Little House on the Prairie

There's an article in today's New York Times about small towns on the American Great Plains giving away land and other incentives, like country club memberships, if people will move into their town.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/opinion/02greene.html?incamp=article_popular_3

I hail from one of these dying prairie towns. My town isn't mentioned in the article. And I don't know if the town fathers have resorted to offering free land yet; but they did just tear down an elementary school to put up a retirement home. That's a frightening indication of the state of affairs in rural Monana.

Depopulation has been the name of the game on the prairie since the first whites showed up and confiscated the land from the native population. The government wanted the Great Plains populated and so it gave away free land . . . land that they took by brutal force with their superior Army.

A flood of European settlers built cute little towns, schools, churches, and lots of saloons. Many, they named after their European hometowns. For a few years, everyone had a good time. But then it became achingly apparent that a few hundred acres on the plains isn't enough to generate a consistent income or even keep a family from starving, and so the idealistic settlers turned tail and moved on to the west coast or back east from where they originally ventured.

Manifest Destiny failed trying to settle the Great Plains.

I remember when I was a little kid, and I asked my father why the white man took the land away from the Indians. He told me it was the white man's responsibility to do so because the Indians weren't utilizing the land to its fullest capacity. I bought that line for more than a couple of decades.

But it wasn't true. The Europeans took the land because they thought they could make a lot of money off the land. And like panning for gold, a few did make fortunes, but the majority lost and left, and that is the tale that is still playing out on the Plains. The land is more powerful than man . . . that's something the Europeans hadn't run into before. But the Native Americans knew it . . . that's why their communal, roaming system of living developed.

It would be the grandest of ironies if the people that answered the ads giving away free land were all NATIVE AMERICANS.