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The State Song Of Kansas And The Musical Of The American West

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“Home on the Range,” the state song of Kansas and the musical embodiment of the American West. With its original composition dated in the early 1870’s and continued popularity around campfires today, this song offers listeners a chance to remember the true West – a land “where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play… and the skies are not cloudy all day.” This song describes a beautiful, open frontier where humanity admires nature and the two live in harmony with one another. An area full of wild animals and natural landscapes alongside cowboys and farmers. With this song in mind, people of the past and present may envision wilderness alongside tranquility, a place characterized by its mutually beneficial relationship with the land. Although many envision the 19th century American frontier as an open land full of forests, plains, buffalo, cowboys, and Indians, the actual American frontier was a large industrial system – blinded by capital – that relied on the exploitation of the natural world, technology to transform this nature into capital, and trains to link together this vast industrial frontier. As Dr. Higley wrote the poem that became “Home on the Range,” the American industrial frontier simultaneously began to render the roaming buffalo extinct. At the same time, Americans depleted and exploited other native animals and natural lands, turning nature into capital and paving the way for the American industrial frontier. The depletion of America’s

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