The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb
"The Great Plains," published in 1931 by historian Walter Prescott Webb, is a pivotal text in American Studies that examines the unique environmental and institutional characteristics of the Great Plains region of the United States. Webb's thesis posits that the geographical conditions of the Plains, marked by their level terrain, subhumid climate, and absence of trees, significantly influenced the social and cultural adaptations of its inhabitants, specifically contrasting the experiences of Plains Indians with those of Spanish colonizers and American settlers. The work is structured around eleven questions raised by the author, leading readers through a historical narrative that encompasses the adaptation challenges faced by different groups and the technological innovations that facilitated settlement.
Webb's analysis draws on the concept of an "institutional fault" at the ninety-eighth meridian, suggesting that distinct geographical features created unique challenges and opportunities that shaped human institutions in the region. Key technological advancements, such as the six-shooter, railroads, and barbed wire, played crucial roles in transforming the Great Plains from a cattle kingdom to a settled agricultural landscape. Although Webb's thesis has faced criticism regarding its generalizations and isolation of the region, it remains a foundational work for understanding the interplay between environment and human institutions in American history. The continuing relevance of Webb's insights speaks to the complex legacy of the Great Plains and invites further exploration of its historical significance.
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Subject Terms
The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb
First published: 1931
Type of work: History
Critical Evaluation:
Since THE GREAT PLAINS was published in 1931 it has become one of the cardinal texts of American Studies, the most significant extension within the United States of the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner, for despite criticism of both Turner and Webb, their work has served its purpose, that of setting up new frames around known facts and encouraging the exploration of the blank spaces within those borders. But THE GREAT PLAINS belongs in two other contexts. One is the great development of Southwestern studies associated with people like J. Frank Dobie and John Lomax in the first four decades of this century. The second is the canon of the four historical works by Walter Prescott Webb, of which this is the second. The four began with a commissioned history of the Texas Rangers. Contemplation of the effect of the introduction of the six-shooter on the Plains became the germ and center of THE GREAT PLAINS. Webb later turned to consider the imperial-colonial relations of Eastern capital and Western development in DIVIDED WE STAND. Finally he produced his own expanded version of Turner’s “frontier thesis” in THE GREAT FRONTIER, an interpretation of European and world history since 1492 in terms of the influence of the frontier on the metropolis.
The genesis of Webb’s thesis about the Great Plains is briefly described in the preface of this work, in his presidential address in 1958 to the American Historical Society, and in his rejection of Fred A. Shannon’s “Appraisal” of the book for the Social Science Research Council in 1939. “Appraisal,” Webb’s rejection of it, and the conference which involved author and appraiser were the severest testing of the work. The summary of the conference showed that it is impossible to use or even to obtain all the facts needed to support such a general thesis as Webb’s, and that the decision did not affect the growing use of the book by all sorts of people from English students to game wardens. The continuing appeal rests on the scope and novelty of the thesis, as well as on its studied presentation. The orderly sequence of chapters and the clear divisions within chapters are typical of Webb’s work, as is the use of long quotations and epigraphs as well as the use of questions to suggest hypotheses.
Walter Prescott Webb is not a social scientist but an institutional historian whose thesis developed out of and back into his famous Frontier Seminar at the University of Texas. The subtitle, “A Study in Environment and Institutions,” states his intention to study the influence of the former on the latter, and the guiding genius of his work is probably that figure who lurks behind Turner’s thesis: John Wesley Powell, Director of the United States Geological Survey. In accepting the postulate that man does change in response to his environment Webb follows a long line of distinguished historical writers from Buckle and Taine to Ellsworth Huntington; their task has usually been to assert the sudden illumination which contemplation of one historical fact has provided: in Turner’s case the census of 1890; in Webb’s the six-shooter. Although Turner imagined the frontier as a series of bands of transition between savage and civilized life, Webb depends heavily on a fixed geographical frontier, the ninety-eighth meridian, as the cause of so sharp a change in human institutions that he calls it an “institutional fault.” Webb and Turner are alike, however, in that they are students of variables in history, not of a continuing tradition or line of development; further, they are unlike most historians who prefer to see change as the result of time, not of place. The difference between Webb and his critic, Shannon, has been summarized as simply that between two kinds of historians: those who see the woods and those who study the trees.
THE GREAT PLAINS consists of an introductory chapter and ten chapters corresponding to the eleven questions which, Webb says, contemplation of the Plains suggested to him as a historian. The introductory chapter is in some ways the crux of the book and has become, next to the whole question of geographic determinism, the main point of criticism against the Webb thesis: the attempt to isolate a part of a whole (here a part of the United States—the Great Plains—from the continent) is always the first step in regional studies; unless the region is shown to have a genuine unity or entity the study cannot proceed. Webb’s criteria are three: the region is defined by being relatively level, subhumid, and treeless. The second chapter contains an elaboration of the author’s introduction. The next two chapters show the successful adaptation of one race, the Plains Indians, and the failure to adapt of the Spanish colonizing culture. The next five chapters (V to IX) cover the American settlement in three stages: early setbacks because of a new and different environment, adaptations which allowed conquest, and institutional adaptations resulting from settlement. These chapters constitute three-fifths of the book. The remaining two chapters show less tangible adaptations in a rough sketch of the literature of the Great Plains, and the final chapter presents a set of seven additional larger questions about the meaning of the Great Plains experience in American life, questions which led to THE GREAT FRONTIER.
Webb discovered the “institutional fault” at the ninety-eighth meridian by recognizing four aspects of the Plains: its indigenous inhabitants (the Plains Indians), lack of timber, level land, and relative lack of water. Although the conditions varied slightly in the three subregions of the Plains he distinguished, they were all markedly different from the pioneering conditions met by the American settler on the frontier from the coast to the Mississippi. Five technological developments enabled the American to settle the Plains: the six-shooter, the railroad, barbed wire, windmills, and farm machinery; in two phases these altered the human institutions for transporting and controlling stock, and for granting land and water rights. The first phase was the Cattle Kingdom, achieved by the revolver and the railroad; the latter in turn, together with the other three technological developments, swept away the Cattle Kingdom for the second phase, homesteading. Webb does not pursue the thesis up to the Dust Bowl, but that would seem in part to confirm his thesis that man was not using the tools the environment meant him to use, and in part to deny it because in his view the environment seemed powerless to insist that man use the right tools. Webb suggests, the Great Plains themselves summoned the six-shooter into commercial production. But he does agree that time tends to smooth out the “institutional fault.”
A further difficulty in reaching a total view of an arbitrarily isolated historical phenomenon is seen in THE GREAT PLAINS, for two activities proceed apace. At the same time that the life in the Great Plains is being analyzed and categorized in the appropriate chapters, an explanation of the historical cause of each aspect of that life is being urged in terms on one total thesis. The antithesis, then, could maintain that there is little effect of environment on institutions and, by piecemeal analysis, assert that what has been proved in selected aspects must be true of all. Webb maintained, however, in 1939 and elsewhere, that he would welcome such a critique; but none has been forthcoming and his thesis is therefore still unchallenged as a working hypothesis, at the very least, of what happened during an exciting period in American history. Undoubtedly Webb’s own Great Plains ancestry and pioneer forebears led him, like Turner, to apply his gifts as a historian in an imaginative recapitulation of the Great Plains experience. While this personal involvement sometimes makes his writing more assertive than is usual in history textbooks, it is also the quality which continues to attract students and laymen to his work.