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 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 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.
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—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 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 environment—too wet to be a desert and too dry for forest—that 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 Earth’s terrestrial biomes, or life zones, with an expanse that covers more than a third of the land area of the planet. (At least, that’s the area over which grasses would hold sway if natural conditions were allowed to prevail.) We’re talking some 18 million square miles (46 million square kilometers)—almost 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 world’s major nations.
The first European known to have set foot on this great domain 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 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 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 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 “a wilderness in which nothing grew, except for very small plants,” but which nonetheless was teeming with millions upon millions 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 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 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.
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 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 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. 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