Walter P. Webb . . . .
I first read The Great Plains by UT Austin history professor Walter P. Webb when I found it on my grandfather’s bookshelf in 1965. I was 14, he gave it to me, and I still have it. In 1969 I moved 1,000 miles east from hometown Pampa on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle to attend college on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee . . . surrounded by forests, running water, and hills and mountains.
That is when I concluded that Webb was correct: that the distinctive, really different conditions of life on the Great Plains “have bent and molded Angle-American life, have destroyed traditions [prevalent in the East] and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner.” Webb identified the conditions of semi-aridity, flatness, and treelessness as precipitating new ways of thinking and doing, cultural innovations, and legal changes. Access to and use of scarce water is an example. Webb posited the 98th meridian as an institutional fault line . . . approximately the north-south line just west of Fort Worth. The Great Plains was a wide-ranging history of the region from prehistory to the end of the 19th century.
The book came out 100 years ago, and has always provoked critics as to Webb’s method and his sources. In more recent times, the book has incurred justified criticism about Webb’s racial attitude and his ignoring or overlooking the role of women in the history of the west (they are confined to two pages).
To commemorate the centenary of the publication, and to evaluate what in it has stood the test of time, SMU has republished the book with a superb introduction by Andrew Graybill of its History Department.
Graybill acknowledges the problems and limitation of the book, but finds that “The Great Plains endures because of its concrete definition of the region. . . . [it] is a deeply flawed masterpiece. . . . [and still it] speaks unmistakeably to the present.”
And, finally: “The environment will shape human possibilities in the Anthropocene in ways far beyond Webb’s ken, but which are consonant, all the same, with Webb’s penetrating insight into the importance of the natural world as a historical actor of incontestable importance."
Well done, Professor Graybill and SMU….
