As the frontier crossed America, the men and women building it used the materials at hand in ways they understood. Where there was clay for brick and fuel to fire it, they built with brick. Where there was stone - granite or limestone, fieldstone or slate - builders adapted building materials to techniques they understood to be the ways people deserving of respect build. When the frontier moved too fast for such niceties, or where stone and clay were not available, builders piled unmilled but squared logs into walls - sometimes crudely, but more often with cleverly fashioned corner notches that held the houses firmly together - firmly enough, we should note, that many frontier houses still stand a hundred or even two hundred years later.
The pioneers' intent was never to be quaint, romantic, heroic, or rustic. Frontiersmen built their homes to look like houses, and wherever possible, as soon as possible, they painted log houses white or covered them with clapboard siding, just as they understood houses were supposed to be. In no case would the frontier family have been content for long with the rounded log home with jagged corners of Hollywood fantasy or in vogue today as weekend cabins.
As soon as they could afford the extravagance, within a few months or a couple years of hacking a farm out of the virgin forest, a frontier family painted, plastered, sealed, papered, and trimmed interior walls and ceilings. They replaced or covered puncheon floors with milled lumber, carpets, rag rugs, and composition mats.
That is pretty much the way architecture developed as the frontier crossed the Appalachians and the prairie woodland east of the Mississippi. Building materials were not a problem; in fact, they were in surplus. To build a farm or village, settlers had to clear away stone and trees, and one way to dispose of these obstacles was to apply them to the construction of the floors, walls, and roofs of the buildings that constituted settlement.
All that changed at the Missouri River. To the east, in what was now Iowa, there were still the gently rolling hills settlers recognized from Illinois, or Pennsylvania, or Germany, or Yorkshire - wooded copses, rock-bottomed creeks, stands of oak, walnut, ash, hickory, and maple. To the west, however, was a landscape they could not have imagined in their best or worst dreams: the Great Plains.
Subsistence architecture on the Great Plains
Except where glaciers had deposited fieldstones, not easily adapted to construction, deep layers of windblown sands and clays cover the Plains' bed rock. As for the lack of trees, perhaps diminished rainfall was the problem - to the east well over twenty-four inches annually, to the west only twenty inches, dropping within a couple hundred miles to fifteen inches, to less than a foot two hundred miles farther. Perhaps it was the gigantic herds of buffalo, with young bulls eager to test their horns against every sapling they encountered.
More than likely, however, the principal determinant in the geographic reality of the Plains - unbroken treeless grasslands - were the fires that regularly swept across hundreds of miles of tinder dry bluestem, sideoats grama, and love-grass, faster than a man could ride on horseback, destroying everything but
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