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In lecture 6 we learned about the perception of the Plains go from 'The Great American Desert' to land of opportunity. The changing mindset can be attributed to the cattle boom of the early to mid 1800's. In this time great cattle towns were developed such as Ogallala, Dodge City, Wichita, et cetera. These communities have been portrait as being lawless anarchy societies, but the reality is that they were relatively peaceful communities with the few, but highly remembered skirmishes. As people from the East continued to settle the West, the unregulated cattle towns became places of Law and Order with the introductions of such sheriffs as Wild Bill Hickok. As more people continued to farm the land the once cattle towns would mature into a farm town. As quickly as the cattle market exploded with investors the market fell out. Though people at the time believed the cattle depression to be to harsh winters and overgrazing modern analysis suggests the recession was only a reflection of how the industry actually was. Isern suggested that it may have been a saturation may have been only in the record books not the land. The result was the liquidations of huge cattle empires into smaller more manageable herds and as the land became fenced in the day of the free cattle range came to an end.
Today the cattle industry must face the issues of ever changing consumer taste, environmentalists, animals rights activists, and packer oligopoly. The meet the demands of these pressures the industry has had to be flexible and will have to continue to be flexible in the future.

Though unstated in the summary I was most intrigued by Isern's interpretation of cowboy weddings. As a romanticist I am inspired by regionally scaled culture and the idea of being identified by clothing, dialect, traditions, et cetera. Unfortunately, we are becoming a generic society largely dominated by national chains and media. I feel it would be much more interesting if cowboy weddings were the norm or if we did talk like in the movie Fargo. But I would suspect that is what the people are looking for is a unique sense of Identity different from New York or California. The idea is really not much different from someone dyeing there hair to stand out from their surrounding.

One thing that I am curious about after the lecture is that in Whoop Up Country there was a large court case in the Canadian Courts regarding a skirmish between traders and Native Americans. Would the American government be as involved in the in the ongoings of the Cattle Lands as the Canadian government? What was the relationship between the cattle towns and the rest of the American nations as far as voting, taxation, courts, et cetera?