The Rise and Fall of the Plains Indian Horse Cultures Article Review

I decided to publish my write-ups from my comprehensive exam reading fields. I am publishing them *equally is.* Thus they represent my thoughts as a new PhD student. They were written between September 2011 and July 2012. The full collection is accessible here.

Swell Plains I

• Pekka Hamalainen, "The Ascent and Autumn of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,"The Journal of American History 90.3 (December 2003): 833-862.
• James E. Sherow, "Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and Their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800-1870,"Environmental History Review 16.2 (Summer 1992): 61-84.
• Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,"The Journal of American History78.2 (September 1991): 465-485.
• Pekka Hamalainen, "The First Phase of Destruction: Killing the Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840,"Plains Quarterly21.2 (Spring 2001): 101-114.
• Andrew C. Isenberg,The  Devastation of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• William A. Dobak, "Killing the Canadian Buffalo, 1821-1881,"The Western Historical Quarterly 27.1 (Spring 1996): 33-52.
• Theodore Binnema,Common and Contested Ground: A Human being and Ecology History of the Northwestern Plains (Toronto: University of Toronto Printing, 2001).
• Elliott Due west,The  Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers , and the Blitz to Colorado (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas, 1998).

The history of the Great Plains has largely been shaped past two mammalian animals, 1 native and one foreign—the buffalo and equus caballus, respectively—and past the shaping of the environment for human purposes by Native Americans and Euroamericans alike. The introduction and domestication of the equus caballus in Indian societies on the plains enabled more efficient exploitation of bison and thus played a major office in bringing the bison to almost extinction. Yet, despite its office in the downfall of the bison, the introduction of the horse into Plains Indian culture is typically portrayed by historians every bit a positive outcome or "a straightforward success story." (833) All the same, this rosy portrait is not accurate, Pekka Hamalainen, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, argues in "The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures," because it ignores the enormous upheaval the horse created aslope the positive, progressively Western advancement. Hamalainen contends that Plains Indian History has been concise past an obsession with an east-west paradigm, and that, instead, the history of these societies tin exist amend understood when analyzing actions from North to Due south. The equus caballus-based culture of the Plains Indians, he explains, originated due to the influence of the Castilian, who initially introduced the beast to the region. The horse quickly spread through the region and infiltrated the Indians' way of life because it was well-suited to the southern Plains environment. Those tribes that were able to conform nigh rapidly to the horse, such as the Apache and Comanche, who developed a vast pastoral trading empire, and were able to increase their equus caballus resource most proficiently became the dominant groups on the plains.

Hamalainen points out that horses encouraged a nomadic lifestyle in the South. Other tribes, wishing to profit from the same type of livestock economic system that fueled Comanche say-so as well as follow the trail of bison, moved to the southern Nifty Plains, the close proximity of which led to more clashes between groups. The egalitarian social structure, Hamalainen points out was weakened past the influx of equus caballus and material wealth, equally one'south social standing became tied to the number of horses i owned. This infiltration of a kind of class consciousness affected many aspects of Indian life, including matrimony. Notwithstanding, the major negative changes experienced by the Plains Indians were not social, but rather ecological in nature, he writes. Horse hunting, drought, and increased traffic across the Southern Plains led to the diminution of their primary source of subsistence, the bison herds. The demand to support two types of economies, a trade economy based on horses and a subsistence economy based on bison hunting, required that 2 sets of horses, one for merchandise and one for hunting, be maintained.

Indians in the Northern Plains did not adopt the horse civilization as readily as those in the Due south, Hamalainen writes. However, once the horse had infiltrated their lodge, they embraced information technology enthusiastically as a replacement for canis familiaris ability and an opening through which textile prosperity would menstruation. Scarcity of horses and the difficulties of raising them in the northern climate, however, limited the Northern Plains Indians and made sure that they were unable to completely transform their society into one based on mounted economy. Still, horses still destabilized the egalitarianism of the Indian tribes in the North besides and perhaps even more and so considering horses were rarer and therefore more valuable. Only the richest of tribe members in the North had access to horses and they rarely allowed poorer individuals to benefit from them. The equus caballus wars were also more than intense and, Hamalainen argues, eroded the Northern horse culture from within. The imbalance that the horse culture created within the Indians' societies outweighed the economical benefits that the horses enabled, and thus contributed to their demise.

In "Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and Their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800-1870," James E. Sherow, a professor of history at Kansas Land Academy, links the problems of Native American horse culture to a more ecologically based miracle—the imperfect adaptation of Native American gild to the environmental conditions of the Slap-up Plains. Sherow's analysis is based on the concept of the geodialectic, which, he states, "implies ever changing environments on the planet, and in order to survive, humans and other living things must adapt to constant environmental flux." Indians and their horses made changes to the natural surroundings and failed to fully comprehend the consequences of their actions or the influence that outside forces, which were out of their control, had on these deportment.

The key to examining the Indians' inability to keep up with geodialectic processes is to look at the emergence of their material culture that was enabled by the introduction of the horse, Sherow argues. Like Hamalainen, Sherow believes that historians accept focused likewise much on the positive changes the horse brought to Indian guild and take overlooked those changes that were detrimental. While horse enabled trade and efficient bison hunting, which became the hallmarks of Indian economic system, information technology besides placed a number of constraints on these individuals. One of the greatest constraints was due to the erratic and arid nature of the Plains surround, which often acquired suffering for Native Americans and horses alike. Finding adequate grazing for the horses was normally hard, but often proved about impossible during dry years. Because the environment did not naturally nurture the health of the horses, Indians had to spend a dandy deal of time taking care of their animals, ofttimes having to drift to riparian areas in order to observe decent grazing weather, especially during winter. Vitamin deficiencies during the wintertime often caused ailments for the horses and forced Indians to accept the time to find feed sources of such supplements as Vitamin A.  Even in the summer, during prime number bison hunting season, the horses were susceptible to ailments, such as heat stroke and dehydration. Finding water for horses often forced Indians to get out of their way. Withal, despite tirelessly trying to adapt their horse husbandry to the Plains environment, the Indians were never fully successful. Even though the Plains Indians were relatively ecologically-minded, Sherow argues, they were unable to understand the geodialectic of their homeland, which led to a great deal of suffering on the part of both the humans and the horses. They were forcing upon the country a style of life that was non compatible with reality.

Dan Flores, like Hamalainen and Sherow, as well believes that historians have been misguided in regards to their range of focus when analyzing the impact of horses and bison on the Plains Indians. Historians have focused too much on the popularized issue of these social, economic, and ecological changes, such every bit the cease of the tragic end of the bison and the trigger-happy war machine campaigns against the Indians. Focusing on the upshot has caused historians to ignore the earlier causes that led these later events. Flores, a cultural and environmental historian of the American West at the University of Montana, subscribes to the thought of thelongue duree, beginning introduced into academic by individuals such as Fernand Braudel, and believes that information technology is central to history, specially ecology history. Like Sherow, though not using the aforementioned terminology, Flores asks, in "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850," how well the Plains Indians created an ecological equilibrium. Instead of focusing on the evolution of the Indian horse civilisation, Flores begins his argument at the signal that Indians accept already made the transition to horse nomad and is more than concerned about the horse Indians' human relationship with the bison. Hamalainen comments in "The Rise and Autumn of Plains Indian Horse Cultures" that the equus caballus enabled Indians to tap energy that had previously been unavailable to them. Flores besides points out that the Indians were quick to have advantage of new forms of extracting free energy.

Referring to pollen analysis and archaeological studies, Flores challenges the pop belief that bison were a constant strength on the plains. Instead, he argues that there were times when the bison were not prevalent and perhaps absent. Flores describes bison as akin to weeds, a specie that flooded a niche. Using the agricultural census of 1910, Flores estimates that there were 8 million bison on the Southern Plains and 28-20 million in all of the Great Plains, which would have seemed like an endless supply to the Indians. The lack of biodiversity amid big grazers enabled the horse to movement into the Plains and flourish. Bison hunting by horse led to specialization amidst tribes resulted; those tribes such as the Comanche who made to move to specialization initially did better than those tribes that continued to try to diversify their economic system. Similar to Sherow's questioning of the Indians' level of environmental sensibility and ability to maintain ecological equilibrium, Flores asserts that as the Indians became more than entrenched in the horse civilisation and bison merchandise, they became less ecologically-minded and more tied to man-made merchandise networks. Thus, when measuring the Plains Indians upshot on and placement in the environment's equilibrium, one must look at a wide spectrum of information, including natural occurrences that affected the bison and Indian populations and cultural aspects that affected the way Indians utilized bison. Affects on bison tin exist equally far-ranging as wolf predation and drought. Past 1850, Flores argues, bison herds were entering a period of pass up at the aforementioned time Indians were taking the steps to bison hunting specialization. Drought combined with this increment in hunting, Flores writes, were the main elements that led to the bison population collapse. Bovine diseases, an increment in grazing contest due the influx of horses, and white inroad were side factors that enhanced the effects of drought and hunting. Flores argues that ultimately it is not possible to decidedly conclude whether Indians could have adapted their new style of life to ensure ecological equilibrium because the situation was not allowed to play out. Yet, he states that it is unlikely that they would take been able to reconcile bison hunting and horse culture with environmental balance.

Hamalainen, in another article titled "The First Phase of Devastation: Killing the Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840," acknowledges the meaning, revisionist contribution Flores and Elliott W had to the field of Western History. However, Hamalainen cautions that considering Flores and Westward's arguments resounded then perfectly through the halls of the ecological bison history when it was published, New Western historians have fallen into the same trap as those Western historians who followed Frederick Jackson Turner. They accept failed to question the works' inadequacies and have presented their arguments equally unquestionable verities, thus causing the field to remain stuck in the intellectual mires of the past.

Hamalainen believes that the Flores/West model needs to be revisited because its findings practice not entirely add up. The erroneous facet of the model lies mainly in its time span. Hamalainen contends that the decline of the bison began well before Flores and W's 1840s. The Southern Plains buffalo, instead, began to decline in numbers as early as the 1780s and 1790s. However the time span of bison diminution is non the only component of Flores' argument that Hamalainen wants to dispute. He likewise believes that they placed too much emphasis on the negative effects of environmental degradation upon the bison population, and asserts that it was a combination of overhunting, indigenous population growth, and the onslaught of large-scale marketplace commercialization, and ecology factors that led to bison decline. Taking into consideration the early on introduction of the horse, Hamalainen illustrates that massive Indian slaughter, even at the subsistence level, of bison at an unsustainable charge per unit was likely occurring 50 years earlier it is traditionally believed to have begun. The commercialization of bison hunting only aggravated the situation. Hamalainen also places a nifty deal of significance on the reject of the ranges area and increasing scarcity of resources on the plains made worse by the incursion of horses into the plains. These problems likewise originated, not in the Arkansas basin as Flores and W argue, but rather in the Texas Plains.

Hamalainen also examines the outcome that changing ecological and economic trends had on the Comanche in the surface area. With a flood of other tribes into their region fatigued by promise of bison wealth, the Comanche had to spend more fourth dimension defending their horses and their bison reserves, which led naturally to increased warfare. Hamalainen emphasizes the importance of attempting to understand the difficult position in which the Comanche found themselves rather blaming them unquestionably for the over-hunting of the bison. Though the Comanche knew they needed the bison for their long-term survival, Hamalainen writes, they besides knew that they needed allies, weapons, and secure trade routes in order to survive in the short-term. "Faced with a disquisitional strategic crisis," he states, "the Comanche had no other pick but to allow unsustainable exploitation of the bison." (28) This early exploitation and subsequent reject in the bison population led Indians to shift their beingness to one of pastoralism, equally he discussed in "The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Equus caballus Cultures."

InThe Destruction  of the Bison: An Ecology History, 1750-1920, Andrew C. Isenberg, a professor of history at Temple University, also notes that the annihilation of the bison was a effect of numerous, interconnected factors. Nevertheless, Isenberg discounts the idea that the environment has a natural equilibrium. A constant offsetting of imbalance on the function of natural forces in order to once again achieve equilibrium is not an accurate portrayal of nature. Rather, he argues, nature is a dynamic forcefulness that is inherently instable. There is no incertitude that this instability, represented by such forces every bit drought, played a major function in the near-extinction of the bison. Isenberg also places more accent on forces, such every bit grazing competition and predators, other than over-hunting and drought than Flores. It is too unproblematic to assume that the bison population was depleted due to capitalistic greed. Ecology factors greatly influenced the fortunes of both the animals and the Indians of the Plains. Consequently, Indians were force in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to adapt to the changes that resulted from Euroamerican intrusion, namely horses, which made bison hunting more efficient, Old World diseases, which pushed the Indians further into a nomadic lifestyle, and the fur trade, which immersed the Indians into the market system and encouraged specialization. Thus, information technology was non simply human greed or survival instincts or dynamic natural forces, but a complex interaction of the iii that led to the bisons' demise.

Isenberg highlights the attitudes of white settlers and government officials much more than than Flores and the other authors. Isenberg notes that many federal authorities applauded the extermination of the bison considering the finish of the bison would also end the reign of the gratuitous Indian and thus removing their independent livelihood and making it easier to fence the Indians into reservations. Preservationists were also, Isenberg contends, not driven past a pure, altruistic sense of stewardship towards the environs, just, rather, past a want to preserve the remaining remnants of Frederick Jackson Turner'due south vanishing frontier. Saving the bison was a kind of memorial to a lost time, an enshrinement of the manly virtues that had made America unique. They may have saved the remaining remnants of the species, but they still yearned for the times when bison were plentiful and ripe for exploitation. Prior histories of the bison have represented these two strains of idea by either presenting the decline equally a celebratory landmark of the triumph of white progress or every bit a tale of Progressive Era philanthropy. In both cases, Isenberg writes, the historical record has been over-simplified by jubilant the inevitability of Euroamerican conquest and the supposedly static and passive nature of Indian society. InThe Devastation of the Bison, Isenberg seeks to illuminate the diverseness of Plains Indians, and the mode in which "the exigencies of resource apply transcended ethnicity." (8) Despite this diversity, the Plains Indians shared had a mutual set of experiences due to their need to follow the migratory patterns of the bison. The mobility of the bison, Isenberg writes, was the greatest challenge to the Indians' survival, and the horse provided a ways to make this challenge less foreboding. Withal, as Hamalainen and Sherow bespeak out, horses likewise fabricated the Indian'southward dangerously dependent on trade and bison hunting and radically decentralized their social structure and increased warfare amongst the dissimilar tribes. Ultimately, Isenberg views the story of the Plains Indians as a cautionary tale, which demonstrates "the futility of riches and the fragility of nature." (122)

In "Killing the Canadian Buffalo, 1821-1881," William A. Dobak, a freelance historian who received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the Academy of Kansas, turns the word surrounding nineteenth century bison depletion to the Canadian Plains. Dissimilar Isenberg, who states that in that location was no direct connection betwixt the downfall of the Indian and the bison because the Indian continued on later on the buffalo were gone, adapting to new conditions as they had in years by, Dobak makes a direct connection betwixt the herding of buffalo to their deaths and the herding of Native peoples into reservations. Dobak states that the American story of the bisons' demise is much more well-known and that ultimately it was the commercial hide-hunter that did the final impairment. Like Flores, Dobak approaches the history of the Plains Bison from the assumption that the environment has an equilibrium at which it is always struggling to stay.

Dobak argues that the Canadian Plains is the perfect properties on which to test the validity of American historian'due south conclusions that the bison'southward turn down was due to a combination of environmental and market place forces because the Canadian bison disappeared before the major institutions needed for merchandise, such equally railroads, had arrived. Because the classic capitalist forces were nonexistent in the Canadian side of the story, Dobak contends that the buffalo left the region as the event of native actions. Similar Isenberg, Dobak begins with an estimate of the bison population, which comes in at i,900,000, based on the extent and conveying chapters of the region based on Flores' apply of the 1910 census.

Diminishing grasslands was not a causational factor in the decline of the bison herds considering the grasslands really extended farther than they do today, due to grass fires like those described by Stephen Pyne inFire in America. Possible causes of the decline include grazing competition as a result of horse introduction and climactic weather, which Dobak states are hard to pinpoint due to the incomplete and contradictory nature of the climate data from the time flow. Nonetheless, it is known that in the 1850s conditions were drier than normal, and thus, coupled with the increased human pressures on the population, could accept led to the buffalo's turn down. Yet, since the evidence is unconvincing, it is more than likely that it was man factors that were to blame. Dobak estimates that there were about 24,000 Indians in the three major groups on the plains, all of which worked to provide traders with hides and pemmican. Hunters oft favored cows because their hides were more appealing, which, Dobak notes, severely injured the herd's power to reproduce and aggrandize. The buffalo range afterward contracted, which led to increased contest over a smaller number of bachelor prizes, thus making places where buffalo could live untouched few and far between. Dobak concludes that "sheer population pressure, augmented by commercial demand, which claimed the skins of thirty percent more buffalo than Natives required for their minimum needs" (49) is the most likely candidate for blame. However, he offers other potential factors that could have led to the reject of the Canadian bison. Dobak, Flores, and Hamalainen notation that one major reason that the Indians may have not been able to sympathise the toll that their actions were having on the bison population is due to their spiritual beliefs involving the natural world. Southern Plains Indians believed that the bison came out of the footing in the bound and that nature'southward abundance was never-ending.  However, this spiritual factor may not be practical to Canadian Plains Indians equally easily. A less romantic caption is that the native people did non understand the extent of the damage they were causing considering their insular outlook on life focused on the apparent enormity of the herds that they institute and did not consider the fact that the bison, as a whole, were existence destroyed. The Canadian Indians but killed at an unsustainable rate without the foresight needed to understand the consequences of their deportment.

InCommon and Contested Basis: A Human and Ecology, Thomas Binnema, a professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia, argues that prior historians take neglected a large portion of testify in an attempt to incorrectly accentuate the ways in which Indigenous communities' adapted to and accustomed change within their cultural constructs. Like Isenberg, Binnema asserts that the cultural alter that occurred on the plains did not destroy native civilisation, but rather led to a different, modified grade of information technology. Ethnic peoples understood that change was inevitable and fifty-fifty embraced it with the aforementioned kind of zeal attributed to progress-obsessed individuals of European descent. Connecting his written report to contemporary issues, Binnema states that information technology is important to understand how native groups administered themselves in the past to better understand how to back up self-government in the future.Mutual and Contested Ground is meant to be an unconventional assessment of Indian life on the Canadian Plains, which bypasses the hullabaloo surrounding culturalist preoccupations and the romanticized images this preoccupation creates to offer an analogy of the Indian that is more than realistic and factually based. The romanticization of a group of people, Binnema argues, is just equally disrespectful as demonizing them.

Rather than culture, the history of the Plains Indians was shaped past the interplay between tribes in the form of merchandise, warfare, and diplomacy, Binnema argues. "The northwestern plains," he writes, "were the common and contested footing of various communities." (5) This region was based originally on geographic characteristics, which were accentuated by way of diplomatic and military relations. Referring to Richard White'southThe Eye Ground, Binnema describes the plains as a meeting ground for disparate groups of people, both native and Euroamerican. Trade, warfare, diplomacy, and even intermarriage created a middle group of people who worked together for and often fought over the same spoils. The idea that Indians were characterized by their cultural, tribal ties is an outdated mode of interpretation, Binnema contends. Instead native groups are best understood as band societies, which were every bit organized as modern-twenty-four hours societies. These bands were distinct due to the acceptability of member fluidity. Individuals were free to leave one group and bring together another because both individualism and communitarianism were valued. It was completely normal for an encampment to include individuals from several bands and cultures. Because bands were so willing to join with others for common benefit and also equally as willing to take up artillery when their livelihoods were threatened, Binnema argues that cultural considerations was non the primary preoccupation of these individuals. Whatever preoccupation with culture has been placed upon these historical figures by misguided historians.

Like Isenberg, Binnema acknowledges that the ecological systems in which the Indians lived were non static, only rather dynamic. Native peoples continuously worked to shape the surround to their will often in hopes of increasing the lands ability to back up bison. Like to Sherow'southward account of the southern plains, Binnema discusses the way in which the Indians in the northwestern plains were often beholden to the migratory patterns of the buffalo and the whims of the region'due south climate. The Indians were not thoughtless wanderers, merely rather methodical resource exploiters. Being natural exploiters, as all humans are according to Binnema, the Indians' deportment were not entirely determined by environmental conditions, and thus did not live in complete harmony with nature. "The environment of the northwestern plains regulated homo activity, but it left considerable latitude for human innovation," (55) he states. Binnema discusses the ways in which groups of Indians molded together and shot apart in order to sustain their survival. The introduction of the horse is less of import in regards to changes in the Indians' culture, as Hamalainen and Sherow focused on, and more pregnant in regards to warfare and merchandise, of which the horse, often coupled with the gun, became a vital player. Although Binnema provides an important link in the chain of historical agreement surrounding the past of the northwestern Plains, his outright dismissal of cultural indicators seems forced and his evidence dealing with warfare, trade, and diplomacy does not fairly substantiate his grandiose merits. While alliances and squabbles no dubiousness played a major role in these individuals' lives, it is hard to believe that in day to day interactions their cultural understandings of themselves as individuals and equally a people were non more important to them on a personal level.

InThe Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers , and the Blitz to Colorado, Elliott West, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, does not shy away from questions of cultural indicators, but rather leaps head-on into the realm of the immensely personal, that which lies in our imaginations. Unlike Sherow, who paints human'south role in nature on  a much more fifty-fifty keel with other animals, West is adamant that humans are not equal to other species, but rather accept a more avant-garde perception of their surroundings which allows them to think most their environment and reflect on the possible repercussions of their actions. Humans have the added power to create variations of reality in their listen, and subsequently act out theses imaginings in existent life. Imagination enables humans to manipulate their environment, West contends. The environment is continuously setting up roadblocks for humans and animals akin, but but humans are able to finer imagine ways to control these road blocks. Yet, despite their ability to imagine the future, humans are unable to fully cover the repercussions of their actions. Environmental history, Westward writes, is basically the continuous story of how humans attempt to get themselves out of the trouble in which their impulsive imaginations identify them. Both the Native Americans and the easterners that sought wealth in the gold mines of Colorado had visions for a better future, dreams that that they wished to come truthful. Like Binnema, W argues that Indians were not adverse to change, just rather embraced it with enthusiasm.

Departing from bison-equus caballus dynamic, West examines the role of minerals, specifically gilded, in the Due west, but still manages to illustrate the competitive temper of the West, where Indians and Euroamericans both fought for the prize of prosperity. The golden rush to Colorado in the belatedly 1850s is mainly associated with the mountains in which the digging took place, yet, Westward finer demonstrates that the plains played an equal if not more of import role during the time period considering it is across the plains that these, mainly, Euroamerican individuals had to travel, the very plains on which the Indians of the region were experiencing a massive cultural transformation. The histories of white and Native Americans are not divide, but deeply interconnected, and this interconnectedness is most hands viewable in the crossings of cultures on the plains in the nineteenth century. The individuals that inhabited and intruded upon the plains during the 1850s exchanged goods, diseases, animals, plants, and alien hopes for the future. The rush for golden transformed the meaning of the Plains in the American conscience, and realigned the power dynamics of the plains.

As discussed earlier, Indians lives were profoundly transformed by the introduction of the horse. Upon introduction, Indian visions of the future and the mode in which they could use nature to their advantage were deeply intertwined with this foreign life course. The horse, as Hamalainen and Flores previously discussed, introduced a grade of energy to the Indians' lives that had otherwise been unavailable. Energy, in the way that W treats information technology, also denotes ability. Trade and guns introduced a way to harness energy and subsequent ecological, political, and economical power. Because of this newfound power, natives embraced a new lifestyle, that of nomadic and pastoral bison hunter, which would lead to future difficulties, such as increased warfare and bison extinction, which were initially unimaginable.

Gilded is popular because it is rare, it is inert, and it is shiny, Westward writes. He demonstrates the massive affect gold had on individuals and the power it had to reshape entire regions. The low in the years straight prior led to an even greater number of individuals traveling to Colorado in social club to grasp their dreams for a ameliorate futurity. West outlines the ways in which travelers had to learn how to deal with natural phenomena while on the trail, and how the difficulties of trail life often reinforced familial and communal relationships. As more and more than people traveled to the West, the plains no longer seemed like a wasteland through which i traveled as quickly every bit possible, but instead, began to look like a identify that was ripe for the development of exchange routes that were vital to the future economic health of the nation. White imaginings of farms and ranches clashed with Indian imaginings of a future based on hunting and merchandise. Every bit was typical for the time period, white citizens expected Indians to abandon their own dreams in exchange for subordination. As tensions grew between the ii visions, particularly subsequently the Civil War, conflicts between the two groups grew more fierce. Due west's narrative of the Colorado gilded rush effectively demonstrates the way in which Native Americans were forced to requite up their imaginings of the future upon the onslaught of Euroamericans. All the same, it is the nature of the author to always question those that insistently claim that superiority of humanity in relation to rest of the natural world.

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Source: https://jessicamdewitt.com/2018/11/29/comps-notes-great-plains-i/

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