Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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April 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 3
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 3
“As far as the eye could reach, in every direction, there was neither tree, nor shrub, nor house, nor shed visible; so that we were rolling on as it were on the bosom of a new Atlantic, but that the sea was of rich green grass and flowers, instead of the briny and bottomless deep.” Thus James Silk Buckingham, a British traveller, described America’s Great Plains in 1837. This was the same “Atlantic of grass” that the homesteaders saw, and the longhorns when they spread over the open range up from the South—an ocean of grass to be grazed. There were homesteads to be developed, cattle empires to be expanded, and wheat fields to be plowed deep and combined. The grass grew naturally; it did not need to be cultivated. Who could imagine the broad green ocean drying up? The Great Plains used to be one of the richest natural grasslands of the world. From the SaskatchewanManitoba line it extended south along the ninety-eighth meridian to the Gulf of Mexico and all the way west to the Rockies, taking in eastern Montana, Wyoming, Golorado, and New Mexico, the western part of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle—“The Great American Desert,” it was designated on the maps of the early iSoo’s. And it was all public domain. AVe owned the grass and had a rich heritage, but within a century after Buckingham’s visit we had almost destroyed it. The grass kept the Plains in place, kept them from becoming a real desert. It was as simple as that. Jn an environment with a maximum annual rainfall of only twenty inches and an evaporation rate as high as sixty per cent, there was a hairline balance between sun, water, rivers, soil, wind, and grass. The grass—putting down its roots four, even six feet into the soil, improving its structure, ventilating it, letting water penetrate it, keeping moisture loss low—held the balance of power and kept the environment from destroying itself. During the summer months the rain fell in thunderstorms, hailstorms even; water rushed in torrents down from the Rockies, carried by the Red River, the Platte, the Missouri. Against that force of water nothing could stop the erosion of the soil, nothing but a good thick carpet of grass to hold it down. Through the ages, nature had laid dosvn such a carpet—native grasses capable of withstanding the special conditions of the environment. They lay dormant through drought and came back above ground when water came again. Some grasses grew in the warm seasons, others in the cool. They could grow with little moisture, hoarding what they got. Over the centuries they had struggled for survival in the Great Plains, adapted to the environment, and thrived. The environment is diverse. The Great Plains are not all on one level: from an altitude of 5,500 feet up against the Rockies they flatten out going eastward