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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
1 Flores, Dan, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History, 78 (09 1991), 482CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Mighetto, Lisa, Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Dunlap, Thomas P., Saving America's Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Fogleman, Valerie M., “American Attitudes towards Wolves: A History of Misperception,” Environmental Review, 13 (Spring 1989), 63–94Google Scholar; Lopez, Barry Holstun, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1978)Google Scholar.
3 Club, Sierra, Branch, Alaska, Alaska Report, 19 (03 1993), 4Google Scholar.
4 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Milner, Clyde A. II, and Rankin, Charles E. (eds.), Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991)Google Scholar, Preface, x; Donald Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” Ibid., 15.
5 Cronon, William, Miles, George and Gitlin, Jay (eds.), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)Google Scholar; Worster, Donald, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Cronon's essay on environmental history in Under an Open Sky offers the environmental approach as a way to illuminate the basic questions of social history. His use of an Alaskan example is a welcome advance. See the new preface to the paperback edition of Coates, Peter, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation and the Frontier (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993)Google Scholar for a discussion of the relationship between western/environmental history and Alaska. For a gruff review of the NWH see western novelist McMurtry, Larry's “ How the West was Won or Lost,” New Republic, 22 10 1990, 32–38Google Scholar.
6 Blake, Michael, Dances With Wolves (New York: Penguin, 1988), 161–62, 167, 177, 283–5Google Scholar. We are dealing with a form of entertainment, so it may be pedantic to point out that novel and film are set in 1863, at least seven years before the hide trade began. Buffalo hides had no commercial value before 1870 when tanners found a way of converting the soft skin into serviceable leather. Most of the killing for the earlier robe trade was actually done by Indians like the Comanche. When Dunbar first sets eyes on the Comanche village he speaks of “a primal, completely untouched civilization,” and “ageless tableau” (p. 99). The notion of an untainted culture in a perennial homeland, needless to say, is highly suspect. The Comanche had themselves colonized this area of the southern Plains (Fort Sedgwick, Kansas, was a real place) and their culture, based on acquisition of the horse, was barely a century and a half old.
7 Ibid., 298.
8 As quoted in Walker, Martin, “How the West was Won, or was it?” The Guardian, 13 06 1991Google Scholar.
9 See Worster, Donald et al. , “A Roundtable: Environmental History,” Journal of American History, 76 (03 1990), 1078–1106Google Scholar; William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Ibid., 78 (March 1992), 1347–76; Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Ibid., 77 (Sept. 1991), 465-85 ; Richard White, “Discovering Nature in North America,” Ibid., 79 (Dec. 1992), 847–91.
10 Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” 16.
11 Jacobs, , “Revising History with Ecology,” in Nash, Roderick (ed.), Americans and Environment: The Problem of Priorities (New York: Holt Dryden, 1972), 86, 85, 87Google Scholar. Extracted from “Frontiersmen, Fur Traders, and Other Varmints, An Ecological Appraisal of the Frontier in American History,” American Historical Association Newsletter (11 1970), 5–11Google Scholar. See also Bartlett, Richard, The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier, 1776–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), ch. 4Google Scholar; Opie, John, “The Environment and the Frontier,” in Nichols, Roger L. (ed.), American Frontier and Western Issues: An Historiographical Review (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986)Google Scholar; White, Richard, “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), ch. 9Google Scholar. The most recent collections of essays and documents all contain environmental material: Richard White, “Trashing the Trails,” Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” and Robbins, William G., “Laying Siege to Western History,” in Limerick, et al. , TrailsGoogle Scholar. The first and final chapters in Milner, Clyde A. II (ed.), Major Problems in the History of the American West (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1989)Google Scholar include essays by environmental historians.
Just as the cutting edge of western women's history is now seen to be the interface between white women and non-white women and the impact of the frontier process on “women of colour,” so the future of environmental history is seen by some to lie in a more multicultural (and gender based) approach. To this end, the latest collection of documents and essays on environmental history contains material on black and Chinese gold miners in California. Yet while detailing their activities, these extracts reveal nothing about whether their attitudes to nature and the exploitation of resources differed from those of the dominant whites. See Merchant, Carolyn, Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1993)Google Scholar. On the need for a marriage between environmental and ethnic history see Limerick, Patricia Nelson, “Disorientation and Reorientation: The American Landscape Discovered from the West,” Journal of American History, 79 (12 1992), 1021–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Slatta, Richard W., Cowboys of the Americas (Yale: Yale University Press, 1990), 80Google Scholar.
13 On the “Cattle Free” movement to cleanse the public lands, see “Last Roundup on the Range,” U.S. News and World Report, 26 11 1990, 30–32Google Scholar.
14 White, Richard, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
15 Worster, , Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985)Google Scholar.
16 Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991)Google Scholar.
17 See Worster et al, “A Roundtable: Environmental History”; “Theories of Environmental History” (Special Issue), Environmental Review, 11 (Winter 1987)Google Scholar.
18 Limerick, , The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 31Google Scholar.
19 White, Richard, Environmental History Review, 16 (Summer 1992), 91Google Scholar.
20 Nature's Metropolis, 211, 263. Cronon, 's earlier prizewinner, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google Scholar, was equally concerned with how human economies transform nature into resources, with how environmental change is part and parcel of economic and social change, and with how we can find out about changes in human society by reading the land.
21 Powell, , “From Savagery to Barbarism,” Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Washington, 3 (1985), 195Google Scholar. As quoted in Lacey, Michael J., “The Mysteries of Earth-Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington's Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmentalism in the Late Nineteenth Century” (PhD dissertation, George Washington University, 1979), 271Google Scholar.
22 Nature's Metropolis, 150, 424, note 9. One of the essays in question is “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly, 18 (1978), 157–76Google Scholar.
23 Ibid., 19.
24 Potter, , People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Nature's Metropolis, xvii, 72, 93, 98, 256–57.
26 Journal of American History, 78 (03 1992), 1347–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Ibid., 1365, 1368, 1370, 1373.
28 In a recent essay, Worster repeats the view that the Plains Indian trod lightly on the land, even after contact, citing an anthropologist's assertion (1961) that from the 1830s onward, even assuming the heaviest and most abusive use, Indian hunting had minimal impact on buffalo herds. See Under Western Skies, 245, 278.
29 Sherow, James E., “Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800–1870,” Environmental History Review, 16 (Summer 1992), 61–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For comments on the superior condition of army horses, see 62, 70-71, 73, 76, 78.
30 Under Western Skies, 27–28, 230. For the roving discussion of pastoralism, see “Cowboy Ecology,” 34–52.
31 Ibid., 237.
32 Ibid., 246.
33 Ibid., 247.
