Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U. S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies.(purchase at Amazon.ca)
Just as she closes this stunningly excellent and singular book, Rozum points to a “telling exchange” that “took place in 1956 between former grasslands residents Wallace Stegner and Wilfrid Eggleston” (360). The author of The High Plains (1938), a novel set in an imaginary town named Wolf Willow, Eggleston had noticed an article by Stegner, “Quiet Earth, Big Sky,” that had recently appeared in Saskatchewan History and was writing with praise. He mentioned the “haunting fragrance” of the shrub wolf willow that had drawn him to the name and, for his part, Stegner “admitted that he ‘did not know’” Eggleston’s book “but promised to find a copy” (360). He also “put Eggleston on a list to receive a copy of his next book. Eggleston’s opinion mattered, Stegner explained, ‘as one of the few people in the world competent to judge its material’” (360). Tellingly indeed, that book proved to be one among the quintessential texts from what Rozum here calls “the northern grasslands” (362), Stegner’s (also singular) Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962). Probably more than any other—though I would pause and seriously consider Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) or Sinclair Ross’ As For Me and My House (1941) or W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) as possible equals—that book in its generic syntheses stands largely alone in capturing the imaginative place that is the northern prairie-plains. Or, again as historian Rozum has it, the northern grasslands.
When, during the heady days of Canadian nationalism in the 1970s, Laurie Ricou published his study of Canadian prairie fiction, Vertical Man / Horizontal World (1973), a book followed a few years later by Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977), Stegner’s Wolf Willow loomed large. And when I came along with a Rozum-like corrective to such Canadian exceptionalist argument, asserting that the prairie-plains landscape derived from a single biome in The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989), irrespective of the Canada-US border, Wolf Willow was still very much there—as was Stegner himself more broadly, through what I have elsewhere called “the literature of historical memory” (Thacker “Erasing” and “Wallace Stegner”; see also Quantic).
The exchange of letters between Eggleston and Stegner that Rozum highlights is found in the former’s papers in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and as such, it is emblematic of her method. While those of us who have produced synthetic studies of prairie-plains writing have certainly had something to say, that analysis has been mostly based on primary and secondary published texts. Rozum, an historian from the northern grasslands herself, has here rooted her arguments in that very place through her abundantly detailed and wide-ranging use of archival resources drawn from throughout the region and both nations. The stories she synthesizes are imaginative, certainly, but those syntheses are drawn from the writings and records of a diverse group of historical persons, grasslands-grown persons. Eggleston and Stegner are two, Rozum returning to their observations again and again throughout her chapters, but there are many others whose archives produce extended connections to and meditations on grasslands culture and place: Alberta artist Annora Brown, South Dakota politician Peter Norbeck, North Dakota journalist Era Bell Thompson, Icelandic American scholar Thorstina Jackson Walters, and ethnologist George F. Will among them.
While the role of any of these figures in Rozum’s analysis might be detailed here, Will’s circumstances are of particular import. Educated in archaeology at Harvard, most of Will’s life was spent running his family’s seed and nursery business in Bismarck, North Dakota, and concurrently studying the agricultural practices of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. He spent much time surveying “over 140 Indigenous earth-lodge village sites along the Missouri River, acquiring ‘voluminous field notes,’ which he turned into publications for academic journals and popular magazines” (185). Equally, as president of Oscar H. Will and Company, George Will “saw potential in Indigenous corn for settler society” and, during World War I, he “urged farmers to invest in ‘recovered’ Mandan and Arikara corn” (175–76). “Will spent the next forty years breeding and selling seeds and reading the landscape, especially Indigenous archaeological sites. Will followed corn down a path to a more complex understanding of Indigenous cultures and grasslands environments” (176). This story, Rozum emphatically shows, is told through materials in the Will Family Papers at North Dakota State University. Throughout, she weaves and connects it to the other archival stories she tells.
Once again toward the end of Grasslands Grown, Rozum offers a concluding passage that gets right at the breadth and extent of the ambitious project she accomplishes here:
Actual and metaphoric conversations among the grasslands grown of settler society suggest their struggle to explain and express their experiences of the place. They shaped cultural memory with narratives and imagery that became regional touchpoints. They created institutions and associations through which settler society wedged their stories into the land, already associated with the history, language, memories, and sacred traditions of Indigenous peoples, from Mandans to Piegans, whose cultures have still “a different continuity and intimacy with the universe,” to use the critic Elizabeth Cooke-Lynn’s words. Region and place making was to land claiming in the settler-colonial project down the generations—that is, parents of the grasslands-grown generations acted as settler colonials by claiming homesteads under the laws of the United States and Canada; their children furthered settler colonialism by drawing boundaries and creating senses of place to express cultural ownership in atmospheric and geographic regional terms. (361–62)
Ironically, the Cooke-Lynn essay Rozum quotes here is her well known and contentious “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner” (1996), one in which she decries the absence of Indigenous peoples from his writings. Be that as it may, Rozum’s summary here distills the whole of this remarkable book. In its breadth of inclusion and through the deep detail of its sources, both archival and published, Grasslands Grown contextualizes the cultures and histories of the northern grasslands over time in ways thoughtful, careful, precise, and complete. Again, a remarkable book.
Works Cited
Quantic, Diane Dufva. The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 1995.
Stegner, Wallace. “Quiet Earth, Big Sky.” Saskatchewan History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1956, pp. 102–07.
Thacker, Robert. “Erasing the Forty-Ninth Parallel: Nationalism, Prairie Criticism, and the Case of Wallace Stegner.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 61, 1997, pp. 179–202.
—. “Wallace Stegner and the Literature of Historical Memory.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, edited by Steven Frye, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 214–25.