Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2008
Publication Title
Great Plains Quarterly
Volume
28
Issue
2
First Page
105
Last Page
133
Abstract
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.1
These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would consider this an ideal landscape for home. So how did the people who settled on the Plains "view" this landscape? What did they see? How did this land come to be recognized as that of home? In Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (1931), Webb argues that when the Plains settlers had to adapt to their new environment, "they were compelled to make a radical readjustment in their way of life."2
In particular, Webb focused on the "treeless, flat, and semiaridity" of the Plains and the key developments of railroads, barbed wire, windmills, and improved farm machinery and methods.3 But another technology was key to the transformation of the Plains: photography. I argue that photography was central to Plains settlers' "radically readjusting" to living on the Plains and conceptually recognizing the Plains as home.
Recommended Citation
Dando, Christina E., "Constructing a Home on the Range: Homemaking in Early Twentieth Century Plains Photograph Albums" (2008). Geography and Geology Faculty Publications. 24.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/geoggeolfacpub/24
Comments
The final published version of this article can be found here: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1346/.