| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert Gough. Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900–1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1997. Pp. viii, 295. $40.00.

American agricultural history is, by and large, a story of triumph. Farmers claimed the land, worked hard, and eventually produced great wealth for the country if not always for themselves personally. Robert Gough presents a counter-narrative, an account of the birth and failure of yeoman farming in northern Wisconsin in the years from 1900 to 1940. 1

Once the forested home of Indians who hunted, fished, and gathered wild rice, much of the eighteen northernmost Wisconsin counties were appropriated by lumber companies that by 1900 had produced a wasteland of tree stumps. Government experts, attempting to salvage the environmental disaster, promoted small-scale farming on the cutover. This was somewhat successful in the boom years of 1900 to 1920 but failed sadly in the ensuing agricultural slump, leaving the predictable human carnage of shattered dreams and poverty. Expert opinion shifted to favor reforestation and depopulation. Gough acknowledges that the cutover was a different place for Indians, timber barons, farmers, and urban critics. The farming phase was a brief interlude; but, for Gough, farmers were central and most deserving of support. For him, the critical factor in farming failure arose not from the spotty soils and short growing season of the cutover but rather from the experts' betrayal and indifference to the lives of cutover farmers, a preview of what other yeoman farmers would soon experience. . . .

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