Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
*New
*Great Plains. Great central region of the United States, stretching from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Upper Mississippi basin in the east, and from Texas in the south into Canada in the north. As in the great cities, people from “six continents, seven seas, and several archipelagoes,” build railroads, bridges, riverboats, and roads that connect their settlements. In the Texas Panhandle and the high plains, the cowboys and cattle shiver in the cold winds that sweep from the North Pole to Amarillo, Texas, their only windbreak a barbed wire fence or the North Star. Voices heard on the prairies, in the deserts, and in Pacific Ocean ports define their lives in terms of their jobs–railroad men, meat wholesalers, fishermen, shippers, politicians, trial lawyers, merchants, waitresses, and housewives–and in so doing, describe the breadth and diversity of the land that is their home.
As Sandburg describes the people who construct the nation as they construct their dwellings and workplaces, he defines the character they impart to the “United States of the Earth.” It is infused with their contradictory spirits of courage and fear, despair and hope–builders and wreckers blending together in a restless but accommodating land with a republican government that guards individual freedom and inspires hope of future success for its people. In a very real sense, the land itself in all its diversity is the setting for this epic of the rise of the United States and its people’s struggle for survival.