Mennonite migrants expressed differing views on their prospects when they arrived in the Great Plains from their previous homes in the steppes of the Russian Empire. High winds raising dust storms in Kansas in 1874 prompted one to say that he was “afraid of the future and whether we would make our living here,”Footnote ¹ despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that such storms were familiar from the steppes. Another new arrival had no such worries. He told Noble Prentis, a journalist from the Topeka Commonwealth, that in three years they would transform the “ocean of grass” of the prairies “into an ocean of waving fields of grain, just as we left our Molotschna [in the steppes].” Prentis predicted that Kansas would be “to America what the country of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov is now to Europe – her wheat field.”Footnote ²

Mennonites from the steppes were just one group among many Euro-American agricultural settlers in the Great Plains. Over the last four decades of the nineteenth century, due largely to hundreds of thousands of settlers, the population of the central and northern plains grew from around a hundred and forty thousand in 1860 to over three and a quarter million in 1900 (see Table 1.1).Footnote ³ The rates of increase in individual states are truly striking. The population of Kansas grew by 174 percent in the 1870s and a further 43 percent in the 1880s. Nebraska saw population increases of 267 and 135 percent in the same two decades. In the 1880s, the numbers of inhabitants of South and North Dakota respectively mushroomed by 256 and 416 percent.Footnote ⁴ The incoming settlers were ethnically diverse, including: white Americans from further east; African–Americans from the south; Hispanics from Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas; French Canadians from the north; and immigrants from Europe, especially Germany, Scandinavia, the Czech lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Britain and Ireland, as well as Germanic peoples, including Mennonites, from the Russian Empire.Footnote ⁵ By their sheer numbers and labor, Euro-American settlers transformed the plains that had been inhabited by smaller populations of Native Americans with their own ways of life into an agricultural region that became a breadbasket for the United States and others parts of the world.Footnote ⁶

The Euro-American settlement of the Great Plains and development of an agricultural economy were consequences of deliberate policies pursued by the U.S. federal government. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 established two territories on land it had previously assigned to Native Americans and opened them to outside settlers. In 1860–1, taking advantage of the secession of the southern states, the Republican-dominated Congress advanced the free settlement of the plains. Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861. The Dakota Territory was organized in the same year. It comprised the future states of North and South Dakota and, for a time, much of the future Wyoming and Montana. The federal government enacted laws to make land and transport available for settlers. The Homestead Act of May 1862 authorized settlers, both U.S. citizens and foreign immigrants intending to become citizens, to claim up to 160 acres of “public land” and, after fulfilling certain conditions, paying fees, and waiting five years, to receive title to the land. Also in 1862, Congress enacted the first of several Railroad Acts. They granted public land and loans to companies to build lines across the plains and on to the Pacific coast. The First Transcontinental Railroad, which went through Nebraska, was built between 1863 and 1869. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad started in Chicago and reached the western border of Kansas in 1873. In time, railroads connected the plains states with the rest of the country. Railroads promoted the agricultural settlement of the plains in three ways. The companies sold the land they had been granted to settlers to cover their costs. The railroads provided transport for settlers to reach the plains. And, once the settlers had crops and livestock for sale, the railroads carried their produce to domestic markets and ports for export.Footnote ⁷

The U.S. government made expert advice available to support the development of agriculture in the plains and other states. Again in May 1862, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was established:

In July 1862, the Morrill Land Grant College Act further supported agriculture by donating public lands to endow “Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.”Footnote ⁹ A decade and a half later, in 1877, the Hatch Act provided funds to found agricultural experiment stations attached to the land grant colleges. The stations conducted research and experiments to promote the “agricultural industry,” “having due regard to the varying conditions and needs of the respective states and territories.”Footnote ¹⁰

The settlement of the plains by Euro-Americans and development of agriculture were achieved at the expense of the indigenous population. From the 1860s to the 1890s, the federal government deployed the U.S. Army to fight a succession of wars and military actions against the Plains Indians. By the end of the century, the army and the tide of settlers had driven Native Americans off much of their lands and into reservations or exile, in the process opening up more land for settlement by outsiders.Footnote ¹¹ Prior to conquest, the indigenous population had led ways of life that were both settled and mobile. Different peoples had supported themselves in a variety of ways that included growing corn, beans, and squash among other crops in bottom land along rivers, gathering wild food, hunting fur-bearing animals and trading their pelts, and hunting bison in the high plains. Hunting bison from horseback was a relatively recent development. Indigenous peoples began to acquire horses in the sixteenth century from those brought over by Europeans. They acquired firearms from the same source. The Great Plains region before Euro-American conquest and settlement was a dynamic world in which indigenous groups moved around, allying with or defeating other peoples. The Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Sioux peoples moved to the plains from outside after they obtained horses and defeated horticultural peoples, such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, of the river bottoms. Over the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the Sioux conquered much of the northern plains, until they and their allies were overpowered by the U.S. Army.Footnote ¹²

In recent discussions over how to characterize the actions against Native Americans in the western United States, some scholars have made explicit comparisons with more recent European history, including the Third Reich under Hitler. They have debated the applicability of such terms as “holocaust,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing.”Footnote ¹³ They have pointed to similarities between the military conquest and agricultural settlement of the American West in the nineteenth century and analogous plans for lands to the east of Germany in the twentieth century. From the early 1920s, Hitler and the Nazi party advocated, and during the Second World War pursued by military means, the acquisition of Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe. The aim was to settle new German agriculturalists in lands to the east from which much of the population, mostly Slavic and Jewish peoples, had been removed. The lands the Nazis designated for German settlement included the fertile steppes of Ukraine. They intended southern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula to become largely German farming colonies. When the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Ukraine in 1941–3, they found some of the earlier Germanic settlers, including Mennonites, still there, although others had been deported by the Soviet authorities before and after the outbreak of the war. The occupying forces augmented the surviving Germanic settlements in Ukraine with more “ethnic Germans” (Volksdeutsche).Footnote ¹⁴ Historians of Mennonites are now coming to terms with the troubled history of Mennonite communities under German occupation, where some of their members were victims, but others participated in the Nazi’s plans, including the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁵

It has been argued that the Nazi policy of acquiring Lebensraum in the east and replacing the indigenous population with white settlers was not just similar to, but was partly inspired by, the American doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” that lay behind the conquest and settlement of the West and removal of many Native Americans. This argument is relevant to this book as it is a possible example of a transfer from the Great Plains to the steppes. There is evidence to support the idea that the Nazi policy drew on American actions in the West. In 1928, Hitler spoke with approval about how the Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”Footnote ¹⁶ In October 1942, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler announced that there was “only one duty,” which was “to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”Footnote ¹⁷ Arguments that Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum and extermination in the east were modeled directly on the American conquest of the West have attracted critics who have not found sufficient evidence for a strong, causal, connection.Footnote ¹⁸ While such debates are beyond the scope of this book, the United States’ conquest of the Great Plains and displacement of its previous inhabitants in the second half of the nineteenth century created the circumstances in which influences and transfers from the steppes of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union could partly shape the next stage in the region’s history.

The settlement of the Great Plains by Euro-Americans and the development of agriculture were achieved also at the expense of the region’s distinctive environment.Footnote ¹⁹ Anthropogenic environmental change did not start with the arrival of this latest wave of settlers. There have been debates concerning the impact of Native Americans on the plains environment before Euro-American settlement. Notions of “Indians” as more ecologically minded than the settlers who replaced them have been advanced and challenged.Footnote ²⁰ In shaping the landscape to suit their purposes, Native Americans contributed to the evolution, and in places creation, of the grassland ecosystem. Plains Indians burned the grasslands to assist them in hunting bison and other large ungulates. They set fire to some areas of land to compel the animals to graze in others, such as river bottoms, where it was easier to hunt them. Plains Indians periodically burned the plains to promote the growth of fresh grasses to provide better fodder for their prey. They also used fire to clear land for crops. Some of the Euro-Americans who ventured into the plains found fire deployed against them to force them out of the ravines or woodland where they were seeking cover or to drive them away altogether. A consequence of setting fires was to promote the growth of some kinds of vegetation over others. Regular burning was favorable to annual plants, in particular grasses, but discouraged woody vegetation. Fire harmed many species of trees and shrubs, particularly young saplings, thus inhibiting the spread of woodland out of river valleys and ravines to the high plains. The bison and other animals the Plains Indians nurtured were also detrimental to tree growth as they grazed on and destroyed young trees. There were further reasons why there were few trees in the Great Plains that were unconnected with human activity, such as the relatively low precipitation and types of soil that were unsuitable for many species of arboreal vegetation, but the use of fire by Plains Indians was a significant factor, especially in the eastern plains.Footnote ²¹ Scholars have also drawn attention to the role of Native Americans, especially once they had acquired horses and firearms, in the decline in the numbers of bison even before white Americans engaged in large-scale hunting in the second half of the nineteenth century. But, it was the Euro-Americans who delivered the coup de grâce to the vast herds of bison that once roamed the plains, driving them to the brink of extinction by the end of the century.Footnote ²²

Euro-American settlement and the development of European-style agriculture marked a turning point in the environmental history of the Great Plains. As the settlers converted much of the land to farms and ranches, for crops and grazing, they greatly reduced the rich biodiversity of a region once inhabited by such an array of wild life that Dan Flores called it the “American Serengeti.”Footnote ²³ The native flora of the vast areas of grasslands, with tall grasses in the east and short grasses in the west, and the colorful array of wild flowers and other plants, became increasingly rare as land was plowed up, sown with crops introduced from outside, in addition to corn, or subjected to intensive grazing.Footnote ²⁴ Geoff Cunfer has termed plowing grassland as “the ecological equivalent of genocide,” and the “plow-up of the Great Plains” as “the most important ecological change to emerge out of the shift from Indian to Euro-American land use.” “The act of plowing,” Cunfer continued, “alters vegetation, animal populations, water dynamics, and soil chemistry and physics in catastrophic ways.”Footnote ²⁵ Russian scientists have made similar assessments of plowing up the steppes.Footnote ²⁶

From the perspective of the first generation of Euro-American settlers, this transformation of the plains environment entailed back-breaking labor as they engaged in the “arduous, expensive, and time-consuming process” of “sod busting”: breaking up the “hard, compact, and tenacious” soil bound by the dense and thickly matted roots of the prairie grasses that had been growing there largely undisturbed for millennia. This was not just very hard work for the settlers, but required particular techniques, special plows, and heavy oxen to pull them. Even with the best equipment and strongest draft animals, the most a farmer could hope for was to break one acre a day.Footnote ²⁷ And yet, from around 1870 until about 1930, millions of plains farmers succeeded in plowing up over 100 million acres of grassland. While the main focus of this book is on arable farming, the agricultural economy in the region as a whole was diverse. Throughout the plains region the total proportion of the land that was plowed up amounted to around 30 percent. In the more humid eastern part, around half the land was plowed for crops, while in the more arid western part, only 10–20 percent was plowed up, the rest used for grazing domesticated livestock, in particular cattle, in contrast to the undomesticated animals that Plains Indians had hunted.Footnote ²⁸

The agricultural settlement of the plains was not a steady progression, but fluctuated between years of advance and retreat that coincided with favorable and unfavorable climatic conditions, especially the amount of rainfall, and in the market for agricultural produce. In good years when the rains came and the markets were good, settlement and agriculture expanded. Plains farmers experienced good years for much of the 1870s and first half of the 1880s, encouraging further settlement and expansion. High demand for wheat during the First World War led to high prices and a further growth in the area of crop land. On the other hand, in bad years when the rains failed or the plains were visited by grasshoppers and other pests that destroyed crops, or when market demand was low, the agricultural settlement of the plains slowed or retreated. Farms were abandoned. Settlers moved away. They went back to their previous homes or on to seek new lives on the west coast. The late 1880s and much of the 1890s witnessed droughts and low prices for farm produce. The more arid western plains were worst affected. Parts of western Kansas lost a quarter of their population between 1888 and 1898. Other areas in the plains saw farm abandonment on a larger scale.Footnote ²⁹

The experiences of one settler family were portrayed in her memoir by Rachel Calof, a Jewish migrant from the Russian Empire. She moved to North Dakota in 1894 with her husband and his extended family. She described how, in the desperate cold of their first winters, three families lived for several months in a sod house measuring twelve by fourteen feet, where they were crammed together with their livestock. Over the following years, as they worked hard to establish a successful farm in the face of the harsh environment, they experienced setbacks when their crops, livestock, buildings, and hard-won achievements were damaged by gophers, hailstorms, and lightning strikes. Fear for her children when they fell ill, with doctors several days’ journey away, pervades her memoirs.Footnote ³⁰ The arduous lives of the pioneers, from Europe and the eastern United States, were captured by writers such as Willa Cather. She drew on her own experiences with her family, who moved to Nebraska from Virginia in the 1880s, in her Great Plains novels.Footnote ³¹

Seared into the American memory are the hard years of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, when the plains were hit by extreme drought,Footnote ³² which dried out the top soil and allowed it be blown away by high winds. Coinciding with the economic disaster of the Great Depression, many plains farmers could not withstand the double catastrophe. Banks foreclosed on bankrupt farms, farmers and their families abandoned their land and headed off in search of hope. The Dust Bowl conjures up images of the skies blackened by dust storms, abandoned farms, “Okies” leaving the plains, heading west along Route 66 for a promised land in California, and Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the “Migrant Mother” anxious about her children. The human story of the Dust Bowl was reinforced by John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, and John Ford’s movie of 1940.

The prevailing narrative of the Dust Bowl has been a declensionist one that challenged the progressive history of American settlement of the Great Plains told by Walter Prescott Webb (whose history was published on the eve of the disaster in 1931). In the declensionist interpretation, the Euro-American agricultural settlers, who had come from outside the plains and were supported by the government and the banks, had a destructive impact on a fragile grassland environment they did not understand. The settlers plowed up too much land, including areas unsuitable for farming, used inappropriate methods to cultivate the soil, and overgrazed other land. The fertile soils yielded bumper harvests in wet years, but the settlers reaped only misery, and choked on the dust, in bad years when the rains failed and the winds blew the top soil. These were the findings of the House of Representative’s Great Plains Committee, which submitted its report, “The Future of the Great Plains,” in 1937. The Committee concluded: “Nature has established a balance in the Great Plains … The white man has disturbed this balance.” In contrast to the Plains Indians, who the report’s authors believed had lived in “harmony” with “nature,” the settlers’ “destructive tendencies” resulted from their “lack of understanding concerning the critical differences between the physical conditions of the Great Plains … and those … east of the Mississippi whence they had come.”Footnote ³³ (The notions that Native Americans had lived in “harmony” with the “natural world” and that nature establishes a “balance,” were widely held at the time, but have since been challenged.Footnote ³⁴)

The version of the story of the Dust Bowl that blamed the plains farmers for their own plight, because they had upset the “balance,” was graphically portrayed in the documentary film “The Plow that Broke the Plains” made by Pare Lorentz for the federal government Resettlement Administration in 1936.Footnote ³⁵ The narrative has been followed by many historians of the Dust Bowl, including the prominent environmental historian and native of Kansas, Donald Worster. In 1979, following detailed research in the parts of the plains most badly affected, he argued: “Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.” Worster blamed capitalism for the ecological and human disaster.Footnote ³⁶

Not all scholars, and certainly not many plains farmers, have accepted this version. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Kansas historian and plainsman James Malin railed against the view that the farmers were responsible for the Dust Bowl. He pointed out that dust storms were not a new phenomenon, but had occurred before the plains were plowed up. He argued that, over the longer term, plains farmers had shown an ability to adapt to conditions in the region. He based his arguments on his considerable knowledge of Kansas history and sought to understand the land and environment of the plains by drawing on the natural sciences, in particular ecology.Footnote ³⁷ Building on Malin’s work, Cunfer presented a “middle ground” between the declensionist and progressive narratives of Great Plains history. Insisting that people are a part of the natural world, Cunfer used Geographic Information Systems to analyze data on land use and the climate in the precise region affected by the Dust Bowl. He concluded that the main cause of the ecological disaster in the plains in the 1930s was the drought. Plowing up land may have tipped the balance in parts of the southern plains, but overall he argued the weather was a more important cause than settler agriculture, careless or otherwise. Echoing Malin, he pointed out that there were dust storms on land that had never been plowed up. Cunfer concluded that plains farmers achieved a “sequence of periods of temporary equilibrium” interrupted by disruptions such as the Dust Bowl that prompted farmers – most of whom did not leave the region – to seek new ways of working with the land.Footnote ³⁸ The understandable attention paid to the Dust Bowl years, moreover, has overshadowed the longer-term history of agriculture and the environment in the Great Plains since the advent of Euro-American settlement.Footnote ³⁹

What the years of droughts and dust storms, such as those in the 1890s and 1930s, indicated – and this is important for the argument advanced in this book – was the types of crops and agricultural techniques that were effective in extreme conditions. The bad years also indicated the importance of acquiring an understanding of the plains environment that could inform identifying the most appropriate crops and methods. This is where the Russian experience of settling and cultivating the steppes came in. In many ways, it resembled, and had anticipated, the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains.

In the steppes, agricultural settlers, mostly of European origins, had moved out of the more humid, forested regions of central Russia, the north of today’s Ukraine, and parts of central Europe to the grasslands that lay in the south and southeast of the Russian Empire. Backed by the Russian state and its armed forces, settlers pushed the indigenous peoples, who lived from a mixture of pastoralism, nomadic and settled, and some crop cultivation, to the margins or into exile. The settlers who displaced them engaged in extensive livestock husbandry for several decades before gradually plowing up much of the grasslands to cultivate crops, principally grain, in the fertile soil. Like their counterparts in the Great Plains, they lived in dugouts in the early years, broke the sod of the virgin land with heavy plows pulled by draft animals. They experimented with crops from their previous homes as well as varieties acquired locally as they sought those most suitable for the conditions. The process of adaptation to the steppe environment was easiest for settlers in the more moderate conditions near the heartland of Russia in the eighteenth century. It became harder as the frontier of settlement moved southeast and east over the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some settlers in the north today’s Kazakhstan found soils that were shallower and less fertile than elsewhere in the steppes. They struggled in the harsher climate with more frequent droughts. Throughout the steppe region, just as in the United States, the Russian and later the Soviet governments supported research to inform advice to farmers. They also largely disregarded the knowledge and experience of the indigenous peoples. The settlers managed, despite the difficulties and recurring droughts, to create a flourishing agricultural economy in those parts of the steppes that were more favorable to crop cultivation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in many years, the Russian Empire was the world’s largest grain exporter. Grain from the steppes was exported to other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean world.Footnote ⁴⁰

While there are similarities between the environmental histories of agricultural settlement of the Great Plains and the steppes, there are differences that are important for this book. First, the Russian state had conquered large parts of the Eurasian steppe by the late eighteenth century, but had started to promote the agricultural settlement of the region by European, including Slavic, farmers several decades earlier. This was long before similar processes in the Great Plains that took off only in the 1860s. Thus, there was significant prior Russian experience in the steppes of identifying appropriate crops, techniques, and gaining a deeper understanding of the steppe environment. Second, the Great Plains are orientated from north to south, while the steppes extend from east to west, and much of the steppe region is on a similar latitude to the Canadian Prairies and northern Great Plains. One of the consequences is that the steppe region as a whole has a slightly harsher climate. The climatic conditions in the eastern steppes in southern Siberia and the north of today’s Kazakhstan are significantly more severe than in the central and southern plains (see pp. 8–10). The harsher environment of the steppe region, and the limited availability of land well suited for agriculture in adjoining regions (there is no equivalent of the prairies of the Midwest in Eurasia), has meant that a far larger proportion of the steppes has been plowed up than the Great Plains. Over 30 percent of the steppe region of the European part of the Russian Empire had been plowed up by the late 1880s, and over half in the parts with more favorable conditions, for example, the region to the north of the Black Sea where the Mennonites lived. By the end of the twentieth century, 57 percent of the entire Eurasian steppe had been converted to arable land.Footnote ⁴¹ The harsher conditions in the steppes as a whole and the cultivation of land with marginal conditions for farming has meant that varieties of crops and techniques that worked in average years in the steppe region were capable of withstanding all but the greatest deviations from average conditions in most of the Great Plains. Most hardy were the crop varieties cultivated in the southern Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American “plant explorers” appreciated the significance of the more extreme conditions in the eastern steppes and collected hardy plants that grew there (See pp. 95–7).

Thus, when the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains by outsiders developed from the 1860s, the settlers and their advisors in the USDA, agricultural colleges, and experiment stations stood to learn from the prior experience in the steppes of Eurasia of plowing up and cultivating a semi-arid grassland, and one where, for the most part, conditions were harsher than in much of the North American plains. Before this would take place, however, there were a series of barriers that would have to be overcome.