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7. The Great Plains
- University of Illinois Press
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7 The Great Plains Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas differ from each other in climate, landform, and details of history, but all are part of the Great Plains that sweep from Oklahoma to the Canadian border. The term “Midwest” was seldom used for the region before the twentieth century—the Midwest before then was Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Women publishing books about the Great Plains during the years I’m looking at saw the region as western, indeed the heart of the true West. Their work told of failure repeatedly averted by women’s pioneer tenacity. I found only two books of poetry for the Great Plains. Celeste May’s 1886 miscellany, Sounds of the Prairie, does not specify its setting beyond the title. For her the plains are one continuous space (she lived in Nebraska and Oklahoma, and published her book in Kansas) dominated by homesteaders. A sequence of opening poems shows a family leaving a rented eastern farm to homestead. On the prairie they cope with such natural disasters as prairie fires, blizzards, and droughts, ultimately establishing “cottages neat, and pastures wide, / Flowering gardens and stone walls grand, / Young orchards and field on every side / Pictures of comfort and thrift” (24). “The Cities’ Poor” describes the agonies of slum dwellers and the incendiary danger they pose to national security, proposing homesteading as a safety valve. Yes, on the farm they still “rise at dawn, but not to chill and cramp / You hear them singing; for their cheerful toil / Speaks more of lusty life than hard turmoil” (125).Thousands “have plenty now. and some to spare instead, / With homes that are their own, and grown so dear. / The Nation, for her safety, need not fear; / For if she ever needs strong, loyal hands, / She’ll find them in these sons who till the lands” (126). According to Nettie Garmer Barker in her 1915Kansas Women in Literature, the title poem in Esther M. Clark’s ἀ e Call of Kansas and Other Verses (1907—in its first edition unpaginated and with only nine poems), was known to everybody in the state (5). A 1921expansion contained 66 pages. In “The Call of Kansas” the speaker, on a southern California beach, contrasts the gorgeous scenery— pepper trees, poinsettias, ocean, hills—with the prairies and states that “Sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer rains; / Nearer my heart than these mighty hills are the windswept Kansas plains.” In “The Man Behind the Gun,” Clark praises Kansas men “who shed their blood at the Nation’s call for the martyr-state’s release” and the women who stood behind them. * * * After the Civil War, Kansas celebrants usually claimed that all emigrants from the Northeast had been abolitionist patriots, while all Missourians arriving over the border were pro-slavery ruffians driven by greed. In the 1850s and early 1860s, however, New England women’s reports from Kansas boomed the territory for settlement more than they made lofty nationalist arguments. Hannah Anderson Ropes’s 1856 Six Months in Kansas and Miriam Davis Colt’s 1862 Went to Kansas were nonideological. Ropes went to live with her son, who was homesteading outside of Lawrence, the center of New England emigration; Colt went with her husband and children to live in a vegetarian commune among like-minded people. Sara Robinson’s 1856 Kansas; Its Interior and Exterior Life was both ideological and economic in its concerns; Massachusetts abolitionist Lydia Maria Child’s novella ἀ e Kansas Emigrants, serialized in 1856 and collected the next year in her Autumnal Leaves, was purely ideological—but Child didn’t go to Kansas. Ropes’s initial anxieties in the letters home to her mother she used to produce her book were over dirt and illness among the emigrants—“the sickly look of everybody” (48)and the horrifyingly unsanitary conditions of their lives. Lack of sanitation, a constant among the overlanders and new settlers, is usually ignored in women’s books, although their occasional references to terrible conditions imply this. They traveled and slept with their cattle; they washed their clothes, bathed in, and drank contaminated water (when water was available). Much as she was focused on pioneer filth, however, Ropes did note “the dark clouds heaving up over our hopeful sky, from our heartless, poor-apology of a neighbor, Missouri” (201).Six months after her arrival she was back in Massachusetts, publishing for a New England audience and alternately describing the awful conditions of settler...