Frazier makes no bones about the fact that he is a stranger in the Great Plains, that vast expanse of land from the edge of the eastern forests to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. As similar outsiders Frazier situates his readers in the selected history and developments of the Great Plains. Throughout he succeeds in casting the region as a palimpsest, with modern concerns only properly understood in light of what has come before. Indeed Frazier makes a convincing argument that it is specifically this light of history in which the Great Plains are best viewed, for it is here that the recent past of American history remains the most visible and visceral. Here was the last outpost of the free Indians, of the tribes of Lakota, Shoshone, Mandan and the Crow and a healthy portion of the book is focused on the disappearing history of the Indian tribes. The book begins with dead Indians and to a certain extent never fully departs from this theme. Along the way Frazier gives voice to the feeling that much of our continent's heritage has been lost, to never be regained.
"For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and Indians undestroyed, the prairie unplundered. Maybe history did not absolutely have to turn out the way it did." - p. 174
At its heart the Great Plains for Frazier, and indeed for many who live there, is really about another America, one that exists on the margins of the two coasts. There time moves differently, with an eye to the future but also with a foot in the past. There much may seem unmodern, but it is rather a place of people who have chosen, or been stuck in, a different kind of modern America. Most people would say that the Great Plains have little to recommend themselves to people of the outside world. But the plains Indians didn't think so and neither, it seems, does Ian Frazier.
"They are the lodge of Crazy Horse." -p. 214
