Thomas D. Isern's Blog: Willow Creek: A Writing Journal, page 12

WCFS #109

Last Friday's Willow Creek Folk School, #109 - https://fb.watch/ej_kHHEdwt/

The Cattle King's Prayer Revisited

Working on this paper for the agricultural History Society on the importance of the Little Ice Age to historical transitions in the history of agriculture on the Great Plains. I just wrote the section on the demise of the open-range cattle industry--how the cattle kings commenced operations with climatic assumptions which were appropriate to the northern plains of the Little Ice Age, but which no longer obtained, as the LIA had ended some forty years before. And thus, expecting dry, open winters, they came to grief in the winter of 1886-87.

I am working on this paper at the same time as I put together scripts for the Willow Creek Folk School and for Plains Folk on Prairie public radio, so things tend to run together. The centerpiece of the paper section dealing with the cattle industry is the 1886 ballad from Montana, "The Cattle King's Prayer," wherein the balladeer prays,

Now, O, Lord, won’t you be good,
And give our stock plenty of food;
And to avert a winter’s woe,
Give Italian skies and little snow.

Italian skies, isn't that rich? Because not only is that a wonderfully nineteenth-century phrase, it also perfectly conveys the expectation of an open winter.

I remember my good old cousin Bernice had definite ideas about the meterological potential of prayer as to the weather. "You can pray for rain all you want," she once told our pastor, "but as long as the wind is blowing from the southwest like this, it won't do any good."

The Armadillo Episode

In a couple of weeks Dr. Kelley and I fly to Norway, there--specifically, at the University of Stavanger--to attend the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society. I'm busy this week knocking out a paper for presentation at the conference--"A Radical Misapprehension: Reckoning with Climate Change on the Great Plains of North America." I propose to deal with a half-millenium of climate history in a fifteen-minute presentation. It will have to be tight. Except when it isn't--which is the rhetorical key, I think, to handling such a thing. Outline carefully, budget your words and time, and thus leave room for some narrative episodes that lubricate the apparatus.

So, this paper opens with what I have come to call the Armadillo Episode--the story of 1 January 2020, when perched in my deer stand in Barton County, Kansas, I observed an armadillo passing beneath me. "From that day," my introduction intones, "I have taken seriously the repercussions of changing climate on the Great Plains. Every farmer on the plains, Texas to Alberta, is doing the same. Historians are not." You see there, I slide from easygoing narrative into a provocative observation that may well ruffle some feathers in the professional flock. While I have the flock's attention, I can make my argument, then back and fill with caveats and musings. In the conclusion I return to the deer stand and contemplate the field, so to speak.

I am arguing that the Little Ice Age is the woolly mammoth in the room, the big thing we have overlooked in narrating and periodizing the agricultural history of the Great Plains. I feel like that is the sort of argument I can get away with, or at least be tolerated, at the age of three-score and ten. The introduction winds up,

Today I argue that the rise of equestrian cultures--so-called Plains Indian cultures--on the northern plains took place in the context of Little Ice Age conditions that encouraged hunting for subsistence and, counterintuitively, facilitated the keeping of horses; that such cultures were characterized by animal husbandry--again, the keeping of horses; then, that the warming and humidifying of the region during the nineteenth century both weakened pastoral cultures, Indigenous and settler, and favored practitioners of arable agriculture; and that settler colonial occupation of the land was enabled by the changing climatic regime. . . . Parcel to commencement of a new interpretive history of the Great Plains, I here explore the influence of climate change on the great transitions of the Great Plains and consider implications into the twenty-first century. “Explore” is the operative term. Postholing half a millennium in fifteen minutes, my hope is to suggest a line of inquiry necessary to a new framework for the history of regional agriculture.

Come All Ye Texas Rangers

The Willow Creek Folk School is back this Friday night with Session 109 - "Come All Ye Texas Rangers." That's our opener, because we're just back from a visit to the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco. Also, we're honoring the birthday of songcatcher Louise Pound, and she has a fine text of "The Texas Rangers" in her Folk-Song of Nebraska and the Central West (1915). Streaming live from the Salon on Willow Creek, 7pm CDT, on the Facebook timeline of Plains Folk.

The Cattle King's Prayer

Last week on Prairie Public - https://news.prairiepublic.org/podcast/plains-folk/2022-07-09/the-cattle-kings-prayer

WCFS Session 108

Last Friday - https://fb.watch/e2LUZ-gOIG/

This Land

This Land - WCFS #108 coming up Friday night at 8pm CDT on the Facebook timeline of Plains Folk - https://fb.me/e/2flFrgpMI

Home on the Range

Last Friday's Willow Creek Folk School - https://fb.watch/dUQe96qeh7/

Their Best Days Are Over

Last week on Prairie Public - https://news.prairiepublic.org/podcast/plains-folk/2022-06-25/their-best-days-are-over

High Summer

Last Friday's WCFS - https://fb.watch/dMkCYpyX7H/