Time heals wounds from ‘Buffalo Commons'

By Richard Mize

Published: September 8, 2007

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.S. Census of 1890, which officially stated that the frontier had broken up.

The frontier never disappeared, they wrote. With it depopulating so steeply and consistently, we might as well turn the Plains back over to buffalo. The fight was on.

"Nobody ever tried to ride us out on a rail between 1988 and 1995, the period of highest divisiveness about our work,” Frank Popper recalled Friday in an e-mail interview. "But we did have to cancel a 1992 meeting in Montana because of death threats, probably more directed to our hosts than to us. ... There was a near-nasty 1990 incident in Nebraska, and a 1991 Wyoming trip was the most unpleasant ...”

In 1990, when the Poppers lectured in Oklahoma City and Norman, they surely were met with rolling eyes and furrowed brows, but The Oklahoman reported no catcalling or violence.

In fact, a scheduled debate never materialized after a federal agriculture official who grew up in the Panhandle realized that the Poppers were not issuing a call for wholesale federal-state action.

Rather, they were sharing their professional vision of an inevitable future, one that government could ease by fostering social and market forces already at play.

Clouds followed the Poppers through the mid-1990s.

A few prominent Plains politicians who dissed the Poppers admit now they underestimated the reality of continued outmigration (despite rosier times lately in some oil-and-gas-rich areas), the drawdown of the Ogallala Aquifer, national companies abandoning business in the Plains as unprofitable, and other threats.

The American Prairie Foundation in Montana, the Grassland Foundation in Nebraska and the Great Plains Restoration Council, which Frank Popper chairs, and others have sprung up to foster some of the Poppers' vision.

And, the Poppers can point to two more Census reports that show people still leaving the Plains, as, interestingly, bison production has increased.

"We have evolved from academic Martians to normal (though Eastern) people holding a respectable minority opinion,” Frank Popper said.

"Buffalo Commons” — not exactly a source of comfort for most rural Plains people, but no longer fighting words.

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