Webblog

This lecture dealt with the view people had and some still have about the Great Plains being a desert like region. The lecture focused on what the Spanish, French, British Canadian, and American explorers thought about the region and what impact their expeditions had on the Great Plains itself.

Spanish Explorers felt this connection with the plains because it reminded them of their homeland back in Spain. Even though they liked the Great Plains they would later report back to their king that they thought the land had little value to their country. The French did find the land a bit more important in the value of fur trading but there isn't any evidence that explorers had any affinity for the land. However, when the British Canadians explored the land they found something nobody had found before and that was a fertile belt of land that had economic value. Which surprised me because the Americans explored the plains extensively and pretty much came away with the opinion that land had little value and that it was an uninhabitable place.

After hearing about all the expeditions into the Great Plains it came to no surprise that the region got the reputation of being a desert. Not many placed a whole lot of value on the land. In some ways I can see why they would come to that conclusion but in others ways it makes me wonder if they knew what they were looking for. The Great Plains has so much wildlife and natural beauty that I find it hard to give it that kind of label. It makes me wonder if this new and very different landscape they saw made it hard for them to grasp the potential it had.