reports from the Great Plains Committee that the farmers themselves were complicit in their own undoing. As Pare Lorentz’s federally funded documentary film makes clear in its very title, the official line proclaimed that it was The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936).5 As later environmental histories penned by Donald Worster and Richard Manning corroborate, commercial agriculture and the successes of the preceding decades contributed to the ecological destruction of the grasslands during the 1930s and made the land vulnerable to the erosion of the soil, hence the spectacular dust storms. Manning reminds us that the prolonged drought of the thirties was not an “aberration but a norm of arid land” and was only “the spark and not the fuel” of the Dust Bowl era: “What the region had never before known was the fuel: the plowman’s war on the roots, which had left the loose prairie soil naked in the teeth of the winds. Agriculture, not roots, was the disaster” (148). More specifically, as patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 139

Worster demonstrates, the “Great Plow-up,” begun during World War I, served the double function of putting more land under production and integrating “plains farmers more thoroughly than ever into the national economy—into networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufactures, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system” (qtd. in Manning 147). Even the small-scale farmer and tenant farmer were enmeshed in this changing economic landscape, thereby alienating them from the land even as they unwittingly participated in its destruction.6 This is the essence of the two-pronged tragedy of the Dust Bowl: it shook the ideological foundation in which the Euroamerican settlement of the Plains was rooted and it shredded to dust the land itself. This is why, as Lookingbill documents, the early accounts of the Dust Bowl disaster took on a biblical tone, forecasting the “tragic plot” of a fall from grace. Like the biblical Fall, this plot also looked forward to a recovery (41). The catastrophic effect of the Dust Bowl phenomenon, that is, generated a revision to former models of inhabitation and land use in the region. This process of revision involved adaptations along political, economic, aesthetic, cultural, imaginative, and ecological lines. The notion that something should (and could) be salvaged from the wreckage of the decade fueled a series of fictional narratives that surveyed the fallen landscape for the lessons it might teach so that the rebuilding of community in the region could help move the region’s story past tragedy. Both Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’s The Golden Bowl engage the legacy of drought and depression in the region and work to reclaim the power of pastoralism and adapt it to fit a fallen, postfrontier world, where the promise of the garden of the West has been obliterated. The quest for what Olsen calls “patches of green,” which offer not only refuge from an increasingly mechanized and alienating world but also a site where a more-than-material connection to place may be established, certainly draws on the traditional power of pastoralism and its polarization of built and unbuilt nature. The Dust Bowl pastoralism of Olsen and Manfred moves beyond what Marx calls “sentimental” modes of pastoralism because it directly engages the social and historical conditions that give shape to the modern biocultural landscape of the Plains. Their novels complicate pastoralism’s potential in a postindustrial and postfrontier context and refit the romantic tradition of bad land pastoralism to follow the contours of the transformed bioregion. 140ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

“Patches of Green” Pastoralism in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio Since the surfacing and publication of Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties in 1974, most of the scholarship concerning the novel has examined it from a Marxist or feminist perspective. Critics like Constance Coiner, Michael Staub, Mara Faulkner, Elaine Neil Orr, and Barbara Foley, among others, examine the ways that the novel fits into and perhaps provides a model for what Deborah Rosenfelt calls the “socialist feminist tradition” (56).7 The intersection of the novel’s proletarian and protofeminist discourses certainly provides for a number of rich moments, which taken together constitute Olsen’s critique of industrial capitalism. That is, through the collective narration of her three main protagonists—Mazie, Anna, and Jim— Olsen documents the pejorative effects of capitalist economic structures on both the working class in general and working-class women in particular. In giving voice to the experiences of the marginalized and doubly marginalized members of the Holbrook family, Olsen dramatizes, as Rosenfelt puts it, the “tension between human capacity and creativity—the drive to know, to assert, to create which Olsen sees as innate in human life—and the social forces and institutions that repress and distort that capacity” (72). This broader socioeconomic critique is grounded in the more localized environment of the arid West and the looming crisis of the Dust Bowl. Understandably, little attention has been paid to the regional dimension of Olsen’s working-class novel, precisely because her proletarian discourse addresses a national, and even global, concern. However, her novel must also be considered an integral part of the story of the West, as the novel’s setting does more than provide arbitrary coordinates on which the “socialist feminist” drama is played out; indeed, Yonnondio has much to tell us about the specific situation of the Plains during the Dirty Thirties and engages the apparatuses of bad land pastoralism that I have been tracing in this study. In an often-quoted lecture given at Emerson College around the time that she recovered and published Yonnondio, Olsen defines her status as a student of place: “What matters to me is the kind of soil out of which people have to grow, and the kind of climate around them; circumstances are the primary key and not the personal quest for identity” (qtd. in Rosenfelt 86). In Yonnondio the soil is that of the trans-Mississippi West and the circumstances pivot on the cross-fertilization of regional experience and national/global trends. patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 141

Written in the years after she left Omaha, Yonnondio reflects much of Olsen’s early life in the Great Plains. One critic who acknowledges the regional influence in Olsen’s work is Linda Ray Pratt who argues, “The plot [of Yonnondio] recasts experiences of her own family, the mother and child characters reflecting memories of her mother and herself, but the family as a whole is generalized to represent a type” (237). That is, Olsen adapts her experience of the Plains into a set of regional metaphors that help to convey her broader social interests. In Yonnondio, Jim’s different labor situations reflect her father’s actual work experiences on the Plains. She culls her plot from these experiences in order to undercut some of the national mythologies about the West that embody the chief values of capitalism, including rugged individualism, the promise of agrarianism, and the myth of equal opportunity. In each manifestation of labor in the novel—in the coal mine, the tenant farm, the sewage plant, and the packinghouse—Olsen’s depiction de-romanticizes work on the Plains and shows how such labor disrupts or represents the disruption of the place’s ecology. Yonnondio essentially presents a land-use odyssey that reverses the conventional flow of frontier advancement, both in terms of physical movement and ideological thrust. That is, the Holbrook family moves continually eastward, from central Wyoming to a city on the eastern fringe of the Plains (either Omaha or Denver), and from literally the bowels of the earth (a coal mine) to a booming metropolis. This movement signals a double critique: first, it undercuts the promise of the frontier, as each move in the wrong direction proffers no change or rebirth in the fortunes of the Holbrook family; second, the movement toward the city and away from nature represents the progressive alienation from the natural world that the Holbrooks suffer. The workers must follow the work, which often means movement away from intimate contact with nature. Within the novel, this alienation is counteracted by flashes of pastoral transcendence achieved by Olsen’s protagonist, the young Mazie. The first two chapters of Yonnondio are set in a coal-mining community in Wyoming and establish the pattern of settlement and unsettlement that occurs throughout the rest of the novel. When the “terror” of the “gutturalvoiced metal beast” of the mine whistle wakes Mazie from her sleep, within the first few lines it becomes immediately clear that the mine is a site of fear and death (1). The whistle announces the loss of one of the miners on the job, a young neighbor of the Holbrooks, and the mining chapters in general 142ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

are replete with references to corpses and ghosts (3, 6, 7, 9, 14–15, 18, 24). The Wyoming landscape is portrayed as a dead land, literally and figuratively a graveyard for those who are paid to mine it for coal. As the agitprop narrator informs the reader later in the chapter, the bowels of the earth claim the immigrants rather than the other way around, despite what myths of the “New World” might suggest (6). Instead of a life-giving force, as the earth is in the romantic tradition and in the early myths describing the garden of the West, the mined earth in Olsen’s novel symbolizes the destruction rather than the creation of human dreams.8 The mining chapters thus set a thematic tone that rests upon the rift between the human and nonhuman community that is a direct result of socioeconomic forces at play in the development of the West. The earth-asbowels metaphor represents Mazie’s earliest consciousness of the land, and the mine and its whistle imprint upon her imagination as the sum of her knowledge about the world. She tells herself, Bowels of earth. It means the mine. Bowels is the stummy. Earth is a stummy and mebbe she ets the men that come down. Men and daddy goin’ in like the day and comin out black. Earth black and pop’s face and hands black, and he spits from his mouth black. Night comes and it is black. Coal is black—it makes fire . . . Day comes and night comes and the whistle blows and payday comes. Like the flats runnin on the tipple they come—one right a-followen the other. Mebbe I am black inside too. . . . The bowels of earth. . . . The things I know but am not knowen. . . . Sun on me and bowels of earth under. . . . (5–6) This passage reveals both the devaluation of nature and humankind’s alienation from the physical environment that is the result of economic exploitation of the land. That the rhythm of earth, the cycle of the days, is defined as much by the whistle and payday as by the rotation of the planet signals how economics, more than anything else, shapes the human connection to place. Mazie reads the world here in terms of an industrial metaphor, the passage of time “like flats on the tipple.” Thus, her “knowen” at this point in the novel is limited to the reality of her father’s working conditions; the most she can imagine for herself is that she is “black inside” like the coal that is so important to the stability of her family. Mazie’s knowen represents the mining community’s disconnection from nature. Like her, patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 143

the community is forced into an economic relation to the place as “paid dreamers” (8). The exploitation of a nonrenewable natural resource seems to turn nature against the community. Indeed, images of a vengeful nature recur throughout the novel. The chief metaphor for this vengefulness is the earth’s devouring members of the community. This metaphor receives its fullest articulation when Sheen McEvoy tries to throw Mazie into the fiery mine. McEvoy’s desire to sacrifice Mazie to the mine so that the “mine’ll forget about men” (17) pointedly illustrates the level to which economic exploitation of the land can degrade the individual’s relationship to nature. Although Mazie is saved from McEvoy’s madness, his prophecy of destruction is ultimately fulfilled when the mine explodes and kills or injures a number of miners, including Jim. While the literal cause of this explosion is the neglect of the fire boss who refuses to “find out if gas had collected” in the mine, the explosion also represents the culmination of a new mythology that dramatizes a hostile relationship between the humans and nature (24). Nature here is not benevolent; instead, it functions as an angry god who antagonizes those who work to subdue it. In an effort to escape the restrictive and damaging circumstances of mining, the Holbrooks turn toward the old safety valve of the rural Plains. When the Holbrooks move to the farm in South Dakota after the mine explosion they seem to enter into the most positive phase of their lives. The farm promises the most potential in terms of relocating a sense of place. However, as a labor site the farm is not so different from the mine. Even if the domestic life of the farm is less claustrophobic than that of the mining community, from a labor standpoint the worker’s connection to the land is still dictated by capitalist economic structures: the land is resource and the wage laborer is the tool employed to develop that resource. As a tenant farmer, Jim Holbrook makes the transition from being a “paid dreamer” to being a paying dreamer—working borrowed land to no effect. Just as the mining chapters open with the admonitory whistle, the farming chapters open with a warning from the Holbrooks’ neighbor Benson. He chides, “I tell you, you cant make a go of it. Tenant farmin is the only thing worse than farmin your own. That way you at least got a chance on a good year, but tenant farmin, bad or good year, the bank swallows everything up and keeps you owin ’em. You’ll see” (41). Whereas Jim was once subject to the whims of the “fat-bellied” fire boss and superintendents of the mine, he is now a slave to the bank. Forced 144ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

into an economic relationship with the land once again, Jim is largely cut off from the easy, pastoral pleasure that the children gather from the “drama of things growing” (42). Building upon Benson’s warning, the Holbrooks’ other neighbor, Caldwell, tells Jim that modern farming on the Plains is no different than any other industrial practice. He says, When I came out, a man had some chance. The only thing against him was nature, locusts and drought and lake frost. You took your chance. That was all you had to fight. But now that hardly matters. There’s mortgage, taxes, the newest kind of machinery to buy so you do as good as the other fellow, and the worry—will it get a price this year. (47–48) It is this reality that prevents the farmers from getting any satisfaction out of working the land. As Caldwell and Benson suggest to Jim Holbrook, the arid grasslands have always been “next year country,” and certainly the pioneer struggle against the elements has been the subject of some of America’s most celebrated Great Plains epics, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Giants in the Earth. This romantic tradition belies the harsh economic situation at the core of the pioneering enterprise. This situation is made only more evident with the advent of agribusiness, which more openly exposes the economic circumstances of farming as wage labor. Under the tenant farming system, farmers and the land they work (which is not their own) are only valuable as resources, as meeting the ends of production. Thus, as Dawahare rightly points out, when Jim’s “pastoral illusions” fail, it becomes clear that what matters in Olsen’s “vision of exploitation is not ‘place’ but the relations of production governing a particular society” (264). Both the land and the people are exploited under the industrial-capitalist system of relations, a fact that further limits any possible spiritual connection to place. From an aesthetic standpoint, farming the land hardly seems as destructive or exploitative as gutting the earth for its resources; indeed, there is a real beauty attached to the fields of corn “rippling like a girl’s skirt” (Olsen 43). Olsen’s overall depiction of the Plains clearly reflects a post–Dust Bowl consciousness concerning attitudes toward land use. Olsen left the Plains in late 1932, and although she was not living in the region during the peak Dust Bowl years between 1935 and 1937 (Worster, Dust Bowl 14–15) the novel was composed at this time.9 While the novel is set in the twenties and early patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 145

thirties, the severe drought and swirling dust storm that appear in the final moments of the book certainly foreshadow the Dust Bowl. In his survey of the Plains literature of the Dust Bowl era, Lookingbill documents the various ways that regional writers incorporate the image of dust in their work as they attempt to revise regional and national attitudes toward the land. Arguing that dust figured primarily as a symbol for displacement, he concludes, “Texts written during the Great Depression represented dusty trails, devastated homes, failing crops, dying livestock, and human abandonment, even as they portrayed the mysterious forces that worked to alienate humans from the land and from each other” (“The Living and the Dead Land” 46). Although his study does not mention Olsen, this conclusion applies nicely to Yonnondio. The mysterious forces here are not so mysterious: they are the economic circumstances of an agribusiness model that push the Holbrooks off the land and away from any promise of “place.” The ominous images of drought and dust that appear at the novel’s end communicate both the future alienation of people from the land and the impending revenge of the land against the forces that work to exploit it. In this sense, the dust storm at the end of the novel deconstructs the agrarian myth of the Great Plains that drew so many to the region in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. To a reader aware of the implications of dust in the years following the environmental devastation wrought by the Dust Bowl storms, the novel’s closing moments would add an important corrective to the nation’s mythology concerning the settlement of the Plains. Coupled with Caldwell’s lament for what capitalism brings to the work of the region, the rising dust storm evokes a lesson of land use that Worster more directly outlines in the introduction to his landmark environmental history of the Dust Bowl: [The Dust Bowl] came about because the expansionist energy of the United States had finally encountered a volatile, marginal land, destroying the delicate ecological balance that had evolved there. We speak of farmers and plows on the plains and the damage they did, but the language is inadequate. What brought them to the region was a social system, a set of values, an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as “capitalism” . . . Capitalism, it is my contention, has been the decisive factor in this nation’s use of nature. (5) 146ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

Olsen’s novel certainly implicates the role of industrial capitalism in the breakdown of the relationship between the human and nonhuman community. The machine- and business-oriented vision of farming that Caldwell bemoans anticipates the growing trend toward industrial farming, “the Henry Ford example of using machinery and mass production to make more and more profits” that Worster argues is at the core of the environmental crisis of the Plains (8). This trend makes the independent farmer obsolete; at the same time it contributes to the overburdening of the land that leads to the Dust Bowl conditions. The Holbrooks’ final remove east into an unnamed midwestern city, which is loosely based on Olsen’s experiences with Omaha and Kansas City, represents the zenith of both the family’s isolation from the land and Jim’s encounters with the exploitative nature of industry. It is clear upon their arrival that the city embodies the worst of what the Holbrooks have experienced: Monster trucks shake by, streetcars plunge, machinery rasps and shrieks. Far underneath thinly quiver the human noises . . . sighs of lust, and guttural, the sigh of weariness; laughter sometimes, but this sound can scarcely be called human, not even in the mouths of children. A fog of stink smothers down over it all. . . . Human smells, crotch and underarm sweat, the smell of cooking or of burning, all are drowned under, merged into the vast unmoving stench. (67) This description of urban dystopia characterizes what is literally and figuratively the end of the line for the working class. They are silenced by the machinery of the metropolis and smothered by the waste and the stench that accompany the wage work they do to keep this machinery functioning. The “vast unmoving stench” of the city and the winds of stink that emanate from the packinghouse certainly contrast with the winds of “freedom and joy” that met the Holbrooks as they traveled toward their Dakota home (35). In this way, the city serves as the novel’s ultimate symbol for how industrial capitalism frustrates the potential for nonmaterial connection between the working class and the natural world. One of the jobs Jim holds in the city is in the packinghouse, and the work here makes clear the double exploitation that results from this industry. Just as the workers are welded to a mechanized and mechanical system of production, so too is nature. In one of Olsen’s more gruesome passages, the patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 147

narrator informs us about the “one constant motion” of the packinghouse floor: “ruffle fat pullers, pluck separators, bladder, kidney, bung, small and middle gut cutters, cleaners, trimmers, slimers, flooders, inflators—meshed, geared” (emphasis in original) (166). A fine example of proletarian realism, this passage, and others like it in this section of the novel, document the kind of work that is going on here. The slaughter of animals and the packaging of meat for market provide unmistakable images of commodified nature. Even if the Holbrooks themselves are not fully conscious of it by the end of the novel, this is the lesson Olsen communicates to the reader in her descriptions of each of the labor sites. The result of this abuse of nature is the schism between the human and nonhuman community, a disruption that pejoratively affects the emotional and spiritual state of the Holbrooks and the working-class families they represent. For Olsen, this commodification of nature, like the mistreatment of the worker, does not have to be permanent; that is, redemption from the Fall is possible. The agitprop intrusions of the narrator make clear that the solution to the dehumanization of the worker lies not in “individual revolt” but in a collective action that will “wipe out the whole thing” (92). Similarly, as long as nature is seen as capital it will be exploited; the only way to reverse such exploitation is to fundamentally change the way nature is valued. Olsen advances no such ideal in the editorial interludes, but her depiction of the workers’ alienation from the physical environment under capitalism suggests that much is to be gained through socialist revolution.10 While the “unfinished” Yonnondio does not reach the revolutionary pitch that Olsen had planned for the novel, there are moments in the published version where the possibility of locating a sense of place, even in the postindustrial world, is revealed and where the promise of such an imaginative connection to nature is extolled. These moments of transcendence are set in the spaces of the physical environment that are literally and figuratively in between the labor and domestic sites. That Mazie must locate a sense of place in these inbetween spaces is significant because it works against the conventional, male-oriented frontier dichotomy of wilderness and civilization where wilderness is exploited for the sake of progress. Mazie’s interactions with the natural world work against this dichotomy because they are set in marginalized landscapes, patches of green in a sea of waste rather than a pure and pristine wilderness. Her quest for roots in the middle ground between home and work spaces involves an attempt to reconnect with the nurturing, 148ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

maternal quality of the scarred physical environment that has been abused by the centuries-long conquest of nature. Olsen introduces the reader to the importance of these in-between spaces in a scene that finds Mazie lying on the “one patch of green” that lies “between the outhouse and the garbage dump” near her Wyoming home (4, 5). A minor moment in the novel, this scene nonetheless serves as a model for Olsen’s ambivalent Dust Bowl pastoralism. As Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson has noted, this patch of green becomes an “objective correlative” for Mazie, as she “attempts to locate this better space throughout the text” (267). The outhouse and garbage dump wonderfully prefigure the images of waste that become so prevalent in the urban chapters, and serve as reminders for the overall destructive nature of exploitative economic practices. Yonnondio is an optimistic novel and it is important to note that while failure characterizes the moments set in nature throughout the book, these “patches of green” are also the setting for the most hopeful expressions of transcending the conditions of the working class under capitalism. It is on this first patch of green that Mazie ruminates about what she is “knowen,” an indication of her slow awakening to self-consciousness. Thus, as they are throughout the novel, the inbetween spaces of the physical environment reflect the ambivalence of nature; that is, they simultaneously represent the far-reaching, oppressive effects of industrialism and the importance of transcending such effects through the imagination to reconnect to and reclaim the power of pastoralism in a postfrontier context. Besides this Wyoming refuge, there are three other “patches of green” in the novel, corresponding to each of the family’s three movements east; these spaces are separate from both the work and domestic spaces, emphasizing their pastoral potential. The first of these bigger patches of green is the grove that Mazie and Will go to in order to escape the fears in the household concerning the accumulating gas in the mine. The grove is a “long way” from town, and when Mazie arrives there with her brother “the tightness that had been around her heart slackened, eased, and was no more” (25). MacPherson rightly contends that this moment, like the two others set in the unbuilt environment, constitutes a form of escapism, an attempt to block out and ignore reality “through withdrawal into fantasy” (264). While this is true, what is significant about this escape is that it allows Mazie, and even the much-younger Will, to exercise the imagination and to read the environment in terms that are not economic or attached to base survival. patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 149

Even as Mazie struggles to resist thoughts about her father’s safety (26), she is able to achieve some peace and a temporary communion with the physical environment. The very thing that provoked Mazie to escape to the woods ultimately interrupts this moment: the mine explodes and injures her father. This interruption signals again the intrusion of the repressive situation of capitalism on even this idealized space of the physical environment. After the mine explosion, the Holbrooks make the long journey to their Dakota farm, a trip that is the subject of the third chapter. What is most interesting about this chapter is that it is the only one that takes place completely outside of any labor or domestic space. I would argue that it is also the only purely positive chapter in the whole novel; though the Holbrooks do get stuck in a snowstorm, foreshadowing the destructive blizzard that occurs later in the farming chapters, they meet this setback with a sense of humor and accordingly the sun smiles down upon them (37). In this sense, the chapter as a whole represents a pastoral, and their migration through the Plains constitutes the second significant moment of transcendence. As they enter into South Dakota, the scene reads like something out of Virgil: “[The Holbrooks’] breaths caught in sharp wonder at the green stretching for miles, at the small streamlets like open silver veins on the ground, and here and there dots of cattle grazing, heads down. The air was pure and soft like baby’s skin” (33). The sweeping vista of the Plains suggests the vitality of nature and a vision of eternity. The purity of the air contrasts with the claustrophobic feel of the air in the mining community. That the air is compared to “baby’s skin” suggests the childlike sense of innocence and beauty that the landscape inspires, and echoes images of maternal and nurturing landscape, not unlike what Jim Burden idealizes when he witnesses the profusion of Cuzak children pouring from the fruit cave on Ántonia’s Nebraska farm. As the family ascends a hill and looks down upon the farming community that is to become their temporary home, this vision of eternity coalesces with an image of the peaceful coexistence of humans and nature: “Below lay the farms, uneven patches of brown and plowed black and transparent green, and far stretched the river, dull yellow in the sun, glinting crystal, where the wind stirred it. Tiny as a toy, a man was plowing a thin thread of black in the brown square of field immediately below them” (38). The view of the tilled Plains from the vantage point of a hill is a common one in Plains literature, and it intimates the Holbrooks’ state of transcendence in this 150ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

moment. The romantic figure of the man cultivating his field embodies the fecundity implicit in this pastoral connection of the human and nonhuman. Such a vision speaks promisingly of what farming has to offer the Holbrooks, so when Jim comes upon the family’s own homestead, despite its dilapidated structure, he confidently refers to it as “the place” (40). At this point at least, dreams of putting down roots seem entirely feasible. The physical environment of the Plains’ wide-open spaces certainly inspires new hope that the family might locate a sense of place, though the irony of this interlude is that they can locate this connection with nature only when they are passing through the region and exercising a microcosmic manifestation of the nomadic model of inhabiting this place of motion. I have already noted what prevents the Holbrooks from achieving a permanent home on the farm, but the overall ambivalence of this miles-wide patch of green is made most strikingly evident in two contrasting moments involving Mazie. The first occurs early on in the Holbrooks’ farming experience, as Mazie lies on a patch of clover along a roadside. Here, she feels the earth push against her and is “drugged with the scent” of the clover (45). It is at this moment that Old Man Caldwell comes along and together they look at the stars. As she does briefly in the grove, Mazie is able to imagine a cosmic connection between her, the earth, and the heavens. Coupled with Caldwell’s stories about Greek cosmology, Mazie achieves a sense of “timelessness, of vastness, of eternal things that had been before her and would be after her, remained and entered into with a great hurt and wanting” (47). Again, this wanting is crucial to Mazie’s forthcoming awakened political consciousness, and this moment represents the potential sense of power and freedom that comes from a connection to the natural world. Mazie can attain such wisdom primarily because she is a child, and she does not have the responsibility of working the farm so that the family can survive. The effects of this responsibility soon present themselves when Caldwell’s death and the family debt intrude upon Mazie’s sense of place. This becomes clear in the spring before the Holbrooks’ move off the farm, and Mazie, now lying on a patch of violets, once again tries to achieve transcendence. This time she fails when the “soft dankness” of the spring earth, typically an image of regeneration and renewal, reminds her of McEvoy’s “face like jelly pushed up against hers” (60). The reality of working-class life reasserts its predominance in Mazie’s consciousness, and the landscape of the farm now parallels the ugliness of the mined earth. The earth comes patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 151

to represent fear and destruction: Mazie once again turns to the sky for solace and sees “swollen bellies” and “the blood and pain of birth” (61). Such images address the exploitation of the workers like McEvoy, and look forward to Anna’s violence-induced miscarriage in the following chapter. Thus, the harsh realities of working-class life once again disrupt the optimism of Mazie’s encounters with nature. The juxtaposition of deathly images with the cosmic unity Mazie felt in the earlier scene again shows the ambivalent relationship between the human and nonhuman. The final patch of green noted in the novel, a field of dandelions on an urban plot near the Holbrooks’ urban western home, represents for many critics the ultimate image of hope in the novel. What is significant about this moment is that it involves both Anna and Mazie. When they finally locate “dandelion glory” (142) at the end of a street that has no houses—the urban version of a wilderness—Anna becomes entranced by the smells of a catalpa that remind her of her home. As she pulls Mazie close to her they both realize a “strange happiness . . . and farness and selfness” that is not unlike what Mazie achieves in her two earlier communions with nature: The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie into happiness and intactness and selfness. Soft wove the bliss round hurt and fear and want and shame—the old worn fragile bliss, a new frail selfness bliss, healing, transforming. Up from the grasses, from the earth, from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent life streamed and seeded. The air and self shone boundless. Absently, her mother stroked; stroked unfolding, wingedness, boundlessness. (146) The mingling of her mother’s comfort with the boundlessness of the earth perfectly embodies in a single image the power of locating a sense of place. To feel at home and connected with her physical environment is once again the source of transcendence. The feminist readings of this scene put forth by critics like Rosenfelt (80–81), Roberts (85–86), and Orr (64–66) accurately highlight the significance of the mother-daughter bond here. Orr puts it best when she explains, “the union of Mazie and Anna and narrator in the lyrical rendering of the [catalpa scene] suggests a fulfillment of the text’s struggle to give representation to a vision of the world as it can be, springing miraculously from disdained and unfulfilled lives” (65). An integral part of this vision of the world, besides the feminine spirituality these critics point out, is the realization of an imaginative connection to the natural world. 152ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

This sense of place is once again only temporary, as the wind carries in the stench of the packinghouse where her father is working. This wind severs the bond Anna and Mazie have achieved, and Anna quickly loses her look of happiness. The reeking air from the slaughterhouse contrasts sharply with the boundless, transformative air under the catalpa. Thus, the boundaries and barriers of working-class life reemerge, and the family must leave this sacred spot and return to their home. The catalpa scene represents the last purely hopeful moment in the novel. The next scene set outside the spaces of work and home takes place on the garbage dump where the Holbrook children go to play. While the joy they receive playing among the heaps of waste signals their adaptive nature, the fact that the byproducts of capitalism replace the natural environment as the place to escape to is certainly foreboding. Throughout Yonnondio, Olsen documents the systematic exploitation of nature under a capitalist paradigm of land use and the pejorative effect this exploitation has on those who labor on the earth—a far cry indeed from Jefferson’s “chosen people.” Although the reality of this situation is inescapable, as the intrusive moments described above make clear, the novel is generally optimistic about the power of the human imagination and the transformative effect of a nonmaterial interface with the physical environment. Even if the Holbrooks’ attempt to locate a sense of place fails, their transcendence of their condition even momentarily is a sign of their potential triumph. That is, these moments of spiritual connection should not be taken lightly. The power of such moments emphasizes Olsen’s point that until the revolution that she envisions in the agitprop intrusions is realized, the cultivation of place-sense offers the best avenue to overcome oppression. This is to say that the elusiveness of the “patches of green” does not devalue the pursuit of a sense of “selfness” grounded in imaginative attempts to connect to place. If Yonnondio engages the tragedy of the Dust Bowl and the physical and spiritual displacement it reckoned, Olsen’s novel also reaffirms the imaginative and intellectual rewards of our interactions with the natural world. Although there is little sense that the Holbrooks’ struggle will end, Mazie does achieve a degree of transcendence through place-memory after she leaves the idyllic Dakota farm, the first place where she truly felt at home. When the Holbrooks move to the city, Mazie finds herself mentally escaping the confinement of the city by imagining herself back on the farm. For example, even as the stench of the packinghouse intrudes upon her senses, Mazie patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 153

at one point becomes “enveloped in the full soft dream of the farm [where] she was secure. Hollow and unreal the dirty buildings and swarming people revolved about her, flat like a picture that her hand could smash through and see the rolling fields and roads of home just beyond” (84). That she identifies the farm as home here is significant, as is her defining hominess and security in terms of nature and the “rolling fields.” The fields are for Mazie what the catalpa is for Anna: a symbol of peace, comfort, hominess, and connection to nature. Significantly, during the catalpa scene Mazie forces her mind past “the trucks and freight noise” of the city and sees herself back on the farm once again (144). Thus, Mazie uses memory here to renew a connection to the physical environment. The presence of the city is always there to disrupt this imaginative act of escape. Memory’s transformative power, like memory itself, is fleeting; at the end of the novel Mazie is complaining that she “don’t have no place” (178). However, while “place” is not yet a physical reality for Mazie, her imagination and memory seem to provide her some access to a sense of place that will be necessary in order for her to overcome, and even erase via revolution, the class and gender boundaries that inhibit her. If we take Mazie as representative of the Dust Bowl migrant—whose attachment to the bad land likely runs even deeper than young Mazie’s—we can see how nostalgia and memory work as powerful elements in the overall process of renegotiating a connection to a fallen and scarred (and even abandoned) landscape. By way of concluding this discussion of the discourse of place in Olsen’s Yonnondio, I would like to return to the image of dust that emerges at the end of the novel. The dust here nicely symbolizes the phases of the novel’s discourse about place. As I have already mentioned earlier, the dust storm at the end serves as an ominous sign of the ecological catastrophe that is the Dust Bowl, a catastrophe rooted in the misuse of the land under the capitalist system. The dust also reflects the ambivalence of the physical environment that characterizes Olsen’s novel. Dust is the earth, and, inasmuch as the earth is living substance, dust too is life itself; conversely, at least from an agrarian standpoint, dust is also associated with the dying land. As a life-indeath image, dust embodies the limitations and hopes implicit in the physical environment. Anna’s desire to be out among the “great dust wraiths” (191) can thus be read as an expression of her desire to join the life force of nature or her desire to destroy herself and come face to face with her mortality. Finally, the rising dust storm at the end seems to draw the family together, 154ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

as Anna pulls Jim inside the house and away from the storm. As has been true throughout the novel, the Holbrooks seem to gain something from their encounters, beneficent or vengeful, with the elements. Anna’s final statement that the “air’s changing” (191) hints at the forthcoming revolution, a revolution that will no doubt give root to the uprooted. The dust storms thus provide a tragicomic image that reflects the ambivalent heritage of the Dust Bowl, as it suggests destruction even as it demands recovery and a renewed commitment to place. Locating this commitment to a damaged bioregion is much more pointedly at the center of Manfred’s The Golden Bowl as he chronicles the departure and return of his hero, Maury Grant, a would-be Okie whose self-imposed exile reinvigorates his dedication to the family farm. While his concerns are slightly different than Olsen’s, Manfred shares with the author of Yonnondio a faith in the redemptive power of the natural world, built or unbuilt.

Bad Land(s) Pastoralism in Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl While The Golden Bowl lacks the intense social critique deployed in Yonnondio, Manfred shares with Olsen a desire to adjust the pastoral mode to fit the changes wrought by the Dust Bowl crisis. His ostensible affirmation of a revised agrarian myth, embodied in the novel’s prophecy of a returning “golden bowl,” could certainly be read as an anachronistic and naïve recuperation of an outdated paradigm of Plains emplacement, a problematic retreat to a damaging romanticism that lacks the revolutionary power of Olsen’s social realism.11 I would argue that by grounding his pastoralism in the dust of a damaged landscape, Manfred carries forward a revisionist tradition that demands acknowledgment of the spiritual and creative remunerations of the land-use interface. Like Olsen’s “patches of green,” Manfred locates a pastoral promise in the shrinking islands of unbuilt nature in the larger sea of the developed grasslands. The poetic opening of The Golden Bowl establishes the setting of the action, rehearses the “fall” motif often associated with Dust Bowl discourse, and sets in motion the thematic undercurrents of the novel. Manfred begins the narrative with a cartographic overview of Siouxland and the High Plains region, tracing the meandering path of the Atlantic Yellowstone Pacific Highway as it moves progressively west through farmland, cities, the Bad Lands, and across the Missouri and Jim rivers, eventually crossing the isohyetal line into patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 155

the arid region where “the land loses its healthy green” and the “grass is pale and many of the cornstalks are yellow and dead” (3).12 This is the parched landscape of the Dust Bowl, with the paved highway providing a visual reminder of the closed frontier and the advent of modernity. This roadmap to the region then gives way to what William Least Heat-Moon refers to as a deep map, a description of the Plains palimpsest, the layers of human and nonhuman history recorded on the landscape “long ago” and over which the highway runs. What begins as a path carved by the various animals of the grassland wilderness gives way to the foot and horse trails of the nomadic Arkiras and Teton Dakota, which in turn become the wagon, rail, and paved roads of the white settler (5). In the midst of this conventionally unfolding evolutionary drama the familiar pioneer hero, Iver Thor, appears almost magically on the scene, his surname a clear signal of his strength and heroic power. A version of Per Hansa and Alexandra Bergson, Iver stakes a claim on the land and begins to wrestle a home farm from the landscape, the fruits of which are soon manifest in the profusion of “corn and wheat kernels” and in the birth of the Thor children, Kirsten and Tollef (6). This familiar story of conquest, however, begins with an indirect warning by the historically aware, omniscient narrator: “Ignorant of the land, the sky, the sun, and the capricious and subtle interweaving of their forces, [Iver] broke the prairie sod” (6). The Atlantic Yellowstone Pacific Highway snakes through cracked and fissured land, where “the earth, like a colossal apple hurled upon the floor of the universe, has burst open, its fragments scattering to the winds,” and provides a clear image of the consequences of the Plains pioneer’s ignorance (4). This cost becomes personalized when the accomplishments of the Thor family are slowly undone by an intense drought that kills their crops. Iver owes back taxes, so the government repossesses the family’s vast and once productive acreage, leaving only the home farm where it is difficult to eke out a living. The Thors are forced to eat boiled Russian thistle for sustenance, and each successive year finds Pa cutting a new hole in his belt. The coming of the dust storms is rendered in near-biblical terms, presented by Manfred in indented italicized passages, and the story of the Fall culminates when the Black Blizzard of 1933 claims the life of young Tollef. By the end of this opening chapter, the triumph of the ubiquitous dust seems complete, linked as it is to the death of the Thors’ son: “Dust drove through the cluster of bareheaded people that gathered in the churchyard. Dust filmed the coffin. Dust and the minister’s word fell beside him in the 156ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

grave” (10). Tollef’s funeral thus marks a double tragedy: the death of the land as symbolized by the dust and the death of the homesteading dream as embodied in both the dust and Tollef’s coffin. Even as this pivotal first chapter ends on a tragic note, Manfred’s poetic map of the Dust Bowl establishes the broader context of nature’s cycles that situates the Fall within an overarching narrative of redemption. The deep map of the region indicates that even in the face of change and presumed progress, nature endures: the layers of past experience remain an integral part of the story of the Plains. Even if the Thors are complicit in their own misfortune, to abandon their attachment to place would be to exacerbate the sin already perpetrated by their ignorance. Instead, the Thors renew their commitment to the land, spurred by Ma Thor’s defiant refusal to go on relief or to follow their neighbors in exile. On the verge of accepting defeat, Pa is transformed by his wife’s perseverance and announces the family’s plan: “Guess you’re right, Ma. . . . The banker said ‘No.’ The grocer said ‘No.’ Well we can say ‘No,’ too. No! We won’t go with them that’s on relief. An’ we won’t follow them that’s gone to Californier. We’ll stay put!” (8). Even after Tollef’s death—and therefore the loss of one-fourth of their workforce—the surviving Thors maintain their bold stance to pursue their homesteading vision. As the grave sites of Natty in The Prairie, Brock Brewton in Sea of Grass, and Emil Bergson in O Pioneers! illustrate, death can fortify the connection of the living to place, as it sacralizes space by joining the human and nonhuman community together through the shared cycle of birth and death. So, the first chapter of The Golden Bowl provides two ways of reading the Thors’ decision to “stay put”: as an extension of the ignorance upon which the sod was broken to begin with or as a patient commitment to what Manfred has elsewhere called the “long view” (qtd. in Milton 231). The skeptical versus idealistic reading of their choice becomes the driving force of the plot, taking shape in the ideological confrontation between Pa Thor and Maury Grant, a self-proclaimed “bindlestiff” who temporarily takes up work on the Thor farm en route to the mining camps of the Black Hills (14). As Quantic rightly notes, the thrust of the plot centers on the conversion of the skeptichero, Maury, who, “in spite of himself, commits himself to the [Thors’] farm community” (“Myth and Reality” 299). Maury is a Dust Bowl migrant who shares the restless, searching nature of the Holbrooks and the Joads; with his parents dead and with no filial attachments to speak of, Maury does not have the added pressure of supporting a family. His wandering establishes patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 157

him as an American Adam, who is unfettered by the past with nothing but freedom and possibility stretched out before him.13 This is not to say that he is without a past; in fact, the tragic circumstances of his past shape his attitude toward rootedness and drive him ever onward—a Huck Finn lighting out for territories that no longer exist in postfrontier America. The son of Oklahoma farmers who suffered and eventually died because of the Great Drought, Maury hopes that escaping the physical site of tragedy will release him from the psychological effects of his past. “A memory is an awful thing,” he tells Kirsten; although he recognizes that “nothin’ ever grows in the heart of a bum,” he sees drifting as the only possibility for eradicating the awfulness associated with the Dust Bowl (99, 61). His direct experience with the tragic effects of the drought prods him to rhetorically reject the Thors’ inclination toward rootedness. Quantic correctly articulates how this rejection is compelled by a deeper denunciation of “the mythic promise of the garden” to which the family so stubbornly clings (“Myth and Reality” 303); that is, as Quantic elsewhere elaborates, Maury’s insistence on seeing a “dust” bowl where Pa sees a “golden” one rehearses the desert versus garden debate from the earliest moments of Euroamerican settlement of the region (Nature 84–86). Maury is certainly the voice of reason in the novel, a kind of ecological gadfly who is constantly reminding the Thors about the futility of their venture. For him the land is defined by what it lacks. He tells Pa, “When you kin show me that the pheasants and coyotes and jackrabbits, and the birds and the bunnies, can make a livin’ here, then I’ll lissen to you” (24). He puts it even more bluntly to Kirsten in a later conversation: “Them little animals got more sense than you people have. They knew it was no use, an’ gave up an’ croaked” (101). Even God himself has forsaken the land, as Maury notes how all the “christers” praying for rain “never caught on that the good Lord had left the land” (31). Maury thus reads this landscape of absence as a scathing rebuke against the Thors’ decision to stay on the land; more broadly, his desire to see a healthy and vibrant ecosystem undercuts the agrarian myth that propelled the settlement of the arid West. For Maury, the empty, “nothin’ ” land seems to confirm the claim that homesteading the Plains was and continues to be a colossal mistake. This fact compels him to keep moving and to commit himself to the antithetical promise of migration. While Maury rhetorically positions him against the Thor family, his emotional response to their undertaking is much more ambivalent. Quantic notes this ambivalence and locates its source in Maury’s struggle to reconcile 158ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

the mythic promise of the Plains with the reality posed by Dust Bowl conditions (“Myth and Reality” 300–302). Maury’s brief respite at the Thor farm—a stay that increases in duration despite Maury’s wanderlust—generates an interior struggle that forces him to weigh his former faith in the power of the bad land against his adamant renunciation of inhabiting the Dust Bowl. For Maury, the Thor farm is both something new and something linked to his past, a fresh stop on his odyssey of self-discovery that resembles the very thing he is attempting to leave behind though he once loved it. Throughout his stay, Maury fluctuates between admiration for the Thors’ perseverance (and a consequent desire to help them persevere), and chastisement of their stubborn attachment to place. His reasons for abandoning them after three days are rooted in his intellectual assessment of the dead land, but his sympathy toward the Thors issues forth from his recognition of the emotional and aesthetic power of cultivation. His trial as a hired hand draws him deeper into this power as he is reminded of the exhilaration that accompanies working the land. After building a dam that will provide some relief for the Thors’ crops during the prolonged drought, Maury imagines the possibility of staying: “He belonged here,” he muses (66). This sense of belonging is fortified through other projects—cultivating corn, digging a well, and planting greens—that do little for the Thors’ financial prospects but that more significantly whittle away at Maury’s resistance to emplacement. Maury’s internal debate to stay or go, as Quantic suggests, is connected to his effort to reconcile his more romantic inclinations to the tragic implications of the Dust Bowl. Insofar as Maury rehearses claims about the Great American Desert, he certainly draws on a tradition entrenched in the biocultural record of Euroamerican settlement of the Plains. In a postfrontier context such claims take on new meaning that reveals the existential crisis at the heart of the Dust Bowl crisis. Maury and his generation must not only confront the difficult terrain of the arid West, but must also deal with the vista of a failed garden, a fallen world. Even as he is drawn into this world, Maury is reminded of the futility of rooting oneself in such a place: “He had sworn to himself that he would never again work on a farm, even if it were to be set down in the Garden of Eden” (56–57). The experience of his family in Oklahoma has taught him that underlying every Eden is a field of dust in wait. Furthermore, the dead land of the dusted-over Plains, with its lack of floral and faunal life, is worse than the presettlement bad land wilderness, which at least teemed with bison and grass and promoted hope in the patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 159

potential of the garden. The Dust Bowl represents the desertification of a once blooming and hard-won biocultural landscape. All that survives and seems alive in this postfrontier desert, Maury notes, is the highway and the railroad, which he reads as a clear admonishment against the Thors and as support for his desire to ramble on (43). Furthermore, the signs of floral and faunal life that Maury looks for in the Dust Bowl reveal his vexed position as a postfrontier Plainsman. What Maury mourns in the absence of cottontails and coyotes is not only the desertification of the once thriving Grain Belt, but his own personal loss of an opportunity to pursue the pioneer tradition and to reengage the pastoral impulse that drives it. What he wants are signs of a reinvigorated virgin wilderness and a return to frontier conditions; he wants to return to an “original” prairie wilderness where his roaming instincts can be tamed by reworking the prairie garden. This point is not surprisingly rendered through Maury’s courting of the Thor daughter, Kirsten, who he refers to as his “little bunny cottontail” (106). His romantic conquest of the farmer’s daughter, just like the farmers’ conquest of the wild land, has deep implications for the fate of family and roots in the arid West. The irony is that if Maury were to somehow receive what he is looking for—the return of “the pheasants and coyotes and jackrabbits” (24)—then he and the Thors would likely run them right back off the land; after all, the coyote and cottontails are no friends to the family farm and are a threat to a healthy harvest. Maury’s complaint about the dead land, then, is largely a postfrontier lament that recycles Cather’s ambivalent pastoralism. He is drawn toward vitality in wild nature and even posits a pseudoconservationist stance about the value of wilderness, but he undercuts this same stance through an implied commitment to an ethic of development that is rooted in his ancestral vocation. The challenge that Maury faces as he confronts the specter of the Dust Bowl is similar to that which Cather’s postpioneer heroes faced: how does he fulfill his pastoral urges in a decidedly anti-pastoral terrain? Maury’s ambivalent, in-between position traps him in an internal struggle as he works through his conflicting attraction to the Thors (who he sees as a reincarnation of his own family) and his antithetical desire for freedom. When he begins to sense the binds of family tightening their grip on him— primarily in the form of his romantic union with Kirsten—he decides to flee and to complete his intended journey to the Black Hills. His movement west is spawned by a double quest: on the one hand, he seeks a community 160ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

that unlike the Thors will satisfy and justify his migratory appetite; on the other hand, he responds to that call embedded in cultural memory to go west with the hope of reclaiming the magic of the pioneer experience in the presumably wilder environments of the western woods. Both of these quests are unfulfilling and thus it is only after his excursion outside of his home region that Maury comes to recognize and adapt to the reality of the postfrontier Plains. Maury’s rambles throughout the West—from the Dakota Badlands to the Black Hills and through the Bighorns and Shoshone valley of Wyoming to Billings, Montana—unravel as a personal odyssey that draws parallels to similar Western journeys by the Joads and Holbrooks. The significant difference, again, is that Maury chooses migration; furthermore, as a man unattached to family he is able to read his journey as an exercise in freedom. However, he shares with the Joads and Holbrooks the difficult task of adapting to a nomadic mode of existence although his past experiences and the dictates of his cultural heritage have prepared him for and insisted upon a more settled life. For the Joads, who must recreate themselves once they are torn from the family farm, the nomadic and settled paradigms of inhabitation are reconciled through a faith in the rooting power of an enduring “people that live,” a terra homo that must substitute for the terra firma of Oklahoma (Steinbeck 360). Bound by a shared experience of displacement, loss, and suffering, “the people” collectively contain the “great big soul,” as Casy tells Jim, which provides ballast in an increasingly discordant world (535). Likewise, the Holbrooks—and particularly the Holbrook women—adjust to the despair of dislocation by possessing a landscape of memory that sustains a sense of rootedness in the midst of their quest for the patches of green that will realize the proletarian dream for community. Maury’s odyssey combines an attempt to join the movement of the people with a parallel effort to find pastoral fulfillment in the living, rugged land of Wyoming: a sweeping patch of green that contrasts sharply with the “nothin’ ” land he left behind (Manfred 101). Just before he leaves, he exclaims to Pa: “What I can’t figure out is how you can live in all this emptiness without goin’ nuts” (130). It is precisely this question that Maury’s leave-taking circuitously comes to answer. Despite a handful of kind souls he meets along the way—a restaurateur who gives him a free meal and a truck driver who offers both friendship and a ride—Maury’s pursuit of a fuller human community than was to be found in the empty land of the Dust Bowl is frustrated by the reality of suffering patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 161

and inhumanity that he experiences. His dream concerning the open life of the “bindlestiff” is deflated primarily through his uneasy association with the two different groups of migrants that populate the West: the tourists and his fellow homeless ramblers. The tourists are significant because of their relative absence: they speed past a hitchhiking Maury because, despite their shared experience of mobility, “tourists hated bindlestiffs” (150). Tourists and migrants represent the condition of transience, of crossing borders and boundaries, but the tourists’ overarching relationship to place rarely breaks from a home-based model. In this way, the tourists enact the conventional pastoral process as their leisurely escapes are always framed in relation to a home base to which they will return. Their travels may change them and their relationship to this home base, but will likely not shake their sense of the value of a settled existence. The tourists’ suspicion toward the bindlestiffs is embedded in the threat that they pose to this ideal of permanence. The Dust Bowl migrants are thus ironic reincarnations of the savage Indian and the barbaric cattlemen whose existence establishes them as almost nonhuman. Maury comes close to sharing the tourists’ view after his encounters with the “lean men” of the migrant camps and relief stations throughout the West (157). In these men he sees his own life reflected back upon himself and does not like what he sees. His initial empathy toward the migrants separates him from the tourists, as does his acknowledgment of the social conditions that give shape to their misfortune. He revels in the camaraderie of the migrant communities and comes close to a Tom Joad–like conversion experience: “He sat beside poets and philosophers. . . . The language of their lives was intelligible to Maury because he lived as they did, because his appetites were blunted and whetted like theirs. The lonely understands the lonely. The hungry understands the hungry” (183). The potential power of what Ma Joad calls “the people” is quickly dissipated when an oncoming train disperses the temporary community, as they scatter toward the tracks and continue their quest for work. Manfred explains, “Maury was a little stunned by their heartless leave-taking. . . . Everybody shared his food, but no one cared much if one was unhappy” (189). For Manfred, the most striking consequence of the Depression and the Dust Bowl is that it exaggerates the importance of economic livelihood at the cost of more spiritual and emotional concerns. While he understands the migrants’ quick departure and the desperation of their search for work that will provide financial security, their suffering and loneliness force Maury to reconsider what he had with the Thors. 162ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

Maury’s return to the Dust Bowl is precipitated by a series of failed pastoral moments that would seem to put him in a position akin to his pioneer forebears but that instead reaffirm the tragic reality of postfrontier America. During his journey, Maury four times encounters the exhilaration of wild nature: the Black Hills, the alpine forests of the Bighorn and then the Shoshone Mountains, and two visits to the Dakota Badlands that frame his escape from and return to the Thor farm. The latter site holds special value for Maury’s conversion experience, which I address later, but his mountain experiences repeat a pattern of promise and disappointment that echo a shift from “sentimental” to “complex” pastoral. In each experience, Maury is taken by the aesthetic power of the wilderness, a fullness that invites the pastoral impulse in contrast to the “dry breasts of April’s clouds” that greet him when he enters the Thors’ land (11). He is drawn to the “lofty hills” replete with “green life” of the Black Hills (157), the “bursting growth” of the Bighorns that offer a landscape “he had never dreamed existed” (164, 165), and the awesome and sublime beauty of the rugged Rockies with their enchanting explosion of floral and faunal life (177–78). These experiences stand in obvious contrast to the “dead” land of the Dust Bowl. Although these moments affirm for Maury the transformative and creative power of wilderness experience—he even picks up his guitar in the Shoshones to accompany the tunes of the forest—they also highlight for him the transient nature of such superficial engagements. This is to say, his experience is essentially that of the tourist except that Maury has no home base or foundation into which to channel his awakened energies. These pastoral moments thus highlight his loneliness and exacerbate his sense of displacement. The living wilderness landscape only makes Maury aware of his deeper needs, and he expresses disillusionment that in the midst of fecund nature he was still “hungry and homeless” (165). Rather than an escape from his toil, these failed pastoral moments reflect the wider social ills of Depression America. As the myth of the pioneer foretells, his ancestors addressed their own hunger and homelessness by taming the wilderness West, a project that grounded them in the soil and made them co-participants in the “bursting growth” of nature. His realization that such an opportunity is lost to him, coupled with his disenchantment among the frail migrant community, reconnects Maury with the culture of place and the stabilizing effects of homemaking, even in the fallen and postfrontier world of the Dust Bowl. The failure of Maury’s double quest sends him back east, driven by a sense of defeat that ultimately becomes a process of reconciliation. This patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 163

pattern of sin, conversion, and redemption is made strikingly clear in his second pass through the Badlands as Maury looks ahead to the work to be done on the farm once he returns to the Thors. The majestic and sublime landscape forces not only a pastoral awakening to the regenerative power of the natural world, but also initiates a string of memories about the “old days” that remind him of his place within a larger scheme: Maury clenched his fist. He had done something terribly wrong. He had, for four years, doubted the land. In the years to come, he would work doubly hard to make the earth and his own heart, forget that he had been unfaithful. (196) This recognition signals the culmination of Maury’s evolution as an ecohero. Critics generally agree that Maury’s conversion begins shortly before he abandons the Thors. In a scene rich with symbolism, Maury descends into a well to retrieve a wrench that has fallen in and that is preventing the well from working properly. His immersion into what Mazie Holbrook calls “the bowels of the earth” (Olsen 5) is parallel to a return to the Earth Mother, and his successful escape, with wrench in hand, echoes a process of “baptism.”14 This baptism, however, is only the beginning of his spiritual journey, as his shaken faith in the arid land and people’s place in it continues to be tested both on and away from the Thor farm. Milton traces the tripartite structure of Maury’s transformation, which begins with the well scene, is fostered by his first trip through the Badlands where he communes with the dinosaur graveyard of the scorched land, and is completed by his rejection of the hobo community (231–32). Together these experiences teach him about the value of taking root in the land and compel him to return to the Thors. Maury’s conversion and its thematic significance are actually prefigured in the very circumstances of his first arrival on the Thor farm. This arrival sets in motion a typological structure that equates the Dust Bowl plains with the postlapsarian world of Christian salvation history; to read Maury’s conversion within the context of this broader ecotypology is absolutely necessary as it provides important insight into Manfred’s articulation concerning the tragicomic nature of Dust Bowl pastoralism. Maury’s arrival opens the chapter that follows the description of Tollef Thor’s funeral. Tollef dies in November and Maury arrives the following April, a seasonal sequence that parallels the agricultural pattern of harvest and seeding. Maury’s arrival in spring thus enmeshes him in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that is 164ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

inherent to the “long view.” Within the Thor family, his arrival also signals new hope for the future: a figurative second coming of a son who was sacrificed to the elements and whose death reinvigorated the family’s commitment to endure in the fallen world. That Maury will complete the cycle of redemption begun by Tollef is manifest in repeated references to how much the former resembles the latter. For example, Kirsten reports to Maury that “Pa said . . . you looked just like my brother, Tollef. . . . Just like him. If Tollef was alive, you’d be his dead-ringer twin” (30). Maury’s adoption into the family and his incorporation into the family farm enact a double restoration that replaces the loss suffered by the Thors and that reconnects Maury to what he lost in Oklahoma through the tragedy of the Dust Bowl. If Maury is physically Tollef’s twin, the novel as a whole charts his growth into his spiritual twin, a process that sees him taking up the mantle of Pa’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitment to the biocultural landscape. Not only does his process of conversion awaken him to the “long view,” which is an integral part of Pa’s inheritance, but it also weaves him into the fabric of the Thor family and stabilizes their effort to sustain roots in the generations to come. Maury’s return to the Thor family, that is, redeems their decision to stay on the land and assures that their son did not die in vain. His return also affirms the central tenets of the Thors’ commitment to the farm: a belief in the value of family and roots, a realization of their role in the deeper past of the place, and a tragicomic awareness that beauty and hope are possible even in a fallen world. Pa’s insistence on the saving grace of family is communicated early on when he proclaims that what Maury needs to cure his soul sickness is “another fambly. A home. A place to live. Some people to care for” (26). As I’ve already noted, Pa’s faith in family and roots places him in opposition to the rambling Maury. It is Maury’s rejection of family that drives him off the farm in the first place: he is scared off after Kirsten reveals her strong desire to have babies (136). This comes after they have already consummated their budding romantic relationship—a union that in fact produces a child. Maury’s rejection is also rooted in his doubts concerning the possibility of “rais[ing] such a family in this desert” (137). Despite his visceral denunciation of family, Maury also venerates birth and growth when he is witness to it. In addition to his aesthetic response to the fecundity of the Black Hills and the mountain ranges of Wyoming, this respect for reproduction is also manifest when he is stunned to silence as he patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 165

watches Kirsten aid a sow giving birth to her piglets. Manfred writes, “His eyes opened, his nostrils twitched. The smell of birthing was suddenly overly sharp. The straw gleamed. The light in the cobwebbed window became golden, the sun upon the land white-hot. . . . It was a sight for only a reverent man to see” (78). At this point, Maury considers himself an unworthy witness; after all, he had approached Kirsten at this moment with the intention of telling her good-bye after fulfilling his initial obligation to the family. After witnessing the sow birth, he decides to stay on a little longer. Although he eventually does leave, his extended stay serves to deepen his attachment to the family in general and to Kirsten more specifically. His eventual return to and reunion with Kirsten and the family culminates his latent drive to be a part of a family and community. He takes up the role of both replacement son and new father. In this way, his turnaround links the past to the future and fosters a kind of genetic endurance. This endurance is set within a broader geological context as Maury comes to accept that the apparent “nothin’ ” land is actually a “land full of history” (58). As I have already noted, Maury always recognized the tragic aspect of the historic landscape, seeing how the “ghosts [of his family] were vivid” in the Dust Bowl (110). For him, the ghosts and ruin are signals to abandon the place. Part of his process of recommitting himself to the family farm involves his growing awareness of the power of this ghost landscape, a land inhabited not only by personal specters of the past but also by the ghosts of a much deeper and primordial past. Nowhere is this deeper past more apparent than in the Badlands. Aside from their rugged and austere beauty, the Badlands are also rich in the “bones of beasts a million ages old” (147). As Milton notes, Maury’s first visit to the Badlands as he escapes the Thor farm allows him to “look back to the distant past, to the age of dinosaurs, for the beginnings of man. This is the search for origins, which is a part of the search for identity” (232). While Milton is right to point out the archetypal dimension of Maury’s Badlands experience—his lesson that “there is an origin common to all men”—it is important to recognize how this experience also allows him to link the struggle to inhabit the arid West with the longer process of locating a dynamic, biocultural equilibrium. This pastoral experience invigorates Maury’s imagination, makes him “forget his hunger,” and produces a vision of an enlivened and enriched landscape (146). Maury studies the mysterious landscape and imagines its twisted shapes coming alive to reveal the 166ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

palimpsest of the Plains: he sees the spires transform into the shapes of the “tortured breast of a woman” and the “bulging muscle of the man”; he sees tree shapes alongside “barns and cultivators and plows and scrapers and horses and cows”; and finally, witnesses the rocks become “the fearful old animals again, rumbling and grumbling among themselves” (146–47). This string of visions places agricultural history within the larger pattern of natural history, joining man, woman, and their work to the “rumbling and grumbling” of their nonhuman predecessors. The fate of the dinosaurs suggests that any hold on place is temporary, subject to shifting winds of change. This is to say that endurance is a relative term in a world subject to death and decay. What endures throughout these transitions is a wider web of connections that ties together the human and nonhuman community in space and through time. To participate in this network of relations is to be a part of something bigger than the self. This is perhaps why Pa is so drawn to the Badlands, and why he associates them with his overall motivation to stay on his farm. He tells Maury early on, You know, it’s funny about this here country. Some people can live here all their life, an’ yet be full a hate fer it. But not me. I love it. I love this land here, an’ I love the Bad Lands. I go there sometimes just to look at ’em. Them purple spires have been a comfort to me many a time. (27) Maury’s love for the land and recommitment to it are likewise bolstered through two transcendent moments amid the “purple spires” of the Badlands. Bad land pastoralism becomes Badlands pastoralism: the intractable landscape of bones, scorched earth, and eroded clay becomes a site for a transformative experience that demands respect for the value of humanity’s nonmaterial—aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional—engagements with the natural world. The Badlands experience also brings Maury closer to Pa’s view of how personal tragedy commands an attachment to place. Whereas the ghosts in the landscape initially push Maury away from his home region, the Thors cling to their farm in large part because Tollef’s death has consecrated the ground and made it sacred to them. Wendell Berry’s definition and defense of regionalism is pertinent here, as he emphasizes the role that tragedy plays in any given community of place. Berry expresses his dissatisfaction with the American migration myth as manifest in Huck Finn’s decision to light patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 167

out for the territories, and posits instead a definition of community that is tied to tragedy: What is wanting [in American culture], apparently, is the tragic imagination that, through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal. What is wanting is the return to the beloved community, or the possibility of one. That would return us to a renewed and corrected awareness of our partiality and mortality, but also to the healing and to joy in a renewed awareness of our love and hope for one another. (21) This “one another” includes the nonhuman members of the community as well, and through his experiences with the Dust Bowl Maury appropriates this “tragic imagination.” The supposed death of the land, like the death of Tollef and Maury’s parents, is not cause for abandonment, but a source of community. Maury’s rejection of the community is the sin for which his reabsorption into the Thor family is his only choice for reconciliation. This reconciliation occurs when Maury returns to the family and commits himself to Kirsten and their forthcoming child; just as leaving was a sin against the land and a betrayal of Kirsten, his return reveals his renewed commitment to both. It is fitting, then, that the action of the narrative ends not with the triumphant return of the redeemed hero, but with a brutal reminder of the tragic conditions of the Dust Bowl in the form of another dust storm. To complete the typological trajectory of the narrative, the storm comes like “Judgment Day” (222) to test Maury. Although matters look bleak, Maury withstands the storm with this faith in the land intact: “Well, let the damned wind blow,” he exclaims. “If it blows the house down, we’ll build another” (221). This statement reveals his dedication to the family farm, which vindicates the Thors’ decision to stay on the land despite the potential for utter failure. Maury also vindicates Pa’s vision of a forthcoming golden bowl and, more importantly, his commitment to the work necessary to reclaim this golden bowl. The stakes of this struggle reside in more than just achieving financial security; as the poet narrator comments in the concluding paragraphs, the struggle for roots also involves a quest for longevity and a drive to cultivate a space where “it is safe for the young lads to sire the girls and to mate, and have children” (emphasis in original, 226). Even if this vision is only attainable in 168ҍ patches of green and fields of dust

the “hidden country of a pilgrim’s heart,” Manfred’s novel illustrates how such spiritual and emotional awakenings are perhaps the land’s greatest harvest (emphasis in original, 225).

Toward the Commons; or, Modes of Recovery There is much that separates the Dust Bowl pastoralism of Olsen and Manfred. The circumstances surrounding the Holbrooks’ struggle in Yonnondio point to the sociopolitical barriers that complicate and challenge the process of emplacement for the working-class community. While Olsen’s novel offers an important critique of the shortcomings of pastoralism—identifying it as a luxury afforded only by the leisure class—it also offers a revised version of pastoralism that folds in an element of social awareness even as it retains an emphasis on the value of nonmaterial engagements with the natural world. In Manfred’s The Golden Bowl, the Thors have already achieved the state of rootedness that eludes the Holbrook family; the challenge which needs to be met in this novel is how to maintain these roots and refashion the power of pastoralism in the face of dystopian natural conditions. Where Olsen is more explicitly focused on the role industrial capitalism plays in the human component of the Dust Bowl, Manfred seems more concerned with the existential struggle caused by ecological destruction and focuses on a romantic narrative of an individual reconciling himself to a fallen natural world. What these two narratives share is faith in the value of place; whether it requires social revolution to achieve or a commitment of spirit and labor to sustain, both Olsen and Manfred suggest the rewards of place-sense in a postindustrial, postfrontier world. Like so many other examples of Plains fiction, these two novels end on an ambivalent note, portending an arc of hope without fully realizing it. That is, whatever the Holbrooks and Thors may have achieved in their individual odysseys of place is called into question by the dust storms that accompany the end of both narratives. These violent storms provide stark reminders that the struggle for place is ongoing and that the dialectical process of biocultural landscape formation is ever shifting and changing as it tends toward some possible equilibrium. These two authors also hold in common a sense of the regenerative power of tragedy, contending that out of the ashes of the Dust Bowl crisis a new and better order might be founded. Through Mazie’s steady if complete bildungsroman, Olsen posits how the dreadful reality of displacement that patches of green and fields of dust ҏ 169

the Holbrooks suffer has the potential to foment social revolution. The experience of migration strengthens the resolve of the working class to demand a place in the world and to cultivate a sense of “selfness” that is withheld from them by the political and economic structures of industrial capitalism. Likewise, Maury’s commitment to the Thor farm issues from his recognition that the personal and historical record of tragedy and loss written on the landscape is a vital component for a spiritually fulfilling attachment to place and not cause for abandonment. Interestingly, though both Olsen and Manfred recuperate the power of pastoralism to address the social ills that attend the Dust Bowl crisis, neither author considers the ecological impact of the human dedication to place. That is, if Maury and the Thors, and to a lesser degree Mazie and Anna Holbrook, locate a revitalized commitment to the value of place through their personal tragedies, this does not necessarily mean that this commitment will be an ethical one. Indeed, Olsen and Manfred also share a general lack of consideration for the laborer’s complicity in the ecological dimension of the Dust Bowl disaster. Olsen comes close to such a consideration as she exposes the twin exploitation of land and people perpetrated under capitalism. The idealized figure of Caldwell in the Dakota chapters ultimately condones Plains agrarianism, particularly when his farm is considered alongside the antipastoral work of the mine, sewage plant, and packinghouse. Manfred’s novel also glorifies the homestead and the Thors present a throwback to the yeoman pioneers who populated so much Plains fiction in the decades preceding the Dust Bowl. Ultimately, the ecological lessons of the Dust Bowl took some time to trickle down into fictional narratives about the postfrontier Plains. With the third major cycle of prolonged drought since Euroamerican settlement under way in the region, the depopulation of the deep rural Plains in the decades leading up to the millennium forced a major reconsideration of what it meant to successfully inhabit the arid West. Indeed, the record of doom and the legacy of the Dust Bowl, captured so poignantly by Olsen and Manfred, are difficult to ignore. As I demonstrate in the next chapter, however, the effort to move the region’s story beyond tragedy is in progress, as writers like Annie Proulx and Thomas King craft narratives that highlight sustainability and that heed the warnings of past failures.

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Healing the Wounds of History Buffalo Commons Pastoralism in Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole and King’s Truth and Bright Water Here was the heart of my buffalo blues. Even if buffalo someday returned, the same forces that brought them to near extinction would refuse to treat them like the Great Plains Eucharist that they are. —Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, 2001 It is often said that change always happens; the question is: who determines the direction of the change? —Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 1999

Redeeming the Great Plains In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper, a Rutgers- based couple, published their Buffalo Commons proposal as a response to what they saw as a reemerging crisis on the Great Plains that involved massive depopulation from rural counties and continued ecological devastation brought on by the cumulative effects of centuries of drought, overgrazing, and over-irrigating. Their proposal called for the transformation of a large portion of the Great Plains, particularly those counties most in distress, into a federally owned and managed park where the prairies could be restored and the buffalo could roam again.1 Bringing back the native grassland and buffalo would mean returning the bioregion to its preconquest state, representing what Anne

Matthews calls “a massive act of ecological restoration that boldly reverses three centuries of American settlement and land-use history” (14). The public reaction on the Plains to the Poppers’ proposal has been mixed. On the one hand, it has incited fear, anger, and denial, particularly from farmers and ranchers most bound to the traditions that the proposal seeks to overturn; on the other hand, the Poppers’ idea also generated excitement and renewed hope for the future of the bioregion. Although it has not unfolded exactly as the Poppers originally envisioned, the Buffalo Commons idea has come to fruition in a number of ways, including a mosaic of private and public enterprises: buffalo ranching operations are becoming more common; many tribes are bringing back the buffalo to reservation lands; and grassland preservation efforts have been initiated by the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as by agencies like the Nature Conservancy and the Great Plains Restoration Council.2 The most important outcome of the mixed and often heated response to the Buffalo Commons proposal for the purposes of this study has been the formulation of a compact and functional regional metaphor. In “The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method,” which was published twelve years after their original proposal, the Poppers discuss the value of the Buffalo Commons as a “literary device, a metaphor that would resolve the narrative conflicts—past, present, and, most important, future—of the Great Plains” (“Metaphor as Method”). The Buffalo Commons metaphor is layered and can therefore be appropriated by both supporters and opponents as a way to enter into the discourse about the sweeping changes taking place within the region. The Buffalo Commons metaphor thus provides a way to arbitrate the agglomeration of economic, historical, cultural, and ecological forces that have given shape to the region’s identity as it addresses the multivalent value of the Plains biocultural landscape within the context of the economic development of the region. I am interested in how this complex regional metaphor becomes codified in contemporary fictional narratives about the Great Plains, how these narratives contribute to a form of postpastoral discourse tied to the Buffalo Commons mythology, and how the more salient features of the Buffalo Commons idea have entered directly and indirectly into the literary discourse concerning the region. In particular, I will analyze two recent novels that integrate this Buffalo Commons mythology into their narratives about the bioregion: Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) and Thomas 172ҍ healing the wounds of history

King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999). Both of these writers incorporate the return of the buffalo as a central trope in their narratives, moving the metaphor beyond the realm of cultural geography and regional planning and employing it as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains.

The Buffalo Commons as Metaphor and Myth To better understand how the Buffalo Commons metaphor functions in Proulx’s and King’s novels, it is important to examine the paradoxes implicit in the buffalo’s status as a symbol of the North American West. These paradoxes arise from the animal’s tragic history and its association since the early nineteenth century with the disappearing grassland wilderness. The connection between the buffalo and wildness is a constant theme in the earliest Euroamerican descriptions of the Plains. Many of the first European visitors to the Plains—explorers, traders, and travelers—marveled at the huge buffalo herds that ranged the grasslands. For many of these writers, the wildness of the buffalo was inexorably linked to the mystique of the nomadic Plains Indians. In A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Washington Irving emphasizes this correspondence: “The Indians consider [the bee] the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say that, in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and the buffalo retire” (50). Irving’s statement reveals the tragic dimension of buffalo symbolism: as Euroamerican civilization advances, the buffalo and the wilderness it represents must “retire.” Historically, the buffalo’s retirement, that is, its near extinction, played out over the course of the nineteenth century as the result of two factors: first, the increase in demand for buffalo fur in the latter half of the century led to the proliferation of hide hunters who sought to exploit the boom economy;3 second, the animal’s association with the “hostile” tribes of the West was one factor which led to the extermination policy of the U.S. Army under General Sherman.4 The destruction of the buffalo changed the traditional way of life for the Plains tribes who depended on the buffalo herds for subsistence. With no more great herds to hunt, these tribes were forced to settle on reservations. The near extinction of the species during the Great Slaughter of the 1870s and the subsequent confinement of the Plains tribes that this slaughter helped to foster certainly reflect the destructive impulses behind the westward expansion of the frontier. The demise of the buffalo, which had for so long been synonymous with the Great Plains wilderness, came to symbolize healing the wounds of history ҏ 173

in the nineteenth century the greed and wastefulness of Euroamerican civilization. On this level, the buffalo signifies the sense of endings, loss, and limitation implicit in the myth of the closed frontier. Many commentators at the forefront of America’s frontier movement onto the Plains recognized that the expansive herds of buffalo they witnessed were doomed. Some expressed a wish to preserve the species. The first vision of a Buffalo Commons came when George Catlin, in North American Indians (1841), recommended setting aside a large park preserve in the grasslands where both the buffalo and the Indians who hunted them could roam unimpeded. When the extinction of the buffalo came closer to being a reality in the 1870s and 1880s, efforts to save the species became more of a priority. These turn-of-the-century efforts, as Isenberg points out, paled in comparison to Catlin’s vision of a huge wilderness preserve; instead, the actions of those like William Hornaday and Charles Jesse Jones, while saving the animal from extinction, were driven by a “nostalgic urge to recreate a facsimile of the frontier” that salvaged only “a fraction of the species’ genetic pool and natural habitat” (emphasis added, 164, 165). These efforts were limited, Isenberg surmises, because they were motivated by the “dual vision” of the North American frontier as both a “progression toward the modern age” and a “refuge from modernism” (167)—something like the Captain’s marsh in Cather’s A Lost Lady. In this way, even the buffalo that were saved from slaughter reflect the paradoxes behind the pastoral impulse that ironically fueled the expansion of the frontier.5 The image of buffalo returning from the brink of extinction adds another dimension to the buffalo’s status as regional metaphor, particularly for its Native American inhabitants who, along with the buffalo, were presumed vanished when the frontier “closed” in 1890. In a 2001 article titled “The Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property,” David Moore provides a thoughtful analysis of buffalo imagery in contemporary Native American literature in which he traces the political potency of the buffalo metaphor. The presence of returned buffalo in such texts draws upon and subsequently subverts the tragic dimension of buffalo symbolism by undermining the conventional association of disappearing buffalo with the closing of the frontier and the supposed triumph of Euroamerican civilization. Moore argues that the repatriation of the buffalo functions rhetorically to disrupt the dominant mythology of the frontier, which presents both the buffalo and Native Americans as victims of overwhelming forces of progress. He explains 174ҍ healing the wounds of history

how such allusions help Native American authors to “convey complexities of survival and to reclaim representation of their cultures” (56, 57). As a land-use plan, the Poppers’ original proposal does not explicitly address the complicated cultural dynamics contained in Moore’s examination of the symbol of the buffalo, but by making the buffalo the centerpiece of their plan they certainly draw upon both the tragic and comic dimensions of the animal’s past. What their plan adds to the legacy of buffalo returns is an ecological imperative. That is, by coupling this image with that of the Commons, the Poppers’ proposal emphasizes the ideal context for returning buffalo: a bioregion that has been restored. In “Metaphor as Method,” the Poppers note how the term commons “connotes the need to treat land more as a common property resource.” The metaphor thus demands a reexamination of how the region has been inhabited, so that a more reciprocal relationship between the various human and nonhuman communities on the Plains can be achieved. The literal and figurative return of buffalo to a restored grassland implicit in the Buffalo Commons metaphor suggests the possibility that the wounds of history, which have been written on the landscape, can be healed through redemption, renewal, and restoration. The paradoxes inherent in the mythology of the Buffalo Commons make it a flexible and useful vehicle through which to navigate the palimpsest that is the cultural landscape of the Great Plains. The regional narrative it embodies encompasses the darker aspects of the region’s history—the legacies of loss, failure, and violence that define the centuries-long attempt to inhabit the place; on the other hand, it stresses the potential, even the need, to transcend these legacies and to reverse the dangerous and damaging trend of history. In this way, as a metaphor the Buffalo Commons provides a condensed pastoral image that addresses both the current biocultural crisis on the Plains and, more broadly, the whole history of crises in the region. Ultimately, Proulx and King draw upon and dramatize three primary and interrelated aspects of the Buffalo Commons metaphor. First, their novels take place within a postfrontier context where the Great Plains is presented as a fallen and scarred region, ravaged by a series of ongoing boom-andbust cycles dating back to the original advancement of the frontier. In this sense, the region signifies a biocultural landscape in crisis, which the novels’ protagonists must confront in order to locate a sustainable sense of place for themselves and their respective communities. For Proulx’s characters, this crisis is the very one to which the Poppers’ plan responds: depopulation of healing the wounds of history ҏ 175

the deep rural Plains and the concurrent disruption of the region’s natural environment. This unsettled bioregion provides the backdrop for King’s novel as well, though the roots of the crisis stretch further back in time for his Canadian Blackfoot characters to when Euroamericans first colonized the grassland wilderness and its original inhabitants. Thus, both authors explore crises that are simultaneously cultural and ecological. Second, Proulx and King both employ the Buffalo Commons as the instrument through which their protagonists mediate these crises. In so doing, both authors stress a paradigm of restoration that involves a reevaluation of the past, an embrace of the losses implicit in this past, and, ultimately, a forging ahead with a new and better vision for the future. In this sense, their novels incorporate the tragic and comic dimensions implicit in the story of the Plains buffalo and found in the other manifestations of bad land pastoralism considered so far. The animal’s demise at the hands of westward-moving Euroamericans embodies the destructive impulses behind the conquest of the North American West—for the species, the biome itself, and the various cultures of the region’s original inhabitants—while the Poppers’ proposal, the latest in a line of preservation movements since the turn of the twentieth century, seeks to redeem the sins of the past. Finally, while Proulx and King approach the mythology of the Buffalo Commons from different cultural perspectives, they share in their visions an ecological imperative that is at the center of the Poppers’ plan. That is, the Poppers’ proposal couples the comic image of buffalo restoration with that of the Commons, which emphasizes a symbiotic relationship between the human and nonhuman communities.

Moral Geography in Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole The two main components of the current crisis on the Plains are massive depopulation, particularly in deep rural areas, and ecological devastation.6 These two trends make room for and are exacerbated by the emergence of agribusinesses. The return of drought to the region at the turn of the millennium has placed a strain on the water-dependent rural economy, leading to increased poverty and a disappearance of small farming and ranching operations that must give way to corporate megafarms. These larger farms possess the infrastructure and capital to manage huge tracts of the semi-arid grasslands, but many critics argue that these bigger, specialized operations 176ҍ healing the wounds of history

damage the landscape and are not ecologically sustainable. Despite the lessons learned from the Dust Bowl and the catastrophic consequences of the “great Plow-up,” in the 1970s and 1980s industrialized farms plowed under more and more land to raise single crops to take advantage of “economies of scale” (Manning 151), threatening the already fragile soil of the Plains. This approach, from an ecological standpoint, Manning asserts, is a “sustained catastrophe”: “It is the practice of plowing, then preventing nature from healing itself. It is an imposition of a monoculture on a system that wants nothing so much as to diversify and stabilize” (155).7 So, while this kind of agriculture is perhaps economically viable (and often supported by large-scale federal subsidies), it establishes a paradigm of extraction that is ecologically unethical and that contributes to the self-perpetuating cycle of boom-and-bust catastrophes. Indeed, after decades of aggressive cultivation of the Great Plains, which was encouraged by Department of Agriculture policies initiated during the Nixon administration, soil erosion has approached levels comparable to the Dust Bowl years. The Ogallala Aquifer, the source of groundwater for much of the Plains, is “dropping fast” (Popper and Popper “Great Plains” 91). The steady rise of corporate agriculture and the equally steady decline of smaller farms lend an epic atmosphere to the crisis, an atmosphere which provides the backdrop for Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole. Proulx dramatizes the current crisis on the Plains by pitting a Denver-based corporation, Global Pork Rind, against the farming and ranching community of Woolybucket, Texas, a fledgling town in the panhandle region of the southern Plains. This clash unfolds through the quest of the novel’s protagonist, Bob Dollar, an employee of Global Pork Rind. Bob Dollar is sent down to the panhandle to scout potential sites for the corporation to buy out and convert into hog farms. The corporation shows little regard for the pollution and environmental damage that these megafarms cause, and even less for the cultural trauma brought on by their expansion into the deep rural Plains. When Bob raises concerns about the awful smell that emanates from the hog farms and about how the animals are allegedly mistreated (site scouts are banned from visiting the hog farms by the company), his boss, Ribeye Cluke, admonishes: “We don’t think of hogs as ‘animals,’ Bob, not in the same way as cats and dogs and deer and squirrels. We say ‘pork units’ . . . —a crop, like corn or beans.” This statement, the narrator explains, is followed by “a long lecture on free enterprise and the American Way, the importance of economic healing the wounds of history ҏ 177

opportunity and the value of entrepreneurship to the general good and the well-being of America” (302). In this way, the designs of Global Pork Rind are an extension of the general Euroamerican impulse to conquer the Plains and convert its resources into commodities with little regard for the local human and nonhuman communities. Bob’s attachment to the company is rather superficial: directionless and essentially homeless, he takes the job merely to fill a void in his life left by the childhood trauma of being abandoned by his parents. He knows nothing about the nature of pork unit production and commits himself to the dirty work only because he wants to avoid the pattern of abandonment set by his parents. In fact, as his exchange with Ribeye noted above indicates, Bob is full of doubts about his position as a site scout. Because there is so much animosity toward hog farms in the panhandle, it is company policy that all site scouts lie about their identity so they can gain full access to the local communities in the region. Bob masquerades as a scout for luxury home sites, a lie he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with as he gets to know the people of Woolybucket. Even as he feels more and more like a villain, he doggedly pursues potential sellers: “He had taken up a responsibility—to find sites for hog farms and persuade elderly farmers and ranchers to sell out their decades of labor to the silent rows of Hog World—and he would not put it aside. That would be too much like his parents dumping him and haring off to Alaska” (308). The tone of this omniscient narration reveals Bob’s struggle to reconcile his duty to Global Pork Rind with his desire to protect the Woolybucket community. The postfrontier Plains landscape that Bob traverses in his quest for hog sites is depicted as a region in decline, where “nothing of the original prairie remained” (1). As he enters the bioregion for the first time, he can only imagine what the “enormous North American grassland” (3) might have looked like prior to the advancement of the frontier. What he sees in its place is a landscape that “churned with detritus”: “Sheets of plastic, food wrappers, sacks, papers, boxes, rags” and signs of a “chemical spill years before [that] had killed off all of the soil organisms” (43). He also notices how “houses looked as temporarily there as items on a grocery shelf ”; it is a landscape where the image of an abandoned farm is very familiar (305). Instead of a buffalo-filled short-grass plain, the kind described in the journals of the earliest Euroamerican explorers to the region, Bob comes across an abused region. As Proulx’s narrator surmises, “it seemed he was not so much in a 178ҍ healing the wounds of history

place as confronting the raw material of human use” (3). Such a utilitarian view contrasts sharply with, even as it echoes, Jim Burden’s exaltation of the prairie blank slate; whereas the open plain presented transcendental possibilities for Jim, Bob’s emphasis on use reveals both his status as an outsider and his superficial focus on the materiality of the panhandle. The desire to resurrect ruined places is at the core of the Buffalo Commons mythology and is what drives the residents of Woolybucket to reassess their connection to place. Competing with Global Pork Rind to control the future of the Great Plains, and hoping to redirect the focus of Bob’s commitment, are two elder residents of the town: Ace Crouch and Brother Mesquite. While many residents of Woolybucket have little recourse but to sell out to Global Pork Rind, these two men actively resist the infiltration of hog farms into the region. Ace, a longtime rancher and windmill technician who “emanate[s] a kind of authority” (110), defends the integrity of biocultural landscape most vehemently. When Bob spouts the company line about embracing the global economy, Ace launches into a rant about how the homogenizing effects of such an economy has ruined the Plains. The technology that was supposed to make the panhandle like the rest of the world, Ace explains, has “kept us from adjustin to the bedrock true nature a this place and that’s something will catch up to us one a these days. The water is plain out. The people built their lives on awl money expected it would last forever too. The awl is pretty much gone” (111).8 For Ace, the triumph of altering the arid grasslands into the Garden of Eden, an integral part of the pioneer mythos, has transformed into an apocalyptic warning about what happens when nature’s limits are exceeded. Such devastation, Ace proclaims, “open[s] the door to this agribusiness and corporate farmin’ ” that only feeds the cycle of ecological deterioration (111). What Ace opposes most about Global Pork Rind is that the company contributes nothing to the local communities. With offices based in Denver and Tokyo, the corporation’s investment in the region is purely economical and ultimately extractive. Ace tells Bob, “Hog farms create uninhabitable zones just as sure as if land mines was planted there. Does a corporation have any kind a right come into the panhandle and wreck it for the people rooted there?” (114). There is an element of nostalgia in Ace’s resistance to hog factories, and his rejection of the Global Pork Rind can be read as a stubborn resistance to change and modernization. Bob raises this point late in the novel when he proclaims, “We can’t live in the past. Probably in forty or healing the wounds of history ҏ 179

fifty years there’ll be something else pushes out the hog farms and somebody else will say how sad it is, how the panhandle hog heritage has been lost” (334). Ace’s response makes his position clear: Something else like what, use the panhandle for a atomic testin ground? And you sure don’t need a tell me about change. A lifetime windmillin. It’s like Brother Mesquite says: ‘Things are as the windmill to the wind, constantly changin, makin a response.’ But what things change into is somethin else. Just one or two people can stand up and fight back (334). What Ace wants is local control over the kind of change that will take place in the region. As someone who has witnessed and been a participant in the myriad changes that have swept through the Plains, Ace resists the role of being a static victim of progress. Instead, he sees himself as pursuing a better type of progress for the bioregion, which is predicated on stewardship and sustainable inhabitancy. His pastoral vision for the panhandle region, which is rooted in the Buffalo Commons concept, involves directed change and provides an alternative to the globalizing trend embodied in Global Pork Rind’s venture. Ace’s complex pastoralism is motivated by what Brother Mesquite calls “moral geography” (114). Brother Mesquite practices moral geography through his work at the Triple Cross, a buffalo ranch he and his fellow brothers operate on monastic lands. For Brother Mesquite, the operation is much more than an economic venture: it becomes a way to contribute to and participate in the spirit of the place.9 He explains the significance of buffalo to Bob: Now the buffs, they evolved on the plains with the plants—the two grew up together, they belong together in this place, this landscape. The bison and the native plant species have a relationship. Your cow is out of place here and that’s why they are so much work. You’ve got to keep them fed with food they like, you’ve got to give them water—those thousands a windmills, this and that. The buff rustles for hisself. He’ll walk a long way for water, or find little seeps and springs you didn’t even know was there and, if he has to, he’ll dig a seep out with his hoof. . . . The bison is self-reliant and belongs in this country. The cow, bred to be placid and sluggish and easy to handle, is a interloper. (274–75) 180ҍ healing the wounds of history

The “buff”/cow dichotomy that Mesquite establishes here echoes the perspective shared by the Native characters in Cooper’s The Prairie and Welch’s Fools Crow and reflects the central aspect of the Buffalo Commons mythology: favoring adaptation over imposition. As an “interloper,” the cow— an icon of tamed West—represents a paradigm of imposition.10 It is bred to achieve certain characteristics and places a strain on the environment through its need for “food they like” and “those thousands a windmills” that deplete water from the Ogallala Aquifer. Buffalo, on the other hand, “belong” on the Plains and contribute to the bioregion as a vital part of the diverse ecosystem. The transition from cattle to buffalo ranching performs the vital work of healing the physical environment and redeeming some of the damage done to the landscape by the cattle industry. The Triple Cross is a sustainable economic venture, but, perhaps more importantly for Mesquite, it is a restorative project. He tells Bob, “You want to get a idea of what this country looked like a hundred fifty years ago, come pay us a visit at the Triple Cross. You can see a long way and never get a fence in your eye” (275). Again, while this longing for the original prairie reflects a deeply embedded sense of nostalgia common in accounts about the enclosure of the grassland wilderness, it also reveals optimism about what can be gained by bringing back the buffalo, for both the bioregion and its inhabitants. Mesquite proclaims, “We’ve learned from these animals—about their ways, about ourselves, about what suits this region a the earth. The monastery is a happy and productive place. And I am happy. Couldn’t ask for much more from life” (278). At the end of the novel, Mesquite’s “moral geography” wins out. Ace reveals that he has inherited a large sum of money from his former business partner and he uses this money to establish the Panhandle Bison Range. He is further able to convince all of Bob’s prospective targets to sell their land to this consortium rather than hand it over to Global Pork Rind. Like the Triple Cross Ranch, the Panhandle Bison Range is a small-scale restoration project that includes, as one of the sellers explains to Bob, “Buffalo, prairie dogs, prairie chickens, native grass, antelopes, all that kind a thing, something like a nature preserve” (340). In this way, Ace’s venture is even more ambitious than Mesquite’s, who signs on as a consultant. It becomes a panhandle manifestation of the Poppers’ original vision of the Buffalo Commons, and part of the better wave of change Ace wants for the region. Tater Crouch, Ace’s brother, explains to Bob: “We’re goin a take down fences and open her healing the wounds of history ҏ 181

back up, run bison in the panhandle. . . . We got them Poppers comin down a talk at the church next Thursday. They’re already doing this kind a thing in the Dakotas” (340). At the core of Ace’s endeavor is a desire to redeem the damage done to the landscape and to locate a more responsible and reciprocal relationship to the Great Plains environment than has been forged in the past. The reference to the Poppers and to bison-based enterprises in the Dakotas situates Ace’s consortium within the overall context of the Buffalo Commons phenomenon. Like the Triple Cross, the Panhandle Bison Range is both an homage to and upheaval of the frontier myth that drove the Euroamerican settlement of the Plains. It presents the opportunity to return to the era of the open range, while at the same time it attempts to strike a balance between ecological, cultural, and economic goals. In addition to doing what he thinks is best for the ecosystem, Ace is also defending what he calls the “historical and psychological rights” of the pioneer descendants to control the region’s future (335). They deserve this right, he explains, because the panhandle has become their home. He tells Bob, “You don’t hardly know a thing about this place. You think it’s just a place. It’s more than that. It’s peoples lives, it’s the history of the country. We lived through the droughts that come and we seen the Depression and the dust storms blowin up black as the smoke from a oil fire” (333). Ace argues here that his sense of place, his emotional and experiential connection to the panhandle establishes him as an insider who has earned the right to dictate the future of the region, unlike the outsiders who run Global Pork Rind. Ace’s position is ironic on two levels. First, his claim about the Euroamerican pioneers’ “historical and psychological rights” to the region conveniently discounts the fact that this claim was staked on already inhabited ground. His dismissal and erasure of the Plains Indians’ rights to the land is ultimately predicated on a Eurocentric bias concerning what it means to inhabit and make use of the physical environment of the Plains. When Bob raises the issue of Native rights to the land during his first meeting with Ace, the old rancher proclaims: “[The Indians] didn’t live here. They were nomadic. . . . No, the first people tried a live here was those old farmers and ranchers” (111). The racist implications of this statement aside, Ace’s position is ironic considering how the Panhandle Bison Range, as a manifestation of the Buffalo Commons plan, draws on a paradigm of motion and nomadism that unsettles the settler-based agrarian model. That is, the plan calls 182ҍ healing the wounds of history

for and relies on a strategy of land use that echoes the one employed by the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of the pre-Contact Plains. While Ace himself is ignorant of the implicit irony of his claim to “historical and psychological rights” to the land, Proulx excavates the buried Indian presence of Ace’s vision through Moony Brassleg, an elderly Indian from the Pine Ridge Reservation Bob picks up on his trip to Denver. Hitchhiking from the reservation to his daughter’s house in Trinidad, Colorado—to teach his son-in-law the “medicine ways”—Moony provides a sobering reminder to Bob about the lingering effects of loss and displacement on the descendants of the original inhabitants of the region. When Bob hints at his own sense of detachment and uprootedness, Moony explains, “There are chances for you, a young white man. How you like it on the reservation? . . . Young men there do not think, What am I going to be in my life? Answer: a drunk, die young and miserable, leave damaged chirdren [sic] behind. They think, How long will I live?” (287, 294). With ties to the land as deep or deeper than Ace’s, Brassleg thus illustrates the cultural and historical complexity of the panhandle region. Second, Ace’s position is ironic because his declaration of his “historical and psychological” right to implement his vision for the panhandle is the same argument that many rural Plains residents make against the Poppers’ plan, which seeks to further empty the rural Plains of its residents and turn the land over to the federal government. The Buffalo Commons plan has the potential to violate the very “historical and psychological” rights to the land that Ace so vehemently defends. Proulx’s narrative incorporates and ultimately negotiates some of the complicated cultural dynamics implicit in the Buffalo Commons mythology by making the Panhandle Bison Range a locally established rather than federally managed operation. Furthermore, Ace’s status as an insider does not disintegrate into a perverse provincialism or an us-versus-them mentality, as evidenced by his seeking help from both the eastern-based Poppers and Bob Dollar; instead, he sees his insider status as the basis of an “obligation to the panhandle” to recover what has been lost (336). The fact that his operation is a cooperative highlights Ace’s communal as well as ecological goals. The novel’s happy ending is fraught with tension and contradictions. Indeed, as these two ironies indicate, Ace’s plan fully reflects the paradoxes inherent in the Buffalo Commons mythology. Furthermore, as Bob wisely points out, Ace, as a windmill technician, is himself a transgressor who healing the wounds of history ҏ 183

made his living off an extractive economy, contributing to the very depletion of the Ogallala that he laments earlier in the novel (111). Furthermore, he inherits money from Habakuk, another windmill man who ultimately makes his fortune as an oil tycoon, the paragon of an extractive industrialist. Because of this background Ace knows what is at stake and has the potential to learn from his past so that he can find more sustainable ways to inhabit the Plains. Ace’s commitment to the land comes, in part, from his recognition that he is complicit in the ascendancy of the very forces that now threaten the panhandle. Whether the Panhandle Bison Range is the answer is not clear. The history of loss and failure in the region looms large within the regional imagination. Bob has doubts about the future of the Panhandle Bison Range, as he tries to reconcile his sense that “ruined places could not be restored” with his hope that Ace’s venture is the “beginning of something huge” (358). Despite these doubts, Proulx implies that he will move permanently to the region to head up the real estate division of Ace’s consortium, “Prairie Restoration Homesteads.” This division is Bob’s own creation, an extension of the project he invented as the cover for his true purpose in the panhandle. Over the course of the novel, he becomes so engrossed with his lie that he even pitches the idea of a luxury real estate side venture to his bosses at Global Pork Rind, which they ultimately reject. Mesquite and Ace tweak Bob’s plan, for they envision it as part of the overall restoration work of the Panhandle Bison Range. As Mesquite describes it, [Ace has] sort a talked to the Nature Advocacy and the Wildlife Coalition and they think there’s somethin’ in it. . . . Each one a the home sites would have a covenant—the buyer would have to agree to maintain habitat for prairie species. . . . Ace thinks there’s people out there would be proud a get into such a way of livin, kind of a experiment in community habitat restoration. (356) The “covenant” presents a model of long-term and sustainable reemplacement that requires an adaptation to and healing of the physical environment. As a whole, Prairie Restoration Homesteads, as a part of the vision of the Buffalo Commons, reimagines how humans might more conscientiously inhabit the region. As someone who has adopted the panhandle region as his home, the real estate venture is a perfect fit for Bob: finding homes becomes his business. The paradigm of bioregional renewal and redemption implicit 184ҍ healing the wounds of history

in Mesquite’s “moral geography” thus ultimately finds its parallel in Bob’s new commitment to place.

A Contemporary Ghost Dance in King’s Truth and Bright Water Like Bob and Ace, the characters in King’s third novel, Truth and Bright Water, must wrestle with the realities of ruin and loss and seek redemption and restoration. Set in an American railroad town, Truth, and a Canadian Indian reserve, Bright Water, this bildungsroman, narrated by a teenaged Blackfoot boy named Tecumseh, unfolds on both sides of the Montana and Alberta border. The presence of the national border at the 49th parallel underscores the prominence of cultural divisions in the novel, while the Blackfoot reserve is a potent reminder of the consequences of the Euroamerican conquest of the Plains. The legacy of loss for the Plains Indians implicit in this conquest forms the basis of King’s engagement with the pastoral power of the Buffalo Commons myth. King establishes the template for his manipulation of Buffalo Commons pastoralism in the brief prologue to Truth and Bright Water. In the prologue, there is the “fierce and alive” Shield River that “snakes across the belly of the prairies . . . and splits the land in two” (1). Arching across this river is the bridge between Truth and Bright Water, ostensibly a sign of rejoining a land split in two but ultimately a symbol and site of divisiveness and broken connections. Although it looks “whole and complete” from a distance, the illusion is broken on closer inspection to reveal the “open planking and the rusting webs of iron mesh” (1) of an abandoned project. Tecumseh later reveals the history of the incomplete bridge: part of a proposed new highway that would intersect with Truth and cross over into Canada at Bright Water, work was halted halfway through the bridge’s construction and the project was abandoned for undisclosed reasons—another plan to rejuvenate the economy of the rural Plains gone awry. The “steady stream of tourists” that were to pass through the borderland region on their way to Waterton, Banff, Glacier, or Yellowstone (38) were redirected, leaving the economies of Truth and Bright Water in stasis. The most significant cultural landmark in the novel is the abandoned church that sits on a hill overlooking Truth. The church, like the railroad, is a vestige of the region’s frontier period. King metaphorically links these two instruments of Manifest Destiny in his description of the church steeple: “[It] healing the wounds of history ҏ 185

is square and flat with a set and angle that make it look as if a thick spike has been driven through the church itself and hammered into the prairies” (1). Reminiscent of the iron spikes that connect the railroad tracks to the prairie, the church is thus aligned with the advancement of the frontier. Furthermore, as viewed from the river, King explains, the church looks like a “ship leaned at the keel, sparkling in the light, pitching over the horizon in search of a new world” (2). This image implies that the building of this church in the northern Plains continues the legacy of North American colonization begun back in the time of Columbus. While the church itself looks “hammered into the prairies,” a symbol of permanence and order, the story of the church, like many Plains stories, is one of transience. The building was sold to the Baptists in the 1940s, and then passed on to the Nazarenes, then to the First Assembly of God church, and finally to the Sacred Word Gospel church whose members abandoned it after the construction on the bridge was halted. In the postfrontier cultural landscape of the Plains, the church epitomizes how fleeting connections to place can be within a cultural context that generates an exploitative, boom-to-bust approach. Thus, the church provides a complex metaphor for the Euroamerican tradition of settling the region; it is at once an icon of frontier expansion and, as a ruined and abandoned structure, a sign of the failure to successfully grapple with the realities of the region. The “open wound of wood” on the north side of the church, ripped apart by the “cold and wind” (2), underscores the fact that the Plains have been scarred by the paradigm of imposition that has driven two centuries of Euroamerican settlement. Taken together, the cultural landmarks that King maps out in the prologue and in the early chapters of the novel make up a landscape of loss, division, and abandonment. This cultural landscape, however, represents only one dimension of the place where the novel is set. King juxtaposes his description of the half-built bridge and the abandoned church with a series of natural images that communicate a different story of the region: one of cycles and continuity. The final four paragraphs of the prologue include descriptions of the nonhuman dimensions of the Truth and Bright Water area: the Horns, a rock formation which hangs over the Shield on the American side; the ubiquitous wind that “moves in the shadows” underneath the bridge (2); and the flora and fauna that typify the region’s physical environment. Through his account of the animals that roam the river valley during 186ҍ healing the wounds of history

daylight and then at night, King undermines the linear cultural narrative implied by the bridge and church and instead stresses the cyclical, diurnal rhythm of the natural world. Furthermore, the most prominent topographical feature in the valley is the Horns. These are “twin stone pillars” that come up from the water and meet to form a “shaggy rock crescent that hangs over the river like the hooked head of a buffalo” (2). This rock is an “old place” that serves as the setting for a couple of the novel’s key moments. That the Horns look like the head of a buffalo is significant; with this description, King introduces the buffalo imagery that figures so prominently in the novel. By linking this image to an old and sacred structure like the Horns, a place where one can “turn into the wind and feel the earth breathing” (2), King endows his buffalo iconography with a spiritual aspect. Like the rhythm of day and night and like the blowing of the wind, the Horns stand for the endurance of nature. Many of the characters in King’s novel suffer from the postmodern condition of placelessness and are essentially disengaged from these natural rhythms. This disconnection from place is most evident in Tecumseh’s father, Elvin, and in Franklin Heavy Runner (whose namesake, the historical Blackfoot chief, is featured in Welch’s Fools Crow). These characters were both born and raised in the river valley, but both are disconnected from the physical environment and both make very poor father figures. Elvin is a borderline alcoholic who has abandoned his family, who has left the reservation for Truth, and who moves from job to job throughout the novel. His main job involves smuggling biohazardous waste across the border and dumping it on the Canadian reserve (82–83). He is thus a parasite who feeds off the waste of modern civilization. Franklin is also connected to industrial waste: as the tribal chief he allows a portion of reservation land near the Shield to be used as a landfill, figuring it would mean big money. Although the landfill was supposed to have been closed down because it was too close to the river, Tecumseh and Lum witness a bulldozer covering garbage with a mound of dirt (152–53). The implication is that the landfill was never closed and that Franklin is involved in a corrupt waste-smuggling operation. Focused on making money, both Elvin and Franklin have little concern that their operation is polluting the Shield and negatively altering the landscape. As Tecumseh and Lum watch the bulldozer at work, Lum refers to garbage as the “new buffalo” (153). In the postfrontier world, this is how modern Indians, stripped of their traditional connection to the land, healing the wounds of history ҏ 187

must make their living. That Elvin and Franklin are linked to this “new buffalo” reinforces their spiritual, if not physical, displacement from the land. This displacement is further illustrated in the attitude of these two men toward the “old” buffalo. Another one of Franklin’s schemes involves setting up a buffalo hunt at the Indian Days celebration where tourists can buy tickets to chase a small herd of buffalo around an enclosed space and shoot paintballs at them from a motorcycle sidecar. This scheme is highly successful: it is the “white man’s wet dream” (151), as Lum says, and the tourists line up to take their shots. Franklin had originally purchased a hundred and fifty head of buffalo to attract tourists to his Happy Trails campground (another money-making scheme gone wrong), but it did not draw the crowds he had hoped. After two years with no increased tourist traffic, he buys the motorcycles and hatches his buffalo hunt plan. The essential point here is that he does not return the buffalo to the Plains for spiritual or ecological reasons, or even for the good of the reservation community. Indeed, Franklin does not envision his returning buffalo as part of a grander restoration project in the mode of the Poppers’ Buffalo Commons; instead, he reenacts the hunts of the late nineteenth century that nearly decimated the entire species and plays upon the racist impulses behind the white man’s wet dream of destroying the buffalo.11 In this way, Franklin is fixated on the idea that the buffalo is a sign of loss, something that will always and should always vanish. It is no surprise then that a number of the original Bright Water herd, as Elvin tells Tecumseh, “just disappeared” (106) shortly after they were brought to the reserve. Elvin participates in the buffalo hunt scheme solely for the wages. He delivers the motorcycles to the reserve in his truck and is generally skeptical of the venture. For Elvin, the buffalo are reminders of the tragic past. As he and his son watch Franklin’s herd grazing in their corral, he pontificates on the disappearance of the buffalo: Those history books you get in school say that the railroad sharpshooters killed off all the buffalo, but that’s not true. . . . Most of them just took off and never came back. . . . Just like that. . . . Soon as the smart ones got a good look at the Whites, they took off. When Tecumseh asks him where they went, he avoids the question and responds, “That’s the mistake we made. . . . We should have gone with them” (91). This longing for what could have been is certainly understandable, but it 188ҍ healing the wounds of history

implies that buffalo belong only to the past and that they, like the Indians, are out of place on the postfrontier Plains. Elvin’s portrait of buffalo here is an admiring one: he revises the “official” historical record of their decimation and thereby transforms them from being the victims of white encroachment to being active agents who choose not to live in a region colonized by Euroamericans. This portrait is only a fantasy; underneath this fantasy lies a profound angst that reflects a collective feeling of self-deprecation for the Indians who did not follow the “smart ones” when the Euroamericans arrived. As he later proclaims, “Buffalo are stupid. . . . The ones who stayed behind are stupid. . . . Just like the Indians” (106). This sentiment hardly reveals a reverence for buffalo or for the connection to place that the animal traditionally signifies. The short-sighted actions of Elvin and Franklin, mired as they are in the tragic past, are offset by the revolutionary artistry of Monroe Swimmer whose reputation and fame as an artist is based on his various restoration projects. His expertise involves restoring old paintings, mainly nineteenthcentury landscapes by white artists. His work becomes political when, as he tells Tecumseh, he sees images in a nineteenth-century landscape that “weren’t in the original painting [begin] to bleed through” (130). The images include an “Indian village on a lake” (130) and Monroe decides to paint “the village and the Indians back into the painting” (133). This act of cultural repossession restores the Native American presence to the North American landscape. Monroe’s “magic” brush (129) reverses centuries of post- Contact Euroamerican attempts to make the Native Americans vanish. Monroe’s restoration project in Truth continues this work of cultural repossession by drawing on the mythology of the Buffalo Commons. He purchases and moves into the abandoned church that overlooks the American town and begins to paint it so that it is indistinguishable from the surrounding prairie. Tecumseh describes what he sees on his first encounter with Monroe’s work: There is no sign of Monroe, but you can see where he’s been at work with his paints and brushes. The entire east side of the church is gone. I don’t know how Monroe has done it, but he’s painted this side so that it blends in with the prairies and the sky, and he’s done such a good job that it looks as if part of the church has been chewed off. (43) healing the wounds of history ҏ 189

By erasing the church from existence, he symbolically reverses the exploitative violence of Euroamerican frontier advancement; that is, in Monroe’s reconstruction of the living landscape, nature bites back. As Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews argue, Monroe buys the dilapidated and ruined church “in order to present his own artistic countermemories of Native life on the Plains” (184), to replace a Eurocentric view of the region with a “Native-centered” one (185). For Davidson, Walton, and Andrews, the reclamation of a pre-Contact grasslands devoid of the signs of frontier advancement is an integral part of this countermemory: “[Monroe] uses paints to dramatize the gradual consumption of the church by the land, and thus erases one symbol of colonization that has led to the division of the Blackfoot territory” (185). As Monroe’s work continues throughout the novel, the church completely disappears from sight; his disappearing act is so convincing that toward the end of his project the artist himself cannot find the church (238). Monroe does not simply erase the church out of existence, but replaces this cultural artifact with one of an open-space wilderness. The “gradual consumption” of the church by Monroe’s grass-and-sky mural enacts an image of biotic reclamation that places the tragic story of colonization within the broader context of nature’s cycles. Just like the descriptions of the ruined church and the abandoned bridge are juxtaposed with the Shield, the Horns, the animals, and the wind in the prologue, Monroe’s painting over the church dramatizes themes of endurance and continuity. He draws attention to the deep history of the region, a process of change and natural succession that had been going on long before even the Blackfeet inhabited the Plains. Monroe’s depiction of the original prairies would be incomplete without the presence of the buffalo. His buffalo, of course, are artificial: three hundred and sixty of them. Tecumseh describes them as “flat iron wire bent into the shape of a buffalo” of “all different shapes and sizes” (130, 131). They secure the figures to the ground “with a long spike, the kind they use for laying track” (132): the act of replacing the buffalo on the prairies thereby echoes and provides ironic commentary about the building of the transcontinental railroad, the ultimate symbol of frontier advancement. Indeed, the iron spikes that are a part of Monroe’s restoration project directly correlate with the church steeple, which looks like a “thick spike” that has “hammered” the structure into the prairies (1). The iron spikes of Monroe’s project represent 190ҍ healing the wounds of history

a paradigm shift that opposes the model of imposition embodied in the church and the railroad. As native inhabitants of the prairies, the buffalo signify adaptation to and connection with the landscape. While the buffalo spikes serve as reminders of the process of colonization, Monroe’s project reinscribes them as symbols of recovery. His modern art experiment uses a central symbol of the triumph of Euroamerican frontier expansion to bring back the buffalo and restake a claim on the land for Native America. This act of turning back time and reestablishing the Plains as a Nativecentered space links Monroe’s project with the historical Ghost Dance of the 1890s. In his analysis of the allusions in Truth and Bright Water, Robin Ridington points out how Monroe reenacts the Ghost Dance of the nineteenth century as a modern-day Wovoka (93). Certainly this comparison is easy to see: like Wovoka’s prophecy, Monroe’s artistic vision erases the colonizing presence and brings the buffalo back to the prairies. The aim of Monroe’s Ghost Dance project, like its historical predecessor, is to assure the survival of Native culture and values in the face of physical and spiritual dispossession. In presenting a visual representation of what the Plains were like before white encroachment, Monroe allows the possibility for Indians like Tecumseh to reconnect to the place and to see the deeper history of the region. Monroe’s work, in a bout of magic realism, also seems to bring back the ghosts of departed Native Americans. Monroe’s return to Truth and the beginning of his restoration project is accompanied by the arrival at the Happy Trails campground of a small band of Cherokees who have traveled from Georgia. Although it is never directly addressed in the novel, this group of Indians turns out to be ghosts from the Cherokee removals: John Ross, chief of the Cherokee during their 1838 removal from Georgia; George Guess, the English name for Sequoyah, who “devised a syllabary for writing the Cherokee language” (Ridington 100); and Rebecca Neugin, a Cherokee woman who “actually traveled the Trail of Tears from Georgia to Oklahoma and relayed her childhood experience of displacement to an interviewer later in life” (Davidson et al. 145). Both Ridington and Davidson et al. acknowledge that the allusions to these historical figures function as reminders of the physical and cultural dispossession of the Native Americans. Even more significantly, I would argue, the fact that these ancestral spirits return, like the buffalo return, emphasizes an overarching paradigm of recovery. The story of the buffalo on the healing the wounds of history ҏ 191

Plains is a tragic one of removal and displacement, filled with the threat of extinction, but through memory and imagination Monroe brings them back, just as his artistic Ghost Dance seems to bring back the Cherokees. While Rebecca’s association with the Trail of Tears makes her a signifier of loss and removal, as Ridington, Davidson, et al. suggest, it is important to recognize that she also comes to represent continuity, not only because her spirit is brought back to the earth, but, perhaps more importantly, because she is a survivor of the Trail of Tears—someone who lives to recount the story of removal and who finds a new home in Oklahoma. While there is no debating the tragic nature of the Cherokees’ removal from Georgia, it is essential to recognize that their history does not end with this removal; they live on in flesh, memory, and story. Monroe’s Buffalo Commons installation therefore calls forth the ghosts in the landscape and reconnects the Native community to their past, while at the same time it restores a relational, ecocentric worldview by juxtaposing the cyclical rhythms of the natural world with the palimpsest that is the cultural landscape of the contemporary Great Plains. The Buffalo Commons proposal thus overlaps with the Ghost Dance in a couple of interesting ways, the most obvious of which is that they both draw on the image of returning buffalo as an answer to biocultural crises. Frank Popper himself acknowledges this link in a conversation with Anne Matthews, who, in her book Where the Buffalo Roam (1992), chronicles a year of the Poppers’ speaking engagements throughout the Great Plains. Pondering the heavy resistance to their idea from the region’s farmers, Frank Popper explains, “These farmers and ranchers don’t know it yet, but in the contemporary West they are the new Indians. We seem to be cast as the new Crazy Horse, speaking in visions. Or as the twentieth-century intellectual version of the Ghost Dance. What a mind warp!” (52). On the one hand, such a statement can be read as yet another act of cultural appropriation where the “plight” of Native Americans is co-opted in an effort to sell another Euroamerican vision of the Plains. Jonathan Raban, for example, calls the Poppers’ proposal to reinvent the frontier “the old story, of the prairie as a blank page” (250). On the other hand, the comparison to the Ghost Dance is more than metaphorical and the Buffalo Commons vision is more than simply pastoral nostalgia; it involves a serious reconsideration of what the conquest of the Plains has cost not only the Native and non-Native communities, but the land-community as well. The combined ecological and cultural 192ҍ healing the wounds of history

dimensions of the Buffalo Commons, in other words, make its appeal crosscultural. This is evident in the fact that the plan’s most vocal supporters are Native American intellectuals like Winona LaDuke and Vine Deloria Jr. One of the more active manifestations of the Buffalo Commons is the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, formed in 1993 as a pan-tribal consortium dedicated to restoring bison to reservation lands for the economic and spiritual amelioration of Native communities. As part of the overall motif of ghost dancing in Truth and Bright Water, King draws on the mythology of the Buffalo Commons in order to incorporate an ecological imperative into the cultural polemic of Monroe’s project. In re-creating a High Plains wilderness, he allows for the possibility of reinhabiting the region and relocating a sense of place. His restoration project is ultimately informed by a bioregional perspective: it presumes that every location and every region can be viewed as the “centre of the universe,” which is how both Tecumseh and Monroe refer to the Shield valley (227, 251). That is, Monroe’s restored Buffalo Commons helps dissolve constructed boundaries and borders, like the 49th parallel, and replaces such boundaries with a paradigm of relationality. In resurrecting the Plains as the “centre of the universe,” Monroe creates a space where healing can occur. This is most evident in the repatriation ceremony that Monroe initiates, during which he and Tecumseh cast a number of skulls off the Horns into the Shield. Monroe had stolen these skulls from the museums where he worked, taking advantage of his fame as an artist to rescue the bones of Indian children from all over the world. In a ceremony that is “not traditional,” as Tecumseh notes, they tie a ribbon through the skull and eventually cast it into the river (252). The bones are from Indians all over North America, most without any connection to the High Plains; however, by recreating the sense that the Shield valley is the “centre of the universe,” Monroe’s “ceremony . . . for putting bones in the river” (251) becomes a pan-tribal act of symbolic repatriation that equates homeland with place-sense. That is, his Buffalo Commons provides a space where the living and the dead can be reconnected to the natural world. The dichotomy of insider/outsider is dissolved, replaced with a model of interrelatedness: the North American grasslands do not belong to the whites, anymore than they belong to the Blackfeet who migrated there or the Cherokees who were forcibly moved to the region, but are common to all who respectfully inhabit them. healing the wounds of history ҏ 193

This repatriation ceremony is interrupted by the appearance of Lum, who is severely distracted and on the verge of committing suicide. The timing and location of Lum’s suicide reinforce the tragic dimension of Truth and Bright Water. For Lum, the half-constructed bridge “symbolizes the despair of a Native boy who cannot find escape from feelings of insecurity and situations of abuse even within his own tribal community” (Davidson et al. 153); that he jumps off this bridge during Monroe’s repatriation ceremony underscores how “the young boy joins myriad other Indian children, whose bones now rest at the bottom of the river” (194). In this way, Lum’s death adds an important corrective to the hopeful message implicit in Monroe’s restoration project. His suicide reminds the reader that barriers still exist between nations and races, between humans and the natural world, and even within tribal communities, and that these barriers still generate tragic consequences. When Lum follows the skull of an Indian child into the Shield below, this act further reminds us of the historical roots of many of these barriers. Lum’s death thus reveals the limitations of Monroe’s work. To suggest that this suicide “undercut[s]” the “comic dimensions” of Monroe’s buffalo commons project (Davidson et al. 194), however, fails to fully acknowledge the double vision—the overarching tragicomic dimension—of that project. Lum’s demise represents the painful aspects of dis-location; although he is physically rooted in place (he cannot escape his broken home in Bright Water), he is spiritually and emotionally disconnected from the landscape. He has inherited from his father an overwhelming sense that the Shield valley is a landscape of loss, both personal and historical. Like Franklin, he has difficulty coming to terms with this loss, of seeing Bright Water as the “centre of the universe.” Thus, Lum becomes a victim of displacement, entrenched in the ongoing cycle of violence and despair. Monroe’s restoration project works against this cycle, returning place-sense to the foreground of tribal identity. The political and cultural fight to reclaim tribal lands and tribal identity must go on, but equally necessary is the recovery of a relational worldview. The full force of Monroe’s epic vision is passed on to his main devotee, Tecumseh. Monroe’s Buffalo Commons installation allows Tecumseh to further cultivate this place-sense and to better visualize the “deep map” of the region. The measure of Tecumseh’s success in achieving this “prehistoric” place-sense is manifest in his reaction to Franklin’s penned-in buffalo 194ҍ healing the wounds of history

herd after he has helped Monroe with the iron buffalo. Upon hearing a few of the cows bellowing he says: I wonder if they can remember the good old days when they had the place to themselves, before they had to worry about Indians running them off cliffs or Europeans shooting at them from the comfort of railroad cars or bloodthirsty tourists in tan walking shorts and expensive sandals chasing them across the prairies on motorcycles. (235) Here, Tecumseh notes the tragic elements of the animals’ past, but he also tries to imagine their ancient dignity and their connection to the Plains. Through this emphatic act of imagining the bisons’ perspective—perhaps the Plains version of Aldo Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain”—Tecumseh is able to articulate the profound relationship between the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Furthermore, Tecumseh embodies the concept of survival and continuity that is so central to Monroe’s contemporary Ghost Dance. Monroe’s Buffalo Commons project, with its mixture of “magic” and “realism” (198), prepares Tecumseh to deal with the loss of his cousin and to overcome the potential downward spiral into despair that his death might cause. As Monroe sets up the iron buffalo on the prairies, which are all facing the river, he deliberately sets up one smaller buffalo “away from the rest, looking back towards the church” (198). When Tecumseh expresses concern about this baby buffalo, Monroe explains to him: “If you want the herds to return, you have to understand magic. . . . Every so often, a calf will get lost or separated from the herd. . . . If the baby doesn’t make it back to the herd in time, the coyotes will find it. . . . It’s sad . . . but it happens all the time” (198). Monroe’s Buffalo Commons is not simply a bucolic scene of the natural world peaceably restored, but includes the reality of loss that is a part of nature’s cycles. The stray buffalo anticipates Lum’s separation from the community; that the baby buffalo is headed toward the church provides a metaphorical reminder of the larger cultural forces at work in Lum’s demise. While the fact that it “happens all the time” does not take the sting of sadness away from the reality of loss, the glimmer of hope is that this loss is not and cannot be the end of the story—Tecumseh and the community must learn to move on. The pastoral image implicit in the Buffalo Commons thus parallels the tragicomic pastoralism of the returning buffalo at the end of Welch’s Fools Crow: healing the wounds of history ҏ 195

while Fools Crow’s vision on the yellow skin informs him that the buffalo will soon be decimated, their seasonal molting and their return to grazing ranges in the closing moments emphasize a paradigm of cycles and endurance. Likewise, on a personal level, Tecumseh and the Blackfoot community will transcend personal and historical loss in order to survive as a people and as part and parcel of the “centre of the universe.” While Monroe is the self-proclaimed “hero” who has set in motion the processes that will help “save the world,” Tecumseh’s role is equally important. He is assigned by Monroe to be the hero’s “minstrel,” to “make up songs and stories about [Monroe] so no one forgets who [he is]” (193). This role once again aligns Tecumseh with Rebecca, the Trail of Tears survivor, who has recorded the story of her people’s removal and readjustment. As the narrator of King’s novel, Tecumseh is the carrier of Monroe’s restoration narrative, which includes tragic moments—the deaths of Lum and Soldier and the separation of his parents—but that more importantly incorporates a longer view of history, one that allows him to appreciate and strive for a connection to his home environment. While Monroe’s project effects very limited practical change, his work and its influence on Tecumseh underscore the importance of art as a tool through which to realize the multidimensionality of place, a point I shall return to in the epilogue. It is significant that both Proulx and King end their novels on a note of doubt: Bob calls into question the future of the Panhandle Bison Range and Lum’s suicide at the end of Truth and Bright Water certainly tempers the comic vision of Monroe’s art. This sense of doubt, and the legacies of loss behind it, is placed within the broader context of nature’s cycles—the bird’s-eye view of history, so to speak. Ultimately, Proulx and King present two different versions of the Buffalo Commons, the former a more direct manifestation of the Poppers’ plan and the latter an artistic rendering that draws on the power of that plan. While these two authors approach the postfrontier Plains from two divergent cultural perspectives and contend with two different, though overlapping, sets of ghosts in the landscape, they each emphasize that an appreciation for the endurance of natural and cultural cycles is a necessary component of the redemptive process of reimplacement. This process, predicated on the paradigm of reciprocity implicated in Mesquite’s “moral geography,” does not banish these ghosts from the landscape, but, as Bud Hirsch says of Monroe’s project, it does “point the way” toward a process of redemption (154). 196ҍ healing the wounds of history

Ultimately, the paradoxes inherent in the mythology of the Buffalo Commons make it a flexible and useful vehicle through which to navigate the palimpsest that is the cultural and natural landscape of the Great Plains. It is these paradoxes that have made the Poppers’ proposal a touchstone of regional debate over the past two decades as Natives and non-Natives, easterners and westerners, city and country dwellers have wrestled with the past and for the future of the Plains. The mythology of the Buffalo Commons encompasses the darker aspects of the region’s history—the legacies of loss, failure, and violence that define the centuries-long attempt to inhabit the place; this mythology also stresses the potential, even the need, to transcend these legacies and to reverse the dangerous and damaging trend of history. By tapping into complex pastoral discourse embedded in the Buffalo Commons metaphor, Proulx and King navigate the complex and paradoxical tapestry of the Great Plains in order to re-envision what it means to properly inhabit the arid region.

healing the wounds of history ҏ 197

 Epilogue Pastoral Art and the Quest for Beauty

As a wealthy “famous Indian artist,” Monroe Swimmer can afford to bypass economic considerations when he uses his land for artistic purposes, and he is therefore free to ignore the financial pressures and temptations that haunt those whose livelihood depends upon making the land produce. Assessing the practical value of Monroe’s restoration project thus raises a larger question that ecocritics have been debating for decades and that lurks at the core of this book: what is the relationship between aesthetics and activism, between art and community? Within the confines of King’s novel, as I already suggested in the preceding chapter, the lasting power of Monroe’s art is in its effect on Tecumseh and, to a lesser extent, the broader Truth and Bright Water communities. Ultimately, Monroe’s mission as an artist is about changing his viewers’ consciousness and reconditioning their way of seeing and being in the world. The social objective of his oeuvre is relatively clear: his very reputation is based on the power his work has to elevate the visibility and status of Native communities in the wake of centuries of erasure and removal by Euroamerican settler culture. While less explicit, his art—particularly his Buffalo Commons installation—also employs an element of environmental activism. To understand how his activism works is to understand the potential power of pastoral art in general.

What Monroe’s restoration project does on an abstract level—on the level of what we typically call vision—is resist the influence and allure of what Curtis White has recently called the Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is what has driven and what continues to drive Western civilization: a thirst for conquest, consumption, and accumulation. White explains, “This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order, the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence” (emphasis in the original). He later adds, “It is a mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but also, more profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder, and eventual anguish and regret” (33, 35). In the arid West, the handiwork of the Barbaric Heart is evident in the scars left behind by Manifest Destiny and its war on the indigenous human and nonhuman communities and the subsequent centuries-long plunder of the soil. Within Truth and Bright Water, we see this barbarism at play in Franklin Heavy Runner’s exploitation of the buffalo herd and in Elvin’s participation in hazardouswaste dumping on the Bright Water reserve. Lum’s suicide at the end of the novel is both a symptom and a culmination of the Barbaric Heart feeding upon itself. Other signs of this destructiveness are manifest in the works I’ve examined here: in Bull’s violence against his prize cow; in Ivy’s draining of the Captain’s marsh; in the swirling Dust Bowl storms that kill the Thors’ only son; and in the rampant spread of Global Pork Rind’s hog farms. What opposes this barbarism, White contends, is an emphasis on the virtues of wholeness and beauty. About the latter, White professes, “Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don’t mean the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within communities, and in our relation to the natural world” (36). Monroe Swimmer counters the Barbaric Heart by deploying an aesthetic of wholeness in his art. By painting over the church and removing the remnants of past violence against the land and its original inhabitants, Monroe visually represents the prospect of starting over. His restoration work, that is, offers its viewer the opportunity to experience a pastoral remove, to imagine the high prairies in their indigenous state. Unlike conventional pastoralism, however, Monroe’s pastoral art compels its viewer to move beyond the notion that culture and nature are violently opposed to one another; instead, it offers a vision of the human and the nonhuman in harmony—the grass and wind 200ҍ epilogue

intermixed with paint and iron—and depicts this harmony as beautiful. By simply offering a glimpse of this alternative to barbarism, King seems to suggest, Monroe presents Tecumseh with a more promising life trajectory than the one that ultimately destroys Lum. Lum wanted nothing more than to flee what he saw as the permanently damaged human and natural landscape of Bright Water. Tecumseh inhabits the same tragically broken landscape, is a part of the same flawed community, but the magic of Monroe’s masterpiece is that it allows Tecumseh to see the tragic as only one dimension of a much broader and ever-evolving story. Monroe’s presentation of the Beautiful, which cements Tecumseh’s commitment to Truth and Bright Water, is a starting point—a renewal—but also an objective to persistently aspire toward. What is true of Monroe’s art is ultimately true of King’s novel and of each of the pastoral narratives that I have addressed in this book. This is not to suggest that any of the authors I’ve explored here have a clear and uncontested path toward environmental sainthood: I discussed Cather’s own ambivalent legacy at length in chapter 3 and, with the right instrument, I suspect the steady beating of the Barbaric Heart could be detected within each of the ten bad land pastorals dissected in this book. Indeed, the biographies of many of the authors I’ve focused on—with the exceptions of Manfred, Welch, and King—grate against the concept of committing to place, as, like the prodigal Monroe Swimmer, most of them are part-time Plains folk at best. What their works share in common, though, and what propels the tradition of bad land pastoralism that I have been tracing here is an underlying faith in the beauty of wholeness and in the multidimensional practice of inhabiting a continuously changing biocultural landscape. Within all of these works, pastoral experience—the encounter with the Beautiful—is not an endgame unto itself but an initiation that leads toward a renewed understanding of the integral connection between the human and nonhuman communities. Bad land pastoralism is about recognizing the inevitability of change that comes along with human use and taking seriously the power that story and language have to shape the direction of that change.

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Notes

Introduction 1. As a journalist, Manning popularizes thinking about the Plains that informs the more academic approaches of environmental historians like Flores and Worster. Jackson’s Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, typifies an effort to recreate and restore the arid Plains by researching sustainable agricultural practices that utilize native flora. Burgess’s Center for the New West promotes a different strategy by shifting the emphasis from the region’s rural identity to its urban potential. 2. I borrow the “bad land” moniker from the title of Jonathan Raban’s social history of Montana’s homesteading frontier, Bad Land: An American Romance (1996). Raban’s book exemplifies revisionist approaches to the Euroamerican settlement of the Plains. In it, he uncovers the ambivalent legacy of Plains homesteading, acknowledging both the romance and tragedy implicit in the Euroamerican drive to conquer and improve seemingly inhospitable terrain. 3. Ricou and Harrison focus solely on Canadian literature, while Thacker and Quantic explore the Great Plains as a whole and therefore include both American and Canadian texts. Although Ricou and Harrison exclude American literature from their studies, I agree with Thacker that their assumptions may be readily applied to both literatures. Like Quantic and Thacker, I take an internationalist approach, examining texts from both sides of the 49th parallel. Certainly, differences abound between the two nations, as American and Canadian authors respond to and draw on distinct histories, myths, literary traditions, and national ideologies. Insofar as this study investigates the interface between human culture and the unique climactic and topographical features of the Great Plains, the American and Canadian experiences are ultimately parallel; in other words, the similar topography of Plains space on both sides of the border warrants an international approach.

1. (Un)settling the Indi a n W ilder ness 1. Throughout this book, I cycle through a series of terms to describe the indigenous peoples of North America. I will most commonly use the terms Native American (or Native, when applied as an adjective) and Plains Indians, employing the latter particularly when discussing indigenous populations in the region on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Where possible and appropriate, I will specify tribal affiliations. Finally, I will retain the misnomer Indian when it is used by the Euroamerican writers I examine or when I am referring to the Indian as a Euroamerican construction. For example, the term Indian wilderness, which I adapt from Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness, connotes a conventional Euroamerican view of the inseparability of indigenous people and their natural environments. 2. I use the designation tribal instead of Native here to underscore and ultimately explode the Eurocentric dichotomy of tribe/nation that posits the former as a primitive, even backward social grouping compared with the latter. The term tribal also denotes the reality of cultural and regional variation among indigenous communities, which is to say that not all tribes use the land in the same way. The tribal communities whose representations I focus on here are those that depended upon bison-hunting practices. 3. I borrow this term from Adamson, one of many scholars working in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of environmental justice. Recent works by Adamson, Hallock, and Spence engage in what Jeffrey Myers calls “multicultural ecocriticism” (Converging Stories 7), which explores the connections between racial politics and environmental issues. 4. The Prairie, for example, is excerpted in Quantic and Hafen’s recent anthology, A Great Plains Reader, officially incorporating the novel into the regional canon. 5. For a sampling of critical assessments of this idea, see Newlin’s “The Prairie and ‘The Prairies,’ ” Miller’s “Cooper’s Elegiac Comedy,” M. Lewis’s “The Desert Metaphor in Cooper’s The Prairie,” and Thacker’s Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination. 6. In “Cooper’s Invention of the West,” Brotherston provides a solid examination of the Indians in The Prairie, pointing out Cooper’s convenient reinvention of western Indians (see particularly 169). Cooper constructed his account of the prairie tribes from what he read in his sources and through brief run-ins with some actual western Indians; for example, Cooper modeled Hard-Heart on Petalasharo, a young Pawnee chief whom he met on the east coast in 1821 (for the sources of Cooper’s prairie Indians see Överland’s The Making and Meaning of an American Classic 56, 78–87). 7. More typically, miscegenation provides the subject of frontier tragedies that pose ideal unions between the races only to erase them. Stephens’s Malaeska, which ends with the deaths of the white hunter, his Indian wife, and their half-blood son, provides one example of this. Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) is perhaps the more widely

204ҍ notes to pages 1–27

known antebellum novel to deal with the dissolution of an interracial union, as the title character disappears to make room for his white wife’s reunion with her English paramour. Within Cooper’s opus, the potential romance between Uncas and Cora in The Last of the Mohicans ends with sacrificial violence. Such narratives hover around, but ultimately abandon, the positive potential of love matches made across racial lines. 8. It is abundantly clear, as most critics have noted, that Cooper generally shared this overall view of the uselessness of the arid West, a view he likely adopted from James’s account of the Long Expedition into the Great American Desert (for commentary on Cooper’s sources, see Överland’s The Making and Meaning and MuszynskaWallace’s “The Sources of The Prairie.”). Indeed, the hope that the aridity of the Plains would slow, if not altogether thwart, Euroamerican expansion, and thus prevent the weakening and thinning out of the young nation, is directly expressed in the introduction as Cooper refers to the region as a “barrier to the progress of the American people westward” (Cooper xxv). 9. Cox borrows this term from Jill Carter, who uses it to “privilege a critical practice based on the work of Native creative writers and intellectuals and foreground the issues that they raise as important to Native people and communities” (Muting White Noise 12). This emphasis on “red readings” is a manifestation of the recent calls for an American Indian literary nationalism made over the past decade and a half, most notably by Native scholars Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. 10. As both Westrum (“Back to the Future”) and Barry (“ ‘A Myth to Be Alive’ ”) suggest, Fools Crow bridges the gap between the American Indian past and future and incorporates the cultural changes wrought by white encroachment into a kind of myth of survival. In this manner, Welch’s hero represents and resolves some of the central concerns found in many contemporary works by Native authors. As I argue in the final chapter, King’s Monroe Swimmer in Truth and Bright Water fulfills a similar role as a contemporary Native hero. 11. Little Dog, the Pikuni head chief succeeded by Mountain Chief after his death, was among those who signed a treaty in 1865 that moved the southern boundary of Blackfoot territory northward and promised annual monetary payments. His farming exploits and peacekeeping efforts are described briefly in John C. Ewers’s The Blackfeet (231–33, 235, 237). It is notable that Mountain Chief, one of the more influential reactionaries and representative of the opposite extreme of Little Dog’s attitude, was also killed by one of his own people in 1872.

2. Pastor a lism a nd Enclosur e 1. See, for example, Webb’s The Great Plains, Manning’s Grassland, and Starrs’s Cattle Ranching in the American West.

notes to pages 33–57 ҏ 205

2. It is important here to note important subregional differences: military engagements with the Plains Indians on the northern Plains—in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas—continued until 1890 and thereby slowed the cattlemen’s occupation of these territories. When they did move in, organizations like the Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association kept a steady political hold on the land, protecting their interests against the incoming tide of homesteaders and rustlers. 3. Although differences abound between American and Canadian ranching as they developed in the West, they held in common the techniques and cultural apparatuses that make western ranching a unique bioregional phenomenon: grazing substantial herds of cattle on large tracts of land, usually in the public domain (whether leased or held by “range rights”), and driving these herds to market on horseback to be sold to the expanding markets of the East. For a more detailed discussion of the differences between American and Canadian ranching practices in the West, see Thompson’s Forging the Prairie West (63–66) and Starrs’s Cattle Ranching in the American West (22–23, 66). For the best accounts of the development of Canadian ranching, see Potyondi’s In Palliser’s Triangle (especially 43–74) and Breen’s The Canadian Prairie West. 4. The fullest treatment of the role that promoters and boosters played in the settlement of the arid West is provided by Emmons’s Garden in the Grasslands; Smythe’s The Conquest of Arid America (1900) is perhaps the best example of the booster mentality tied to a faith in technology, in this case irrigation. For a good overview of dry farming, see Hargreaves’s Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains and Libecap and Hansen’s “Dryfarming Doctrine.” 5. Powell’s influence on western environmental history is well documented in many sources; see Webb, Stegner’s Beyond the One Hundredth Meridian, and Worster’s The Unsettled Country (1–30). For an outline of Pearce’s defense of the ecological viability of western ranching, see Breen’s The Canadian Prairie West (especially 112–19). 6. While Pifer’s work is the most useful to my study here as she addresses the broader, trans-Atlantic literary applications of the child figure, she continues a scholarly genealogy that includes works focused mostly on British literature. See, for example, Kuhn’s The Child in Western Literature and Blum’s The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction. 7. His Royal Nibs (1925) was published under the name Winnifred Eaton Reeve—her married name. 8. The term ranch, as I have been using it to this point, refers to grazing land, which during the open-range era could be quite large. Thus, as I posit it here, the range-farm frontier denotes a dividing line between two distinct land-use practices. As Eaton uses it here, of course, “ranch” more generally refers to a plot of land given over to monocultural agricultural pursuits—whether beef production, as on the Bar Q, or grain production, as on the three other quarter sections in the novel. Throughout the

206ҍ notes to pages 58–67

rest of this chapter, I will continue to use “ranch” to refer to grazing-based operations and “farm” to refer to grain-based operations. 9. Under the Homestead and Dominion Lands acts, homesteaders were expected to cultivate a certain percentage of their acreage over a three-year span, at which point, if successful, they would receive title to their land. This was known as “proving up.” 10. Textual clues suggest that the specific setting of the novel is the area east of what is now Banff National Park, and west of Calgary. Nettie’s repeated references to the Ghost River suggest that Yankee Valley—so called because of its large number of American settlers—is situated on the high plains northwest of Calgary, a location further suggested by references to a fictional town of Barstairs whose actual counterpart is likely Carstairs, approximately sixty miles north of Calgary. 11. That Eaton is sympathetic to Angella’s cross-dressing is in part revealed through the inclusion of the diary entry, which allows Angella to speak for herself and earn the reader’s respect; without this diary entry, the reader would be more inclined to accept the more negative and conservative judgment of rural Alberta’s parochial community. Thus, I agree with Cole that Angella’s voice is among the most powerful in the novel, though, as I demonstrate, I do not agree that her abandonment of her symbolically masculine persona means a diminishment in her overall power. 12. The other books are Early Americana and Other Stories (1936), a collection of short stories previously published in the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal; Tacey Cromwell (1942), a romance set in the mining town of Bisbee; and The Lady (1957), which dramatizes the conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders in New Mexico. 13. Richter won the Pulitzer Prize for The Town in 1951 and the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos in 1960; and was awarded the gold medal for The Trees and Sea of Grass by the Society of Libraries of New York University in 1942 (Gaston vii–viii). 14. Using internal textual evidence to demonstrate what Richter would later confirm in his introduction to the Time-Life edition of the novel, Barnes posits the Arizona line as the ranch’s western border, the Rio Grande as its eastern border, and the towns of Socorro and Santo Domingo forming its southeastern and northeastern limits, respectively (17). The archetypal elements of the clash between ranchers and farmers inherent in Richter’s novel, however, make its land-use discourse readily adaptable to any setting in the arid West. 15. There is a legal and historical precedent for Lutie’s act here in the Timber Culture Act that offered an additional 160 acres to any settler who would plant the added acres in trees. An extension of the Homestead Act of 1862, the Timber Culture Act reflects an eastern bias and is largely regarded as exacerbating the destructive effects of plowing the grasslands and imposing wet-country aesthetics on a dry land environment.

notes to pages 67–86 ҏ 207

16. It is important to note here that though Powell believed that the arid West was well suited to large-scale grazing operations, he was also an avid defender of the agrarian myth. As a result, most of his suggestions for land reform involved changes that would promote the success of the grain farmer in the arid West, including increasing the size of the agricultural homesteads and establishing hydrographic communities where water rights (and irrigation patterns) were in the hands of local inhabitants. Thus, on the grounds of ideology, Powell would likely support Chamberlain’s attempt to defend the pioneer farmer; ecologically, however, Powell shares with the Colonel a “willingness to look at what was, rather than at what fantasy [. . .] said there should be” in terms of land-use practices (Stegner xvii).

3. H a r monious Fields a nd W ild Pr a ir ies 1. For a good analysis of Jim’s misreading of Virgil’s Georgics, see Goggans’s “Social (Re)visioning in the Fields of My Ántonia,” especially 156–59. 2. A Lost Lady is not Cather’s final novel set in Nebraska, as she returns to this setting in Lucy Gayheart (1935). This latter novel does not deal with either the act or the heritage of Plains pioneering, however, and therefore will not be examined in any detail here. 3. Rosowski is by no means alone in her commemoration of an “ecological aesthetics” in Cather’s work. See also Schneider’s “Willa Cather’s ‘Land Philosophy’ ”; Reynolds’s “Willa Cather’s Environmental Imagination in Context”; Dillman’s “Imagining the Land”; and Lyon’s “Willa Cather, Learner,” in which he heralds Cather as “one of our greatest nature writers . . . because she had this living sense of the biotic community” (92). The best source for exploring the divergent views concerning Cather’s environmentalism is Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination, edited by Rosowski. 4. Cather’s romanticism and modernism is the subject of much scholarship, though critics tend to look at one or the other. Rosowski’s work as a whole examines Cather’s romantic inclinations, particularly the often-cited The Voyage Perilous. In Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration Urgo examines the theme of migration in Cather’s oeuvre and categorizes her as fundamentally modernist; his is the best among many studies that investigate Cather’s reactions to and articulations of modernism (see also Downs’s Becoming Modern; Lilienfeld’s “Willa Cather”; and Rose’s “The Case of Willa Cather”). I provide working definitions of these two terms in the course of my discussion of Cather’s work, though generally I use romanticism to refer to a perspective that places value on the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of the natural world and an implicit faith in power of the individual imagination. When discussing modernism as it pertains to Cather I refer primarily to her growing skepticism toward modern society and what she sees as the prevalent materialism of post–World War I America.

208ҍ notes to pages 88–104

5. For an examination of Cather’s use of Whitman in O Pioneers! see Woodress’s “Whitman and Cather.” 6. It is perhaps not surprising that A Lost Lady is the last of Cather’s novels to deal specifically with the Plains pioneers. Her attention as a nature writer in her later novels turns to alternative models of environmentally sound living represented by the ancient civilizations of the desert Southwest; her two most significant works in this regard are Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Professor’s House, particularly the “Tom Outland’s Story” section.

4. Patches of Gr een a nd Fields of Dust 1. The Dust Bowl primarily refers to the central and southern Plains of the United States; the main areas affected by the great dust storms of the 1930s were the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, western Kansas and Nebraska, and eastern Colorado and New Mexico. However, severe drought occurred throughout the Great Plains, on both sides of the 49th parallel, and I adopt the term Dust Bowl to refer to this broader regional land event. 2. This is not to say that the pastoral mode generally separates the poles of city and country. As Raymond Williams and Leo Marx, among others, have successfully stressed, pastorals are far from bucolic expressions about the simplicity of nature versus the complexity of culture. Instead, the classical pastoral should be understood as a lopsided discourse that reveals more about the desires of the metropolis than about the human engagement with the natural world. 3. The significant gap between the perception of mass depopulation during the Dust Bowl and the historical reality should be noted here. In The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, Bonnifield, for example, analyzes a series of statistics, like newspaper circulation, post office transactions, and school closings, to suggest that more people stayed on the land than left (91–105). The lasting legacy of the Dust Bowl, however, pivots on the image of displacement. The cultural fixation on this displacement is captured most memorably in Steinbeck’s presentation of the Okie experience in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and John Ford’s filmic adaptation of this novel; but the record of this fixation is also evidenced in Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads, Dorothea Lange’s stark images of dust and depression, and Alexandre Hogue’s painting of a land and a people in deep crisis. A recent and highly readable cultural history of those who stayed can be found in Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. 4. See Emmons’s Garden in the Grasslands for a discussion of this safety-valve phenomenon (71–120). 5. It is important to note that many historians would identify the U.S. government’s failure to heed the reformations to land laws posed by Powell as the moment

notes to pages 105–39 ҏ 209

when the seeds of the Dust Bowl disaster were first sown (see, e.g., Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; Worster’s Dust Bowl; Webb’s The Great Plains; and Manning’s Grassland). Even in the wake of the Dirty Thirties, this commitment to agricultural development was unwavering, even if a new conservationist effort was grafted onto the agrarian vision. Lookingbill puts it concisely: “Agrarianism constituted a powerful ideological force to rationalize unprecedented government measure [during the thirties] for assisting farmers” (43). For a more detailed examination of federal efforts to assess and correct the crisis of the Dust Bowl, see also Bonnifield’s The Dust Bowl. 6. Bonnifield asserts that the policies of the U.S. government, particularly the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, also contributed to the demise of the small farmer. In an effort to take land out of production and reclaim native vegetation—as a way to prevent future Dust Bowls—the government bought out smaller farmers or attempted to relocate them to less marginal lands (131–38). He interestingly compares the fate of the yeoman with roots in the “marginal land” to that of the region’s original inhabitants: “Like the Indians before them, Dust Bowl farmers were tempted with removal, improvement in civilization, and a shift in land ownership” (118). This parallel juxtaposition of Native and non-Native experience on the Plains is also deeply entwined in the mythology of Buffalo Commons, which I explore in the last chapter. 7. The publication history of Yonnondio is significant. Written but not completed during the thirties, the novel was recovered by Olsen and published with few changes made to the original manuscript. As Olsen writes in a note that accompanied the published novel, there was no “rewriting, no new writing” (158). For an excellent analysis of the stylistic consequences of the novel’s publication history and its “bifocal view” as a document of the 1930s and 1970s, see Vickery’s “The Aesthetics of Survival.” 8. An excellent study of the history of the mining industry and its effect on the environment in America is D. Smith’s Mining America. In this book, D. Smith traces the slow awakening of an environmental consciousness pertaining to the mining industry. I would suggest that Olsen’s novel represents an early expression of this consciousness. 9. Early dust storms did rage across the southern Plains in 1931 and 1932, but there is no mention in any of the biographical material of whether or not Olsen experienced such a storm firsthand. However, she must have experienced the conditions of the drought that was responsible for the Dust Bowl. 10. In outlining some of the main principles of the emerging field of ecocriticism, Howarth points out how in Marxist readings of the environment it is, of course, capitalism that is responsible for all environmental abuse. However, he also points out how Marxist theory virtually ignores natural science and that “such views ignore many inconvenient facts: that disturbance is commonplace in nature; that aborigines and socialists often commit ecocide” (79). More recently, attempts have been made to wed the Marxist model with natural science and to join material history with environmental

210ҍ notes to pages 140–48

issues; see, for example, O’Connor’s Natural Causes, which provides a provocative overview of how human labor and the “history of nature” are inseparable (26). 11. This is not to suggest that Manfred’s writing lacks a social consciousness, but rather that such a consciousness is less pronounced than in Olsen’s novel (particularly with its agitprop interludes). Manfred does in fact engage the socioeconomic situation of the Dust Bowl in the second half of the novel as he traces Maury’s odyssey through the West looking for work. Also, the well-documented publication history of The Golden Bowl involved a meeting between Manfred and Meridel Le Sueur where the latter, an established proletarian author, encouraged Manfred to go forward with his “powerful” work that she felt should “outrank and outsell” Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (conversation quoted in Huseboe). Although Manfred was not accorded a space in the canon of proletarian literature, his genesis as a writer suggests that he was aware, if not part, of the radical movement. 12. Many of the works in Manfred’s prolific oeuvre are set in Siouxland, which encompasses the four corners area of Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas where the true prairies meet the High Plains. Not unlike Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Erdrich’s Turtle Mountain reservation, Manfred’s sustained focus on a specific, semiliterary locale situates him, in part, as a regional writer. 13. I adopt this term from the title of R. W. B. Lewis’s classic study of the principles of “hope” and “memory” in nineteenth-century American culture. 14. For readings of this scene, see Quantic (“Myth and Reality” 302); Milton’s Afterword (231–32); and N. Nelson’s “Frederick Manfred” (18– 20).

5. Hea ling the Wounds of History 1. Throughout this chapter I will use the term buffalo instead of the more technically accurate name bison because within the North American popular imagination the animal is consistently, if wrongly, referred to by this label. 2. For discussions about how the Buffalo Commons concept has developed since it was first proposed in 1987, see Popper and Popper (particularly “Checkered Past, Hopeful Future,” “Metaphor as Method,” and “Then and Now”) and Matthews’s Where the Buffalo Roam. 3. For a good history of the hide hunters of the 1870s, see Sandoz’s The Buffalo Hunters (1954); for a brief overview of the Canadian fur trade, see chapter three of Thompson’s Forging the Prairie West. 4. Natural historians disagree about the main causes of the near extinction of the buffalo in the latter half of the century. Flores, for example, contends that a whole “agglomerate of forces” cultural and natural were disrupting buffalo ecology long before the hide hunters arrived on the Plains—including drought and changes in

notes to pages 155–73 ҏ 211

the way various Plains tribes hunted the animal (“The Great Contraction” 18). In his The Destruction of Bison, on the other hand, Isenberg argues for the primacy of economic forces in the destruction of the buffalo herds, stating that while “the hunters served Sherman’s [extermination] purposes, they did not come to the plains at his behest but rather to satisfy an industrial economy’s appetite for natural resources” (129). Whatever the source of the destruction, however, the important issue for my discussion is that the demise of the buffalo is associated by many literary and visual artists with the westward expansion of Euroamerican civilization into the North American grasslands. 5. It is important to note that these early efforts to save the buffalo, despite the problematic motivations behind them, do represent the germ of the wilderness preservation movement. Indeed, that the establishment of a number of protected wildlife areas followed the efforts of these early buffalo preservationists—including the Buffalo National Park in Alberta in 1907 and several bison preserves in Oklahoma, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska between 1905 and 1914—is a testament to their contribution to the environmentalist movement. For a more detailed record of their efforts see Isenberg’s The Destruction of Bison (164–92); Dary’s The Buffalo Book (222–78); Geist’s Buffalo Nation (101–23); and Lott’s American Bison (185–94). 6. The population of rural counties in the Plains peaked in the 1930s and counties have been losing people ever since. As the Poppers note, the 1990 census provided evidence of an “accelerating cycle”: “Most Plains counties lost population during the 1980s—for instance, 50 of Nebraska’s 52 Plains counties, 38 of North Dakota’s 41, and 22 of Oklahoma’s 23” (“Great Plains” 91). According to the 2000 census, this trend continued in the 1990s, leaving farm counties on the Plains “terminally ill” (Egan, “Amid Dying Towns” para. 44). 7. For a broader critique of agriculture from an ecocritical standpoint, see Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness. 8. This statement directly contradicts Webb’s famous thesis in The Great Plains (1931). Webb admires the Plains pioneers for adapting their technology and institutions to fit the unique characteristics of the grasslands, citing in particular advancements in irrigation. 9. I suggest that Brother Mesquite was inspired by Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993). Norris juxtaposes her discussion of adapting to her life in rural Dakota with passages about monastic life. She sees both lifestyles as deeply linked to the practice of asceticism, which leads to the attainment of “desert wisdom” (24). Both the religious- and place-based modes of asceticism are embodied in Brother Mesquite. 10. As my earlier discussion of the range-farm frontier illustrates, the idealization of the cattle ranges as a biocultural landscape is equally prevalent in this literature,

212ҍ notes to pages 174–81

as ranching has long been considered the most viable economic venture for the arid region. Bison ranching thus combines in interesting ways two traditional land-use practices in the region. 11. Ecotourism is an important component of the Buffalo Commons proposal. The Poppers recognize that their plan must be economically as well as ecologically viable. Franklin’s business scheme, however, lacks the latter element; as his involvement with the landfill plan demonstrates, he has little concern for preserving the environment. His corrupt nature is further revealed when Elvin informs Tecumseh that Franklin bought votes to secure his election as chief (105).

notes to page 188 ҏ 213

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Index

agrarian myth, 103, 136, 146, 155, 158 agrarianism, 102, 113, 142, 170, 210 agriculture. See farming Andrews, Jennifer, 190, 191, 192, 194 aridity. See drought Badlands, 164, 166–77 Banner, Stuart, 18 Barillas, William, 117–18 Barry, Nora, 48, 50 Berry, Wendell, 167–68 bildungsroman, 169, 185 bison. See buffalo Black Blizzard, 156 Bonnifield, Paul, 137 Breen, David H., 57, 59, 80 Buell, Lawrence, 9, 10 buffalo: compared to cattle, 44, 63, 180; eradication of, 173–74; as literary metaphor in Plains fiction, 35–36, 174; preservation of, 174; restoration of, 174, 193. See also Buffalo Commons; buffalo hunt Buffalo Commons: 3, 13, 171–72; connection to Ghost Dance, 192–93; as metaphor, 172, 173, 175, 197 buffalo hunt: in fiction, 32; as Native landuse practice, 17, 50, 54

capitalism: and Dust Bowl, 136, 146; Olsen’s critique of, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 169, 170 Cather, Willa: 83, 98, 135, 136, 160; “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional,” 107; environmental legacy of, 102–4, 132–33; influence of American Transcendentalism on, 105; A Lost Lady, 101–2, 105, 117, 121–33, 174; modernism in the works of, 118, 120; My Ántonia, 99–101, 117, 118–20; O Pioneers! 101–2, 104, 105, 107–17, 121, 128, 129, 132, 133; One of Ours, 120–21; romanticism in the works of, 101, 103–4 Catherland, 133–34 Catlin, George, 174 cattle ranchers: as barrier to Plains farmers, 57; compared to farmers, 56, 60; in Plains fiction, 58, 62, 122, 124 cattle ranching: bioregional viability of, 60, 61, 94–95; Canadian, 57, 59; comparisons to bison hunting in Plains fiction, 43, 44; comparisons to grain agriculture, 60–61; decline of, 60; development in Great Plains of, 58–59 children: cultural significance of, 65; illegitimate, 58, 66; as literary metaphor, 61, 65–66

closed frontier: and Dust Bowl, 136, 139, 156; and extermination of bison, 174; and literary tragedy, 86, 101, 125 Cole, Jean Lee, 66, 74–75, 79, 82 Commerce of the Prairies (Gregg), 16 Conlogue, William, 113, 114, 119 Cooper, James Fenimore: 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 40, 44, 45, 48, 54; and tradition of historical romance, 21, 104; depiction of Indians in works of, 19, 25–26; the Leatherstocking series of, 16, 20; The Prairie, 22–39, 138, 181 cowboys, 62, 63, 65 Cox, James, 40 Davidson, Arnold E., 190, 191, 192, 194 Dawahare, Anthony, 145 Dekker, George, 19–21, 25, 41. See also historical romance Dirty Thirties. See Great Depression Dominion Lands Act, 59, 67 drought, 13; as bioregional characteristic, 56, 57, 137, 176; effects upon Cather of, 107, 108; in Plains fiction, 94, 95, 109, 112, 113, 136, 139, 140, 146, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170, 171 Dust Bowl: 5, 6, 82, 135, 136, 137–38, 139; sources of, 132, 139–40 Eaton, Winifred: Cattle, 58, 67–82, 87, 89, 93, 96–98, 99; His Royal Nibs, 67; literary reputation of, 66–67 ecocriticism, 9, 10, 199 Eddy, Sara, 66, 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Farming,” 105–07, 111, 114, 121; Nature, 125, 132 Emmons, David M., 60–61 environmental crisis: 5, 11, 175–77. See also Dust Bowl farming: bioregional challenges to, 10, 17, 57, 61, 88, 107; compared to cattle ranching, 60–61, 82; compared to hunting, 35;

228ҍ index

and depletion of arid grasslands, 59–60, 139, 177; and Euroamerican civilization, 60, 95; and industrial capitalism, 145, 147, 176; and New Agriculture, 113–14; and sexual metaphors, 71, 110, 115. See also agrarian myth; agrarianism; frontier Feikema, Feike. See Manfred, Frederick Fischer, Michael, 129 frontier, 15, 16; in American historical fiction, 20; as archetype, 21; and depletion of buffalo, 174; and dispossession of Native Americans, 18, 22, 34; rangefarm, 56–57, 60, 61, 62. See also closed frontier; Manifest Destiny frontier hero: in Cooper, 20, 29; in Eaton, 72; in Schaefer, 63–64; in Welch, 41, 45, 48–51 Gaston, Edwin W., Jr., 82–83, 91, 93, 94, 95 Ghost Dance, 191. See also Buffalo Commons Gifford, Terry, 10, 116 grasslands, 6–7 Great American Desert, 17, 23, 103, 107, 114. See also drought Great Depression, 137, 146, 162, 163 Great Plains: bioregional characteristics of, 10; geographical parameters of, 4; as literary region, 11 Gregg, Josiah, 16 Grove, Frederick Philip, 2–3 Handley, William, 61, 62, 65, 66 Heat-Moon, William Least, 2, 23, 156 Hirsch, Bud, 196 historical romance, 19; American tradition of, 20–21; and Cooper, 22, 24, 25, 31; Native Americans in, 21, 25; and Richter, 91. See also Indian historical romance; Waverley model Homestead Act, 67, 103

homesteading: in Cather, 99, 101; in Eaton, 69, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81; in Manfred, 157, 158; narratives of, 4–5, 8; in Richter, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 93; in Schaefer, 63. See also farming; pioneering Hornaday, William, 174 Indians: 12, 39–40, 57, 58, 185; as classic Plains culture, 17–18; dispossession of, 58, 129–30, 182, 191; removal of, 18, 28, 37, 48; as subject of historical romances, 21. See also Indian removal; Indian historical romance; Indian wilderness Indian historical romance, 19, 22, 37, 39, 40. See also historical romance Indian wilderness: 3, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22; in Cooper, 23, 27, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39; in Eaton, 75, 76; in Welch, 40, 41, 53 Intertribal Bison Cooperative, 193 Irving, Washington, 173 Isenberg, Andrew C., 174 Johnson County War, 60, 80 Jones, Charlie Jesse, 174 King, Thomas, 172–73, 175, 176, 197; Truth and Bright Water, 173, 185–96 Kolodny, Annette, 110, 119 Lahood, Marvin L., 83, 90 “The Land Ethic” (Leopold), 3, 7, 103 land use, 6–7. See also buffalo hunt; cattle ranching; farming Leopold, Aldo, 3, 7, 103, 195 Lookingbill, Brad, 140, 146, 210 Lorentz, Pare, 139 Love, Glen A., 9–10 Lukács, George, 19, 20 MacPherson, Heidi Slettedahl, 149 Maddux, Lucy, 28 Manfred, Frederick, 169–70; The Golden Bowl, 137, 140, 155–69; and Siouxland, 155

Manifest Destiny: and agricultural development, 114; in Plains fiction, 8, 49, 57, 130, 185 Manning, Richard, 5, 17, 139–40, 177 Marias Massacre: 16, 42, 49, 51; in Welch, 46–47, 52 marriage: as metaphor for nationhood, 28, 38, 61–62, 65 Marx, Leo, 8, 9, 10, 140 Matthews, Anne, 5, 172, 192 Meeker, Joseph, 103, 104, 106, 114, 132 Miller, Edwin, 38 Milton, John, 164, 166 Mogen, David, 21 Moore, David, 174–75 Native Americans. See Indians O’Brien, Sharon, 115, 119 Ogallala aquifer: explanation of, 177; in Proulx, 181, 184 Olsen, Tillie: biography of, 169–70; critical response to works of, 141; and social realism, 155; Yonnondio: From the Thirties, 137, 140, 141–55, 169 open range, 86; demise of, 57, 59, 60; as wilderness, 62. See also cattle ranching Orr, Elaine Neil, 152 Överland, Orm, 22, 38 pastoralism, 65, 119, 163, 174; in Cather, 100, 102, 104, 110, 116, 121, 123, 125, 129, 132, 133, 134, 155; conventions of, 1; in Cooper, 18, 22, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45; definition of, 8; and Dust Bowl, 136; in Eaton, 77, 82; and ecological criticism, 9–10; and environmental crisis, 11, 12, 13; and imagination, 7, 11, 12, 13; in King, 185, 195, 197, 200; limitations of, 8–9; in Manfred, 140, 155, 160, 161, 162, 163, 169–70; Native-centered versions of, 16–17, 53, 54; in Olsen, 140, 141, 149, 150–51, 164,

index ҏ 229

pastoralism (continued) 166, 167, 169–70; in Proulx, 180, 197; in Welch, 18, 45, 49, 51, 53, 54 Paul, Rodman, 59 Pearce, William, 61 Pifer, Ellen, 65 pioneering: literary commemoration of, 83, 91–92, 100, 101, 102, 103, 114, 115, 117, 121, 124, 156; literary critique of, 52, 127, 129, 131, 145, 156, 179; literary nostalgia for, 121, 125, 126, 160, 163. See also cattle ranching; farming; homesteading Platte Valley, 22, 26 Popper, Frank and Deborah, 171–72; on the Buffalo Commons metaphor, 172, 175; in Proulx, 181–82 postfrontier. See closed frontier postpastoralism: 116, 172; definition of, 10. See also Gifford, Terry Powell, John Wesley, 61, 68 Pratt, Linda Ray, 142 proletarian literature, 141, 148 Proulx, Annie E., 13, 170, 197; That Old Ace in the Hole, 172, 173, 176–85, 196 Quantic, Diane Dufva, 4, 11, 157, 158, 159 Raban, Jonathan, 192 Rans, Geoffrey, 23, 36, 37 Richter, Conrad, 12, 66; Sea of Grass, 58, 82–98; and Southwest, 82–83 Ridington, Robin, 191, 192 Rosenfelt, Deborah, 141 Rosowski, Susan J.: on Cather’s romanticism, 103, 104; on A Lost Lady, 121–22 Ross, Norman P., 85 Ryan, Melissa, 129 Sarver, Stephanie, 106, 107 Schaefer, Jack, 62, 63

230ҍ index

Schwartz, Nina, 131 Scott, Walter, 19, 31 Shaw, Harry, 19 Simonson, Harold, 86 Skaggs, Merrill, 105 Slotkin, Richard, 130–31 Smith, Henry Nash, 22–23 Steinbeck, John, 135, 138, 161 Sweet, Timothy, 7 Thacker, Robert, 11, 102 tourism, 162, 163, 185, 188 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 56, 86 Urgo, Joseph R., 128–29, 130 Virgil, 7, 8, 38, 100, 150 Walton, Priscilla L., 190, 191, 192, 194 Watanna, Onoto. See Winifred Eaton Waverley model, 12, 19, 20, 54; in Welch, 21, 41 Webb, Walter Prescott, 56; on the “cattle kingdom,” 58, 59, 60 Welch, James: 11, 12, 16, 18, 19; Fools Crow, 15, 39–54, 97, 181, 187, 195–96; as historical romancer, 21; Killing Custer, 42 Whitman, Walt, 105 wilderness: and buffalo, 173–74; in Cather, 100, 101, 102, 114; in Eaton, 72, 77; in King, 190, 193; in Manfred, 159, 160, 163; in Richter, 86, 92, 95, 97, 98. See also Indian wilderness Williams, Raymond, 8, 9 Wilson, James, 17 Wister, Owen, 62 Woodress, James, 125 Worster, Donald, 5, 68, 139, 140, 145, 146 Wovoka (Paiute), 191

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