A study of a rural region and plural society, this book is a distinctive contribution to anthropology, in that it brings the conceptual framework of that discipline to bear on a contemporary agrarian society and its historical development, rather than on peasant or tribal peoples; cultural ecology, in that it shows the nature of the adaptations of four distinctive social groups to the environment of the Canadian Great Plains; the study of social and economic change, as it describes cultural patterns and mechanisms that are relevant to agrarian development the world over; and North American studies, in as much as it deals with community life in the classic sequence of settlement of the Western Plains.