| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2

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.
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).	1
The remaining six chapters turn to Race and Agriculture, and consider African American, Euroamerican, and Kiowa agricultural adaptations. Lynn-Sherow depicts Oklahoma agriculture as a tri-racial struggle in which African American settlers and Kiowas lost, not because (as the Euroamericans argued) they were poor farmers, but because they lacked capital, and because Euroamericans used both criminal and legal violence to dispossess them. Government further tilted the odds: "The agents of the USDA helped to popularize specific technologies and practices that excluded many poor white, African American and Indian farmers, causing them to lose control over their land or to leave farming altogether" (p. 147).	2
The most original contribution of Red Earth is the discussion of Native American agriculture. Lynn-Sherow finds significance that eluded prior historians, and credits the Kiowa with a sophisticated understanding of the economic value of their lands, and a determination to use agriculture as a survival strategy. She shows that during the 1890s they applied their skills and knowledge as pastoralists to become successful horse and cattle raisers. The Kiowa did not establish individual family farms, but lived and worked in groups "analogous to their former band arrangements" (p. 121). The application of the Dawes Act after 1900 destroyed this successful agro-economy, she argues, as their "collective" farms were "stripped from them with the legal allotment of their reservation and the loss of resources they had formerly depended on" (p. 138).	3
Sherow's red, white, and black trinity works less well to describe African American and Euroamerican farm families. Although she understands that "an elite [my emphasis] group of native-born white farmers were eventually triumphant over all others" (p. 146), the non-elite majority of Euroamerican farmers seldom appear in Red Earth. Instead, white farmers are aggressive agri-businessmen, in sharp contrast to idealized black farm families who practice "a mixed economy of subsistence farming and market farming through diversified agriculture" (p. 51). Rural historians would apply this same description to most white farm families, and would point out that white and African American farm families shared similar farm-building and family survival strategies. Given that one of her central arguments is that white farmers succeeded because of their "willingness to invest in mechanized agriculture" (p. 53), Lynn-Sherow is vague about the actual techniques and technologies used by Oklahoma farmers.	4
Lynn-Sherow is a much more talented writer than most academic historians, and in several chapters her prose borders on elegant. She has been badly served by her editor and publisher, however. There are typos, repetitions, and embarrassing errors. Four of the nine black and white photos are too murky to make out, and none is well related to the text. Finally, in a genre that demands spatial understanding, Red Earth has not a single map.	5
John Herd Thompson teaches North American history at Duke University. His most recent book is British Columbia: Land of Promises (Oxford University Press, 2005), and he is at work on a comparative study of the U.S. and Canadian northern Great Plains.

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