The Contested Plains Quotes

“In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" The question is always open. How we treat our world and each other grows from our vision of how we have come to where we are. Ultimately, of course, the issue is not survival but decency and common sense. Everything passes, the psalmist reminds us. No one escapes. The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“As they lived into the plains, the Cheyennes named its parts according to how they saw and used them. Rivers were especially telling. Nebraska’s Niobrara was the Sudden or Unexpected River. The Platte was the Moonshell or Musselshell, the Arkansas was the Flint Arrowpoint, and the South Platte was Fat or Tallow River. They named the Solomon by its prolific game bird—the Turkeys Creek. The Smoky Hill went by its most welcoming feature: the Bunch of Timber River.21”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado