The Contested Plains Essay

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While surveying the western half of the United States an individual can see a wide variety of biomes. The peaks Rocky Mountains, the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest, the arid desserts of the Southwest, but none compare to the Great Plains. The grasslands of North America have a tumultuous history that dates back look before the English setters arrived. Elliott West’s book The Contested Plains sets out to explain the history of the prairie, the rise and fall of the native plain people, and the rush to find fortune during the Colorado gold rush. The first section of the book, Vision, chronicles the rise the native Plains people. Beginning with Clovis people, West traces a history dating back more than 5,000 years before Common Era. These tribes “preyed on the Pleistocene herds” and “established a remarkably successful, sustaining way of life several millennia before the birth of Christ”. The leap forward for the plains …show more content…
Human’s failure to control the physical world. The Plains is a wonderful example of a region with a mind of its own. West speaks about Liebig’s law or the law of the minimum that, “an organism’s limits are set, not by the maximum profusion of necessary things, but by those things’ minimum availably” The people of the Plains tribes and the setters did not follow this sampling basic law. They striped the ground of nutrient and destroyed native organisms. The reason we were blinded to our failures is because the imagination clouds the consequence that lay ahead. We pushed harder and stretched the land to it limit and the Plains punished us for it. We are still be punished. The two books that we have read so far, Legacy of Conquest and Contested Plains both questions if we will learn from our mistakes. I have no idea that answer to that question, but without people like West and Limerick writing our mistakes down, how will be learn from

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