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