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.

2018 Nebraska Book Award The state of Nebraska has a rich and varied culture, from the eastern metropolitan cities of Omaha and Lincoln to the ranches of the western Sand Hills. The first atlas of Nebraska published in over thirty years, this collection chronicles the history of the state with more than three hundred original, full-color maps accompanied by extended explanatory text. Far more than simply the geography of Nebraska, this atlas explores a myriad of subjects from Native Americans to settlement patterns, agricultural ventures to employment, and voting records to crime rates. These detailed and beautifully designed maps convey the significance of the state, capturing the essence of its people and land. This volume promises to be an essential reference tool to enjoy for many years to come.

The "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains" is a cooperative project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the University of Nebraska Press, with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Nebraska Foundation, and the Nebraska Humanities Council.

The Great Plains is a vast expanse of grasslands stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River and from the Rio Grande to the coniferous forests of Canada--an area more than eighteen hundred miles from north to south and more than five hundred miles from east to west. The Great Plains region includes all or parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

The region, once labeled "the Great American Desert," is now more often called the "heartland," or, sometimes, "the breadbasket of the world." Its immense distances, flowing grasslands, sparse population, enveloping horizons, and dominating sky convey a sense of expansiveness, even emptiness or loneliness, a reaction to too much space and one's own meager presence in it.

The Plains region is the home of the Dust Bowl, the massacre at Wounded Knee, the North-West Rebellion, the Tulsa race riot, the Lincoln County War, the purported Roswell alien landing, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. From it have emerged furs, cattle, corn, wheat, oil, gas, and coal, as well as jazz, literature, and political reform. It has been inhabited for more than twelve thousand years, since Paleo-Indians hunted mammoth and bison. More recent emigrants came from eastern North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, resulting in a complex and distinctiveethnic mosaic.

With 1,316 entries contributed by more than one thousand scholars, this groundbreaking reference work captures what is vital and interesting about the Great Plains--from its temperamental climate to its images and icons, its historical character, its folklore, and its politics. Thoroughly illustrated, annotated, and indexed, this remarkable compendium of information and analysis will prove the definitive and indispensable resource on the Great Plains for many years to come.

Listen to an interview with David J. Wishart from Nebraska Public Radio

2011 "Booklist" Editor's Choice, reference category

The Great Plains, stretching northward from Texas into Canada, is a region that has been understudied and overlooked. The" Atlas of the Great Plains," however, brings a new focus to North America's midcontinent. With more than three hundred original full-color maps, accompanied by extended explanatory text, this collection chronicles the history of the Great Plains, including political and social developments. Far more than simply the geography of the region, this atlas explores a myriad of subjects from Native Americans to settlement patterns, agricultural ventures to voting records, and medical services to crime rates. These detailed and beautifully designed maps convey the significance of the region, capturing the essence of its land and life. The only current and comprehensive atlas of the Great Plains region, it is also the first atlas to include both the United States and Canada, showing the region's full length and breadth.

2017 Nebraska Book Awards Nonfiction: Reference David J. Wishart's Great Plains Indians covers thirteen thousand years of fascinating, dynamic, and often tragic history. From a hunting and gathering lifestyle to first contact with Europeans to land dispossession to claims cases, and much more, Wishart takes a wide-angle look at one of the most significant groups of people in the country. Myriad internal and external forces have profoundly shaped Indian lives on the Great Plains. Those forces-the environment, religion, tradition, guns, disease, government policy-have written their way into this history. Wishart spans the vastness of Indian time on the Great Plains, bringing the reader up to date on reservation conditions and rebounding populations in a sea of rural population decline. Great Plains Indians is a compelling introduction to Indian life on the Great Plains from thirteen thousand years ago to the present.

Until the last two centuries, the human landscapes of the Great Plains were shaped solely by Native Americans, and since then the region has continued to be defined by the enduring presence of its Indigenous peoples. The "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians" offers a sweeping overview, across time and space, of this story in 123 entries drawn from the acclaimed "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains," together with 23 new entries focusing on contemporary Plains Indians, and many new photographs. Here are the peoples, places, processes, and events that have shaped lives of the Indians of the Great Plains from the beginnings of human habitation to the present--not only yesterday's wars, treaties, and traditions but also today's tribal colleges, casinos, and legal battles. In addition to entries on familiar names from the past like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, new entries on contemporary figures such as American Indian Movement spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog and activists Russell Means and Leonard Peltier are included in the volume. Influential writer Vine Deloria Sr., Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, Nakota blues-rock band Indigenous, and the Nebraska Indians baseball team are also among the entries in this comprehensive account. Anyone wanting to know about Plains Indians, past and present, will find this an authoritative and fascinating source.

"In stressing the exploitation and destruction of the physical and human environment rather than the usual frontier romanticism, David Wishart has provided for students of the trans-Mississippi fur trade a valuable service."--Journal of the Early Republic. A standard reference work [that] should be required reading for all students of the American west."--Pacific Historical Review. "The whole [fur trade] system is traced out from the Green River rendezvous or the Fort Union post to the trading houses of St. Louis and the auctions in New York and Europe. Such factors as capital formation, shifting commercial institutions, the role of advanced market information, and the nature, kinds, costs, and speed of transportation are all worked into the story, as is the relationship of the whole fur trade to national and international business cycles. This is an impressive achievement for a book so brief...[It] opens out onto new methodological vistas and paradigms in western history."--William H. Goetzmann, New Mexico Historical Review David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize for distin-guished books in American geography, sponsored by the Association of American Geographers for An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, also available from the University of Nebraska Press.

In 1822 Elijah Mounts, barely eighteen, shoulders his rifle and walks from his uncle's Missouri farm to Saint Louis to seek his fortune in the fur trade. Frank B. Linderman's 1922 novel is a first-person account, based on a true story and his own trapping experience, of a young man's coming of age among the trappers and Indians in remote Montana, on the upper reaches of the wild Missouri River. Befriended by Wash Lamkin, "Dad" to all who know him, "Lige" learns to live on the trail, trap the beaver, hunt the buffalo, speak the Cree language, and observe the customs of the country and its people. Enamored of the freedom, wildness, and beauty of the high plains and tied to the people at whose hands he has experienced kindness, welcome, and acceptance, he must ultimately decide whether he will return to civilization or choose the life of a plainsman. Frank B. Linderman (1869-1938) was a Montana miner, trapper, newspaperman, politician, and chronicler of Indian life and culture. His many works include The Montana Stories of Frank B. Linderman, Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge-Fire, and Indian Old-Man Stories: More Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge-Fire, all available in Bison Books editions. David J. Wishart, a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the author of An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians and the editor of The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, both available from the University of Nebraska Press. Sarah Waller Hatfield is Linderman's granddaughter.

The story of the American fur trade has been told many times from different viewpoints, but David Lavender was the first to place it within the overall contest for empire between Britain and the United States. Rather than offering a simple hagiography of men like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and other legendary trappers, Lavender relates the story of men such as John Jacob Astor and Ramsay Crooks who competed with Britain's Hudson's Bay Company for the fur resources of the Great Lakes region and the upper Missouri River country.

Within this framework of contest and competition, Lavender shows how the American Fur Company learned to exploit the needs and wants of Indian tribes to gain a superior economic position over the British. The brutal and bloody rivalry helped Ramsay Crooks develop the techniques for transporting furs, supplying trappers, and selling pelts that made fur trapping such an integral economic activity in early U.S. history.

Of all the interactions between American Indians and Euro-Americans, none was as fundamental as the acquisition of the indigenous peoples' lands. To Euro-Americans this takeover of lands was seen as a natural right, an evolution to a higher use; to American Indians the loss of homelands was a tragedy involving also a loss of subsistence, a loss of history, and a loss of identity. Historical geographer David J. Wishart tells the story of the dispossession process as it affected the Nebraska Indians--Otoe-Missouria, Ponca, Omaha, and Pawnee--over the course of the nineteenth century. Working from primary documents, and including American Indian voices, Wishart analyzes the spatial and ecological repercussions of dispossession. Maps give the spatial context of dispossession, showing how Indian societies were restricted to ever smaller territories where American policies of social control were applied with increasing intensity. Graphs of population loss serve as reference lines for the narrative, charting the declining standards of living over the century of dispossession. Care is taken to support conclusions with empirical evidence, including, for example, specific details of how much the Indians were paid for their lands. The story is told in a language that is free from jargon and is accessible to a general audience.