“From the Ground Up”

In this forthcoming article, I explore ways to study the epic collision between European immigration and Native American land dispossession. In a constant search for new source materials and ways to interpret them, I center my inquiry on the Northern Plains between 1890 and 1930. I detail the possibilities and pitfalls of using oral histories, family stories, land records, newspapers, photographs, and government documents. These local, particular sources illuminate worldviews, struggles, and triumphs, informing and sometimes contradicting commonly held assumptions about the contest over land in the American west and the people who lived it.