Where the Buffalo Roam

Walter Prescott Webb's 1931 work, The Great Plains, remains a work of singular importance in the field of western history. Working almost entirely from secondary sources, Webb manages to produce an elegantly-written, expansive regional history that is brilliantly imaginative, and accurate in its conclusion: that the geographic-environmental character of the great plains forced settlers to modify successful eastern technologies and institutions in order to make them work in the vastly different landscape of the open treeless west. By twenty-first century standards, Webb's study has its shortcomings. Yet these do not lessen the power of his overall findings.