Jada Ach’s scholarship in Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 seeks to reevaluate the Progressive Era’s environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American West, Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental, national, and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land and oceanic management. Sand, Water, Salt investigates managerial engagements with dynamic ecologies in three particular Western environments: the arid deserts, the semiarid high plains, and the Pacific Ocean.

At different times, and to varying degrees, Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive, incompatible with Anglo-American settlement, and/or highly unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints, the United States has also intensely desired these “wasteland” spaces, perceiving them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. Sand, Water, Salt moves through a variety of novels, memoirs, and cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s, including...

This book illuminates the myriad personalities and interests that combined and clashed over the Pecos Valley reservoirs and canals. Many Americans, including western lawmakers, considered irrigation...

The Elkhorn River originates in north-central Nebraska and empties into the Platte River just west of Omaha. One of the first written records of the Elkhorn describes a flood. A flood hindered travel up the river by the valley's first non-Indian settlers. Decade after decade, floods have swept away mill dams, destroyed crops, drowned stock, soaked inventories, filled basements, undercut roads, washed out railroads and bridges, turned unfortunate riverside homes--even a dance hall--into unwieldy watercraft, and killed people. Everyone in the Elkhorn Valley agreed the Flood of 1944 was the worst in history. Until the deadly Flood of 2010 took the title. From a perspective unusual on the Great Plains--the problem of too much water--Flood on the Tracks offers an intimate portrait of life in the Elkhorn River Basin of northeast Nebraska. In a region often defined by aridity, rivers and their basins have provided sustenance, shelter, fertile soil, and...

Owyhee County, Idaho, also known as the “Big Quiet,” is the largest and least inhabited area in the lower forty-eight states. Who has decided how to use it? From violent mine wars in the mid-nineteenth...

The Great Plains of North America stretch from Texas to Alberta. The region’s history is rich and its population diverse. But throughout this huge area, one issue has dominated culture and politics...