In 1877 a small group of Swiss immigrants from the Graubunden canton formed a cooperative with another Swiss group in Stillwater, Minnesota, to begin a colony in eastern South Dakota. These settlers founded the Badus Swiss colony on the open prairie in Lake County, Dakota Territory (later South Dakota), based on cooperative rules written in…

At the conclusion of Willa Cather's 1913 novel "O Pioneers!", Alexandra Bergson muses about landownership, and more broadly about the human-land relationship, by reflecting on the transience of the county plat map, one of the most popular forms of mapping rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps were…

Nebraskans of the early twenty-first century have had few encounters with railroads. Passenger trains are nearly extinct, and freights run over only a few main lines. But without the railroads that began to crisscross Nebraska in the 1860s, it may have taken years for significant settlement to reach throughout the territory that became a state in…

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…

Data available to scholars on homesteading are of very poor quality--inconsistent, unreliable, inaccessible, incomplete--and surprisingly, they haven't been getting any better. Even basic questions such as how much homesteaded land was "proved up," how much land was commuted, or how many actual farms were created by homesteading cannot be answered…

For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"--but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would consider this an ideal landscape for home. So how did…

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town…

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…

As a literary work initiated and directed by a committee of women, the "Pageant of Paha Sapa" captures the zeitgeist of the post-frontier era through the eyes of the influential women of one small town. Like all origin myths, this script presented the current populace as the rightful heirs of the place and its resources, having won them…

This article lays out U.S. Indian policy in the Great Plains during the twenty-five years after the Civil War by examining chronologically specific "players" that shaped and reshaped that policy: the U.S. Army, the President and Interior Department, Congress, religious organizations, whites in the Indian reform movement, settlers surging…

David Milch, creator of HBO's critically acclaimed Western series, "Deadwood," said, "The only reason the town of Deadwood exists is gold." Milch bluntly discards the Western genre's foundational ideology of self-determination, considering these principles a delusion that obscures the material realities of the late nineteenth…

The odyssey of the Lewis and Clark Expedition continues to capture the hearts of those who love tales of adventure and unknown lands. In light of the bicentennial celebration that began in 2003 and continued through 2006, the popularity and aggrandizement of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery has never been greater.…

Rolvaag's story is grounded in the relationship between the undifferentiated environment and the built environment--that is, the structures that anchor people in place and define the parameters of human existence where geographical landmarks are few. This article is a discussion of the ways Rolvaag elicits this process in both the land and the…

Describes the historical development of the spatial order of human settlement in Geary County, Kansas. Geary County's sense of place derives from the integration of physical and human environments--patterns of association between daily human activities and natural environment that have produced a particular cultural landscape. (SV)

The "Dakota boom" is a label historians have almost universally adopted to describe the period of settlement in Dakota Territory between the years 1878 and 1887. The term "boom" has been applied to this period largely because of the volume of land claimed and the rapid increase in Dakota Territory's population that occurred…