The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

The Fincastle Bison Kill Site (DlOx-5), located approximately 100 km east of Lethbridge, Alberta, has been radiocarbon dated to 2 500 BP. Excavations at the site yielded an extensive assemblage of lithics and faunal remains, and several unique features. The elongated point forms, along with the bone upright features, appeared similar to those found at Sonota sites within the Dakota region that dated between 1 950 BP and 1 350 BP. The relatively early date of the Fincastle Site prompted a re-investigation into the origins of the Besant Culture. The features, faunal and lithic assemblages from twenty-three Late Middle Prehistoric sites in Southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas were analyzed and compared. The findings show that Fincastle represents an early component of the Besant Culture referred to as the Outlook Complex. This analysis also suggests a possible Middle Missouri origin of the Fincastle hunters, as well as the entire Besant Culture. / xii, 183 leaves : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 29 cm

This thesis focuses on the lithic assemblage of a fortified Late Prehistoric site (AD 1260-1440) in Strawtown, Indiana, that was inhabited by the Oneota, a culture that migrated from their core area in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois to other Midwestern locales such as Missouri, Nebraska, Indiana, Minnesota and Michigan (Theler and Boszhardt 2006: 435) . The types of lithic materials that they were using give insights into mobility, trade, and exchange for this unique group in central Indiana. Research centered on three questions:  What lithic raw materials are present in the two Taylor Village collections?  How might the Oneota at Taylor Village have acquired these lithic raw materials?  What might exotic lithic materials tell archaeologists about trade and exchange in the Late Prehistoric period of Indiana? The primary methods used in this research include literature review and macro- and microscopic methods for identifying chert types to determine where the Oneota were traveling to obtain their raw materials. Research from this thesis contributes to information about the Strawtown locality where multiple cultures were living in close quarters; in addition it contributes to Oneota literature where almost nothing is written about the Oneota in Indiana; this data may provide information about how and why they migrated into central Indiana in the Late Prehistoric period and potentially where they migrated from. / The Oneota -- Taylor Village -- Methods -- Raw material acquisition -- Data -- Discussion -- Summary and recommendations. / Department of Anthropology

No description available.

My thesis is a novel-length work of historical fiction entitled Thickwood. The novel can be situated within the context of great/interior plains literature, given its substantial focus on the Thickwood Hills, the northern remnant of the Missouri Coteau. This transition zone between the plains and the mixed boreal forest is an area of geographical and cultural tension. Within this drainage system of the Saskatchewan Rivers, Europeans traded for food and furs with First Nations and Métis peoples, leading to the signing of Treaty 6 and the formation of First Nations Reserves. In Thickwood characters travel across the rugged landscape but also travel into their interior landscape to struggle with questions about belonging and place. During formative years of development, certain landscapes become places of significant attachment, laden with emotional connection and sentiment. This historical work, set in Saskatchewan in 1950, takes place during intense changes after World War Two. Many rural communities without power, good roads, and even telephone services struggled to keep up with post-war development. The cooperative movement, encouraged by Premier Tommy Douglas, was a means for rural people to pool resources to improve their communities. Beef prices were climbing to an all-time high, increasing demand for pastureland. Using close third-person point of view, the novel follows a young female character skilled in ranching, horses, and the sport of baseball. Willomena Swift struggles to find a future for herself after returning from two seasons pitching in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The lease to her family ranch is about to end and her father sells the remaining land to the growing community pasture. After a rogue stallion kills Willo’s purebred foal, she begins a quest to control the stallion and avoid its villainous owner, who is also the pasture committee chairman. Willo uses wit and skill to survive the perils of the landscape and gains confidence to confront Nesteroff about taking over her home as the new pasture headquarters after her father’s death. The novel Thickwood explores personal connections to rugged homeland, spirited horses, and love.

From the Proceedings of the 1971 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 22-23, 1971, Tempe, Arizona / The southern bed of the ogallala aquifer is hydrologically isolated from all outside areas of recharge, requiring local precipitation for all natural recharge. Current withdrawals are so much greater than natural recharge that it appears that artificial recharge affords the only means of establishing at least a pseudo-balance. A number of observation wells were drilled at Texas Tech University, and subsequently capped until recharge water became available. The initial recharge was 2.5 af over 12 days, at a rate of 120 gpm for about the first day, after which 60 gpm was relatively constant. Approximately 1 month later, 1.2 af were recharged over 3 days at rates ranging over 140-90 gpm. It became evident that a cavity was present at the bottom of the hole being recharged. On a later recharge occasion, the cavity seemed to have enlarged. During a period of 2 years more than 28 af of surface runoff water have been recharged through the shallow hole with increases in recharge rates for each subsequent recharge period. The nature of this phenomenon and the cavities are not understood. This may represent the long sought after answer to recharge of the aquifer, but much more extensive research needs to be done.

In the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, our nation's interest in protecting its cultural heritage collides with the high demand for carbon fuels. "Clinker" deposits dot the basin. These distinctive buttes, created by the underground combustion of coal, are underlain by coal veins; they also provided the main lithic resources for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. These deposits signify both a likelihood of extractable carbon and high archaeological site density. Federal law requires that energy developers must identify culturally significant sites before mining can begin. The research presented here explains the need for and describes a statistical tool with the potential to predict sites where carbon and cultural resources co-occur, thus streamlining the process of identifying important heritage sites to protect them from adverse impacts by energy development. The methods used for this predictive model include two binary logistic regression models using known archaeological sites in the Powder River Basin. The model as developed requires further refinement; the results are nevertheless applicable to future research in this and similar areas, as I discuss in my conclusion.

No description available.