Prairie: A Natural History

Oh, give me a home, Where the buffalo roam, And the deer and the antelope play, Where never is heard a discouraging word, And the sky is not clouded all day.

IF I HAD to name my favorite place on the prairies, it would be the high, arid benchlands that sweep along the rim of the Frenchman Valley in southern Saskatchewan. Climb up there on a blue day in early September, out and onto the bald steppe at the top, and the wind will slam against you as if it had a grudge against anything that dared to raise its head above the grasses. This is a landscape that has held to the horizontal for thousands of years, even resisting the torrents of meltwater that once rushed down from glaciers in the Cypress Hills and gouged out the wide, flat trench of the river valley. From up on the benches, you can see the descendant of this ancient flood, a soapy, sleepy little stream that writhes through its oversized course, as if trying to make up in complexity for what it has lost in force.

High on the benchlands, the grasses are stunted and crisp, and the ground bristles with clumps of prickly pear cactus. At one time, long before the Ice Age, this drought-stricken upland was itself the course of a great river that flowed down from the young Rocky Mountains across the northern plains, burdened with loads of gravel and debris. As stones were dropped by the river, they settled onto the riverbed, where they formed a thick layer of sediment. (As the ages passed, this pavement helped the land resist erosion by water and wind, with the result that the former valley is now a high tableland.) Millions of years later, the benches of the Frenchman Valley are still strewn with rounded, river-washed stones, most of them two or three times the size of a clenched fist, all speckled and splotched with lichens.

The eye scans the stone-pocked surface, searching for clues. Grass, sky, rocks. Scattered rocks that suddenly swerve to follow a curve, a curve that coalesces into a circle. Two concentric circles of stones lie half-buried in the grass, tracing a circumference of about twenty paces. A few steps away, another ring and another. People have been here before us in the fairly recent past, though whether it was two hundred years ago or two thousand is more than we can tell. All we know is that a party of bison hunters once chose this bank of the valley to make their camp and that they used these rings of rounded stones to anchor their skin tents. Downslope from the tipi rings, where the benchland begins to fold toward the valley, smaller rocks and pebbles have been washed into terraced drifts, and some of them are chipped and sharpened along one edge as if they had been fashioned for working skins. They fit neatly into the hand.

This land has never been disturbed by the plow—not even a stone has been touched—and it would be easy to think of it as wild, the last stand of the great North American grasslands. In the beat of the wind, you can almost believe you are hearing the muffled drumming of a bison herd that, any minute now, will come rolling into view over the horizon. Through bones and stones and life-forms, these lands conserve not only the memory of the past but the whole promise of a future for many grassland animals and plants. The surviving native grasslands bring us as close as we can now get to the prairie in its natural abundance. Yet when you walk toward that horizon and peer down into the valley beyond, you will not find wild herds or camps of nomadic hunters. Instead, you are very likely to see a bunch of cows. It’s still fabulous out there on the rangelands, but it ain’t exactly wild.

> INTO THIS WORLD OF BEAUTY

When a Kiowa woman named Old Lady Horse looked back on the past, she recalled the not-so-distant time when all the necessities of life had been provided to her people by the bison. Hides for shelter and clothing, bones for tools, blood and meat for food. “The buffalo were the life of the Kiowa,” she said.

When Europeans came to the plains to build railroads and raise cattle, the bison did their best to protect the Kiowa from harm. “They tore up railroad tracks and the gardens,” Old Lady Horse recollected. “They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.”

But when the newcomers sent in soldiers and hide hunters, the buffalo admitted defeat and gathered in council to decide what to do. As it happened, the Kiowa were camped on the north side of Mount Scott, Oklahoma, at this time. Early one morning, a young Kiowa woman looked up from camp toward the mountain, through the mists over Medicine Creek, and saw the last bison herd appear like a spirit dream. As she watched, the face of the mountain opened and the bison walked inside, into a world of plum blossoms and freshness, where “the rivers ran clear, not red.” Into this world of beauty the buffalo walked, and the mountain closed behind them and they were gone.

Old Lady Horse told this story to Alice Marriott, who included it in her book American Indian Mythology in 1968.

Rangelands—expanses of native grassland that are grazed by livestock—exist only where the prairie has somehow managed to escape the plow, usually because the soil is too dry, too thin, too rocky, or too steep to be suitable for crops. The greater the agricultural potential of a region, the less native prairie is left. Because moisture and soil fertility improve from west to east and from south to north, the percentage of the land in natural cover increases in reverse, from east to west and from north to south. Out west on the short grasslands, where the rains are meager and the soil is relatively poor, something on the order of 70 percent of the landscape has survived with its natural integument of grasses and wildflowers. A little to the north and east, by contrast, in the slightly moister mixed-grass zone, the percentages drop off, and what little prairie survives is badly fragmented. (In Manitoba, to cite the most extreme example, less than 0.1 percent of the original mixed-grass landscape remains intact.) On the whole, the irresistibly fertile tall-grass zone has fared worst of all, with less than 1 percent of the entire ecoregion remaining in a more-or-less natural condition. This state of affairs earns the tall-grass prairie dubious honors as the most endangered ecoregion in North America. Today, the only large, continuous blocks of tall grasslands lie in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas and the Osage Hills of northeastern Oklahoma, where a stony rime of crystalline quartz just beneath the surface long ago put a dent in the enthusiasm of plowmen.

The surviving native grasslands span the complete spectrum of prairie types, from the stony benchlands of the Frenchman Valley and the rollicking dunes of the Nebraska Sand Hills to the sculpted badlands of the Palo Duro and beyond. Ecologically, they are as different from one another as big bluestem is from blue grama or as a sage grouse (a threatened bird of arid prairie) is from a prairie chicken (its threatened cousin on the humid tall grasses). Yet for the last century or so, these diverse grasslands have all answered in similar ways to one set of human demands—to produce food for large numbers of cattle and ultimately for ourselves.