Finally, in Andrew Duffin's book, Plowed Under, we have an authoritative history of this unique environment called the Palouse. Duffin, who was fascinated by the ecological mysteries of this region while a graduate student at Washington State University and completed his research for this very readable overview while on fellowship at WSU's Foley Institute, is now an assistant professor of history at Western Kentucky University.

Duffin starts at the geologic beginning, with the ancient bedrock that pokes upward at Moscow Mountain, Kamiak Butte and other Precambrian protrusions; the layers of molten rock that covered the region periodically over 20 million years; the wind-blown dust and ash that formed the quilt of iconic dune-shaped hills; and finally the cataclysmic Ice Age floods of 20,000 years ago that scoured away the soil along the western boundary of the Palouse.

The original tribal people arrived about 12,000 years ago. At the time of the Lewis and Clark visit in 1805, there were perhaps one to two thousand members of the Palouse tribe living in the region. Neighboring tribes, including the Coeur d’Alene and the Nez Perce, survive today, but the Palouse and Cayuse were scattered and eliminated by the incoming settlers.

The Palouse was initially considered a bunchgrass desert, unfit for agricultural development. But as other land in the inland northwest was occupied, in the 1870's, settlers moved into the Palouse, raising cattle and establishing towns and subsistence farms. In the decades to follow, the increasing population, the arrival of the land-grant universities and the railroads, and the gradual realization that the hills could grow lots of wheat, shifted agriculture toward mechanization and consolidation. Farms got bigger, and farmers got richer.

Duffin makes it clear that the lure of money was responsible for that shift away from small family subsistence farms to market-driven agribusinesses. And it was that same shift that unleashed the 800 pound gorilla—soil erosion—that dominated the changing Palouse environment at that time, and continues today as the hidden impact of plowing and planting these vulnerable hillsides.

By 1978, the US Department of Agriculture determined that erosion had stripped all the topsoil from ten percent of the Palouse and one-quarter to three-quarters of the soil from another 60 percent.

While this lurking 800-pound gorilla has killed the streams of the region and literally reshaped the hills, the agribusiness interests (including the university researchers, the banks, and the farmers themselves) ignored the obvious erosion, choosing greed over stewardship. Farmers, brazenly calling themselves “the original environmentalists,” continued to take and even demand federal subsidies without any oversight or requirement to leave their land better than they found it.

That summarizes the environmental history Duffin has uncovered about the Palouse, and then has presented in an academic and factual, but not dry and boring, style.

If the book has a failing, that failing would be in emphasis. Duffin rushes through the preliminaries of geologic history and through the first decades of white settlement to focus on the rise of agribusiness and soil erosion. By racing through the preliminaries, he does emphasize the ecological failings of today's Palouse monocultural desert. However, he does miss out on some great, and important, parts of the Palouse story.

For example, Duffin never explains how the tribes were chased off the Palouse, ignoring the failed campaign of Colonel Steptoe and then the later assassination of the tribal leaders at Hangman Creek.

However, that is really a petty concern. Duffin's book is the one to read for those who want to understand why the Palouse is what it is.

Plowed Under is available at BookPeople or at the Moscow Public Library.