Stories of development from childhood to adulthood or of journeying through a life-changing experience to gain new knowledge are replete in oral and written tradition, as exemplified by the Greek epic of Odysseus and countless other tales. Often the hero journeys naively to an alien land and then, with great difficulty, returns home wiser but…

The American print media are a powerful mechanism for communicating information about places and environment to the American public. When it comes to a landscape such as the Great Plains, experienced by many Americans as either sleep-through land in a car or flyover land in a plane, the print media may be their only real source of information…

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," much Great Plains literature is situational, placing…

It was one of the more harrowing episodes of the Great Depression. Ted and Rose Bates had failed in business in Glidden, Saskatchewan, in 1932 and again on the west coast of Canada the following year. When they were subsequently turned down for relief assistance twice, first in Vancouver and then in Saskatoon, because they did not meet the local…

Unexpected, dramatic stories of death have left deep marks on the physical landscape and in the cultural psyche since humans first began to weave narrative from the Plains. When scholars and writers converged in Omaha, Nebraska for the 34th Interdisciplinary Symposium of the Center for Great Plains Center, many stories received scholarly and…

The inspiring story of homesteaders claiming free land and realizing their dreams became one of the enduring narratives of American history. But scholars who have studied homesteading have often been much more ambivalent, even harshly negative, about how successful it was in practice. While the public often views our history differently from…

While traveling along the Platte River on May 18, 1834, William Marshall Anderson stopped to pick up a human skull bleaching in the prairie sunlight. Anderson was from Louisville, Kentucky, and had been sent west by his physician to accompany a fur-trade caravan to the Rocky Mountains in hopes of regaining lost physical strength. He came west not…

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an "entrada" from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where,…

In a column for the "Lincoln" [Nebraska] "Courier", a newspaper that actively covered the city's political and artistic scenes in the mid-1890s, William Reed Dunroy writes, "Young poets write what they know; what life has taught them." If his own poetry and imaginative prose are any indication, what Dunroy himself…

In May 1910 Mildred Williams, a young teacher in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, made headlines across Western Canada for her pluck and stamina as she waited for twelve days and nights on a chair on the stairs outside the door of the land office in Saskatoon to claim a homestead. She was determined to file on a half-section (320 acres) of valuable land…

The number of contemporary Kansas prairie artists whose works project an affinity for the sea continues to grow. This article focuses on six in particular: painters Robert Sudlow, Keith Jacobshagen, Lisa Grossman, and Louis Copt, and photographers Terry Evans and Larry Schwarm. Each of these Kansas-connected prairie artists has exhibited…

In "The New Language of the Old West," "Deadwood"'s creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language: "Language--both obscene and complicated--was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people.... It's very well documented that the obscenity…

This article contains excerpts from "The Lewis and Clark Journals: An Epic of Discovery, The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition," published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003. Editor Gary E. Moulton chose a few daily entries from the journals to highlight the expedition from May 14-October 12, 1804.

The view from Pikes Peak is breathtaking. In the summer of 1893, Katherine Lee Bates sat on the summit of Pikes Peak, inspired by the panorama to pen the words to "America the Beautiful." Her poem was set to the tune "Materna" by Samuel Augustus Ward two years later to become one of our nation's most beloved anthems. Many…

Literary critics and historians have long attempted to define what is authentic in western literature, praising those works that come closest to presenting a true picture of western life. When read through this lens, Molly Gloss' "The Jump Off Creek" and Nancy E. Turner's "These Is My Words" could be considered praiseworthy.…