Nothing but Sky

When early European settlers first crossed the Mississippi River and emerged from the vast forests of the east onto the vast grasslands of the west, they found themselves in an alien land.  Nothing in their experience prepared them for this strange world.  So they likened it to the one thing they knew that seemed most apt: the ocean.  They referred to the waves of grasses as far as the eye could see.  Traveling across the grasslands without any point of reference was like sailing across the sea.  Instead of leaving a wake in the water, they left behind a wake of wagon tracks.  When they came to a stop, they compared it to being a shipwrecked sailor on an unknown island.  The experience was for many more than a little unnerving.

Which leads to the question: does claustrophobia have an opposite?  Is there a fear of wide open expanses?  I think there may be.

Please understand that I am a country girl.  I grew up in a place with a single blinking traffic light, and streetlights were few and far between.  On a clear summer night, we could sit outside while Daddy named the constellations.  We could see them clearly without the interference of city lights.  I grew up climbing trees and riding horses and pretending I was Lewis (or sometimes Clark, but I liked the name Meriwether so I was usually Lewis) as I wandered through the woods near my home.

But there was always a hill or a line of trees between me and the horizon.  I tried to get around that.  Sometimes I would lie on my back in the grass and cup my hands around my eyes so I could see nothing but sky.  What was it like for Meriwether Lewis to see from horizon to horizon?  What was it like to not be hemmed in by hills and trees?  Could he turn in a circle and see 360 degrees of the edge of the earth?  As I lay on my back and looked up, I wondered if Lewis ever tilted his head back until his vision was filled entirely with blue. 

It took many years and a move halfway across the country before I found answers to my questions.  I now live in Minnesota, but state lines are rather arbitrary things.  We are on the eastern side of the Red River of the North, but we’re almost in North Dakota.  The term “Minnkota” applies here.  There are trees where I live, and hills and curves in the road.  Like where I grew up.  But only a short drive to the west and I am in the flattage – that’s horizon to horizon territory.  The roads look like they were laid out with a straight edge.

In the process of exploring the flattage, I have wandered out onto the Plains.  And I learned something there.  Claustrophobia does have an opposite.  When I drive for mile after mile with no sight of a dwelling or a barn or a telephone pole, I start to get nervous.  Driving farther still towards nothing but the horizon, I start to get anxious.  I keep a close eye on my gas tank.  I fill up whenever I come across a gas station, even if I need as little as ¼ of a tank.  I have no intention of running out of gas out in the middle of nowhere.  And there is quite a bit of the middle of nowhere to be found in North Dakota.

Most dictionaries list “agoraphobia” as the opposite of claustrophobia.  Agoraphobia means fear of the marketplace.  It is anxiety caused by environments the sufferer considers dangerous or uncomfortable.  But it is most strongly associated with public places.  I think the anxiety I sometimes feel when I’m alone on the prairie is something deeper and more primeval.  Adventuring is all well and good, but a road sign now and then isn’t a bad thing.

I look forward to next summer when I plan to take the back roads west and imagine I am following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark.  I wonder if I will ever get over the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is.

 

 

The Contested Plains by Elliott West

Having relocated to Minnesota from western New York (not New York City!) I have become quite enchanted with the Great Plains.  Who knew I was a Midwesterner at heart!  In the pursuit of my PhD in history at North Dakota State University, I have switched my historical allegiance from the Revolutionary War in the South to the Great Plains.  Specifically, I am delving into the Dakota Uprising of 1862 and the aftermath. One of the wonderful books to which I have been introduced is "The Contested Plains."  Here are my observations:

In “The Contested Plains,” Elliott West offers his perspective on the transformation of the American West.  He focuses on two competing visions of the Great Plains: one of the Native Americans who had already staked a claim to the area, the other belonging to the white settlers and goldseekers who swarmed west in pursuit of their dreams.  The story is a familiar one.  A thousand movies and books and television shows in popular culture have dealt with the conflict and dangers and triumphs.  But West tells a more nuanced tale.  There are no “good guys” and “bad guys.”  He doesn’t separate the players into sides and avoids stereotypes.  The Native Americans, for example, are neither the wild savage nor the helpless victim.  West does a masterful job of finding the real people behind the dime store novel caricatures. 

The book is divided into three parts.  The first section, entitled “Visions,” traces the history of the Plains and the people who lived there before the arrival of Europeans.  The second section, “Gold Rush,” is about the migration of settlers and goldseekers that altered the nature of the Plains and the balance of power.  The third section, “Power,” addresses the forces that were at work following the gold strike: political, economic, social forces that were at the center of a great upheaval.

In West’s view, the two competing views of the Plains were irreconcilable and could not co-exist.  “They conceived of and used power in conflicting ways, yet each drew its power from the same sources….Something has to give.  What in fact would give was the basic question behind the famous conflicts between Indians and whites in the 1860s and their appalling consequences” (p. xxiv).  This power struggle is at the centerpiece of West’s explanation for the conflict that arose between whites and Indians.

The “power” West discusses is not our traditional sense of political or even military power.  West is referring to actual physical energy.  For example, “The crucial gift of the horse concerned not power itself but where that power came from” (p. 50).  The horse grazed on grass which, in turn, derived its power from sun and water.  The horse was able to transform the grass into physical power that benefitted the Native Americans.  According to West, “The horse rearranged the basic alignment among people and the possibilities that flowed through the plains” (Ibid.).  While many items introduced by Europeans, such as metal cooking pots, altered the lives of the Native Americans, West points to firearms and horses as the two that did the most to transform life on the plains.  Of course, the Euro-Americans brought the negative (diseases such as smallpox) as well as the positive, and their intrusion on the Plains would alter the traditional way of life in ways both good and bad.

West veers away from a generally accepted and idealized view of the Indian as a natural conservationist and environmentalist, living in total harmony with the land.  He explores the means by which they exploited the environment, particularly after the arrival of the horse and firearms.  The horse was a source of power.  The Indians increased the level of their hunting at the same time their ponies were overgrazing on the Plains.  This overuse of the environment occurred before the arrival of large numbers of whites, but when those immigrants did arrive, it resulted in an even greater environmental strain.  Whites naturally gravitated to the areas where Indians wintered, areas that provided shelter, wood, and forage.  Their livestock grazed there and they cut down the wood.  Two groups were competing for the same resources.  The Native Americans had no recourse if those resources were wiped out.  Whites, on the other hand, could ship in goods that they needed if those things did not exist on the Plains.  Thus, the centerpiece of West’s argument is energy, and the struggle over increasingly scarce resources.

Prior to the Colorado Gold Rush, West argues that the American view of the area was the Great American Desert, a region to cross in order to get to the other side.  After gold was discovered, a national vision arose of gold and agriculture.  This new vision naturally conflicted with the vision held by the Cheyenne, Comanche, and other tribes as new immigrants swarmed to the new Promised Land.  Those tribes were overwhelmed by the massive numbers of immigrants, backed by the strength of the United States Army.

The question comes to mind: is all this history important?  West assures us it is.  Those new immigrants who arrived in the area with such hope and promise “Pulled more than anyone ever had from its reservoir of energy,” but they also pushed the area to its limits.  The result, says West, “was stunning human and environmental calamities.  Looking at the region today, the lessons are clear enough” (p. 337).  And while it is an exercise in futility to imagine how the world would be different if natives and newcomers had been able to peacefully coexist,  West believes we might find in that cautionary tale some lessons that might help us reshape our lives in a fuller and more inclusive manner.

West argues that it is vital to understand the competing visions in order to understand what happened during the Colorado Gold Rush.  He utilizes primary sources including government documents, diaries, journals, and newspapers in his examination of an important but often overlooked event.  He makes the story relevant to our modern lives.  “The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life” (p. 337).