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CHAPTER 1
WHERE IS HERE?
Prairies are part of the original fabric of the world.
CAROL DAVIT, MISSOURI PRAIRIE FOUNDATION, AT THE NORTH AMERICAN PRAIRIE CONFERENCE, HOUSTON, TEXAS, 2019
THERE ARE PEOPLE who think the prairie is boring, and it is hard not to pity them. We see them on the highways, trapped inside their cars, propelled by a burning desire to be somewhere else. But even as we wonder at their hurry, we have to admit that these disgruntled travelers are following in a grand old North American tradition. On both sides of the CanadaâU.S. border, prairie bashing is as old as the written record. In 1803, for example, when the United States was contemplating the acquisition of the lands west of the Mississippi River, the great orator Daniel Webster was moved to object. âWhat do we want with this vast, worthless area,â he thundered, âthis region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs?â And even after this supposedly howling wilderness had been annexed to the United States, many observers remained unimpressed. The painter and naturalist John James Audubon was among them. In 1843, we find him traveling up the Missouri River on his first visit to the Great Plains. Forced onto the shore when his steamboat became grounded on a sandbar, he turned a disparaging eye toward the Dakota countryside. âThe prairies around us are the most arid and dismal you can conceive of,â he wrote. âIn fact these prairies (so called) look more like great deserts.â
Another traveler of the same era, a trader named Rufus Sage, was even more direct: âThat this section of the country should ever become inhabited by civilized man except in the vicinity of large water courses, is an idea too preposterous to be entertained for a single moment.â North of the border, Captain John Palliser, who crossed the Saskatchewan prairies in the late 1850s, was of much the same mind. Forget farming, he recommended. This country is just too dry.
It wasnât until near the end of the nineteenth century that the tide of expert opinion turned, and the Great Plains were opened to agricultural settlement, now touted far and wide as the new Garden of Eden. The fact was, however, that these magnificent grasslands were neither desert nor garden but something completely new to European and Euro-American experience. So new that at first there wasnât even a name for them in either French or English. Pressed to come up with something, the early French fur traders had extended their term for a woodland meadowâune prairieâas a kind of metaphor for this big, wide, sparsely wooded, windswept world. But the Great Plains were far more than a meadow. What the travelers had encountered was a vast, dynamic ecosystem, a kind of tawny, slowly evolving organism that, in a climate of constant change, had sustained itself ever since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. In the presence of this strangeness and grandeur, words and vision failed.
When the newcomers looked around them, all they could see was where they werenât. This was not forest or sea coast or mountains; it was nothing but light and grass, the Big Empty in the middle of the continent. A vacant space, as they saw it, in desperate need of improvement. And this failure of visionâthis inability to see and appreciate the Great Plains Grasslands for what they truly areâhas continued to plague our perceptions right down to the present. Flat? Boring? Lifeless? Nothing could be further from the truth. Itâs time to drop out of the fast lane and give the prairies, our prairies, a second, loving look.
AN EMPIRE OF GRASS
THE KEY TO everything that happens on the prairies lies trampled under our feet. Although grasses may look humble, they are actually versatile and tough, capable of growing under the widest possible range of conditions. Anywhere plants can grow, grasses are likely to be on the scene, whether coexisting with cactuses in a desert, poking up among lichens on the Arctic tundra, or hiding in the leafy understory of a forest. And when circumstances are especially favorable for themâwhen the climate strikes just the right balance between precipitation and droughtâgrasses can assert themselves to become the dominant vegetation. (âDominance,â in this case, refers to the plants that contribute the most living tissue, or biomass, to the ecosystem. As trees to forest, so grasses to grasslands.)
A glance at a map of the worldâs major grasslands demonstrates that these conditions are most likely to occur on a broad, landlocked plain, far from any significant body of water, somewhere near the center of a continental landmass. It is in this semiarid environmentâtoo wet to be a desert and too dry for forestâthat grasses gain the upper hand, whether in the steppes of central Asia, the Pampas of Argentina, the savannas of Africa, or the broad heartland of North America. See Map 16: The Great Plains; Map 1: Temperate Grasslands of the World.
Globally, grasslands are among the largest of the Earthâs terrestrial biomes, or life zones, with an expanse that covers more than a third of the land area of the planet. (At least, thatâs the area over which grasses would hold sway if natural conditions were allowed to prevail.) Weâre talking some 18 million square miles (46 million square kilometers)âalmost three times the area of Russia. In North America alone, grasslands naturally extend over about 1.1 million square miles (2.9 million square kilometers), an area larger than many of the worldâs major nations.
The first European known to have set foot on this great domain of grass was a soldier and sometime explorer named Francisco VĂĄsquez de Coronado. Dispatched from Mexico City in 1540, he was supposed to investigate rumors about a kingdom called Cibola, somewhere to the north, and to plunder its Seven Cities of Gold. When these glittering mirages turned out to be sunbaked Zuni pueblos in what is now New Mexico, he turned his attention to the uncharted Great Plains, where the fish were as big as horses, the people ate off golden plates, and the king was lulled to sleep at night by a tree full of golden bells. At least thatâs what people told him and what he chose to believe. And so off set Coronado, with a party of armed men, in the vague direction of present-day Kansas. In the end the promised golden city turned out to be a town of some ten thousand people who lived in grass-thatched homes and sustained themselves by hunting bison and growing gardens, each in their season.
At every step of their journey, Coronado and his party were astonished by what they encountered along their route. Here lay âa wilderness in which nothing grew, except for very small plants,â but which nonetheless was teeming with millions upon millions of strange humpbacked cattle. âI found such a quantity of cows [bison],â Coronado reported, âthat it is impossible to number them, for while I was journeying through these plains, until I returned to where I first found them, there was not a day that I lost sight of them.â Following these apparently endless herds were parties of hunting people who dressed in bison-skin clothing (sewn with bison sinew, drawn through a bison-bone awl), slept in bison-hide tipis, and subsisted on a diet of bison blood and bison muscle. Even the grass in this new world was cause for amazement, as it rebounded from the conquistadorsâ steps and erased the trace of their presence. In this great round world, all that glittered was grass and an ecosystem of such richness and diversity that it could scarcely be credited.
But think how amazed Coronado would have been if he had somehow been able to sense the true extent and variety of North Americaâs grasslands. Little did he know that he had set foot on a vast prairie heartlandâa continent of grassâthat was flanked on every side by smaller islands of grassland and prairie-to-forest transitions, or savannas. To the north, beyond his farthest imaginings, lay the Peace River Parkland, a region of rolling grass and poplars that marked the frontier between the Great Plains Grasslands and the boreal forest. To the east, the Prairie-and-Oak Transition zoneâa tongue of prairie interspersed with groves of hardwoodsâextended to the Great Lakes and beyond, marking the interface between the grasslands and the eastern deciduous forest. To the south, the prairies merged and melted into sultry, soupy marshlands to produce the semitropical vistas of the Western Gulf Coastal Grasslands. And to the west, in the broad valleys of the western Cordillera, lay the California Grasslandsâspangled in spring by lupines and yellow-orange poppiesâand the arid Palouse Grasslands of the Great Basin. Dominated by scraggly stands of sagebrush and spiky, sparse grasses, the Palouse, or bunchgrass, prairie stretched along the drainage of the Columbia and Snake rivers to intergrade with the shrubby growth of the Montana Valley Grasslands. See Map 2: Temperate Grasslands and Savannas of Canada and the United States.
BUFFALO DANCE SONGS
Buffalo were not only a life-giving material resource to the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. They were also a spiritual presence. These songs were recorded around 1920 by a Pawnee man named Wicita Blain. Both had been passed down from previous generations and were inspired by dreams. The âwaves of dustâ in the first song seemed at first to hide a crowd of people, but the figures were soon revealed to be a herd of buffalo.
The Waves of Dust
Listen, he said,
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd,
These are his sayings.
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd,
The waves of dust roll downward.
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd.
They mark the place of the buffalo wallow.
The Buffalo Are Coming
Listen, he said, yonder the buffalo are coming,
These are his sayings, yonder the buffalo are coming,
They walk, they stand, they are coming,
Yonder the buffalo are coming.
Plains bison, Bison bison
And in the center of everything there lay the main attraction, the Great Plains Grasslands themselves, a landscape that even today invites wonderment. This truly is big sky country, with horizons that extend from the boreal forests of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba to the deserts of the American Southwest and from the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi drainage. The numbers speak for themselves. Length: 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers). Width: between 400 and 700 miles (between 600 and 1,100 kilometers). Vaguely triangular in outline, the region is broadest toward the north and narrows to its apex in the Hill Country of central Texas. Total area: 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers), or roughly 14 percent of the entire landmass of Canada, Alaska, and the Lower Forty-Eight States.
THE GRAND GEOGRAPHICAL TOUR
BUT LENGTH AND breadth are not the only descriptors of the Great Plains. The prairies also have a vertical rise and run that add a whole other dimension of interest. Formed primarily by sediments that washed out of the Rocky Mountains millions of years ago, the landscape slopes away from west to east, stepping down from an elevation of about 1 mile (roughly 1,600 meters) above sea level at the base of the foothills to a few hundred yards above sea level on the banks of the lower Missouri River. Often, the change happens so gently that you hardly notice it. Who would have imagined, for example, that the drive across Kansas, from west to east, following in Coronadoâs path, would be downhill all the way and that youâd lose more than half a mile (a kilometer) in elevation while traversing that seemingly level state?
Overlain on this gently sloping plain are a surprising diversity of landforms. The geography of the Great Plains offers something for every taste, from fantastically sculpted badlands to craggy mountains to some of the flattest expanses of country anywhere on the planet. âI reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went,â our old friend Coronado exclaimed in a letter to the king of Spain in 1541, âwith no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.â The landscape to which he was referring is now known to geographers as the High Plains, an elevated and sometimes spectacularly featureless tableland that extends from Nebraska and Colorado into northern Oklahoma and Texas. An erosional remnant of a high-and-wide landscape that once extended over much of the Great Plains, the region is bounded on three sides by dramatic cliffs, including the upthrusting wall of the Mescalero Escarpment in the west, the tree-clad Pine Ridge Escarpment to the north, and the amazingly convoluted and striated Caprock Escarpment in the east. See Map 3: Geography of the Great Plains.
To the south of the High Plains lie the limestone hills of the Edwards Plateau, or Texas Hill Countryâa world in itselfâwhere the rolling countryside is broken by domed upwellings of rock, deeply cut by streams, and eaten away underground to form a honeycomb of sinkholes and caves. The Edwards Plateau, in turn, is bounded on the south by the terraced ridges and eroded canyons of the Balcones Escarpment, which slashes across Texas at the southern limits of the Great Plains Grasslands.
To the northwest of the Edwards Plateau lies the broad Pecos Valley and a landscape of spectacularly eroded caverns, sinkholes, and steep-walled limestone cuts. And north of the Pecos are the shadowed moonscapes of the Raton Section, where mesas capped with lava compete for attention with contorted badlands and the burned-out cones of Capulin Mountain and other long-extinguished volcanoes. From there, it is on to the broad, terraced valleys of the Colorado Piedmont, literally âfoot of the mountains,â where the waters of the Arkansas and South Platte rivers have, over millions of years, stripped away layer after layer from the original High Plains surface. (This dramatic, if localized, lowering of the surface explains, for example, why the road heading east out of Denver tracks steadily upward for the first half hour or so, as it climbs out of the South Platte floodplain and onto the surrounding High Plains benches.) The effects of water erosion can also be seen on the rugged Missouri Plateau and the deeply dissected valleys of the Plains Border region.
If water has cut into these landscapes, wind has smoothed them out. For example, the southeastern edge of the Platte River valley is softened by a broad belt of curving, undulating sand dunes that were deposited by dust storms sometime during the Ice Age. Similar formations, shaped by similar forces, are also to be found strewn up and down the drier, western side of the Great Plains, from the Great Sandhills of southwestern Saskatchewan in the north to the Mescalero Sands of the Pecos Valley. And right in the middle of the map lies one of the prairiesâ little-known natural wondersâthe Nebraska Sandhills, a region of whale-backed, grassy rises and prairie wetlands that, at an area of almost 24,000 square miles (61,000 square kilometers), ranks as the largest field of sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere. These sandscapes were put in place by the relentless northwest winds that have been coursing across the landscape for millions of years.
With so few barriers to stand in their way, these same winds have had the run of the entire Great Plains region. Although their influence can be seen in many parts of the countryâfor example, as ridges of windblown silt along both the South Saskatchewan and Upper Missouri riversâtheir influence is ...
