The North American Plains are one of the world's great landscapes. Today, the most intimate experience most of us have of the great grasslands is from behind the window of a car or train. It was not always so. In the earliest days, Plains Indians travelled on foot across the vastness, with only the fierce, wolf-like Plains dogs as companions. Later, with the arrival of the Europeans, horses and canoes appeared on the Plains. In this study, Norman Henderson, a scholar of the world's great temperate grasslands, revives these traditional modes of travel, journeying along 200 miles of Canada's Qu'Appelle River valley by dog and travois (the wooden rack pulled by dogs and horses used by Native Americans to transport goods), then by canoe, and finally by horse and travois. Henderson interweaves his own adventures with the exploits of earlier Plains travellers, like Lewis and Clark, Francisco Coronado, La Verendrye, and Alexander Henry.
Lesser-known experiences of the fur traders and others who struggled to cross this strange and forbidding landscape also illuminate the story, while Henderson's often humorous description of his attempts to find and train old Plains breeds of dogs and horses highlight the difficulties involved in recreating archaic travel methods. He also draws on the history of the world's other great temperate grasslands: the South American pampas and the Eurasian steppes. Recalling the work of Ian Frazier and Jonathan Raban, Henderson's account of his three journeys of exploration should foster a better appreciation for, and deeper understanding of, the natural and human history of the North American Plains.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
A captivating 'biography of a landscape,' its good humor blended with impressive scholarship, including snappy thumbnail histories of canoes, horses, dogs, barbed wire and those pesky blood-sucking mosquitoes.
-Publisher Weekly Rediscovering the Great Plains afforded me the gift-in truth, the endgame of all reading-of transporting me from my own time and place into another.
-Elizabeth Fabel, Borealis: The Magazine of Northern Literature, Art and Culture Engrossing . . . compelling and enjoyable. Henderson has a flair for travel writing. At his best, he displays the erudition and wit of Jonathan Raban . . . Like Raban, Henderson is good at tying together history with his own adventures and keeps a steady pace of lively description before the reader. Rediscovering the Great Plains offers much that is new to even the most knowledgeable, well-traveled and well-read prairie dweller.
-Charles Mandel, Calgary Herald This book is a unigue and deeply personal homage to the ideal of the Great Plains area of North America . . . [It] is to be savoured, with beautifully written prose, a sprinkling of humour, and much food for thought.
-Verne Clemence, Star Phoenix (Saskatoon) You will have to search far and wide to find a prairie guide with more knowledge, humour, and humility than Norman Henderson . . . [His] writing style throughout is direct, vigorous, and rich with metaphors . . . He deftly interweaves wry moments with the dog, the horse, the canoe, and a skunk in a fridge with his scholarly reflections on other grassland cultures . . . This is a fine book made even finer by its beautiful maps and by the ink drawings of Robert Cook.
-Trevor Herriot, Blue Jay (Saskatchewan) On the surface, this is a record of personal discovery, an attempt to recapture the ancient, or in the case of the horse, historic, methods of plains travel and through these to rediscover the prairies themselves. But Norman Henderson's experiences, which take place in one small corner of the Great Plains-along the eastern half of Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Valley-are made universal by his familiarity with the history and the literature of the world's other great grasslands and his ability to use these windows on other places and earlier times to capture at least part of the essence of prairie life.
-Barbara Huck, The Beaver A passionate narrative.
-Brad Lookingbill, Journal of the West
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Illustrationen
2 s/w Zeichnungen, 11 s/w Photographien bzw. Rasterbilder
2 Line drawings, black and white; 11 Halftones, black and white
Maße
Höhe: 203 mm
Breite: 156 mm
Dicke: 21 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8018-6688-3 (9780801866883)
DOI
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Norman Henderson is a senior policy advisor on resource and environmental management issues to the government of Saskatchewan.
Autor*in
Senior Research AssociatePrairie Adaptation Research Collaborative
Contents:
Preface
Chapter One: Night Vision - Of the Moonlit Plains by Train
Chapter Two: Dog - Of the Dogs of the Old Plains and of Building a Travois
Chapter Three: "Mush!" - Of Plains Journeys through Heat, Snow, and Mosquitoes with a Remarkable Husky
Chapter Four: Canoe - Of the Extraordinary River Voyages of Plains Navigators
Chapter Five: "En Avant!" - Of Coyotes, Cattle, and Wire, and of the Many Wonders of the Prairie River
Chapter Six: Horse - Of the "Great Gift" of the Spanish and of What-Might-Have-Been
Chapter Seven: "Gee up!" - Of a Final Journey in the Great Valley and of Adventures with a Philosophical Horse
Chapter Eight: Day Flight - Of Home and the View from Above
Acknowledgments
Biographic Notes
Chapter Notes
References
Index
