ABSTRACT
Environmental historians and ethnohistorians whose interests have been environmental topics have in the two past decades been responsible for many of our most valuable recent insights into the history of native Americans since their contact with Euro-Americans. In the nineteenth-century history of the Central and Southern Plains, there have long been perplexing questions that environmental history seems well suited to answer. The answers are complex and offer a revision of both Plains history and western Indian ecological history. The perspective of the longue duree is essential to environmental history. Trade was an ancient part of the cultural landscape of America, but the Europeans altered the patterns, the goods, and the intensity of trade. The Comanches became, along with the Sioux, the most populous and widespread of all the peoples who now began to ride onto the vast sweep of grassland to participate in the hunter’s life.
