“Away to the Great Plains of America, to that vast short-grass western prairie now mostly plowed! Away to the still empty land beyond the kiosks, malls, and velvet ropes of restaurants!”

Thus begins Great Plains, the 1989 survey of America’s heartland. That vast inland expanse of plains and prairies stretching from Canada in the north to the Texas Panhandle in the south. About 2,500 miles long and about 600 miles wide at its widest point, the Great Plains encompasses parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and parts of the US states of Montana, North, and South Dakota. Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Part history, part travelogue, part sprawling road trip, Great Plains has the grandeur and expanse of the frontier itself in its concise 214 pages of main text, which is no small feat, let me tell you.

When he wrote this book, Ian Frazier had driven some 25,000 miles on the plains, from Montana to Texas and back. Twice. As well as many shorter distances. His wanderings took him from an abandoned anti-ballistic missile system command center in remote Montana to the exact spot where Bonny and Clyde plunged into the Red River; from the location of Sitting Bull’s camp at Grand River, to the site of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn; from Fort Union in North Dakota to Fort Stockton in Texas.

It is no coincidence that rivers appear so much in this book, even as peripheral ‘characters’. The Great Plains are sometimes so dry and arid that in the early years of exploration parts of it were known as the Great American Desert. It made sense for early settlers, like Native Americans, to build their forts and villages, their towns and cities along the banks of any river large enough to provide a source of vital food and water for the population.

It is also no coincidence that the story of the conflict between Native American Indians and settlers emerges on the Great Plains. Frazier gets to examine the slaughter of millions of bison, the betrayal and death of Crazy Horse, and meets and mixes with numerous descendants of the great warriors of the past as he traverses this vast space.

All the great characters are here; ranchers and homesteaders, highlanders and fur trappers, outlaws and gangsters, cowboys and Indians, railroad barons, oilmen, coal miners, and more. You get to meet the great and the low, the rich and the poor, German emigrants and former black slaves from the South, and the men and women who fought for generations (and still fight today) to make a living in the Great Plains.

Ian Frazier is clearly a man in love with the Great Plains, its history, and its huge cast of fabulous characters, both modern and ancient. As an introduction to this vast area of ​​land and open space, Great Plains is both entertaining and informative, packed with obscure and ultimately immensely readable information, facts, and historical references.

Finally, the book is well indexed, includes 16 pages of black and white photographs, and has almost 70 pages of extensive notes to supplement the main text. Highly recommended.