Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:58:40.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prairie Prospects: The Aesthetics of Plainness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Joni L. Kinsey ,
Rebecca Roberts  and
Robert F. Sayre
Get access

Extract

The ways American prairie landscapes have been used and understood, since the first Euro-American encounters with them in the early 19th century, are inseparable from how they have been seen and described. The converse is no less true for pictorial depictions and verbal accounts. Far from being disassociated, the differing actions of perception and utilization are in fact interdependent, and as such have had far-reaching consequences for human interaction with the prairie landscape itself and for the subject of prairies as it is presented in literature and art. Although it is not often acknowledged, aesthetics lie at the heart of any discussion of the landform, even in policy debates over agricultural practices or proposals to restore a tract to native grasses. And just as critical, the land's use (or disuse) directly informs its representation in written or visual portrayals, whether these concern virgin territory or cultivated terrain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 21 , October 1996 , pp. 261 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Cosgrove, Denis E., Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 9.Google Scholar

2. Similar assertions have been made for landscape generally, in a theoretical framework by Cosgrove (Social Formation).

3. For more on this aesthetic see Carlson, Allen, “On Appreciating Agricultural Landscapes,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (Spring 1985): 301–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion of approaches to prairie ecology see Tobey, Ronald C., Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).Google Scholar

4. In art history the lack of studies focusing on prairie imagery is in part due to the historical preference for monographs on an artist's production, or on stylistic or regional designations of a particular subject (that is, Baroque landscape, English, and so on). Even in recent American art history, however, where methodologies have proliferated and landscape has been especially favored, prairie landscapes are either ignored or subsumed within discussions of western art. Most recent art historical treatments of prairie landscapes have been from Canadian sources, especially Ronald Rees, although an exception is Kinsey, Joni L., Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996).Google Scholar Literary and geographical studies of prairies include those by Thacker, Robert, The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Olson, Steven, The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Madsen, John, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982)Google Scholar; and Manning, Richard, Grassland: The History, Biography, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie (New York: Viking, 1995).Google Scholar

5. These definitions are paraphrased from the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971 edition.Google Scholar

6. Landscape here and throughout this essay refers to the idea of land within human history and understanding, its depiction in both literature and visual art, and, as well, the actual land itself and the uses to which it is put.

7. Coues, Elliott, ed., The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike (New York: Harper, 1895; rept. New York: Dover, 1987), 2: 524Google Scholar; and Maj. Long, Steven, General Description of the Country Traversed by the Exploring Expedition Between the Meridian of Council Bluffs and the Rocky MountainsGoogle Scholar, in James, Edwin, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819 and '20, ed. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, 14 vols. (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1904–1907), 147–48.Google Scholar

8. Ibid. The implications of these theories are discussed by Webb, Walter Prescott, in The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931; rept. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 155–57Google Scholar; and by Goetzmann, William, in Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist and the Winning of the American West (1967; rept. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993), 51, 62.Google Scholar

9. Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; rept. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 175.Google Scholar

10. An example of an impractical reason would be the large-scale planting of trees throughout the prairies with the idea that such vegetation would alter climate and the general fertility of the land. This was promoted enthusiastically by the U.S. government, which allowed, through the Timber Culture Act of 1873, a settler to claim more than the normal 160 acres if he would plant and maintain a certain acreage of trees (Webb, , Great Plains, 412).Google Scholar

11. For more on the “classic” landscape see Clark, Kenneth, Landscape into Art (1949; rept. rev. ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1976).Google Scholar

12. Daniels, Stephen, “Goodly Prospects: English Estate Portraiture, 1670–1730,” in Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Art and Cartography, ed. Alfrey, Nicholas and Daniels, Stephen (Nottingham: University Art Gallery, Castle Museum, 1990), 9–17Google Scholar; and Boime, Albert, The Magisterial Gaze: American Landscape Painting, 1830–1865 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991).Google Scholar For a different perspective on visual claiming of the American landscape see Miller, Angela, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

13. Daniels, , “Goodly Prospects,” 9.Google Scholar

14. These issues are discussed in Truettner, William, ed., The West As America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991)Google Scholar, especially in Hill, Patricia's chapter, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Expansion” (97–147).Google Scholar

15. Maynard, Fredelle Bruser, Raisins and Almonds (Toronto: Doubleday, 1972), 187Google Scholar; cited in Rees, , “Painting, Place, and Identity,” 125.Google Scholar

16. Catlin, George, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (London, 1844; rept. New York: Dover, 1973), 1: 218Google Scholar; emphasis on “prospect” added.

17. Moore, Charles H., “Materials for Landscape Art in America,” Atlantic Monthly 64 (11 1889): 670–72.Google Scholar

18. Joe Jones began addressing the subject of wheat farming as early as 1934 when he included one work, Wheat, in the Whitney Museum of Art's biennial exhibition. Two years later he exhibited an entire series at the Walker Gallery in New York City, and for a number of years became so well known for the subject that he jokingly called himself the “Professor of Wheat.” When the Treasury Department began looking for artists in the wheat belt for their local commissions, Jones was a logical choice. From 1936–1941 he produced three murals of grain harvesting for post offices in Seneca and Anthony, Kansas, and in Charleston, Missouri, and the 905 liquor company in St. Louis commissioned him and another artist, Turnbull, James Barre (1909–1976)Google Scholar, to produce five murals entitles The Story of the Grain in a similar mode, for their stores. See Park, Marlene and Markowitz, Gerald E., Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Marling, Karal Ann, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar; “Joe Jones, Regionalist, Communist, Capitalist,” Journal of the Decorative and Propaganda Arts 1875–1940 4 (Spring 1987): 46–58Google Scholar; and “Workers, Capitalists, and Booze: The Story of the 905 Murals,” in Joe Jones and J. B. Turnball — Visions of the Midwest in the 1930s (Milwaukee: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, 1987).Google Scholar

19. Joe Jones painted four post office murals altogether, including Turning a Corner in Anthony, , Kansas, , and HarvestGoogle Scholar in Charleston, Missouri (Jones, to Watson, , 08 17, 1939Google Scholar, Anthony, Kansas, General Services Administration; cited in Park and Markowitz, , Democratic Vistas, 49).Google Scholar

20. Lange, Dorothea and Taylor, Paul Schuster, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939; rept. rev. ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 63.Google Scholar Taylor was a labor economics professor at Berkeley in the 1930s. For more on his work see his book, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City: Peregring, 1983).Google Scholar

21. Chardon, Francis, Fort Clark Journal (1839)Google Scholar; quoted in Heat-Moon, William Least, Prairy Erth (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1991), 62.Google Scholar

22. Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (rept. New York: Penguin, 1992), 378 (ch. 79).Google Scholar

23. Bryant, William Cullen, The Prairies (1834)Google Scholar, in Baym, Nina et al. , The Norton Anthology of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: W W Norton, 1985), 1: 814–17.Google Scholar

24. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Slater, Joseph (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 470.Google Scholar

25. See the following Atlantic Monthly articles: “Illinois in Spring-time,” 2 (09 1858): 475–88Google Scholar; “The New World and the New Man,” 2 (10 1858): 513–31Google Scholar; “The Prairie State,” 7 (05 1861): 579–95Google Scholar; “Pioneering,” 19 (04 1867): 403–16Google Scholar; and “How We Grow in the Great Northwest,” 23 (04 1869): 438–48.Google Scholar

26. A full list of the Western Monthly individuals and articles follows: From volume 1: “William Ogden” (01 1869): 1–7Google Scholar; “Lucius Fairchild” (02 1869): 65–69Google Scholar; “Anson S. Miller” 04 1869): 193–97Google Scholar; “Richard J. Oglesby” (05 1869): 257–61Google Scholar; and “William Bross” (06 1869): 321–30.Google Scholar From Volume 2: “Philetus Sawyer” (07 1869): 1–5Google Scholar; “Samuel Merrill” (08 1869): 69–74Google Scholar; “Schulyer Colfax” (09 1869): 133–38Google Scholar; “David Atwood” (10 1869): 213–16Google Scholar; “John M. Palmer” (11 1869): 293–98Google Scholar; and “William B. Allison” (12 1869): 373–80.Google Scholar From Volume 3: “John D. Caton” (02 1870): 81–86Google Scholar; “Robert Kennicott” (03 1870): 165–172Google Scholar; “Thaddeus C. Pound” (04 1870): 245–48Google Scholar; and “The Chicago Board of Trade, [Samuel H. McCrea]” (06 1870): 405–9.Google Scholar The articles are all unsigned. The Western Monthly later became the Lakeside Monthly.

27. “Ogden,” 1–7.Google Scholar

28. “Atwood,” 213–16.Google Scholar

29. “Palmer,” 293–98.Google Scholar

30. “Allison,” 373–80.Google Scholar

31. “Chicago Board of Trade,” 405–9.Google Scholar

32. Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 120.Google Scholar

33. Garland, Hamlin, Boy Life on the Prairie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 416.Google Scholar

34. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 120.Google Scholar

35. There have been many studies of the Chicago Renaissance. Recent works that are especially useful for their insight into the relationships between aesthetics, prairies, and economics are Bray, Robert C., Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Engel, J. Ronald, Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Hurt, James, Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Wills, Garry, “Sons and Daughters of Chicago,” New York Review of Books 41 (06 9, 1994): 52–59.Google Scholar

36. Quick, Herbert, Vandermark's Folly (1922; rept. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 111–13.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., 228–29.

38. Ibid.

39. Iowa Department of Natural Resources, “What is HF 620 and Iowa's Natural Beauty?” Open Spaces (04 1988): 3–4Google Scholar; and “REAP Act Means Brighter Future for Iowa's Diverse Environment” and “Iowa Open Spaces Protection Plan,” REAP (09/10 1989).Google Scholar

40. Stone, Larry, “Prairie's Economic Impact Eyed,” Metro/Iowa Des Moines Register, 05 10, 1991, 5.Google Scholar

41. Stone, Larry, “Prairie Protection Proposal Satisfies Few,” Metro/Iowa Des Moines Register, 10 4, 1991, 5.Google Scholar

42. This issue is extensively discussed by the “New Western Historians,” most notably by Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: North, 1987).Google Scholar

43. Peck, J. L. E., Montzheimer, O. H., and Miller, William J., Past and Present of O'Brien and Osceola Counties, Iowa (Indianapolis Ind.: B. F. Bowen, 1914), 1: 72, 178.Google Scholar

44. Perkins, D. A. W., History of O'Brien County, Iowa, from Its Organization to the Present Time (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Brown and Saenger, 1897), 96–97.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 72.

46. Woods, Roma Wheeler, “Reminiscences of Early Pioneer Days in O'Brien County,”Google Scholar in Peck, et al. Past and Present, p. 221.Google Scholar

47. “Iowa From Above,” Des Moines Register 05 6, 1991Google Scholar, sec. T, 1–2,

48. Mart's work can be compared with the aerial views of crops taken during the same period for the Department of Agriculture. But since they were taken from higher elevations, with no efforts at framing or selection, they do not have the same visual appeal. Moreover, their purpose was economic and administrative and emphasized the value of the land through its human habitation and cultivation. More recently, however, aerial photographs of farmland have been increasingly appreciated aesthetically, at least by photographers. See Gerster, Georg, Amber Waves of Grain: America's Farmlands from Above (New York: Harper Weldon, Owen, 1990).Google Scholar

49. Ibid., 207.

50. Ibid., 216.

51. Peck, et al. , Past and Present, 177–78.Google Scholar

52. George Taylor to Iowa Natural Resource Commission, undated, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

53. Bryant, Scott to Iowa Natural Resource Commission, 09 22, 1991Google Scholar, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

54. Bruce T. Stiles to Iowa Natural Resource Commission, September 6, 1991, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

55. Lovell, Jan, “She Fought to Save Iowa's Prairies,” Iowan (Winter 1987): 22–27, 56, 57Google Scholar; and H, Adaayden, “State Parks and Preserves,” Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science 51 (1944): 43–48.Google Scholar

56. Hayden, , “State Parks,” 48.Google Scholar

57. Cited in Lovell, , “She Fought,” 23, 56.Google Scholar

58. Perry and De An Thostenson to Iowa Natural Resource Commission, September 24, 1991, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources; quoting Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 190.Google Scholar

59. Harrison Fisch, Testimony before the Iowa Natural Resources Commission, Iowa Natural Resource Commission Minutes, May 1991, 45–49.

60. Gene Wiese, President Iowa Cattlemen's Association, to Young, Richard C., 09 18, 1991Google Scholar, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources: Iowa Natural Resources Commission Minutes, October 1991.

61. Peck, et al. Past and Present, 178.Google Scholar

62. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture, part 15, various years.

63. Ibid.

64. Fisch testimony, 48; and Daniel M. Otto, Department of Economics at Iowa State University, “Economic Impact of Creating a Wildlife Preserve in Emmet and Dickinson Counties,” unpublished report.

65. Nelson, Tom V. to Field, John D., 09 16, 1991Google Scholar, Waterman Prairie public comment file, Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

66. Letter to the Editor from the Sutherland Area Prairie Study Committee, Sutherland Courier, 06 20, 1991.Google Scholar

67. Fisch testimony, 48.

68. Ibid., 46–47.

69. Ibid., 48.

70. Editorial, “Getting the Facts on Prairies,” Des Moines Register, 09 29, 1991.Google Scholar

71. Cindy Hildebrand, Testimony to the Iowa Natural Resource Commission, Iowa natural Resources Commission Minutes, October 1991, 89.

72. Fisch, Harrison, Editorial, “Iowa's Prairies Heritage: Another View,” Des Moines Register, 09 8, 1991, 3.Google Scholar

73. Stone, , “Prairie's Economic Impact Eyed.”Google Scholar