Great Plains

by Ian Frazier

National Bestseller

With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Nature, Adventure, Westerns

328 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 1989

About the author

Ian Frazier (b.1951) is an American writer and humorist. He is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/ianfra...

Reviews

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Third Reading*

“I fear for the Great Plains because many people think they are boring. Money and power in this country concentrates elsewhere. The view of the Great Plains from an airplane window is hardly more detailed than the view from a car on the interstate highways, which seem designed to get across in the least time possible, as if this were an awkward point in a conversation….Convincing someone not to destroy a place that, to him, seems as unvaried as a TV test pattern is a challenge. The beauty of the plains is not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them, and in what they are not.” – Ian Frazier, Great Plains


What you think when you look at them? First of all, I think the Great Plains are ruggedly beautiful, but what I primarily think when I look at them is their history. That is also one of the things Ian Frazier pondered as he logged 25,000 miles over several summers engaging in a deep-seated love affair with the region.

As a result, we not only get an in-depth account of the region’s geography, geology, sociology, meteorology, ecology, biology, economy, but also its people, both past and present. And since he is interested in the history of the Great Plains he never bypasses a museum or a historical roadside marker (Ah, a kindred spirit; I never pass them up either and have even written some myself.)

Unlike certain travel writers who adopt a condescending attitude toward small towns and their people (I’m looking at you Theroux, Raban, and, yes, Bryson), Frazier likes people, not just in general terms, he likes them as individuals. And he engages them.

Bill Bryson, who published his first travel book, The Lost Continent, in the same year as Frazier’s book, made two large loops in the United States, one in the west and one in the east, and, if his account is to be believed, talked to hardly anyone. But not Frazier.

He often picked up hitchhikers and showed interest in their lives and he liked the small towns that he visited and the people who lived there. He even asked the names of local high school athletic teams in the small towns where he made stops.

(I first read Frazier’s book in the early 90’s and ever since I also ask someone to tell me the name of the local team. That’s how I learned that the name of the Eufaula, Oklahoma team is the 'Ironheads' and the Hereford, Texas team was the 'Whitefaces.' City folks may not know that Hereford cattle have white faces. According to legend the Ironheads were named after their coach, Harry 'Ironhead' Hansard, who coached their football team during the 20’s and 30’s.)

This too was unlike Bryson, whose book, subtitled Travels in Small-Town America, was, according to him, an effort to find the nation’s perfect small town. Of course he didn’t find it. Oh, he drove through a couple that he thought were okay, but not perfect. But you see, his search was a superficial one. As I said, he drove through them, never taking the time to stop and talk to people. He was strictly a windshield explorer.


“For fantasies, the Great Plains are in many respects the perfect place. They’re so big that you could never know all there is to know about them – your fantasies could never wear them out.” – Ian Frazier, Great Plains


Frazier’s book does ramble a bit, just like his travels. This allows him to integrate historical profiles and vignettes with his contemporary personal travel. He is especially interested in Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, but also he uses interludes to profile other prominent historical figures who played a role in the history of the Plains, people ranging all the way from George Armstrong Custer to Doc Holliday. And, by the way, a roadside historical marker led to a story about Bonnie and Clyde.

Here is an example of how Frazier segues the present into the past:

I turned off at the town of Hague, North Dakota. It had a Catholic church breathing cool church smell through its open doors, a red firehouse, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a big Behlen Quonset hut near the railroad tracks, a Knights of Columbus hall, a bar called Lilt’l Gillys, a Coke machine on the sidewalk, one-story houses with octagon clotheslines and eight or ten rows of corn in the back yards, a lawn sprinkler shaped like a little tractor in one front yard, a few cars angle-parked on the main street, and three blond kids bouncing on a mattress in the back of a pickup truck outside the café.

Hard to believe that one night more than sixty years ago, during a dance that had turned rowdy, someone hit Lawrence Welk over the head with a brick in Hague, North Dakota.

What follows is a delightfully informative profile of the bandleader, a native of Strasburg, a small town located fourteen miles away.

(The rambling aspect is one of the things that I love about the book. That’s the way I prefer to travel, too. And it is easier to do if I am traveling alone, which is, I hate to say, the way I prefer. Traveling alone means no negotiation and it allows serendipity rather than a detailed travel plan to dictate where I will go that day and what I will see and where I will spend the night (and what historical markers I might happen upon). Things that I don’t plan often turn out to be the highlight of my trips. Also lowlights; a harrowing lesson I once learned the hard way was to never take a shortcut in the Rockies.)

At the beginning of this review, I quoted Frazier’s fear about what might happen to the Great Plains. An attempt to extract more from the Plains than they could afford to give resulted in an epic environmental disaster known as the Dust Bowl. Unfortunately, another sin against the environment is currently taking place. Frazier is fearful of what coal strip-mining is doing to the region in some areas, especially in Wyoming.

By leaving nothing behind but a landscape of trash, strip-mining insults the future. By destroying the physical record, and by making the history of white people on the Great Plains look like nothing more than the progress of appetite, strip-mining also insults the past. Land that has been strip-mined reduces the whole story of the Great Plains to: chewed up, spit out.

Today, three decades after the publication of Great Plains, there is a fight over the construction of a pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada through the heart of the Great Plains all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Environmentalists oppose the pipeline and so do the Native people of the region. They will receive little or no financial benefit from the pipeline, but more than that they fear spills that will pollute their land and water. They are putting up a bitter fight in opposition to the pipeline. But if history is any guide, they will lose – again.

[Margitte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like taking the mind on a trip. A circuitous 25,000-mile drive through the heartland of America. The vast semi-arid plains of America.

In the book On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej Stasiuk,Michael Kandel (Translator), the author says: "That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words."

This is what Frazier accomplish in this book, making it a perfect choice for someone who might want to do the same. He visits the old and new; the forgotten and the unknown, and he touches base with different people from different walks of life to compile this unforgettable experience.

Ian Frazier takes his reader through the history, geology, sociology, and contemporary reality of this magnificent region of one of the greatest countries in the world. Magnificent, yes, because the environment tells its own stories through dust storms, flooding, human interventions and, probably, God's will.

Other books made me love America even more: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon; and

A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (read this one before joining GR - so no review).

Both these books contained a novelistic vibe, which I loved. Frazier's book is a short 200 pages equivalent to them, although a little bit too concentrated on the history of particularly Crazy Horse. Fascinating history for sure, but too many pages dedicated to one subject in an otherwise riveting travelogue, however, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The inclusion of history always adds much more spice to the road-trip genre. Great Plains is not a white-knuckle read overall, but it does have some hair-raising moments, such as when he picked up a hitchhiker who incidentally could lead him to the remote place which Sitting Bull called home.

This is not the kind of history that breeds immediate warmth and trust between peoples. In the rearview mirror I looked at my eyes, marked by worry and second-guessing with little lines like the calibrations on a camera lens. Then I looked at Jim Yellow Earring’s eyes—calm, bloodshot, brown as a deer’s. “Keep going, I’ll take you right to him,” he said. The road had now become so deeply rutted that the trick was finding the exact moment to steer from one set of ruts into a new set to the right or left. Just as we were about to high-center, Jim Yellow Earring would yell, “My side! Come over to this side!… Okay, okay, now your side!”

We often find a small road sign pointing to something insignificant, until we realize how the world is contained within it. Frazier captured the spirits which will forever populate its history.

Great Plains was published in 1987. It withstood the test of time splendidly, since it is one person's subjective observations of a fascinating region through his own political, emotional, and jounalistic glasses. A wonderful adventure for the curious reader.

Travel journals can be addictive reading, since it is often more riveting than reading novels. Who can forget:

The Life of John Ledyard, the American Traveller: Comprising Selections from His Journals and Correspondence by Jared Sparks, John Ledyard. John Ledyard set the pace for later travelogues, including those of Lewis and Clark.

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1814). (which probably kick-started this road-genre);

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck;

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883)

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

or the many books of Randall Kenan, and Otohiro Watanabe

Thoroughly enjoyable. Ian Frazier is true to this genre.

~ “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” – Stephen Covey ~

[RandomAnthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I fear for the Great Plains because many think they are boring.”

p. 91

I'll probably like this book more than you. I salivated over the possibilities of Great Plains after reading the author's Travels in Siberia. I went in with high hopes but acknowledge now that twenty-one years lapsed between this book and the Russian one, and Great Plains, as great as it is, reads, and was, the work of a younger and more self-conscious man. Frazier tries to sound cool and detached and drifter-y, sleeping in his car and picking up Indian hitchhikers. He skips many of the cliche-visits (e.g. Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drugs) and focuses more on the wide expanses as a construct, coloring in the details with well-researched historical analysis. His notes, outlining and explaining his sources, are sixty pages long and almost as fun to read as the text they support. Frazier stumbles, however, when he tries to attach great big meaning to environmental concerns and isolated missle silos. He's much better focusing on small observations (the sound an air conditioning unit makes in said silos) and letting the people and places tell their own stories. I liked this book better than Travels in Siberia but the latter is a better book.

I am defensive of the Great Plains and, according to Frazier, I don't even live there. The central time zones doesn't get the lead in commercials for television shows. And the mountain time zone? Do most Americans even know that the mountain time zone exists? People get Nebraska and Kansas confused and only remember the Dakotas because they're two of them. Two of my least favorite words in the English language, when combined, are “flyover country”. I'm not going to ask you to like the Great Plains, and I'm sure as hell not describing the stretch as some sort of peaceful, anti-urban paradise. But I like knowing the Great Plains are there. In a quiet, slumbering way, I see the Great Plains as giving the finger to both coasts. And I love that. I love feeling that, in the middle of Nebraska, we'd all feel a curious mix of boredom and freakout. I'm reminded of that scene in Brown Bunny when the main character is driving. And driving. And driving.

Yes, the Great Plains are boring. But I've had interesting experiences there that probably wouldn't happen anywhere else. Why do I appreciate Frazier's Great Plains? Three stories:

1) About a decade back my friend Sean and I drive to the South Dakotan Badlands. We walked the castle trail, about a ten mile lollipop loop from just short of the gift shop to one of the roads and back. Numbered poles lead the way; you look for the next pole across the lunar landscape to stay on trail. Sean decides to get high. I tell him if he gets busted I'm leaving his ass behind then walk a couple miles ahead of him. Later we argue in the car on the way to Rapid City for Mexican food. I remember the fight involving birds and Sean claiming the media was “the man”. Still later we wait out an apocalyptic storm in a strip mall Borders.

2) Five years before that my wife and I drive across Kansas on one of the last legs of a six week road trip. We stop at a campground in Topeka, where I watch baseball's all star game on a black and white television.

3) Two Badlands trips later, less than two years ago, my car dies on the side of I-90 about fifteen miles west of Sioux Falls. By “dies”, I should clarify, I don't mean “stops”. I mean “pieces of the engine strewn across the shoulder” dies. I walk to the next exit. You don't notice how much roadkill clutters the side of 90 until you walk it. A couple hours later a polite teenager from the auto repair shop where I junked the car waits to make sure the rental works out before he heads home.

“The beauty of the plains is not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them, and what they are not.”

p. 92

There are a million books about New York or whatever, and I'm ok with that. But if you want to catch what driving across the middle of nowhere for eighteen hours might feel like, but in good way, read Frazier's Great Plains.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was delightful. I am from the Plains. Forget my irritation over learning so much about them from someone born east of Chicago, living in New Jersey, and working in New York City. He well-earned his spurs by shedding the East Coast bias, criss-crossing the Plains by car many times over the years, and loving them for what they are. Some weaknesses in his knowledge base (presumably from being an outsider) show through. For example, he mistakes the Eastern boundary of the Plains as about the 100th meridian, saying that is approximately where the tall grass gives way to the short grass. In fact, the tribes who lived there for centuries, the people who live there today, and not least, the buffalo, treated the Missouri River as the beginning of the Plains. No one, or scattered few, people living in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, or the Dakotas think they don't live in the Plains and his line bisects these States. Lengthy descriptions of the tribes - notably the tragic betrayal and death of Crazy Horse who the author properly accords heroic status - the climate, the topography, and many current residents and their attitudes, bring justice to the beauty and history of what is, after all, the heart of America.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a breezy, sweeping crash course on America's Great Plains and much of the West; equal parts travelogue and history with a vividly conveyed sense of place, spiced with historical tidbits and humorously imparted facts of the weird. It's kind of like a bunch of digestible NPR commentaries strung together. Frazier does it with ease, and not in any particular order -- somehow running the gamut from Sitting Bull and Bonnie & Clyde to Lawrence Welk; from arrowheads to barbed wire; from Mennonites to MX missiles; from the Ice Age to the Dust Bowl. He encounters flavorful, colorful characters along the roads of his journeys. I learned a lot about an amazing array of subjects by reading this. Chapter 6 is a moving tribute to Chief Crazy Horse.

What most people see when they see the Plains is nothingness. In fact, the first geographers who mapped it called it the Great American Desert, even though desert it is not. But that attitude still remains, as Frasier notes in a section about strip mining of the plains. He worries that people won't care if something so seemingly boring would be destroyed. He writes:

"I fear for the Great Plains because many people think they are boring. Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere. The view of the Great Plains from an airplane window is hardly more detailed than the view from a car on the interstate highways, which seem designed to get across in the least time possible, as if this were an awkward point in the conversation. In the minds of many, natural beauty means something that looks like Switzerland. The ecology movement often works best in behalf of winsome landscapes and wildlife. The Great Plains do not ingratiate. They seldom photograph well — or rather, they are seldom photographed. Images of the plains are not a popular feature of postcards or scenic calendars."

While this book is not a definitive history, it is an excellent primer, letting the reader nibble at tasty tidbits without becoming bogged down. I felt that my knowledge of the West grew several-fold from reading this. I really enjoyed this and recommend it to everyone.

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Page 214: "Now, when I have trouble getting to sleep, I sometimes imagine that my bed is on the back of a flatbed pickup truck driving across the Great Plains. I ignore the shouts on the sidewalk and the bass vibnrations from the reggae club across the street. The back of this truck has sides but no top. I can see the stars. The air is cool. The truck will go nonstop for nine hours through the night. At first the road is as straight as a laser--State Highway 8, in North Dakota say--where nothing seems to move except the wheels under me and the smell of run-over skunks fading in and out in my nose. Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet. Then suddenly the wheels rumble on the wooden planks of a one-lane bridge across the River That Scolds at All the Others. Ever since the Great Plains were first called a desert, people have gone a long way toward turning them into one. The Great Plains which I cross in my sleep are bigger than any name people give them. They are enormous, bountiful, unfenced, empty of buildings, full of names and stories. They extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Their hills are hipped, like a woman asleep under a sheet. Their rivers rhyme. Their rows of grain strum past. Their draws hold springwater and wood and game and grass like sugar in the hollow of a hand. They are the place where Crazy Horse will always remain uncaptured. They are the lodge of Crazy Horse."

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Plains is a cross between Kathleen Norris' "Dakota" and William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways." It's a road book about the high plains -- that semi-arid, often treeless region covering 10 states lying between the Rockies and the Mid-West. Rather than a day-by-day log of a single journey, it is an account of many trips, as its author criss-crosses the terrain, jumping from place to place and from one historical period to another. When you are done, you have a sense of a vast land and a great 200-year swath of history.

Fragments of times and places that we may know from movies and text books come together in a sweeping tapestry containing: Indian tribes, buffalo herds, cattle drives, railroads, homesteaders, droughts, blizzards, grasshoppers, long rivers, sand hills, badlands, small pox epidemics, black settlers, missile silos, strip mining, the Dust Bowl, the Ogalala aquifer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Custer, Bonnie and Clyde, and the experience of driving a van along straight, empty highways in all weather, picking up hitchhikers, sleeping overnight by the road, and stopping to talk to ordinary people living extraordinary lives in a depopulated landscape most travelers know only as "flyover," that featureless land seen from above between East and West Coasts.

It's a great enjoyable read that meanders over its subject, sometimes with a sense of wonder, sadness, amusement, and even -- at a fashion show in Nicodemus, Kansas -- unadulterated joy!

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should probably add a 'shelf' to my profile on here called 'Great Plains.' There's been quite a bit of Stegner going on over here, and now this. I think it feeds some sort of nostalgia...for a place I've never actually lived. I'm a city boy and can't claim the tiniest bit of even ironrange cred let alone plains cred (I was disappointed to find out from this book that Minnesota isn't even officially included in the enormous region known as the Great Plains. Too many lakes to qualify). But when I read anything that glorifies this region of the planet and its history (as they all must, obviously...name one thing to denigrate. Indian genocide? Duh. So tell the story from the hopeless and desperate but valorous point of view of the Indians themselves) I feel an absurd pride and sense of identification. I totally don't deserve it. Maybe I can admit it's vicarious; I just like it when smart, sensitive people eloquently stick up for a region which, in the grand scheme of american 'culture' *is* actually denigrated (or at best ignored) 99% of the time.

Plus there was a scene in here the rapturous joy of which Frazier so languidly unrolled (had he been hasty, forget it) that it had me getting gooey at my kitchen table. Without that it would have been a fun and informative history book worthy of a positive rating, but with it it became for me one of this year's best reads.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've lost count of how many times I've read this book, but I just read it in preparation for a trip to the Great Plains. And it's still one of my favorite books. Frazier's not a stylist or a cloying writer who uses irony to skewer everything; he's just a good writer with a sense of humor, a sense of wonder, and a sense of adventure. The book is history at its most enthusiastic: sincere, brimming with life, and appreciative of the chance encounters that define and enliven travel. Most importantly, the book evokes the expansiveness of the plains and the joy one might find there.

[Kristīne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lieliska dokumentālā literatūra. Tāds emocionāls populārzinātniskais darbs, kas sevī apvieno autora personisko pieredzi ar interesantiem faktiem, neaizmirstot par daiļrunību un teksta patstāvīgo vērtību.
Neatceros, cik sen un kāpēc iegādājos šo grāmatu, bet priecājos, ka tā atradās manā grāmatplauktā.
Uzzināju daudz jauna par liela ģeogrāfiskā veidojuma ekoloģisko, vēsturisko un kultūras nozīmi. Par indiāņiem, par Putekļu vētrām, par Krimas kviešiem, par bifeļiem un Aukstā kara raķetēm, kas izmaksājušas 1000x vairāk kā vesela gadsimta finansējums zemniekiem, kas mēģina apsaimniekot Lielās Zemienes (nav ne jausmas, vai tas ir pareizais tulkojums).

[Pj · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! At first, I didn't take it seriously. No plot. What seemed like wandering around became something I would look forward to.
Great Plains history stories from Bonnie & Clyde, Jim Yellow Earring, Billy the Kid, Lawrence Welk, Crazy Horse, Nicodemus history, Dust Bowl, Lewis & Clark, to Custer. An overview of Ian Frazier's travels over 6k miles rambling over the Plains, but in a format that felt like you were hanging out over a pick-up truck bed hearing a dude's story. Easily read and not bogged down in too many details.
The authors 'Notes' at the end of the book had wonderful tidbits within. I will always note the biography-I usually love that part of a book so I can look up other books and facts! (I know, I'm odd)

[Julie Richert-Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third Reading.
Published in 1989, this time through it struck me what a tremendous endeavor journalism was in the decades before the internet or mobile phones - one reviewer described this work as "found journalism" and the arc of the experiences, conversations and accidental bursts of inspired serendipity certainly make that apt.
Frazier tells us, "Whenever money and the weather allowed, I would cross the mountains and drive around on the plains." Sure. 10 states, covering 2500 miles north to south and 600 miles east to west-that is a tremendous lot of driving. Looking. Reading and talking and listening and furious scribbling.
Some things I love about Frazier's journalism:
-is a master of impossible lists
-can relate the most outrageous details in flat prose without the slightest hint of irony; which is brilliantly hilarious
-observes minutia and fantastic little quirky things that build into something remarkable which most of us would miss until it was too late
-has the ability to take densely complex events or tiers of events and prep them into appetizer ready summaries (such as how the escalation of the Cold War led to the bizzarre reality that I and my neighbors and countless other communities across the West are living and working every day amidst and above a giant weapons system)
-can craft a synopsis of devastating clarity that smokes the brain and asks one to reevaluate one's convictions
My opinion is that this book remains an important marker of the shaping of life on the Plains before the great technological and mechanical leaps that have occurred since its writing, because more than ever, the history and chains of events that influenced our current realities out here are still in play, magnified and rippling outward through each generation. He outlines the tricky business of trying to engender responsible stewardship, ecological protection, or conservation measures; or economic health or social stability or education opportunities in a place most people consider "boring. Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere. The view of the Plains from an airplane window is hardly more detailed than the view from a car on the interstate highways, which seem designed to get across in the least time possible, as if this were an awkward point in the conversation."

"This, finally, is the punch line of over two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and bury it in vaults, somewhere else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.
And in return, we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land where so much treasure came from- weapons for which our best hope might be that someday we will take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused forever."

[Jack Getz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I have read in years, and I read a quite few books! Great writing, wonderful research, interesting stories and facts and faces about a huge area of this continent that most write off as boring or tedious. It’s anything but that, and this gent knows how to relate wonderful stories based on really solid research and personal experience. He makes seemingly mundane things interesting.

Ian Frazier paints a beautiful picture of the Plains that warms the heart and challenges the mind. Great figures of our western history are humanized and properly honored. It’s the first book in my memory that I didn’t want to end!
The Notes in the back are almost as interesting as the book, but not quite.

Oh, If you want to learn how to write well, read this guy.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up recently at our local library's annual book sale. Lots of good stuff there. 'Bout a zillion Danielle Steele titles.

Have read lots of the author's articles in The New Yorker, but never a book so far. I've crossed the Great Plains myself many times: trains, planes, automobiles. I remember the first time so well: June of 1957 - We stopped for a break somewhere in western Kansas on U.S. Rt.24(I think - might have been 36). Bright sunshine and nothing but a flat horizon for all 360 degrees. I loved it! A dog came up barking and running through a field from a nearby farmhouse. I'd never been west of New York until that trip to Colorado from Massachusetts. Ye goode olde days ...

Still a fun ride, as Frazier takes us along on his sort-of obsessive-seeming jaunts up and down the Great Plains. His prose is sort of breathless and packed with details. Frazier is a skilled writer, so it all works pretty well. Same sort of "genre" as Bill Bryson's stuff, just better written.

All done with this engrossing tour of fly-over country. The main attraction here is Frazier's breathless, all-encompassing prose. You don't get to be a staff writer for The New Yorker if you can't write. The regular text is followed by pages of notes, and a lot of theses are pretty interesting in and of themselves.

- Occasionally there's a sour note struck, writing-wise, as when Frazier seems to approve of white people on trains joyfully shooting buffalo as they cross the plains. UGH!

- The visit to those ICBM resting grounds is pretty chilling. Something we hardly ever think about these days. Are they still there?

- 4.25* rounds down to 4*.

[Meara Breuker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly I have no idea why this book is so well-rated. It is poorly written by an obviously self-indulgent, self-important person. The first page alone every sentence ends in an exclamation point, like the author is yelling at you - I almost put it down right then and there. I almost wish I had. The story is disjointed, historical characters fall through the cracks (except for Crazy Horse, this guy LOVES Crazy Horse) and become strings of names reminiscent of some books in the Old Testament. It's such a shame, because the plains do have such an interesting history that is all but lost in brief mentions by this egotistical, distracted author. I read this book because I wanted to know the history, not because of its ridiculous prose. This is the first book I have disliked in a long time, and I read a book or two a week. The only saving grace that would make me give it 1.5 stars are the last two chapters. I would not recommend this book to anybody.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent set of essays exploring many aspects of the life and history of the Great Plains. His footnotes are worth reading too. He is an excellent writer who spent time exploring, researching, and traveling in the plains. I want to read his book called Siberia.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Away to the air shaft of the continent, where weather fronts from two hemispheres meet, and the wind blows almost all the time! Away to the high plains rolling in waves to the rising final chord of the Rocky Mountains!”

I live on the Great Plains. I live where they meet the Rocky Mountains, and I agree that it seems as if it slowly rise up to meet the Continental Divide, and I have walked their landscape a thousand miles. It wasn’t easy to love them; I had been in Seattle and San Francisco just before, but also Phoenix and Austin, so it was practice to be able to see their beauty. I always knew the skies of the Plains were the thing; “The beauty of the plains is not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them, and in what they are not,” a wide open, borderless, vagabond sky where you can see forever; and that has changed me more than anything I have seen or done or been, but the land was flat, or had small hills, or was dry and sere. But I found its beauty and I find it over and over. If I could, I would forget words, and just submit all my photos of the beauty here.

“The Great Plains are about 2,500 miles long, and about 600 miles across at their widest point. The area they cover roughly parallels the Rocky Mountains, which make their western boundary. Although they extend from the Southwestern United States well into Canada, no single state or province lies entirely within them. North to south, the states of the Great Plains are: Montana   North Dakota     South Dakota Wyoming   Nebraska Colorado   Kansas New Mexico. Oklahoma   Texas
In Canada, they include southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. They are five hundred to a thousand miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, and over a thousand miles inland from the Atlantic. The Texas plains are about five hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Just where the Great Plains begin and end is not always certain. To the west, they sometimes continue past the Rocky Mountain front through gentle foothills all the way to the Continental Divide. To the north, flatlands stretch past the Arctic Circle, but the open prairie has given way to boreal pine forests long before that. In the Southwest, a change from semi-arid grassland to true desert is sudden in some places, slow in others. Of all the Great Plains boundaries, the eastern one is the hardest to fix. Many geographers and botanists have said that the Great Plains begin at the hundredth meridien because that is the approximate limit of twenty-inch annual rainfall. Before Europeans came, it was more or less where the tall grasses of the East stopped and the Western short grasses started. (The hundredth meridian is the eastern line of the Texas panhandle; a map of the lower forty-eight states folds in half a little bit to the right of it.) Since the same amount of rain never falls two years in a row, this eastern boundary always changes.”

I had never read much of this author’s work, but he gets it right repeatedly in the book: “America is like a wave of higher and higher frequency toward each end, and lowest frequency in the middle.” I have lived on both coasts, and in the middle, and agree wholeheartedly with this. I can’t live further onto the plains; I need a medium frequency, balanced between city and country, solitude and people to help, it is the way I am made. His words brings to life the low frequency I don’t know as well, but that is important for us to know if we want to say we know our country and love our country. We can’t learn from the past if we don’t learn it; the evils that were done, to the land, environment, native tribes, they don’t need to be repeated if we could accept and fix them, and this is a place to start. I am in the stage of life balanced between hope and cynicism, that the moral arc towards progress, equality and diversity is to long; but am inspired by all the voices that still speak truth and hope. And

Naturally, I loved the nature bits and pieces, and appreciate some of the history, and it dragged when it was talking about industry and the challenges of farming; but it has a grand scope, a subtle humor, and a lyrical, uniquely American voice and story that keeps you interested.

“The bigger rivers on the plains run roughly west to east. Carrying alluvial sands from the Rocky Mountains, they helped make the plains. Some, like the Brazos, flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Some run into the Red or the Arkansas, which both continue east to the Mississippi. The others end up in the Missouri, which follows a 2,500-mile course from the northwest until it finally joins the Mississippi at St. Louis.”

“The rancher said, “A guy came up here from Denver a while ago and said he wanted to look for artifacts on our land, and I asked what kind of artifacts, and he said, ‘Early-man tools.’ We all thought that was pretty funny—whenever we’d need a rock for something, we’d say, ‘Hey, hand me one o’ them early-man tools.’ Then one day the guy comes down off the ridge and he’s got this beautiful spearpoint about six inches long. Ever since, I’ve been keeping my eye on the ground, and picking up chippings and points and hide scrapers all over the place. Some of these rocks I don’t even know what they were, but I know they were something.”

“The big game animals disappeared from the plains about six thousand years ago, and archaeologists have as yet found little evidence of any game at all there for maybe two thousand years after that. Experts in the subject of paleoclimates believe that during these years—from about 4000 B.C. or 4500 B.C. to 2000 B.C.—the Great Plains went through a period of heat and drought which turned the land to near-desert.”

“I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed, something more than a man’s life was snuffed out. Once, America’s size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank. Like the center of a dying fire, the Great Plains held that original vision longest. Just as people finally came to the Great Plains and changed them, so they came to where Crazy Horse lived and killed him.”

“Suddenly I felt a joy so strong it almost knocked me down. It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs. Robinson’s lovely daughters dance. And I thought, It could have worked! This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness—it could have worked! There was something to it, after all! It didn’t have to turn into a greedy free-for-all! We didn’t have to make a mess of it and the continent and ourselves! It could have worked! It wasn’t just a joke, just a blind for the machinations of money! The Robinson sisters danced; Prince sang about doves crying; beauty and courage and curiosity and gentleness seemed not to be rare aberrations in the world. Nicodemus, a town with reasons enough to hold a grudge, a town with plenty of reasons not to exist at all, celebrated its Founders’ Day with a show of hats and a dance revue. The Robinson sisters wove between each other, three-by-three. People cheered and whistled. The rancher who had wanted to see some break dancing clapped. To me, and maybe to some others in the room, the sight of so many black people here on the blue-eyed Great Plains was like a cool drink of water...For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and the Indians undestroyed, the prairie unplundered. Maybe history did not absolutely have to turn out the way it did. Maybe the history of the West, for example, could have involved more admiration of hats, more unarmed get-togethers, more dancing, more tasting of spareribs. Joy! I leaned against the sturdiness of the McGhee sister by my side. From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns. Thoughts which usually shout down joy in me were nowhere in sight. I read in some magazine once that the most important word in American movies is “home”; that Americans, being immigrants, have strong associations with that word. I was in the middle of America, in the middle of the Great Plains, in the midst of history...

The life streams were flowing with buoyancy. I was no longer a consumer, a rate payer, a tenant, a card holder, a motorist. I was home. The world looked as I wanted it to. My every breath was justified. I felt not the mild warmth of irony, not the comfort of camp, not the cheer of success and a full bank account; just plain, complete joy.

What a humming engine this feeling was! Joy like this is so rare in me as to be endangered. Did people use to feel like this all the time? Was this what those old-timers were looking for, and finding, on the Great Plains? Certainly, no man was ever happier than the first plains Indian to ride a horse, when time and space changed in an instant, and two feet were replaced by four, and a ridge that used to be a long, hot walk away was suddenly as near as a thought, a little leaning forward, and a tap of heel to flank.

Joy seems to be a product of the geography, just as deserts can produce mystical ecstasy and English moors produce gloom. Once happiness gets rolling in this open place, not much stops it. And if the Great Plains are like that today, what must they have been like in the nineteenth century, when man didn’t have to share the stage with laws or institutions or machines.”


“The Great Plains which I cross in my sleep are bigger than any name people give them. They are enormous, bountiful, unfenced, empty of buildings, full of names and stories. They extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Their hills are hipped, like a woman asleep under a sheet. Their rivers rhyme. Their rows of grain strum past. Their draws hold springwater and wood and game and grass like sugar in the hollow of a hand. They are the place where Crazy Horse will always remain uncaptured. They are the lodge of Crazy Horse.”

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this in the history section of a great used bookstore in Chicago, Myopic Books, and I thought it was very fortuitous because I remember wanting to read more Frazier after “Travels in Siberia,” and also a book about the plains seems like an appropriate buy on a Chicago trip.
I really liked it. You know how sometimes you want to just chuck it all and move to Montana and live in a cabin and drive around the plains and write a book about the beating heart of America? Well, Frazier already did that, and he did it better than you would have. Ok, smart guy, you say, I’ll just go get lost in Siberia and write about Asia instead of North America. Yeah…sorry. Too late there too.
As a historian (continuing my training), I got a kick out of realizing how broad Frazier’s source base was. If you go to the notes, you can see that he is drawing not just from your traditional history books, but also roadside markers, plaques at historic sites, pamphlets he found at gas stations in Topeka, conversations with random hitchhikers and people at diners, locally published community histories that probably only exist in tiny local libraries, and other such places. He blends all the information really well, and adds a really nicely expansive optimistic tone. Frazier’s own feelings and little diversions and obsessions are a major part of the book, and they give the whole project a great style.
The one thing that bugged me a little, was that Frazier includes lots of one line facts, or history tidbits, I guess you could say, and when it comes to the tidbits about Indians, I think he needs to be more upfront about the fact that he drew most of them from mid-nineteenth century sources written by white people. These are not neutral sources. At one point when he is listing some really negative facts about a particular tribe, he notes that whites were kind of obsessed with writing negative things about Indians, but this is after seven or eight pages of other info that you wouldn’t know comes from 19th century whites except if you read the notes.
But really, this is a fun read and it won’t take you long. Makes you want to take a road trip.

[Rachelfm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is heartbreakingly witty, earthy, funny, and expansive. If you have ever yearned for North Dakota, this is your unrequited love story. I read this on the heels of Nathaniel Philbrick's Last Stand, and they were great companions. I would read this kind of book every day for the rest of my life: the perfect mix of history, natural history, incisive commentary, squirrelly off-beat locals, missile silos, Lewis and Clark, humor, and an expansive landscape that captures the imagination.

My favorite quotes from the book:
On buffalo skinners: "They wore heavy clothes which they seldom changed. Dried blood caked in their beards. When a group of them walked up to a bar, they would reach in their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy. The prostitutes who catered to them were a special type."
************
"Particularly on the high plains, Lewis and Clark camped at places where nothing as important has happened since. On some of the bleaker reaches of the Upper Missouri, they were the harbingers not of civilization but of future visits from Lewis and Clark buffs."

[Linda Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frazier made this reader feel that she was riding along on this road trip (s) of discovery of the great plains. Living just north in Minnesota, I appreciate the tales of early settlement and the struggles of the land. Our treatment of native Americans hurt the soul. Frazier's ease of talking with the town people and the farmers add reality and dimension to his story telling.

[Synful · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked this book out from the library for my husband and when he decided not to read it after all because it wasn't about what he'd thought, I also thought to skip it and return it. I was interested in books about Indigenous people in the Plains and that's not quite what this book is about. Plus, it was written in the late 80s over 30 years ago and I figured it would be really dated. But then I thought it over and decided to read it anyway thinking there is value is reading about how the Great Plains were back then. I've been on a few road trips and gone through parts of the Great Plains and I can't say that having read this book it's changed too much. Sure, there's incidental mentions of things that don't seem to really happen anymore like the common habit of hitchhiking or tech-related things, but otherwise the land itself and the relatively few people who live on it are in my opinion fairly unchanged.

I got three main things out of reading this book. Primarily is the land itself, the Great Plains, and how inhospitable they really are, while simultaneously how beautiful it is and not just the land but the big wide view of the sky. Frazier makes a good point that that's not a common opinion because photographers and people in general view something like Switzerland as beautiful and think of the Great Plains as a boring, unphotogenic desert of sorts. Of course, its inhospitability is what's made it such a challenge with wide swings from rainy years to droughts for years on end. If only the colonizing settlers had at least tried to learn from the Indigenous people who'd lived there they would've saved themselves a lot of heartache, problems, and time. Something as simple as planting with the ever-present wind in mind would've made a huge difference.

Before people were convinced to move there, Jefferson was obsessed with getting the land surveyed and find a way all the way across it to the Pacific. I was amused by the story that Lewis and Clark wasn't his first attempt at it or even his second. Before them was a French botanist who probably would've been great for the job, André Michaux, but before that got started he got involved in deals with the French ambassador and trying to start problems between the U.S. and Spain in the Louisiana Territory, got into some debts in Kentucky over it, and may or may not have been sent home over it. Then there was the truly epic story of a guy named John Ledyard who hatched a plan with Jefferson to come at it from the other side and cross the entire world(!) to find a path from the Pacific to the U.S. east coast. It involved Catherine the Great denying him a Russian passport, him walking in Finland thousands of miles around the Baltic Sea because it didn't freeze like it usually did, entering Russia anyway by trying to end-run Catherine, getting found out, hard-ridden all the way back to Poland after being within 500 miles of the Pacific, and ending up dying in Egypt after self-inflicted harm from having a fit about trying to leave for a new trip, to somewhere in Africa.

A section late in the book related to the inhospitability of the Plains which I found really interesting I'd not known was what finally made settling the area successful. After untold numbers of people convinced to move there with "free" land (to supplant Indigenous people) tried and failed to farm there, they finally found success with German-ethnic Russians of various religions trying to find somewhere new to live where they could be as extreme on either end of their religion as they wanted, something the new Russian Czar, Alexander II, had decided to stop condoning. They'd learned to live for over a century on the Russian steppes (which are apparently very Great Plains-like) and brought with them wheat varieties hardy enough to handle the similar climate. Between them and a USDA guy having a lightbulb moment and actually going to Russia to do more research, they managed to get enough agricultural varieties that finally there was farming success in the Plains.

Of course, also in typical fashion, being successful enough to grow food there to live well enough wasn't enough. World War I didn't help matters by suddenly creating a demand that really paid and everyone rich they more they output. Farmers went overboard and grew so much stuff in such a short period of time supplanting everything native that kept the soil in place despite the continental wind and wild rain/droughts that, you guessed it, they ruined the land and caused the Dust Bowl. What amazed me here is the description of its effect. I've seen photos of Oklahoma and other Plains areas with all the dust everywhere, but I didn't realize how far that dust went! Chicago inches deep in dust! Dust hanging around DC landing on the president's desk. A May 10, 1934 storm blew all the way to the east coast and blocked out the sun in New York City for 5 hours! Its dust showered ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic! It really put in perspective for me what a massive eco-catastrophe it was, all caused by humans again breaking nature for their viral needs and behavior.

But the most impressive story to me from this book was about Crazy Horse and his strength against the impossible adversity of settlers. His leadership and war prowess I've always seen mentioned, but coming from this author who obviously really looks up to him added a lot of detail I never knew about him. A man who lived his entire life on the Plains, never left them for any reason, and despite obviously being betrayed by probably jealous and/or greedy other Indigenous people, he never gave in to being anyone or anything else other than who and what he was. He lived and died on his own terms and that's why so many still know him, speak of him, and continue to visit the area where he lived. And who can forget that giant carved attempt at a monument to him like the presidents were made elsewhere. His story really is inspiring if ultimately tragic.

So reading this book ended up being much more interesting and rewarding than I thought going into it and that's always a pleasant surprise. If you're interested in a bit of a meander through the Great Plains of the late 80s with a good dollop of history of the 120+ years before that added in a relatable way, give this book a read.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bit of everything in this book that takes you on a journey across the not so defineable
area called the great Plains from Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska,
parts of Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico visiting dinosaur sites, Native American Ruins and abandoned sites, abandoned military forts, where Lawrence Welk came from, Billy the Kid lived, places Doc Holiday lived, Bent's Fort, places where the rendezvous took place, cemeteries, small towns, the homesteads that did not survive, the part of the interstate that most people travel across to get somewhere else as the pioneers left St Louis heading west on the Santa Fe, Mormon, and Oregon trails forced to cross the endless plains. Plus the history of the land grabs, railroads, homesteaders trying to make it doing something else far from where they came from and the destruction of Native American life in so many ways.

[John Spiri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frazier masterfully bounces between his narrative and keen observations and history lessons. I love his tendency to pile on evidence, not necessarily structuring his sentences with the standard three reasons for something, a, b, and c. Frazier might, when he gets on a roll, list 25 reasons why something is the way it is. It certainly works. The only complaint might be this book infects me with wanderlust, ideally around that vast central region of the US, the Great Plains.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a fun, if somewhat incomplete (the author couldn't go everywhere, of course!) non fiction book about The Great Plains of the U.S. Fun history tidbits about Lawrence Welk, Sitting Bull, Custer, Bonnie and Clyde, Crazy Horse, and others. The author did a great job making me feel like I was traveling along with him. I would like more diner and roadhouse descriptions next time, Mr Frazier! I would also have liked to hear about more spots on the Plains, but I realize the author only had so much time and money for the project. Overall, a quick, entertaining read.

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting

I picked up this book because I’m currently living in Omaha Nebraska and the great Plains. So, the book was interesting to me.

I think I like most about this was that people and places and things that the author met were real and it was like he was giving me a personal Tour of areas that I knew very very well.

I did enjoy this book and I would recommend it, especially to Midwesterners

[Iris Olwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most epic books I have ever read

[Elizabeth K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up at the library after Melissa had mentioned it. I like the other things I've read by Ian Frazier, in large part because I'm generally a sucker for ruminations on American identity issues.

This one is focused on the Great Plains, obviously. Weirdly, I didn't know when it was published, but by the first 1/3 through, I was thinking to myself that it sounds, in my head, very 80s. It was 89, as it happens. I'm still not clear on what made it so obviously 80s to me.

Frazier is a New Yorker who as an adult transplanted himself to the middle of America and so has that observant and somewhat obsessive approach that people can get toward things they love but to which they are not native.

He covers a lot of historical periods, one of which is the Indian wars (although I liked these chapters, he was messing around with a weird stylistic thing which I think was supposed to be reminiscent of traditional native story-telling but didn't work very well), and in addition to being a New Yorker who is obsessed with the Great Plains, he's also a white guy obsessed by Indians (further covered in other books), but he's very self-aware about it and always puts it out there as something to be assessed. One of the topics he covers is the Cult of Crazy Horse, and in college I was full-blown into this, let me tell you. And it is a funky thing, I mean, why Crazy Horse when there were other Indians who were crazier, (come on, you know it's so tempting to follow up with "or horsier") or more successful, or more peaceful, or more not peaceful, or who had longer, more significant careers and more influential leadership roles. I especially liked this passage where Frazier articulates why Crazy Horse is so iconic:

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of this birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as "Red" and Spotted Tail as "Spot," they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived to freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate.

Grade: B, ish
Recommended: It's not the best by this author, but if you like him, or if you have a particular interest in the Great Plains (although really, who doesn't?) this is a pleasant read.

[Stop]

Read the STOP SMILING interview with author Ian Frazier

Of No Fixed Accord
By Nathan Kosub

(This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Documentary Issue)

Ian Frazier is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he began his career over 30 years ago. In April 2005, he revisited the legacies of Baghdad's historical invaders. ?It seems that so much of the foolish and horrible things that people do come from being adrift in the world,? Frazier told me. Against that, a book is ?an efficient way to record something? ? to situate a person or an era. Frazier's non-fiction includes chronicles of family, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the Great Plains. He lives in New Jersey, and is currently at work on a book about Siberia.

Stop Smiling: There's an article in your recent collection about walking in New York in a place where a violent crime occurred. Over time, the memorials and the record of what happened there become less and less. Does it seem that that happens all too quickly? That it's forgotten and becomes just a place again? Or is that a necessary reaction?

Ian Frazier: You end up with so much ? the weight of the past is so huge ? that sometimes you want to forget it. America was founded on that ? the idea that, well, we're not going to worry about the stuff that happened before we got here. A lot of the country is a place where, especially out West, you're beginning anew. Nobody cares who you were in Philadelphia. You're in Wyoming now, and whoever you are is who you're going to be. Not who you were before.

There's a parallel phenomenon that I noticed when I was doing the book about my family. The people who know their ancestry usually have children who want to marry somebody who doesn't know his or her ancestry. You get so fed up that you want to marry someone who says, ?Yeah, I know who my grandfather was, but before that, I don't.?

That, I think, is a natural phenomenon that naturally limits the amount of information that you have. If both sides of your family save everything and know everything, as a kid you get that and you're buried under it. Physically. It's such a huge amount of stuff. The amount of stuff that physically I took from my parents' apartment when they died is a lot. If you imagine that piling up over generations, pretty soon someone's going to have a house that's full of nothing but handwritten genealogies.

Read the rest of the interview...

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the things I most appreciated about this book was that Frazier didn't look down his nose at those he interacted with, like certain other travel writers do. There's no arrogance to his writing - refreshingly, you can tell he's genuinely interested in the place and people. I particularly enjoyed his section on Crazy Horse and coverage of small towns with history. Will definitely read more from him.

[Carl R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains is almost twenty years old now, but I’m just getting around to it. I’m sorry it took so long, but glad it waited for me.
As a work, it’s an odd-shaped duck--part history, part anecdote, part philosophy, part naturalism. The Plains, obviously, unify it. That and Frazier’s style. There’s a narrative lyricism that is simultaneously scholarly and poetic and which fuses past and present:



The town was called Mondak, because it straddled the Montana-North Dakota state line, and the half of the town in Montana (which was wet) had nine saloons. Train crews from the Great Northern Railroad often stopped in Mondak to drink, and sometimes men would pass out on the tracks. It is said that the Great Northern ran over more people in Mondak than at any other place along the line. Except for some foundations, a small structure covered in pressed tin, and a couple of rows of concrete cells which used to be part of its jail, Mondak has disappeared. As I watch the purple clouds building to the north, the cottonwood leaves showing their pale undersides to the wind, the whitecaps rising on the river, the veils of dust blowing from a butte, I wonder if maybe this scenery has somehow been permanently altered by the thousands of drunken eyes that have looked at it before.


Frazier wanders around the Plains in his van for about 25, 000 miles, in the tradition of such journeys/writings as Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, Randall Kenan’s Walking on Water, and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. His reporting on what he discovers covers ranching, missile defense, the dust bowl, Catherine the Great, Thomas Jefferson, tumbleweeds, Crazy Horse, the origin of air mattresses, and the different behaviors of drivers at interstate rest stops. And he does it all with great heart, soul, objectivity, and subjectivity. I don’t care much for the Plains, except that I find certain parts of their history interesting. But I sure as hell loved this book.