Technology and Culture

In The Culture of Wilderness, Frieda Knobloch discusses the manner in which agriculture has transformed the American West. She uses the concept of conquest to show how the exploitation of natural resources altered the landscape for both good and ill. Social agendas more than economic gain are key to her interpretation of agricultural expansion. For Knobloch, agriculture is a social enterprise dedicated to both the exploitation and improvement of nature.

Knobloch equates agriculture with the colonization of the land, not just the production of food. She draws upon the technique of textual analysis to [End Page 420] analyze a host of sources on western agriculture. She writes: “Like the words ‘agriculture’ and ‘colonization’ the entire vocabulary of western agri/culture has a history of its own as well as being part of the history of the American West. By necessity, this is a textual study. . . . This study might be called a grammar to describe the ‘rules’ of western agriculture, a poetics to show how these rules refer to phenomena outside western agriculture” (p. 5). The result is more an ideological construct than a historical analysis.

Knobloch cogently contends that civilizations develop through the process of deforestation and that forest policy is an expression of national character. She argues that government officials have used trees as renewable agricultural resources to gain control of the land. Forestry as agriculture, by implication, means state control and cooperation with timber companies for the exploitation of trees; in a word, conquest of both timber and the land. Knobloch also argues that plows enabled men to conquer the prairies and helped displace women from agriculture. Plow technology contributed to a gendered system of farming, and the use of plows indicates more about the subjugation of both women and nature than food production. Indeed, westerners equated farming with nature and the plow with civilization even though it violently tore through the soil. Similarly, ranchers rejected the cultivation of native western grasses and sought better varieties to improve their pastures—that is, nature. Range managers always stressed restoring productivity, not native grasses. Knobloch also contends that weeds often invaded cultivated and overgrazed lands where those plants had not existed prior to the agricultural exploitation of the land. Weeds are unwanted because they restrict agricultural productivity and profits, not because those plants are inherently worthless in a natural—that is, unaltered—environment. Government agencies and private companies marshaled resources to kill unwanted plants, thereby conquering undesirable aspects of nature while improving it at the same time. Throughout this study Knobloch views the conquest of nature for agricultural purposes as a continuous process.

Knobloch writes with grace and clarity, and the result is a highly interpretive account of agricultural development in the American West between 1862 and 1945. Historians of American technology will find the chapter on plows and plowing most useful, although scholars of American agriculture will not find anything new in her factual, chronological narrative of the main features of agricultural development during this period. Even so, while not everyone will agree with her ideological framework, Knobloch offers anyone interested in American agriculture or the West a challenging and provocative study.