West of Highway 81, there lies another Kansas. While it accounts for two-thirds of the state's land area, it is sparsely populated and nearly desert dry. Before 1940, it was still distinctly rural-a place that some residents called the "Edge of the World."

Several generations of the Miner family have lived and farmed in Ness County, providing Craig Miner with a rich and very personal backdrop for this heartfelt and compelling portrait of western Kansas. In Next Year Country he recounts the resilience of his fellow Kansans through two depressions and the Dust Bowl, showing how the region changed dramatically over fifty years-not for the better, some might say.

In this striking regional history, Miner blends the voices of real people with writings of small-town journalists to show life as it was really lived from 1890 to 1940. He has fashioned a richly textured look at determined individuals as they confronted the vagaries of raw Nature and learned to adapt to the machine age. And he captures the drama and vitality of rural and small-town life at a time when children could die in a blizzard on their way home from school, in a place where gaping holes of cellars and wells from abandoned homesteads posed real hazards to nighttime travelers.

No mere nostalgic reverie, Miner's book chronicles the hard challenges to these Kansans' ambitious efforts to create a regional economy and society based on wheat, in an area once thought only marginally suitable for cereal crops. His diverse topics include the history of agricultural experiment stations, new approaches to irrigation, and the impact of the tractor and the combine; the role of women's clubs in developing culture, the growth of higher education, and the rise of the secession movement; and how people responded to pests, from prairie dogs to grasshoppers, and to radical groups, from the IWW to the KKK.

"Next Year Country" depicts the kind of rugged individualism that is often touted in America but seldom seen anymore, a testament to how people dealt with both Nature and transformative change. It is both a love song to Kansas and the best kind of regional history, showing that life has to be taken on its own terms to understand how people really lived.

In 1865, Indian tribes could not know that in just over forty years their greatest natural possession, their tribal lands, would be largely controlled by powerful contenders for their riches, American corporations. Significant as those tangible losses were, the Indian tribes parted with an even more valuable possession, their tribal sovereignty. H. Craig Miner explains that once the large and powerful railway, livestock, coal, and oil companies realized the potential of Indian Territory, they sought to enter the area and utilize its natural resources. The tribes, plagued by a lack of unified purpose, saw their losses occur before any effective protection procedure could be established. Because many whites married to Indians and mixed-blood members of the tribes were concerned with their own financial development, their decisions were of long term benefit to the corporations. In this unique, pioneering study, Miner reinforces his argument that Indian-white coexistence through market negotiation was thought by both sides to be possible in 1865. Each side had things the other wanted, and there was no sympathy for taking Indian property by military force. Yet the history of relations between the corporation and the Indian became a history of increasing political intervention to enforce various abstract solutions to the "Indian Question.'' The Corporation and the Indian leaves the strong impression that, while the Indians might have done no better had their own stratagems in dealing with American corporations been allowed to develop more freely, they hardly could have done any worse. H. Craig Miner was Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University, and the author of many books, including The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873, coauthored with William E. Unrau and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

This volume, which presents a "slice-of-life" on the Plains during its early settlement, adds rich detail to our understanding of the struggle for survival in a harsh landscape that tested the hardiest pioneer. Miner concentrates not only on the major economic events of the period--railroad building, Indian raids, the grasshopper invasion of 1874, the blizzard of 1886--but also on the more personal experiences equally important: building sod houses, choosing crops, filing of claims, fighting varmints, and dealing with the deaths of children on the prairie.

Volume 114 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series " William] Unrau's book is the definitive written history of the Kansa to date, particularly in terms of their interaction with the federal government."--American Indian Quarterly "Unrau examines tribal legends and tradition to trace the origins of the Kansa culture to a single Indian nation, located in 'an unidentified area east of the Mississippi River' and made up of the people who separated before the mid-sixteenth century into the Kansas, Quapaws, Omahas, Osages and Poncas. Balancing tradition and archaeological evidence with French and Spanish records, Unrau] suggests several routes of migration that could have brought the Wind People to the Kansas River valley."--The American West

When Kansas became a U.S. territory in 1854 literally all of its land area was guaranteed by treaty to Indians. More than 10,000 Kickapoos, Delawares, Sacs, Foxes, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kansas, Ottawas, Wyandots, and Osages, not to mention a number of smaller tribes, inhabited Kansas. By 1875 there were only a couple of bands left.

The forced removal of thousands of Indians from eastern Kansas between 1854 and 1871 affected more Indians and occupied more government time than the celebrated exploits of the military against the more warlike western tribes. In this volume Miner and Unrau show Kansas at mid-century to be a moral testing ground where the drama of Indian disinheritance was played out. They relate how railroad men, land speculators, and timber operations came to be firmly entrenched on Indian land in territorial Kansas. They examine remarkable incongruities in Indian policy, land policy, law, and administration, pointing to specific cases in which legal maneuvers by the federal government--within the framework of treaties, statutes, and executive pronouncements--helped to insure the pattern of tribal destruction.

Separate chapters deal with internal factionalism in the Indian tribes, the practice of government chief-making, and the "Indian Ring"--the sub rosa alliances influencing the treaty or sale process. The authors also include revealing portraits of the individuals, from territorial governors to railroad officials, who helped engineer the end of Indian Kansas.

"The reader's perception of those brave, hard-working sod-house settlers may never be the same after reading this book."--"American West."

"This book recounts in detail the processes by which the Indians from east of the Mississippi were deprived of their lands in present-day Kansas. . . . There are no heroes in this narrative of fraud, corruption, and violence by the military, the executives of state and federal governments, legislators, businessmen, lawyers, settlers, and Indians."--"Choice."