Where the Buffalo Roam

On a rainy winter night in 1922, while at work on an article about the Texas Rangers for an obscure oil-industry magazine in a back room at his Austin home, Walter Prescott Webb had an epiphany. He knew that the Rangers had been formed to protect white settlers from Comanches, who were equipped with weapons (bows and arrows) well suited to fighting on horseback. The Rangers at first fought with long rifles, a firearm developed for use in a wooded environment, where the need to reload after each shot was not a disadvantage. On the open plains, the Rangers were at a technological disadvantage, on horseback as well as on the ground. But then they replaced their rifles with Colt revolvers—and began systematically defeating the Comanches. When Webb made the connection between the environment and the revolver, the Texas Rangers, and the survival of white settlers, the whole of what he would accomplish in writing The Great Plains sprang to life; one is reminded of Proust, Gibbon, Perry Miller. “The excitement of that moment was probably the greatest creative sensation I have ever known. I had come upon something really important, that I was no longer an imitator, parroting what I read or what some professor had said. This idea that something important happened when the Americans came out of the woods and undertook to live on the plains freed me from authority, and set me out on an independent course of inquiry.”{1} That independent course of inquiry would take Webb to the very boundaries of what historians are comfortable in calling history. Knowing that his study “would cut across a half a dozen fields, geology, physiography, climatology, botany, zoology, anthropology, history, and literature,” and expose him to criticism from the more pure of heart within his profession, Webb nevertheless “did not hesitate” to make the leap.{2} He never regretted his choice.

The Great Plains was published in Boston by Ginn and Company in 1931.{3} Response was overwhelmingly positive. The book was awarded the Loubat Prize by Columbia University, came close to winning the Pulitzer Prize, was twice on the Book-of-the-Month Club list, and in 1952 was selected by the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (the forerunner of the Organization of American Historians) as “the most important book in the first half of the twentieth century by a living American historian.”{4} Such rare popularity for a work of history didn’t validate Webb’s central claim, but that claim, obviously, had resonance. More importantly, the book began to shape American thinking about the West. Its publication even prompted the University of Texas to grant the author his Ph.D., at age forty-three.{5}

In The Great Plains, Webb attempted to show what happened when a “westward bound people emerged from a humid, broken woodland to live on the level semiarid plains where there was never enough water and practically no wood.”{6} Webb believed the three dominant characteristics of the Great Plains—treelessness, level terrain, and semiaridity—worked “from the beginning” their “inexorable effect upon nature’s children. The historical truth that becomes apparent in the end is that the Great Plains have bent and molded Anglo-American life, have destroyed traditions, and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner” (TGP, 8). Passages like this can make Webb sound like a crude geographic determinist, but his thought is more supple than that.{7}

Webb grounded his thesis in two basic ideas: that the Great Plains are radically different environmentally from the land east of the 98th meridian, and that in responding to this altered environment pioneers were forced to change both their institutions and their way of life. What people brought with them from the timbered east was markedly ineffective in the plains environment; they had to adapt or turn back. In The Great Plains, survival arises out of the interplay between pioneer and landscape, a ballet of cause and effect. The Kentucky long rifle, timber or stone fencing, wetland farming, water-based transportation, and small-farm cattle raising all had to give way, over time and through much trial and error, to their western counterparts: the Colt revolver, the Winchester carbine, barbed-wire fencing, dry farming, and open-range cattle ranching. An explanation of these adaptations constitutes the heart of Webb’s study.

Webb wrote The Great Plains in a state of “suppressed emotion,” a sentiment familiar to historians of the R. G. Collingwood school. “The succession of actors I saw more vividly than I saw real people. They had long been my people, and by understanding them I came to understand the land in which I had grown up.”{8} How many historians writing today would express themselves in these terms? The book is based largely on secondary sources, a drawback for any historical work, then or now. And Webb’s grasp of the material relies more on feeling, intuition, and personal involvement than on original research and a firm grasp of the facts. To Webb, being a historian did not preclude “advancing strong convictions.”{9} A literary sensibility permeates the work. Indeed, Webb, who prided himself on his style, started out wanting to be a novelist. The Great Plains is a treasure chest of phrases many a novelist would have been happy to turn. Like his cross-disciplinary attitude in general, Webb’s view that history was “a branch of literature”{10} put him athwart the conventions of the profession. His methodology certainly did not produce history in the conventional sense. In 1955, not long before Webb assumed the presidency of the American Historical Association, American Heritage asked him for an article on how historians write. He came up with this: “In graduate school the student is taught to select a subject of such small dimensions that it offers no challenge to the intellect, does not develop the mind, and has little or no significance when developed. He is encouraged to write without benefit of imagination, to avoid any statement based on perception and insight unless he can prove by the documents that his idea is not original.”{11} Webb never fell into the trap he so venomously decried.

The Great Plains is a monument to originality. Most of the book concerns development during the post–Civil War years in the West, but there is enough detail about earlier periods—for example, the history of the conflict between Spanish colonists and the Plains Indians—for readers to make sense of Webb’s thesis. In Webb’s narrative, Spanish colonization of the West failed largely because of the inability of Spanish fighters to defeat the Indians. The Anglo-American succeeded because his technology (the Colt revolver especially) offset any advantage Indians might have had as superior fighters on horseback. Adoption of the Colt, in fact, indicated to Webb that the Industrial Revolution itself was moving westward, a process that fueled his interpretation of plains settlement and nudged him into the school of Frederick Jackson Turner, who believed that the frontier was the primary influence in American history.{12}

As Webb saw it, the Industrial Revolution confronted “four major problems in the Plains country: (1) transportation, (2) fencing, (3) water, and (4) farming. The first was solved by railroads, the second by barbed wire, the third by windmills, and the fourth partly by farm machinery and by a new form of agriculture” (TGP, 272). Barbed wire, a technology that like the Colt was invented in the East, was adapted for use on the Great Plains. Extensive use of barbed wire “opened up to the homesteader the fertile Prairie Plains” (TGP, 317). But without water, homesteaders would fail. To succeed, they needed a mechanical device that would raise deep water to the surface. Such a device would also have to be economical, both to build and to operate, and “capable of making slow but constant delivery” of water. Again, technology came to the rescue. The windmill, in use since antiquity, was “adopted, adapted, and developed” (TGP, 336). Water flowed; settlers put down roots.

Webb’s account of how these technologies were used on the Great Plains still rings true. Today, of course, each technology would require a microscopically detailed book of its own. In the seventy-five years since The Great Plains was published, historians have corrected many of Webb’s oversights and filled in what he left out. Some have faulted him for being too much of a regional historian, for missing out on the emergence of a national empire.{13} Others, like agricultural historian Fred Shannon, were far more detailed in their objections. Webb’s friend, J. Frank Dobie, perhaps said it best when he wryly observed that Webb never did “let the facts get in the way of truth.”{14} This was a pithy assessment that Shannon, perhaps, took too much to heart in his well-known critique of The Great Plains. Yet no matter how much Webb’s account has to be fine-tuned or adjusted, the idea that the land made demands of the settlers, his fundamental thesis, still contains that shock of recognition so familiar to readers of Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Lynn White.

Webb’s study, in essence, is an “ardently nationalistic story of the Anglo-American civilization of the Great Plains” in which westward-moving Anglo-Americans defeat relentless Indians and Mexicans.{15} While it seems clear that Webb was not particularly racist by the measure of his own time, a modern reader can hardly fail to read him that way. Women are completely absent from Webb’s account of life on the Plains, and his view of Indians, not to mention the Mexicans that the Anglos also pushed out of their way, is commensurate with the thinking of his day, not ours. The Great Plains is a heroic narrative of the old school, which these days is an indictable offense. But Webb’s claim that “when the [Anglo-Americans] crossed over into the Plains their technique of pioneering broke down and they were compelled to make a radical readjustment in their way of life” (TGP, 507) still has merit. And his insistence that the key to an understanding of history of the West must be sought “in a comparative study of what was in the east and what came to be in the west” (TGP, p. 507) is practically irrefutable, given the path that empire followed. The Great Plains remains influential, a starting point for historians of the West, a touchstone in the burgeoning field of environmental history. So no matter how much Webb may have mishandled the facts—and there is considerable agreement on this front—his ideas prevail. And if in reading Webb Frederick Jackson Turner comes to mind, it’s no accident; the two delved in the same mine. In fact, a good deal of the criticism leveled at Turner’s frontier thesis—too sweeping, too allegorical—can be aimed at Webb, his intellectual twin. Each harbored a romantic sensibility and coupled it with a generalist bent.

Not that criticism of Webb had to await the passage of time or a change in the broader culture. In 1940 Shannon provided a comprehensive critique of The Great Plains that anticipates many objections that might be raised two generations later. Much of Shannon’s argument was correct: Webb was wrong about some plant species, but right about plains animals, especially the prairie dog; he was wrong again, at least partially, about the navigability of rivers and annual rainfall in certain areas, and he didn’t know much about mountains or minerals.{16} Shannon got very windy about Webb’s rather loose geographic definition of what constituted the Great Plains, a legitimate charge; he also maintained, a bit too splenetically, that Webb’s “contribution to methodology was unimportant,” that he employed “poetic license” rather than “judicial restraint,” and far too often was given to overstatement.{17} But Shannon was a man looking for trouble.{18} True as much of his criticism was, it never dawned on him that he was looking at a different type of history, or that he was missing utterly the spirit of Webb’s work. And his resort to ridicule, sarcasm, and overstatement did little to further his reasoned critique. For his own part, Webb didn’t attempt to counter Shannon’s every criticism. How could he? He responded by simply noting that Shannon had “failed completely to discover the method followed in the book,” which was to demonstrate that “conditions on the Great Plains were such as to exert a powerful influence on human beings. If these human beings came from a humid climate, with instruments adapted to a humid climate, they were compelled to modify these instruments, whether tools, weapons, or social and legal institutions, in order to solve the problems they faced on the plains.”{19} This is a notion not unfamiliar to students of technology.

Webb was never without defenders. John D. Hicks, who attended the symposium that gave rise to Shannon’s critique, accused Shannon of being “picayunish.”{20} A year later, John W. Caughey, echoing Webb’s own rejoinder, declared that Shannon failed completely to understand what Webb was up to in The Great Plains.{21} And, perhaps in the most spirited attack ever launched on Shannon’s critique, Avery Craven of the University of Chicago took Shannon to task for conducting a “classroom exercise” in methodology, for missing “the living, breathing world which Webb had caught and pressed into his pages,” and for demonstrating “why the historian has so often failed to make any impression on the wider public and the creative mind,” allegations Webb no doubt found amusing.{22} Any fair-minded reader, however, would agree that, tone notwithstanding, Shannon indeed uncovered many errors which indicated that “Webb was as unsystematic a scholar as he was imaginative an interpreter.”{23} But it isn’t quite true that Shannon failed to grasp the central purpose of Webb’s book.{24} He just refused to believe that central purpose, no matter how splendid or macrocosmically sound, could pass muster with a serious historian.

Reading Webb today is every bit as exhilarating as it was when I first read him in graduate school. There is something fundamentally right about what he has to say about the plains and about how they whittled on and shaped those who dared to go west. The power the physical environment exerts over human action is more on our minds today than at any time in recent memory, which perhaps helps bring Webb’s book, problematic and outmoded in many ways, to life. But it’s one thing for Webb to say that farm machinery had to be modified to work a different type of soil, or that in the absence of wood and water a society with different views of riparian rights and institutions more suited to life in a semiarid region had to rise up. It’s another to say that the Great Plains environment produced a different type of American, a claim that echoes Turner’s thesis. In “History as High Adventure,” Webb wrote that “No one respects Turner more than I, and no one is less patient with critics who take exception to some detail in Turner and argue from this small base that his thesis is wrong. There are few so foolish as to say that the existence of a vast body of free land would not have some effect on the habits, customs, and institutions of those who had access to it. That is essentially what Turner said and that is what I said. If Turner’s thesis is true, then mine is true; if his is a fallacy, then mine is also fallacious.” Both Turner and Webb saw the frontier as a crucible in which a westward-moving civilization encountered bewilderment and savagery and came away not just changed but improved, born again in the values—individualism, independence, freedom—Americans tend to see as vital to themselves as a people.

This is a romantic view, a story of triumph leading to empire. Nowadays we are more skeptical of ourselves as a people, and of the bloody history we have carved into this continent. The Great Plains was written during the era of the Progressive historians, in Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, and presents a vivid if oversimplified account of settlers and pioneers fighting for survival in a hostile environment. The Colt revolver, barbed wire, machinery for drilling deep wells, the windmill, all these made it possible for a people to thrive and to spread over an arid country. But Webb left important things out of his tale of courage and technological success, most notably its victims, the Indians who were vanquished, the Spanish and the Mexicans who were pushed aside. These are not minor objections. And Webb’s failure to acknowledge the role played by pioneer women is a real disappointment.{25} Culpably blind to some things, he was a man of his times, as we are surely children of ours.

Yet even where Webb wasn’t original, his description and interpretation of the Anglo-American movement into the Great Plains, and his understanding of how institutions grew and were modified in response to external realities—the absence of water, the endless expanse of treeless range, the unbearable flatness—has led to new discoveries, new ways of looking at the west. Frontier historiography has expanded exponentially since publication of The Great Plains. And while no historian today would employ the geographic approach Webb used, none can escape his influence. Webb’s insistence that the environment was the irreducible factor in explaining Anglo-American response to the West remains largely intact, if one doesn’t see that irreducibility as a purely geographic determinism. The new generation of western historians takes a more nuanced approach to the frontier. They are more sophisticated than Webb, more subtle, more willing to see the value in cultures that Webb failed to see at all. But no doubt they too labor under the weight of their own limitations.

Webb’s feeling for the Great Plains ran deep. He took a part of America that was steeped in mystery, if not myth, and helped make it intelligible. But to Webb, the settlement of the West meant the end of the frontier, the end of an expansion that, for him as for Turner before him, characterized America, maybe even made America possible. Is it any wonder that Webb viewed the closing of this frontier as a potentially irreplaceable loss? Despite the enthusiasm that fuels it, then, The Great Plains has about it a bleakness that is in keeping with the territory and what happened there. This, perhaps, is another reason why the book endures. It speaks to our sense of tragedy. As a historian, Webb was an iconoclast. He was also an original thinker. He preferred ideas to facts, and was prone to eloquence. The Great Plains is his testament, and remains a seminal work.

{1}Webb made this remark in his presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 69 (1959): 265–81.

{2}The most extensive criticism, better characterized as an attack, was Fred A. Shannon, An Appraisal of Walter Prescott Webb’s “The Great Plains: A Study in Institutions and Environment” (New York, 1940); the volume also includes a response by Webb, a panel discussion, and a commentary by Read Bain. The quotes are from Webb’s rebuttal (p. 113), the only time he ever responded to a critic. Joe B. Frantz later summarized the tenor of Webb’s response by noting that Webb “did not think of the book as history but as art. And any intelligent person knows that art is not confined to the narrow precepts and practices of history.” Wilbur R. Jacobs, John W. Caughey, and Joe B. Frantz, Turner/Bolton/Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier (London, 1965), 80.

{3}I have used the 1931 Ginn and Company edition, cited hereinafter as TGP.

{4}See John Walton Caughey, “Historian’s Choice: Results of a Poll on Recently Published American History and Biography,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952): 289–302, and also George Wolfskill, “Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains: Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 302.

{5}Webb had received a master’s degree from the University of Texas in 1920 for a thesis on the Texas Rangers in the Mexican War.

{6}Webb, “History as High Adventure.”

{7}On Webb as environmental determinist, see, for example, Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 297.

{8}Shannon (n. 2 above), 114.

{9}Wolfskill, 301.

{10}Ibid., 301.

{11}Quoted in Wolfskill (n. 4 above), 304. American Heritage never published Webb’s article.

{12}Two years before The Great Plains, Webb had published an essay titled “The Great Plains and the Industrial Revolution” in The Trans-Mississippi West, ed. James F. Willard and Colin. B. Goodykoontz (Boulder, Colo., 1929).

{13}For example, Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York, 1985), 12–15.

{14}Joe B. Frantz, “Remembering Walter Prescott Webb,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92 (July 1988): 18.

{15}Wolfskill, 305.

{16}Shannon (n. 2 above), 6–27.

{17}Ibid., 10 and 33.

{18}Another eminent Western historian, Rodman Paul, recalls being “buttonholed” by Shannon, whom he barely knew. “Why is it,” Shannon (who had a reputation for being quarrelsome) demanded to know, “that there are so many quarrelsome people in the historical profession? Why, I’m the most peaceable man that ever lived.” See Paul, review of Kenneth R. Philp and Elliott West, eds., The Walter Prescott Memorial Lectures 10: Essays on Walter Prescott Webb (Austin, Tex., 1976), and Necah Stewart Furman, Walter Prescott Webb: His Life and Impact (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1976), Pacific Historical Review 46 (1977): 486.

{19}Webb, quoted in Shannon, 123–125.

{20}Shannon, 192.

{21}John W. Caughey, “A Criticism of the Critique Webb’s The Great Plains,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (1940): 442–44.

{22}Avery Craven, review of Shannon (n. 2 above), American Historical Review 47 (1942): 627–30.

{23}Paul, 486.

{24}In what seems to be rather unabashed praise, Shannon himself wrote (p. 10) that “This volume is a pioneer effort to apply a combined geological and technological interpretation to a phase of American historical development, and this theme is carried out more persistently than in any other book with which the present writer is familiar. Webb has attacked the problem with great enthusiasm, faith, and sincerity. His breadth of approach is admirable and the concept he set out to prove is magnificent.”

{25}Works that correct this oversight include Paula M. Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (Iowa City, Iowa, 1986); Glenda Riley, Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prarie and the Plains (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), and Deborah Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940 (1992).