During the 1880s, European-descended immigrants poured into the vast middle region of the North American continent. The population of the Dakota and Montana territories and the province of Manitoba nearly quadrupled between 1880 and 1890, rising from more than 230,000 to over 830,000. (Tens of thousands of additional Indigenous people were moved west by soldiers and settlers.) Some counties in the central Dakotas only had a few hundred residents in 1880. A decade later, they had many thousands. New homes, farms, ranches, stores, and schoolhouses proclaimed the arrival of settlers. Grasslands Grown, Molly Rozum’s new book about how they created a sense of place in the region, accomplishes several objectives: it recasts the millions of acres of short-grass prairie and plains as a transnational region; it offers a sense of what the land felt like to the children of the first generation of non-Indigenous settlers; and it provides a vision of settler colonialism seen through the sensibilities of young people enveloped by the region’s vast landscapes.

Rozum’s book is a powerful accomplishment. Motivated in part by her realization, as a Dakotan who studied at universities east of the Mississippi, that the region did not seem to connote a sense of place in the same way as other parts of the country, Rozum searched through archives across the several states and provinces that constitute these central grasslands to discover a regional sense of place. Through her research, Rozum unearthed letters, memoirs, paintings, and drawings from otherwise unheralded people and organized their material into sections on flora and fauna and on sights and sounds and smells. The colorful variety of the wildflowers, the rich feel of the soil, the gait of the oxen pulling wagon or plow, the vast “blue distance” of the horizon: all created the sense of place Rozum was searching for.

Some names in Grasslands Grown may be familiar to readers versed in the region’s history. Essayist and environmental writer Wallace Stegner, for instance, turned his memories of Montana and Saskatchewan into evocative prose while fostering the talents of students at Stanford. Others are far less known. Era Bell Thompson, a Black woman who spent her childhood on a ranch near Mandan, North Dakota, wrote and had a long career as an editor at Ebony. Canadian artist Annora Brown’s intricately detailed paintings of wildflowers and the fields in which they grew now hang in Calgary museums.

The chapter “Sensing Prairies and Plains” captures a central conflict that makes this book distinctive and valuable. While Rozum respects settler children’s ability to articulate the rich experience of growing up on the grasslands, she also acknowledges the claims of the Indigenous people, a claim that the first generation of settlers was familiar with. Rozum writes that the first generation “made an implicit argument that they had a claim equivalent to Indigenous people” through their “sensual immersion” in the grasslands; the post-settlement generations, on the other hand, “carried out unspoken and inchoately realized imperatives of settler colonialism” [176]. Grasslands Grown begins with the 1913 discovery, on a hill overlooking the Missouri River near Pierre, South Dakota, of a metal plate that had been left by French explorers in 1743. Controverses over the plate’s ownership and its significance ensued, but, as Rozum ruefully notes, none of the officials debating those issues bothered to inquire about its meaning to the Indigenous people who had lived there for centuries. The career of North Dakota seed merchant George Will captured aspects of this conflict within an earlier generation: while his firm honored—or exploited—the knowledge gathered by Indigenous women who had for centuries coaxed produce from the plains, he recognized that the pace of settlement had, to the detriment of both, made it difficult for the settler and Indigenous cultures to benefit from each other.

Rozum moves from the nostalgia of memoirists who recalled allegedly unsettled lands to novelists’ recreation during the 1920s of a “settler-society aesthetic,” noting the difficulty many writers had in gaining recognition from the literary establishment. Novelists who struggled to find an audience recognized another reality not yet apparent to promoters during the boom times of the 1880s and 1890s—the land could only support so many people. The 1920s witnessed the beginning of a conservation movement that could argue, for instance, that attending to the needs of migrating birds tended also to conserve the lives of human beings and the fertility of the land that supported them.

Rozum does not focus on the essential role of the railroads in bringing settlers in and taking their produce out. The Populist movement plays no major role, and Rozum does not engage with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis. Rozum’s recreation, moreover, relies on the memories of immigrant children, but it ignores emigrant parents’ memories of home in Iowa and Illinois and Ontario. They not only had a sense of place they conveyed to their children, but a pre-existing culture they transported to the grasslands.

Such omissions do not mar the value of Rozum’s book. From the pastoral scenes on the cover that portray the first year of a grasslands homestead in 1893 and its advanced state a decade on to Rozum’s later consideration of what the region should even be called (the Old Northwest would no longer do), the book is a singular accomplishment. The sense of place that the book evokes, and its abundant detail, honors the grasslands’ significance to both the Indigenous people who first inhabited it and to the settlers who later capitalized on it.