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WHERE IS HERE?

“You cannot take care of what you cannot see”.

DR. GEROULD WILHELM, SPEAKING AT THE NORTH AMERICAN PRAIRIE CONFERENCE, KIRKSVILLE, MISSOURI, 2002

THERE ARE PEOPLE who think of the prairie as 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 Canada–U.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 from the French, through the Louisiana Purchase, the great orator Daniel Webster was moved to object. “What do we want with this vast, worthless area,” he thundered, “this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs?” And even after this supposedly howling wilderness had been annexed to the U.S., 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. “The prairies around us are the most arid and dismal you can conceive of,” he wrote. “In fact these prairies (so called) look more like great deserts.”

One of the special beauties of the prairie is the cycle of four distinct seasons, each of which remakes the landscape in its own image.

Another traveler of the same era, a trader named Rufus Sage, was even more direct: “That 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.” 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 meadow—une prairie—as 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 thousands of years before. 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 weren’t. 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 vision—this inability to see and appreciate the Great Plains grasslands for what they truly are—has continued to plague our perceptions right down to the present. Flat? Boring? Lifeless? Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s time to drop out of the fast lane and give the prairies, our prairies, a second, loving look.

> NOTES FROM THE FIELD

The prairies have often been described as a landscape reduced to the barest essentials of land and sky—a place where the eye is lost to distant horizons and nothing much happens. But what this depiction misses is the color and excitement of the prairies seen close-up and the rewards that come with a little knowledge and observation. As evidence, here are a few brief excerpts from my notes:

Aspen Cut, November 11: “A bright blue sky, fresh snow, sparkling and mild. We are standing at the edge of a wooded draw, looking across it to choose our route down. My companion says, ‘A coyote!’ and points to the opposite slope. But it’s not a coyote. It’s a cougar: reddish-brown, stocky, rounded head, long heavy tail, smooth, smooth movements. It flows up the slope—pauses to look back several times— then over the ridge and out of sight. On a snow-covered log at the bottom of the draw, we find large round tracks with pin-prick claw marks above the central toes.”

Chimney Coulee, June 29: “Last night, we stood on a hillside, ankle deep in prairie wool, and heard a whispered quivering sound that seemed to come out of nowhere. And again, like a sudden sigh. Finally we saw them, high up over our heads, a pair of nighthawks that sometimes interrupted their insect-hunting maneuvers to plunge head-long down the sky and rasp the air with their wing feathers. In that moment, the whole place was shot with silver.”

Grasslands National Park, July 9: “In just two days we have seen meadowlarks, horned larks, Sprague’s pipits with their surprising pink feet, phalaropes spinning and dipping like wind-up birds in a dugout, sharp-tailed grouse, nighthawks, western and eastern kingbirds, golden eagles (nestlings and mature), jackrabbits— huge, hallucinatory—cottontails crouching in the shade of large rocks in a prairie dog colony, mule deer, white-tails, pronghorns (bucks, cows with calves), painted lady butterflies, monarchs, showy milkweed in full bloom, prickly pear cactus with waxy yellow flowers, jumping cactus stuck to our dogs, pincushions topped with electric pink blossoms, purple prairie clover, silverleaf psoralea, brown-eyed susans, skeleton weed, blue Missouri milkvetch against bone-white clay, needle-and-thread grass, awned wheatgrass shining in the wind. The cold white glare of a full moon.”

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 them—for example, when the climate strikes just the right balance between precipitation and drought—grasses can assert themselves to become the dominant vegetation. (“Dominance,” 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 world’s major grasslands suggests 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 land mass. It is in this semiarid environment—too wet to be a desert and too dry for forest— that grasses gain the upper hand, whether it be on the steppes of central Asia, on the pampas of Argentina, on the savannas of East Africa, or in the broad heartland of North America.

Globally, grasslands are among the largest of the Earth’s terrestrial biomes, or life zones, with a sweep that covers more than a third of the land area of the planet. (At least, that’s the area over which grasses would potentially hold sway if natural conditions were allowed to prevail.) We’re talking some 17.8 million square miles (46 million square kilometers)—almost three times the area of Russia. In North America alone, grasslands naturally extend over about 1.4 million square miles (3.5 million square kilometers), an area larger than many of the world’s major nations.

The first European known to have set foot on this great empire of grass was a soldier and sometime explorer named Francisco Vásquez 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 sun-baked 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 that’s 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 village of grass-thatched huts, where the people lived by hunting bison and growing gardens, each in their season.

Yet despite this disillusionment, Coronado and his party were astonished by what they found along their route. Here lay “a wilderness in which nothing grew, except for very small plants,” but which nonetheless was teeming with million upon million of strange humpbacked cattle. “I found such a quantity of cows [bison],” Coronado reported, “that 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.” Following along after these apparently endless herds were parties of nomadic hunters— ancestral Lipan Apaches, or Quechero Indians—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 conquistadors’ 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.

Overlooked here by the Sweet Grass Hills of northern Montana, the sleek little Milk River takes the measure of the Great Plains, as it flows from southern Alberta into the Missouri River and onward to the Gulf of Mexico.

But think how amazed Coronado would have been if he had somehow been able to sense the true extent and variety of North America’s grasslands. Little did he know that he had set foot on a vast prairie heartland—a continent of grass—that was flanked on every side by smaller islands of grasslands and prairie-to-forest transitions, or savannas. To the north, for instance, beyond his farthest imaginings, lay the Peace River Parklands, 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 Zone—a tongue of prairie interspersed with groves of hardwoods—extended 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 Grasslands—spangled in spring by lupines and yellow-orange poppies—and 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.

And in the center of everything there was 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 land mass of Canada, Alaska, and the Lower Forty-Eight States.

> DEFINING TERMS

The word “prairie” entered the English language in the 1680s, when fur traders first began edging across the North American continent. Initially, the term was applied to the area just west of the Mississippi River, where the grasses often grew so tall that a man mounted on horseback could not see over them. Later, as the Europeans pushed farther westward, they found themselves in a country of short, spiky plants, quite different in appearance from the Mississippi grasslands. To mark this distinction, the arid grasslands of the western plains were often referred to as “steppe,” a word the explorers borrowed from Russian. The term “prairie,” or “true prairie,” was reserved for the grasslands that the traders knew best, the tall, waving grasses of the eastern plains.

Although biologists continue to find it useful to classify grasslands by height—as short, tall, or mixed—they have dropped the old idea of true prairie. In contemporary usage, the terms “prairie” and “prairies” refer to any expanse of land that is dominated by grass and other nonwoody plants. Prairies, simply put, are grasslands. With the addition of the definite article, “the prairies” also serves as a regional designation for the great grasslands that sprawl across the interior plains of North America.

The geographical terms that are used to define the plains also require clarification. Traditionally, geographers have divided the prairie region into two components: to the west, the Great Plains and to the east, the Central Lowlands. But because there is no clear geographical feature to separate these zones, the boundary between them has never been fixed with precision. On some maps, the dividing line cuts along the 100th meridian; on others, it shifts east to follow the curves of the Missouri River. In either case, the line divides the west from the east, separating prairie from prairie. Several recent sources, however— including the online Atlas of the Great Plains—have erased this artificial division and redrawn the map to show the grasslands of the interior plains as a coherent unit. In this book, the term “Great Plains” refers to the grasslands at the heart of the continent, as shown by the maps.

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 year ago, the landscape slopes away from west to east, stepping down from an elevation of roughly 1 mile (about 1,700 meters) above sea level at the base of the foothills to a few hundred yards (or meters) 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 Coronado’s path, would be downhill all the way and that you’d lose more than half a mile (one 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. “I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went,” our old friend Coronado exclaimed in a letter to the king of Spain in 1541, “with 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.” 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.