[Old Jules] is the story of a pioneer in the high plains of the trans-Missouri country—western Nebraska. To understand Old Jules thoroughly and to get the sap out of him, to see him in his rugged beauty, one must understand his habitat. The trans-Mississippi country rises, an inclined plane, from the Father of Waters. In six hundred miles the plane is tilted from five hundred feet above sea level to five thousand feet, at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The land along the valley through the eastern Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and eastern Kansas is much like that from the Mississippi east to the base of the Alleghenies, rich alluvial soil, loam mostly, where corn grows wherever there is adequate rainfall. There crops are fairly certain. But after the land has risen more than 2500 feet into the thin, dry air, rainfall is never predictable. It is a land of strong contrasts, floods and drouths. Here the buffalo and the horse Indians of the high plains roamed in the sixties and seventies until the late eighties, the last stand of the red man. Here the regular army after the Civil War appeared as a defender of the settler, and the Indian, the soldier, and the pioneer made a unique and colorful civilization. Spread fairly thin, this rather gaudy pattern of American life covered those high plains in the western Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, eastern Colorado and Wyoming. This was the area which geographers of the first half of the nineteenth century called 'The Great American Desert.' It was then and is still semi-arid, a land of tremendous variations—forty below sometimes in winter, one hundred and twenty above sometimes in the summer; a land of floods and withering hot winds; a land that dried up men and discouraged women.
Here Old Jules, the subject of this biography, came in the early eighties. He was a Swiss. He met the soldier and the Indian and looked them both in the eye without fear. He proposed to make an Eden out of those blanched plains. And this story, which is a definitive, documented, carefully verified account of his fifty years' battle with the elements, is a most remarkable tale. The author has painted Old Jules warts and all, a coarse, strong, unwashed, passionate, contentious, domineering, amorous old male. He seems to have derived from the vanishing buffalo some of his tenacious traits. But this book is more than the story of Old Jules. It is the story of three successive charges of pioneers who rushed up the long slanting plain from the lush fields of the lower valley toward the mountain, and who fell under the merciless fire of the wind, the dust, the floods, the grasshoppers, and all the inclement and terrible forces of nature in that bleak wilderness. (pp. 16, 18)
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