Time heals wounds from ‘Buffalo Commons'

Frank and Deborah Popper, about 20 years ago, drew and fired a pair of fightin' words the likes of which the Great Plains hadn't dodged since Gen. Philip Sheridan infamously used "good,” "dead” and "Indians” in the same sentence in 1869.

Only it was whites, not natives and their supporters, who rose in indignation and called for the Poppers' East Coast, academic, nosy, meddling eggheads on a platter.

The words? "Buffalo Commons,” which rocked the Plains from Canada to Texas.

Anger and tears and cursing and ridicule are amazing reactions to any academic article. It was the provocative title: "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” in the December '87 issue of Planning magazine. The subtitle was equally offensive: "A daring proposal for dealing with an inevitable disaster.”

Harrumph! People thought in the late '80s: Dust? We have shelterbelts now! Disaster? We'll survive these ordeals — the farm crisis and oil bust — just like we always do!

Plains determination, you know. Western independence. Damned East Coast liberals!

But what really sent people over the top was the substance of the article by Frank Popper, a land-use planner at Rutgers University, and Deborah, his wife and a geographer.

The Poppers, then others, envisioned policy-makers working with landowners and conservationists to reclaim the Great Plains and create a "Buffalo Commons” — an open range in the public domain harking to the days before white settlement, when tribes did hold land in common.

They declared that demographic patterns in the Plains, including western Oklahoma, defied prominent historian Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis” and the U.

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