Virtually Constructing a Great Plains: Booster Impacts on Plains Viewing

The placemaking of the Great Plains was as much perception as it was physical: a significant element was how Americans “saw” or “viewed” the region. To promote settlement of the Great Plains, boosters created and circulated written and visual images to “sell” Americans and immigrants on this region. In this article, I examine the visual images of the Plains (ca. 1890–1930) in booster brochures and compare and contrast them with images found in early Plains dwellers’ photograph albums. These images impacted the place perceptions of the people that came to live and work the Plains, in what John Urry calls the “circle of representation.” That is to say the visual images of the Plains that the settlers encountered before they arrived impacted how they framed the region.