Yet despite these human innovations, the underlying dynamic of the ecosystem—the interplay between climate and grasses, grazers and predators—remained robust. A landscape that had evolved to support large herds of grazing animals was still doing exactly that, as life ebbed and flowed in time with the seasons. Then, in the early to mid-1800s, the pace of change accelerated. In far-off Washington and Ottawa, ambitious governments began to assert their claim to the land and resources of the Great Plains. As a prelude to agricultural settlement, Native people were confined on reserves and reservations, whether by persuasion or by brute force, and the bison on which they depended—the multitudes of “humpbacked cattle” that had darkened the plains—were virtually wiped out in a bloody orgy of killing. Tellingly, the final stages of this slaughter were motivated by the discovery that bison hides could be cut and sewn into leather belts and used to power machines in the burgeoning industrial complex in the East. (The last free-roaming bison were killed in Canada in 1883 and in the U.S. in 1891.) Modern times had arrived on the prairies.
And then came the settlers, an onrush of humanity that reached full flood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Determined to make a stand in this new country, the incomers quickly progressed from temporary shacks and shanties into substantial homes, making them the first people ever to establish permanent, year-round dwellings on the open plains. This was a bold experiment, occasioned with far more risk than anyone at the time seemed to recognize or, at least, was prepared to admit. But whatever the hazards, the way forward was clear. The object was to assert control over the ecosystem and redirect its natural vitality into the production of commodities that could be bought and sold on the world market. Beef, not bison. Wheat and corn instead of prairie wool.
The largest land animal in North America, a mature bison may stand almost 6 feet (2 meters) high at the shoulder and weigh as much as a ton. Here, a black-billed magpie takes advantage of the view, searching for insects stirred up by the bison’s hooves.
Arthur Savage photo
The result of this revolution is the landscape that we see today, a colorful patchwork of fields and rangelands, where geese feed in the stubble, foxes hunt in farmyards, and meadowlarks sing their hearts out on fence posts. These are the prairies that our generation was born to, and they are beautiful in their own right.
Yet the more we love this place as it is, the more we feel the pain of what it so recently was. The wild prairie ecosystem is gone. And this tragedy is compounded by the realization that we don’t even know exactly what it is that we have lost. “Civilization” and “progress” overran the grasslands with such an urgent rush that the ecosystem was disrupted before anyone had a chance to make a systematic study of exactly what was out there or to figure out how all the pieces interacted with each other. The people who might have had the most to teach us—the last generation of hunters and gatherers—went to their graves largely unheeded by the newcomers, taking their knowledge of the prairie and its life ways with them. We are left with little to guide us except for fragments of written descriptions in the journals of explorers and early settlers—partial lists of species, brief sightings, and offhand remarks—that leave many basic questions unanswered.
The depth of our ignorance is startling. Question: How many bison were there on the plains before the slaughter began? Answer: No one can tell us with any assurance. By working and reworking the available strands of evidence, experts have estimated the precontact population at anywhere from 12 million to 125 million animals, a variance that leaves more than 100 million bison in limbo. These days, experts acknowledge that bison once numbered in the millions and probably tens of millions, but that’s as far as they’re prepared to go. And if we cannot account for big things like bison, how much less do we know about the smaller and less conspicuous organisms—little things like insects and spiders, fish and frogs, rodents and songbirds—that lived and died in their untold variety and interest and abundance? Yet if the wild past is lost to us, we can still look ahead. Despite everything that has happened, it is not too late to acknowledge the natural forces that continue to animate the prairie world and that, even today, shape the lives of all its creatures.
> ABUNDANCE
The great herd running away,
The buffalo running,
Their drumming hooves
Send dust clouds billowing to the sky
And promise good hunting
The buffalo and her child approaching,
Mother and Calf coming,
Turned back from the herd,
Promise abundance.
CHAHIKSICHAHIKS (PAWNEE) SONG
Ecosystems and Ecoregions
It’s not really fair to blame our ancestors for their lack of ecological awareness. At the time the plains were settled, “ecology” as we know it had not yet been invented. Instead, the science of the day was focused on fixing life to a pin, labeled and safely dead, with the species laid out in straight rows and separate compartments. (This passion for “still life” was given concrete expression in the natural-history collections of nineteenth-century museums, those great mausoleums filled with pressed plants, dried skins, stuffed birds, and mounted insects—among them, many thousands of specimens from North American grasslands.) The conception of life as a tumultuous interaction between organisms and the world around them was of no great interest to a science that was largely content to follow in the footsteps of Linnaeus, collecting things and classifying them.
But on the fringes of science, new ideas had begun to stir. In 1866, for example, an eccentric German physician-turned-philosopher named Ernst Haeckel cobbled together two Greek roots—oikos, meaning “household,” and olgie, or “study of”—to describe a radical new approach to life science, ecology. Drawing his inspiration from Charles Darwin’s still-recent discovery that organisms are shaped by the environments in which they evolve, Haeckel described his new endeavor as the study of natural selection in action. It was, he said, “the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment,” including its relationships, whether “friendly” or competitive, direct or indirect, with all the other organisms in its surroundings. The essence of life, he hinted, lay not in a static array of species in a collector’s cabinet but in this wonderfully tangled web of interconnections.
By late summer, big bluestem—the characteristic grass of tall grasslands— often waves above the wild flowers, like the goldenrod seen here, and reaches into the lower branches of bur oaks and other trees.
This was a heady idea, more poetry than science, and for a long time, no one could figure out how to develop it any further. In the end, it took a pioneering biologist from Nebraska by the name of Frederic Clements to ground the new field in observation and hands-on evidence. With the native vegetation under assault all around him, Clements focused his attention on the ability of the wild prairie to recover after it had been burned over, plowed up, dried out, or otherwise disrupted. In a study published in 1916, he concluded that the prairie was a self-healing system in which, given the chance, groups of plants grew back in an orderly sequence, each wave creating the conditions required