Looking over the vast open plains of eastern Colorado, western
Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska, where one can travel miles
without seeing a town or even a house, it is hard to imagine the
crowded landscape of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In
those days farmers, speculators, and town builders flooded the
region, believing that rain would follow the plow and that the
"Rainbelt" would become their agricultural Eden. It took a mere
decade for drought and economic turmoil to drive these dreaming
thousands from the land, turning farmland back to rangeland and
reducing settlements to ghost towns.
David J. Wishart's "The Last Days of the Rainbelt" is the
sobering tale of the rapid rise and decline of the settlement of
the western Great Plains. History finds its voice in interviews
with elderly residents of the region by Civil Works Administration
employees in 1933 and 1934. Evidence similarly emerges from land
records, climate reports, census records, and diaries, as Wishart
deftly tracks the expansion of westward settlement across the
central plains and into the Rainbelt. Through an examination of
migration patterns, land laws, town-building, and agricultural
practices, Wishart re-creates the often-difficult life of settlers
in a semiarid region who undertook the daunting task of adapting to
a new environment. His book brings this era of American settlement
and failure on the western Great Plains fully into the scope of
historical memory.
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