Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Award winning photography and lithography sets this "coffee table" book apart from others of its type.

Into the valley of Donner and Blitzen, almost a century ago, rode Peter French with 1,200 head of California cattle. John Devine of White Horse Ranch was already in the Harney country of Southeast Oregon, but the Blitzen was left for Peter. This is the story of how the great stockmen of the late 1800s set a pattern for modern cow ranches, improving the land and cattle by the best scientific methods available. Peter French himself irrigated thousands of acres of sageland with his canals and ditches. Hard-driving and ambitious, French, in a few years, won control of 200,000 acres of range land, and thousands of head of cattle.

Much as men rushed to the California gold fields, a small group of proud and visionary cattlemen heard of the boundless open and free range land of Central and Southeastern Oregon in the mid-1800s and brought their herds there. Sometimes called “Cattle Kings,” or “Cattle Barons,” they ruled with painstaking vigor, occasional cruelty, and tenacity the untitled land. Thousands of their cattle and horses grazed on the boundless prairies. Four men who built cattle empires were John Devine, Peter French, Bill Hanley, and Henry Miller. One of these four barons eventually owned it all. Smaller ranchers were tolerated but bun-carrying vaqueros discouraged intruders, particularly sheep men and homesteaders. Their empires lasted until the mid-1900s, but during their time they made the era legendary in the history of the region.

Water and land interrelate in surprising and ambiguous ways, and riparian zones, where land and water meet, have effects far outside their boundaries. Using the Malheur Basin in southeastern Oregon as a case study, this intriguing and nuanced book explores the ways people have envisioned boundaries between water and land, the ways they have altered these places, and the often unintended results. The Malheur Basin, once home to the largest cattle empires in the world, experienced unintended widespread environmental degradation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After establishment in 1908 of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a protected breeding ground for migratory birds, and its expansion in the 1930s and 1940s, the area experienced equally extreme intended modifications aimed at restoring riparian habitat. Refuge managers ditched wetlands, channelized rivers, applied Agent Orange and rotenone to waterways, killed beaver, and cut down willows. Where Land and Water Meet examines the reasoning behind and effects of these interventions, gleaning lessons from their successes and failures. Although remote and specific, the Malheur Basin has myriad ecological and political connections to much larger places. This detailed look at one tangled history of riparian restoration shows how—through appreciation of the complexity of environmental and social influences on land use, and through effective handling of conflict—people can learn to practice a style of pragmatic adaptive resource management that avoids rigid adherence to single agendas and fosters improved relationships with the land.

In the urgently expanding field of environmental history, two trends are emerging. Research has internationalized, crossing political and historical borders. And urban spaces are increasingly seen as part of, not apart from, the global environment. In this book, Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey have gathered much of the important work pushing the field in new directions. Eleven essays by prominent and regionally diverse scholars address how human and natural forces collaborate in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires. The Cities section features essays that examine pollution and its aftermath in Pittsburgh, the Ruhr Valley (Germany), and Los Angeles. These urban areas are far apart on the globe but closely linked in their histories of how human decision making has affected the environment. Changing rural and suburban spaces are the focus of Countryside. Elizabeth Blackmar "follows the money" in order to understand why the financing of suburban mall developments makes local resistance difficult. Studies of the fractious history of the creation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon and the ongoing impact of hydraulic mining in the early California goldmining era emphasize the misuse of technology in rural spaces. Such misuse is a central idea of Empires. In "When Stalin Learned to Fish," Paul R. Josephson tells the story of Soviet fishing technology designed to "harness fish to the engine of socialism." Other essays explore the failures of Western agricultural technology in Africa and the relationship between such technology and disease in European attempts to conquer the Caribbean. In a stirring, wide-ranging consideration of the neo-European colonies (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand), Thomas R. Dunlap observes the ongoing, unsettled interaction of lands and dreams. An afterword by Alfred W. Crosby, an eminent scholar of environmental history, closes the book with a broad and insightful synthesis of the history and future of this critical field.