ABSTRACT
In the history of the Anglo-American advance into the Great Plains, the changes went on with great rapidity; and the adaptations were so sweeping and fundamental that they established a culture more radically different from all that preceded it than either the Old Northwest or the Old Southwest was different from the parent East. Walter Prescott Webb's thesis for “what has been and what is to be the meaning of the Great Plains in American life” applies in some measure to the whole “westernizing” process. In two significant pages Webb draws a parallel between the history of the Old South and of the Great Plains region. Both the Cotton Kingdom and the Cattle Kingdom “took root in natural conditions of soil and climate” and expanded because the Industrial Revolution furnished a widening market and a system of the rapid transport.
