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Book Review
| Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory. By Bonnie Lynn-Sherow. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. vii + 186 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $29.95.
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| Red Earth examines west-central Oklahoma between 1889, when the territory was "opened" to agricultural settlement, and 1907, when it became a state. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow begins sixty years earlier, however, with Washington Irving's lyrical 1832 description of the region as "stately groves ... in the midst of rich meadows" (p. 10). She then explains how "a new set of ecological relationships dominated by the values of Euro-American settlers and businessmen" (p. 23) rearranged the landscape "to reflect the well-ordered vision of its white inhabitants: fenced-off farmsteads ... and row upon row of commercially important crops" (p. 144). But Red Earth is not an uncomplicated account of capitalism amok in a garden. In a superb first chapter that would make an excellent undergraduate reading assignment, Lynn-Sherow argues that the Oklahoma Territory was "deeply dependent on the broader national economy" (p. 24) long before agricultural settlers arrived. She makes clear that the Native American horse-bison economy dramatically altered the environment, and asserts that it "could not have been sustained indefinitely without some drastic modifications to their populations and lifeways" (p. 16). After the destruction of the bison, herds of Texas longhorns "ate their way" north to Kansas, so that by 1889, "large portions of the landscape observed by Irving in 1832 had become a semidesert of overgrazed grasslands largely stripped of their tree banks" (p. 24). |
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