In 1854, the Connecticut manufacturer Daniel Halladay developed the first self-regulating windpump specifically designed for the American market, and subsequent commercial production made the multi-blade windpump a ubiquitous feature of the Great Plains landscape within a few decades. These steel-wheeled windpumps, installed on farms and ranches from Texas to Montana, drew water from underground aquifers to supply cattle and homesteads in regions with no surface water — making large-scale cattle ranching and dry-land farming economically viable across the interior of North America. By 1900, over six million windpumps were operating across the USA.

The windpump became an iconic visual symbol of the American West and Great Plains landscape, entering the literary and visual imagination of Western writing from Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) — which describes the windmill as the first sign of civilisation seen by Nebraska pioneers — to the Western poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cather's treatment of the windmill as a symbol of human aspiration and homestead survival on the wind-swept plains is one of the most sustained literary engagements with wind power in American fiction. The windpump's lonely silhouette against the vast prairie sky became synonymous with frontier solitude in American literary mythology.