Rediscovering the Great Plains: Journeys by Dog, Canoe, and Horse (Creating the North American Landscape) - Hardcover

Henderson, Norman Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080186688X ISBN 13: 9780801866883

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001

Synopsis

The North American Plains are one of the world's great landscapes―perhaps the signature landscape of the continent. Today, the most intimate experience most of us have of the great grasslands is from behind the window of a car or train. It was not always so. In the earliest days, Plains Indians traveled on foot across the vastness, with only the fierce, wolflike Plains dogs as companions. Later, with the arrival of the Europeans, horses and canoes appeared on the Plains. In Rediscovering the Great Plains, Norman Henderson, a leading scholar of the world's great temperate grasslands, revives these traditional modes of travel, journeying along 200 miles of Canada's Qu'Appelle River valley by dog and travois (the wooden rack pulled by dogs and horses used by Native Americans to transport goods), then by canoe, and finally by horse and travois.

Henderson interweaves his own adventures with the exploits of earlier Plains travelers, like Lewis and Clark, Francisco Coronado, La Vérendrye, and Alexander Henry. Lesser-known experiences of the fur traders and others who struggled to cross this strange and forbidding landscape also illuminate the story, while Henderson's often humorous description of his attempts to find and train old Plains breeds of dogs and horses highlight the difficulties involved in recreating archaic travel methods. He also draws on the history of the world's other great temperate grasslands: the South American pampas and the Eurasian steppes. Recalling the work of Ian Frazier and Jonathan Raban, Henderson's captivating account of his three journeys of exploration will foster a better appreciation for, and deeper understanding of, the natural and human history of the North American Plains.

About this title

About the Author

Norman Henderson is a senior policy advisor on resource and environmental management issues to the government of Saskatchewan.

Reviews

At first blush, a contemporary crossing of the plains of Western Canada on foot, by boat and on horseback seems a grand and epic adventure. In real life, environmental theorist Henderson's quixotic excursions over the course of three summers are relatively modest. His travels take but a couple of weeks and a couple of hundred miles, and his first outing on foot with a dog hauling a few pounds of supplies on a travois is cut short at mid-point by a plague of mosquitoes. Barbed wire across waterways, a handful of scary cows and nervous horses, spates of high wind and hard rain and loud teens at a campsite are the author's most significant hazards. Luckily for the reader, Henderson's travels and travails through Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle River valley are not the only story he's telling. His account, though geographically and chronologically limited, is buoyantly far-reaching in its passion for the prairies of Canada (his native land), the pampas of Argentina and the steppes of Eurasia, places whose human and ecological histories he weaves into his narrative with a scholar's delight in making connections. His writing style, occasionally overly formal and even florid, evokes (intentionally or not) the 18th- and 19th-century accounts of the trappers and explorers who blazed their ways westward across the great plains; Henderson quotes these accounts liberally, contrasting them cleverly with his own journey. The result is a captivating "biography... of a landscape," its good humor blended with impressive scholarship, including snappy thumbnail histories of canoes, horses, dogs, barbed wire and those pesky blood-sucking mosquitoes.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080186688X
• ISBN 13: 9780801866883
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232