Review of South Dakota Leaders: From Pierre Choteau, Jr., to Oscar Howe and Over a Century of Leadership: South Dakota Territorial & State Governors

Special events in the history of a state have customarily stimulated an unusual variety of commemorative writings. Such is the case with the books under review, both of which grew out of South Dakota\u27s centennial in 1989. Moreover, both books deal with one theme-leadership. One concentrates on political leadership while the other includes a broader representation

Agricultural Pioneering In Dakota: A Case Study

In recent years many historians have increasingly turned their attention to what might be called microhistory. Rather than studying broad topics in a sweeping and comprehensive manner, they have preferred to examine a county, a city, political or social groups within a locality, or an individual firm or institution. The aim has been to present history from the grassroots or the sidewalks-a people-oriented history, so to speak. As a result of such works, historical understanding has been greatly enhanced.1 Little serious microhistory, however, has been done on pioneer agriculture, farm life, and standards of living. While there have been numerous studies of ranchers and ranches, as well as large corporate farms, the ordinary 160-acre homesteader who really brought the frontier to an end has been neglected and ignored. Partially, at least, the problem stems from a lack of adequate statistics. Most small farmers retained no accounts at all. When account books, diaries, and other materials have survived that reflect the daily living and business aspects of pioneer farming, they too often contain only incomplete bits and pieces of information. The records usually do not provide data over a meaningful time period. Consequently, it has been diffIcult to reconstruct on a year-to-year basis the experiences of settlers as they struggled to become established farmers on some raw frontier.2 The manuscript censuses, local histories, court house records, and other sources are valuable, but they do not provide data on annual production, seasonal price fluctuations, operating expenses, and general living conditions over a signiHcant time span. The account books of Frederick A. Fleischman, who homesteaded in the east central part of southern Dakota Territory in 1880, provide an opportunity to take a detailed look at one of the thousands of homesteaders who moved to the unsettled frontier and turned his free land into a productive farm and comfortable home for himself and his large family. Unlike most farmers of the period, Fleischman kept fairly detailed records on his farming operations from the time he settled in Dakota until he retired in the early 1920s, some forty years later.3 While differences existed among frontier farmers, Fleischman might be considered fairly typical of thousands who settled on the western prairies, just east of the Great Plains, in the late nineteenth century. He began farming on government land with very little capital and achieved that elusive Jeffersonian ideal of owning a family farm, which gave him independence and a reasonable degree of economic security. Unmarried and alone, Fred Fleischman ar· rived in Dakota Territory early in June 1879. Born in New York in 1853, the son of a German immigrant, Fleischman had first moved to Wisconsin before deciding to homestead in Dakota. He may have been influenced by glowing accounts advertising the opportunities farther west. Here is a place for a man to rebuild his fortune again, said a Dakota terri· torial legislative report in 1869. Here there need be no poor or destitute, for all that will work there is abundance ; here is a land yielding bountifully, open to all nations, where all may enjoy the blessings of a home. 4 However exaggerated such claims may have been, it was free land that attracted Fleischman and thousands of other pioneers to the Dakota frontier. Then twenty-six years old, he selected land in Kingsbury County about forty-five miles west of the Minnesota border and some two miles north and a little west of what became the village of Oldham. Annual rainfall averaged about twenty-one inches in that part of Dakota . Fleischman was slightly ahead of the mass of settlers who flooded into the area in the early 1880s during the Great Dakota Boom. The census of 1880 reported only twelve farms in newly formed Kingsbury County, with a mere 197 acres improved.5 Fleischman was on the cutting edge of the farmer\u27s frontier

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History\u3c/i\u3e By R. Douglas Hurt

This is the third book to appear recently on the Dust Bowl and the 1930s. Some readers may ask whether the subject deserves another study so closely on the heels of Donald Worster\u27s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, and Paul Bonnifield\u27s The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, both published in 1979. But the fact is that scholars have been too long in filling this important historical void. In The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History, R. Douglas Hurt has written a brief, clear, straightforward account of life and times on the southern plains during the difficult 1930s. He begins by showing that dust storms had been characteristic of the region for many years, and then discusses the causes of the much more serious storms in the 1930s. Hurt explains that severe and extended drought, and high winds blowing over easily moved soils, were mainly responsible for the conditions. Plowing up the sod and failure to use soil conservation practices were also contributing factors. Hurt is much more evenhanded in his assessments of the causes of the Dust Bowl than Worster, who places most of the blame on greedy wheat growers. In chapter 3 the author describes the dust storms from 1932 to the end of the decade, and then tells what life was like and how people responded to the harsh environment. He presents a courageous people who were tough and determined to stay, even against the worst odds. A chapter on soil conservation shows both how naive many farmers were about the problems of wind erosion and how, with professional advice, they went about to control their blowing land. Hurt is especially good at detailing the technological means by which farmers sought to hold their soil in place. He believes that farmers, working through their newly organized soil conservation districts, made considerable progress in soil conservation. Drought, of course, had a disastrous effect on farm production, and Hurt recognizes the important role of government in pulling many Dust Bowl farmers through the drought and depression. Chapters on the emergency cattlebuying program and the shelterbelt project round out the discussion of developments in the period. After surveying drought and dust conditions in the 1950s, Hurt concludes that farmers had learned from their experiences in the 1930s how better to care for their soil. This book is based on extensive research in both primary and secondary sources. The author has digested a tremendous amount of material and presented the results in a relatively brief space. A number of excellent photographs provide a grim reminder of the dirty thirties, especially to those of us who lived through the period on the plains. The book offers readers a quick and yet fairly comprehensive view of the impact of drought and dust on the region. One final note. None of the writers on the so-called Dust Bowl have given much attention to the northern plains, where severe dust storms also existed. Drifting soil, crop failures, the feeding of Russian thistles to livestock, cattle purchases, shelterbelts, and other developments on the southern plains were also common in the 1930s far to the north. Perhaps the next writer on the Dust Bowl era will take a broader look and study the entire Great plains region

Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980

No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture. Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more democratically rewarding group of farm products: poultry, cattle, swine; soybeans; citrus and other fruits; vegetables; rice; dairy products; and forest products. He shows how such crop changes were related to other developments, such as the rise of a capital base in the South, mainly after World War II; technological innovation in farming equipment; and urbanization and regional population shifts. Based largely upon primary sources, Cotton Fields No More will become the standard work on post-Civil War agriculture in the South. It will be welcomed by students of the American South and of United States agriculture, economic, and social history. Gilbert C. Fite is Richard B. Russell Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of American Farmers: The New Minority, Beyond the Fencerows: A History of Farmland Industries Inc., 1929–1978 and other books.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/1036/thumbnail.jp