Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

2. Pastoralism and Enclosure: Marriage and Illegitimate Children on the Range-FarmFrontier in Eaton’s Cattle and Richter’s Sea of Grass

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 andmurderedhiscompetition.Needlesstosay,thisactdidnothelphiscause in the eyes of his god. As a result, and against the dictates of his agrarian  56ҍ pastoralism and enclosure 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 callingfortheCainsandAbelsofOklahomatoforgettheirdifferencesforthe 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 wasavailablefortheploughman,agrarianboostersraisedCaintoonceagain 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 binariesthatreflectthecomplexmakeupofwesternidentityasithasevolved 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, pastoralism and enclosureҏ 57 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...