He attempts to show how these early settlers utilized the animals of the grasslands to survive and how they reacted to the dangers posed by some species. But what could have been a fascinating view of one aspect of pioneer life becomes dull and repetitious because of the author's overreliance on quoted material, his inability to separate the meaningful from the mundane, and his failure to look beyond contemporary accounts to create a more comprehensive view. Wild Animals and Settlers on the Great Plains , as a result, is little more than a collection of raw source material. His principal role is to provide introductions to the cited excerpts. Quoted material makes up the bulk of the book, including the majority of text on 239 of 284 text pages.
Most chapters follow the same formula.
Fleharty spends the first four or five pages introducing a theme, then the rest of the chapter is made up almost exclusively of quoted passages. Individual excerpts are rarely separated by more than a sentence or two of introduction. These sentences appear to have little purpose other than to act as transitions between unrelated anecdotes. What's worse is that it seems Fleharty felt he must include every reference he found that illustrated a theme, regardless of whether it said anything new or provided a particularly telling perspective. This makes the book maddeningly repetitious.