EMPIRES OF THE SUN BIG HISTORY AND THE GREAT PLAINS

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In the 1980s and 1990s I lived on the Great Plains. I have never gotten over it. I grew up in southern forests and bayous, spent twenty years of my life in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, and presently live off the end of the Southern Rockies in New Mexico because I am passionately in love with deserts. And I travel to oceans, since like most of us I find something hypnotic and satisfying to my genetic memory in an ocean beach. But here’s the thing: the sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie. What Romantic Age celebration of landscape aesthetics used to call “the sublime”—an awe capable of stilling the dialogue in the mind—is reachable more easily in vast, horizontal plains than in any other kind of landscape. That sublimity arises from the plains’ unfathomable boundaries, a self-confident grandness of scale layered atop a kind of still, calm, monotony of sensory effect, and from the country’s entire lack of echo and strange ability to deceive. In the years I lived there, I found that, deliberately taken in with all the senses, the Great Plains endlessly stunned me. The place is a sensuous feast of the minimal.

But I do understand that there is something bigger going on here. For the last 40,000 years, since we humans left Africa and began to explore the larger world, encountering and taking the measure of one landscape after another, we have been engaged in a search. Maybe it was the same search, as some believe, that compels us in this century to Mars and beyond. But the impulse may have been simpler, for once we began to write, in the literature of exploration the places that aroused our strongest passions were places that most resembled our original African home: yellow savannahs speckled to the limits of our sight with herds and packs of wild animals. Think of the Masai Mara and the Serengeti as our templates, and the diverse bestiary of Chauvet Cave, the site of some of our earliest artistic expressions, as a subsequent remembering of whence we’d come.

The American Great Plains may be one more reminder that we can find home again. Excepting East Africa itself, 200 years ago no part of the globe quite thrilled us in the same primeval way. Today the plains out east of the mountain divide is a drought- and dust-plagued habitat of big farm machinery, ignored and ridiculed, flyover country. But before it was de-buffaloed, de-wolved, and de-grassed, the nineteenth-century Great Plains was one of the marvels of the world. With its staggering ecology of charismatic animals, the plains enabled Americans and Europeans of all backgrounds to experience home base one last time.

It was here, on these sublime horizontal yellow sweeps, which extended eastward for 500 miles beneath the rain shadow of the Rockies, that we also have the strongest argument for the oldest continuous (or almost so) story of human life in North America. This debate actually revolves around several candidate places, in locations as diverse as Alaska, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Texas, and it is a debate that may not be resolved in our lifetimes. But one overcast March day in 2005, an old friend from Montana, writer Steven Rinella, and I spent an afternoon tramping across one spot that, without any question, stands in the direct line of the founding of human history in America. The bleak, surprising setting of our immersion in Big History in America entirely lacked any of the schoolbook associations of a Jamestown or a Plymouth or a Santa Fe. But in the founding of America, it did have one great advantage not enjoyed by those more famous sites. Its story pushes definite human inhabitation of our continent back more than 13,200 years (Jamestown, 1607, and Santa Fe, 1610, seem yesterday by comparison). Thirteen-thousand years is also how long, for a certainty, we humans—the most charismatic Great Plains megafauna of all—have intertwined our lives and fortunes with the animal life of the North American plains. Once more, across a span of time that didn’t finally end until a century ago, we lived off animals.

There are arguments, to be sure, for a continental culture even older than Clovis. Centered on a small scattering of sites elsewhere in America, one of them, the Friedkin Site in the Texas Hill Country on the southeastern edge of the Great Plains, may date to 15,500 years ago. But so far no older culture we’ve found seems to have draped itself over the continent with the geographic sweep of the Clovis Paleolithic hunters, whose excavated campsites range from Montana to West Texas and the Southwest. We barely know them as a people. One recent theory is that they were a “Northern Hemisphere wild-type.” Think Siberian Vikings, a settler society of hyper-aggressive colonists whose descendants, once the giant bestiary of the Pleistocene collapsed, lost many of those traits. Analysis in 2014 of the DNA of a Clovis child from a Montana site indicated that the Clovis people were not only originally Siberians, they are the direct ancestors of 80 percent of the native population of the Americas.

In search of Clovis America, Steven and I were out in my old home country, the Southern High Plains, although who knows what the ancient inhabitants might have called these flat prairies, seemingly endless as the ocean seas. In 1932, when archaeologists first discovered this ancient setting, near spring-fed wetlands in a shallow Pleistocene stream channel coursing these plains, the place was about to be mined for gravel to build roads through the nearby town of Clovis, New Mexico. Early settlers had named the winding, grassy channel Blackwater Draw. But as archaeologist E. B. Howard made discoveries here that rocked the world, the scientists decided to name the people whose lives they were resurrecting the “Clovis People,” after the nearby town. Eventually science would discover a “Clovisia the Beautiful” that had lasted some 400 years, almost twice as long as the modern United States has so far, and conclude that its residents had fanned out across most of America. But Blackwater Draw was where Clovis people reemerged out of the mists of the continent’s forgotten past. This marshy little valley out in the middle of plains extending thirty miles to the horizons is where one of the templates for how to live in a grand grasslands took shape.

As Steven and I followed our self-guided tour around this famous site, it became clear that the Clovis people had arrived in America at a propitious time. Large cosmic forces have shaped Earth’s Big History. There have been extra-terrestrial impacts that have reset the evolutionary clock more than once, wobbles in the Earth’s spin around its axis that have effected clocklike climate shifts cycling between Ice Ages and the Pluvials between them, plate tectonics and continental drift to raise mountain ranges and spark volcanic fireworks. And of course amidst it all has been biological evolution, refitting life for all the endless changes. But the Clovis people were lucky enough to be here when giants still roamed the continent. Indeed, it was the never-hunted Pleistocene megafauna of the Americas that had drawn the Clovis people out of Siberia in the first place.

Blackwater Draw, eastern New Mexico, site of the original discovery of the Clovis big game hunting culture of North America. Dan Flores photo.

Between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago, though, as the Wisconsin Ice Age began to wane and North America began to warm, many of the large, Africa-analogue creatures that inhabited the Americas were going extinct. But 13,000 years ago in what would one day be New Mexico, it was still possible for the Clovis people to specialize in elephants. It was the discovery of their large spear points embedded in the remains of mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels, and horses that had rocked the world in the 1930s. It confirmed something no one had believed previously, that ancient Americans had hunted giant creatures no longer found on Earth.

Walking along Blackwater Draw and gazing across these vast plains that March afternoon, the obvious observation to make was that the elephant hunt did not last. Indeed, in the early 1970s archaeologists uncovered more than 8,000 artifacts here from another culture, known as Folsom (also named after a New Mexico plains town, farther north), which succeeded the Clovis people in time. As indicated by the Folsom site, and many others like it across the West, the extinction of the elephants led the next inhabitants of this region to specialize in another of the great Pleistocene species, a massive, early bison known as Bison antiquus. But like the mammoths, in time Bison antiquus were also fated to become extinct across the Great Plains. While Folsom culture and its spinoffs perfected bison drives, corrals, and atlatl technology to enable them to survive some 2,000 years, around roughly 11,000 years ago this lifeway, too, was collapsing.

Looking around us at these immense, windy, usually brightly lit savannahs, now bereft of both elephants and giant bison (and on this particular day, even sunshine), it did not require much intellectual effort for Steven and me to discern some patterns in the deep time history of this place. Track any part of the world across the large expanses of time since humans arrived and a story begins to unfold that demonstrates a set of principles about history. First, because the grand forces mean that the Earth is an evolving and endlessly changing world, no place remains the same across Big History. The science of ecology once waxed eloquent about “climax,” the biophysical reality of environments if left undisturbed. But every environment is endlessly undergoing disturbance, or recovery from it, so that what appear to be climaxes are merely snapshots in time.

Second, human beings—like every other living species—change the places where we live. The famous geographer Yi-Fu Tuan once composed a simple and elegant aphorism: space plus culture equals place. In truth, though, only the first human inhabitants to occupy a piece of ground on Earth ever got to interact with “space.” Since we succeed one another in place after place, we end up interacting not with raw nature but with settings that have already been altered by the preceding inhabitants. Just as the Folsom people did in the wake of 400 years of Clovis life on the Great Plains, all of us who come later are engaging with someone else’s previously-created “place.” The Folsom people inherited a Great Plains without elephants, then bequeathed a plains country lacking giant bison.

A story that spans time-frames like these is the province of Big History—what French scholars have for many decades called la longue durée. In a part of the world now divided up into cities and towns and their spheres, by county and state lines—so that we tend to think of ourselves as being in “West Texas” or “the Oklahoma Panhandle” or “the Dakotas”—the plains has actually long functioned, and still does, as a distinctive ecological region that has produced a particular kind of history different from elsewhere, different because of the landscape itself. And its possibilities.

There is in fact a theory about human settlement that goes directly to the issue of possibilities for settler societies. Possibilism, as it’s known, posits that regional environments like the Southern High Plains or the Dakota or Montana Badlands do not completely determine how people will live in them. Rather they offer a range of possibilities from which we choose based on the kind of culture we bring with us. Human cultural preparation can be so different that what one group sees as a valuable potential resource, another group may entirely ignore as worthless. A region like the Southern High Plains, say, does not offer unlimited possibilities. Whaling or an economy based on processing timber would not fall within the range of lifeways any human culture might follow here. Yet out on the expansive, sunlit grasslands of the Great Plains, whose offerings might strike many from forested, wetter regions as quite limited, 13,000 years of Big History shows a fair range of possible ways of living. Always, though, following a particular dictum of nature: like the Earth itself, life on the plains revolves around the sun.

The geology, topography, climate, and biology of the Great Plains have been fundamental keys to life of all sorts in a grassland setting. What appears an unrelenting, unremarkable flatness to the topography of the plains comes from its surface geology, which is sedimentary outwash from the Rocky Mountains. Over millions of years that outwash buried ancient, carboniferous life forms from the Permian, Triassic, and in a few spots the Jurassic periods, when the country that would become the Great Plains was then ruled by dinosaurs. The overlying erosional wash from the mountains also buried very old mountain stream runoff in the form of a gigantic fossil lake we now call the Ogallala Aquifer, which lies beneath the surface from Texas to Nebraska.

Because its surface has been washed down from high mountains to the west, plains topography gradually loses elevation from west to east. Despite appearances from a car window on interstate highways, though, the Great Plains is far from tennis court–flat. Rivers out of the Rockies—the Missouri, Yellowstone, Platte, Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian, Pecos, and hundreds of their tributaries—had carved arroyo channels, canyons, and left vast stretches of eroded badlands on the plains eons before the Clovis people ever arrived. The Red River, Brazos, and Colorado of Texas, draining off an isolated plateau called the Llano Estacado on the Southern Plains—laid down another set of long, shallow channels before sluicing away a wild, tangled, vertical landscape on the plateau’s eastern escarpment. For the last million years these smaller plateau rivers have spilled off that escarpment through deep, brightly colored canyons that expose the underlying Permian and Triassic rocks. The original Clovis site in New Mexico that Steven and I walked in 2005 is in one of the headwater channels of this system.

Geology and topography have remained fairly constant since humans got to the plains, but climate and biology have changed enormously, and often. Because the Great Plains is far inland from oceans, and the Rocky Mountains intercept much of the moisture flowing across the West from the Pacific, since humans have been here the plains has had a semi-arid climate. For the past 13,000 years it has been drier than the country on either side of it, typically bathed in 320 annual days of sunshine, and because of its slight topography and solar heating, usually very windswept. But like everywhere else on Earth, it has had a climate dramatically variable through time. The Wisconsin Glacial period produced much cooler, more lush conditions, with much more extensive tree growth across the plains then. One of the reasons we know this is because of relict populations of trees now associated with the mountains, like Rocky Mountain junipers, that still grow in wet, north-facing locations hundreds of miles out on the prairies. But there have also been hot, dry episodes that sometimes lasted not just decades but hundreds of years, and in the case of a drought called the Altithermal, for thousands.

In a landscape that powers human societies with sunlight converted by grassland photosynthesis into energy, the most direct strategy for exploiting that energy is through hunting grazing animals. Dan Flores photo.

Conditions like these have meant that the plains has been dominated by grasses, which by their nature require less water than woody vegetation. The closer to the mountains, where the rainshadow effect is pronounced, the shorter the grasses, which gradually increase to mid-height and then tall grasses on the eastern edge of the plains. A world dominated by grass and sky has meant everything in plains history. The equation is a very simple one. Biological life is dependent on energy, and since the energy that drives most terrestrial systems comes directly from the sun, grasslands in open terrain under cloudless skies tend to produce a very direct conversion of solar energy. In one simple step of photosynthesis, thermodynamic energy streaming from the sun is directly available to animals that eat grass. Hence when humans, omnivores rather than herbivores, looked to the resource possibilities on the Southern High Plains, what they readily saw were lifeways centered around converting the massive solar energy charge of the region into forms humans could use.

One final element influenced the world of possibilities on the plains: geographical context. Humans are not just social among our own groups, we seek out contacts with other human groups. And if those groups reside in environments different from ours, we trade what we produce and value for things we lack but value. Today our global market economy is the result. So it is not surprising that at signal moments in the human history of the Great Plains, its residents reached out to peoples who were following very different lifeways in very different biological regions to the west and east. The peoples of the plains, in other words, joined in regional economic systems that tied them by trade to peoples living elsewhere.

This is the framework for human history on the Great Plains from the time of the Paleolithic big game hunt, from the age of Clovis elephant hunters and Folsom bison hunters. The Folsom hunters inherited a Clovis place—“Clovisia the Beautiful”—that no longer offered the possibility of elephant hunting. In the time they dominated the plains, Folsom hunters and their several offshoots concentrated their economies on the remnant herds of Pleistocene bison, increasingly on a late subspecies, Bison antiquus occidentalis. But by 11,000 years ago the huge Pleistocene bison were gone.

Then over the next 3,000 years, one species of charismatic Pleistocene megafauna after another went extinct. Winking out in isolated little groups, the camels followed the bison, as did the giant ground sloths. Camelops, the last plains camel, sprang from a family of animals that, like horses and pronghorns, had evolved in the American West. Now this American native was extinct. Hanging on the longest, but whose disappearance is the most bizarre of all, horses were another American native that had absolutely dominated the Pleistocene grasslands. There are recently discovered horse kill sites in the West, but nothing on the scale of the Solutrean horse hunters of Europe, who left kill sites of 20,000 animals. Nonetheless, by 8,000 years ago horses became the last of the big animals to go. The predators that had pursued all these grazers and browsers—the steppe lions and dire wolves and long-toothed cats, the long-legged hyenas and “false” cheetahs—followed the ungulates to their graves. Viewed in fast-forward from space the extinctions would have appeared like wind-scattered embers dying out in a slow rain. And in the end, nothing.

The Pleistocene extinctions are obviously a big story. Isolated from the rest of the world since the breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Laurasia, the Americas had long lacked one significant charismatic megafauna that Africa had, and that Europe and Asia in time acquired: humans. North American wild creatures had evolved many wonderful special adaptations, like the long, curved fangs of the saber-toothed and scimitar cats, perfectly adapted for stabbing young elephants. Several prey species had evolved tactics against predators that hunted in packs, but none had evolved any adaptation at all to a pack hunter who used dogs and fire and topography and highly refined and deadly flint tools. Herds of animals that had never seen or smelled a human no doubt was the magnet that drew hunters from Siberia to search out pathways into America.

American Pleistocene animals seem to have been in no way prepared for that arrival. Sad outcomes from First Contact between sophisticated human hunters and unschooled animals have been a worldwide phenomenon in Big History, but of course on the Great Plains between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, there was another elephant in the room. The Ice Age was ending. Climates were changing drastically, and some species clearly could not keep up. All we know is that across that 5,000-year-long span, thirty-two genera and at least fifty species of American animals vanished forever. A Great Plains that looked very much like Africa, was if anything maybe even more impressive than Africa, dwindled away to a few remnant species, which then went on to create their own grassland ecological marvel over the ensuing centuries and millennia. But it was a fairly faint reflection of what had been.

And to be honest, that is close to where our knowledge ends. Just why almost three-quarters of all the species of our large mammals and birds went extinct is still a mystery. There are theories, naturally, the most engaging of which is paleobiologist Paul Martin’s “Blitzkrieg Overkill” model, positing that a fairly small population of hunters spread rapidly across the Americas, increased in population from the opportunities of this great frontier, and in a few hundred years wiped out millions of big animals. The warming, drying climate theory has a hard time matching that for drama. But the truth is, we just don’t know. Martin’s overkill hypothesis is on its firmest ground with mammoths. Elephant populations may not have been large, and a great many mammoth sites show evidence of human points and butchering tools. For most other species things are far less clear. An emerging line of thinking is that both hunting and climate were involved, climate because it generated patchy habitat that then isolated animal populations, which human hunters may have finished off—not in a few hundred years but across perhaps 5,000. Or, as paleomammalogist Ross McFee has more recently suggested, perhaps human migrations with domesticated dogs brought new diseases that produced epizootics among the native fauna.

It is the grand mystery of early America.

The most important part of this story for us is not so much what killed all these marvelous creatures, or that the Great Plains thereafter would never again quite duplicate the Serengeti, although both those ideas are fully capable of co-opting the mind. Down the timeline we inherited, the most important thing is that the Great Extinctions set in motion ecological ripples through space and time. Nature’s response to the warming climate and the continued stress of hunting societies from the successors of the Folsom (some of them are the Plainview, Plano, and Cody cultures) and so many now-vacant ecological niches was to push the surviving animals to take advantage of the new circumstances. By about 5,000 years ago, with so many grazers now gone, a dwarfed species of bison (our modern animal) that possessed a faster reproductive turnover time and other traits better adapted to the new conditions evolved as a new, fully formed plains species. In the absence of serious competition the population of Bison bison grew exponentially, filled at least some of the vacuum left by the great extinctions, and multiplied into the enormous herds that so boggled the imaginations of all those who would later witness them. In an evolutionary sense, the historic bison was something of a “weed species,” released by a major ecological disturbance. Later bison hunters were reaping the good life from a fairly unusual situation in world history, as it turns out. And as long as there were millions of them covering the river valleys and uplands of the plains beyond the eye’s reach, a thousand generations of human beings really considered no other possibility.

This rise and fall of cultures on the Great Plains is a Big History fixture. Hence the pattern: each set of new inhabitants would inherit a place modified and changed by prior and accumulating human history, in effect a humanized landscape. After the Pleistocene had run its course, new peoples, a collection of slightly different regional cultural groups who are collectively known as the Archaics, would live, love, die, and transform the region by firing the grasslands and hunting the animals for almost 10,000 years, almost forty times longer than our own society, centered on what we call the United States, has existed.

At this point I want to focus the unfolding story more closely, specifically now on the Southern Plains, the part of the Great Plains south of the Arkansas River, in today’s Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Big History patterns here are the clearest of any plains subregion. Archaic peoples are generally known as gatherer/hunters who devoted more attention to plant gathering than had their ancestors, but on the sunny grasslands of the Southern High Plains it was still a grazing animal that converted sunlight most efficiently into energy. The cycles of wet and dry enormously affected the caloric energy in the grasslands. Sometimes the plains produced an enormous biomass of bison that spilled eastward and westward hundreds of miles. At other times bison entirely abandoned parts of the plains. But during times of good climates more than 8 million of them would convert sunlight into energy on the Southern High Plains. Across the past 5,000 years the bison’s adaptation to the shortgrass and mid-height grasslands was such a perfect fit that the animals were able to survive every wild swing of the Grand Forces. No wobble in the Earth’s spin took them out. No asteroid froze them in post-impact winters. In fact Bison bison was better adapted to the grasslands than were the Archaics who hunted them. Until a little more than a hundred years ago they would survive fifty centuries of climate swings and hunting and remain the dominant, iconic, Great Plains megafauna of the new era.

The Archaics perfected a long-term, sustainable lifeway on the plains, one of the longest-running ways of extracting a living from nature that humans have ever practiced in America. But they did experience a changing world that at times led them to draconian decisions. Closely attuned to the feedback they read from nature, aware that times were not always good, they seem deliberately to have managed their populations, and the most common way they did so was through infanticide, a psychological burden they would seek to avoid when and if they could.

They also confronted a major climate emergency that demanded an extreme response. Beginning about 8,500 years ago, climate in the American West cycled into an extremely warm, dry phase that stuck in this climate cycle for a mind-blowing 3,700 years. This was the depths of the Inter-Glacial, a long slide down from the frozen wastelands of the Wisconsin Ice Age. But the Earth’s rotational wobble now had the northern hemisphere slightly closer to the sun, so for almost forty centuries the plains cooked. The Altithermal, as it is called, came close to turning the entire plains into a true desert, and a vacant one. Not only did bison leave the region for wetter conditions to the east and north, evidence is strong that most of the Archaic peoples did the same. While a few villages of Archaics held on in Southern Plains wetlands like Blackwater Draw and Lubbock Lake, outmigration in fact became the preferred adaptation for both people and animals during this longest, hottest summer in Great Plains history. Pretty much everybody and everything left.

As the effects of the Altithermal began to wane and bison and Archaic peoples filtered back onto the Southern Plains, beginning about 2,000 years ago, significant changes occurring on both sides of the region set in motion new possibilities. About 4,000 years ago Mesoamerican cultures separately invented agriculture, a breakthrough step—probably forced by mounting human populations that pushed hunting to its limits—that had revolutionized human life in the Old World a few thousand years earlier. Crop growing as a new lifeway traveled northward with Mexican traders to the Mogollon and Anasazi peoples of the Desert Southwest and to the mound-building Mississippian peoples of the Mississippi Valley. With developing farming societies on either side of the Southern Plains, a new world of possibilities opened up.

In the 1,500 years following AD year 1, in present New Mexico just west of the open plains, corn-growing, pottery-making, pueblo-building societies of great sophistication and far-reaching trade networks grew up whose power began to influence the plains. At about the same time, agricultural, village-dwelling peoples in the South, Caddoan speakers in what is now East Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, likewise established vibrant societies that began to probe up the rivers towards the plains, looking for trading partners and new possibilities. The result of this stimulation for plains hunters was a suite of new ideas—new ways to think about resources, trade, even the kind of houses you lived in. There were dazzling new technologies, the most revolutionary one the bow and arrow, passed from group to group from the Far North. Plains Archaic people probably first saw bows in the hands of the Anasazi/Pueblo farmers in New Mexico.

The trade possibility was an obvious one for people living in different ways and in very different landscapes. The plains peoples had in profusion the products of the bison hunt. They had flints striped in maroon and blue from a famous quarry we would later name Alibates, also beautifully tanned robes, and especially dried protein in abundance. What plains hunters had always lacked to make them fully healthy were vegetables—carbohydrates. Now, with agricultural societies on the scene, both hunters and farmers could overcome their dietary bottlenecks. Puebloan and Caddoan farmers longed for more protein in their diets. Plains hunters ate too much meat. Soon enough the meat-for-vegetables trade became mutually beneficial for everyone involved. Humans being human, luxury and status goods to help people differentiate themselves, like turquoise from the Pueblo mines, lubricated the exchange. The trade items would change over time but this immersion into far-flung regional trade networks was a whole new plains possibility. This Indian form of it would thrive almost a thousand years.

The emergence of farming communities, like the one at Taos Pueblo, on both sides of the plains created new trading possibilities for Great Plains people a thousand years ago. Dan Flores photo.

With a more imaginative take on the possible, plains people could now pursue lifeways of increasing complexity. One spur: from AD 1250 to 1525, as the climate drifted again towards droughts, bison once more migrated away from the Southern Plains to wetter locales to the east. The response of the plains hunters to this was fascinating, to say the least. Apparently the new lifestyles modeled by the farmers suddenly seemed attractive to folks living in the midst of the High Plains; maybe with buffalo gone some of the agriculturalists themselves decided to try to farm the prairie interior. But between 1200 and 1500 a famous experiment on the Southern Plains involved groups like the Antelope Creek people who set up farming towns out in the heart of the plains, along the Canadian River system near the Alibates quarries in the panhandle of present Texas and alongside the Republican River in today’s Kansas. What makes these High Plains farmers a mystery is that their crops, points, pottery, and tools came from both the eastern and western farming traditions. Rather than the hide tipis of the hunters, they built rock-slab houses of multiple rooms, an architecture fairly evidently based on admiration of the Pueblo model from 300 miles farther west.

Crop growing was a strategy to extract solar energy as directly as possible. But growing crops requires consistent moisture, and whoever the Antelope Creek people were, they could not sustain farming in the deep heart of the plains. Drought, the cause that had undercut the great Chacoan Empire of the Pueblos farther west, eventually pressed the Antelope Creek people to abandon their experiment. Others, notably Caddoan speakers from their Mississippian homeland and Siouan speakers from the Great Lakes, would push farming villages up the rivers of the plains, too. But until the twentieth century, no one else would ever try to farm so far out on the High Plains in the midst of a hunting country of big animals.

After the 1500s, of course, radically new possibilities opened up on the Southern Plains and the Great Plains generally. When European Spaniards founded Santa Fe in 1610, and European Frenchmen commenced Natchitoches (1714) and New Orleans (1718) in Louisiana, the Big History story ratcheted into another phase. Two brand-new developments—domesticated animals brought from Europe, and the bottomless desires of a relentless international market economy—once again expanded the possibilities. One of the animals happened to be the old American native, the horse. Their evolution shaped by millions of years in North America, horses had survived in Asia and Europe, where the people who had once hunted them had finally domesticated them. Returned by the Spaniards to their original habitat, horses exploded across their old homeland, especially after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 left Santa Fe’s stock herds in Indian hands. It took fewer than twenty-five years after the Pueblo Revolt for the next dominant hunters of the Southern Plains, the Comanches, to arrive from the north in search of the country from whence an animal as magical and entirely perfect as the horse had sprung.

For peoples then living on (or drawn to) the Southern Plains, the horse was a revolution, and not just because it gave native peoples a more efficient beast of burden to replace the dog. The horse made possible a massive intensification in the human capture of solar energy streaming from the sun into the grasslands. It was a grazer itself, so transformed solar energy into power humans could harness. It competed with the food source animal, the bison, for grass and water, but it also became an efficiency multiplier for harvesting them. With the horse, plains humans had finally become as well-adapted to the grasslands as the bison themselves. Along with the pull of the market economy, the cycling climate of the plains, and growing human settlements encircling the plains that cut off the bison’s migration refuges, the horse also was fated to cast a dark shadow over the bison herds. In the euphoria of the time, no Indian could see that shadow, but it was there.

For 150 years the new Comanche Empire of the Southern Plains availed itself of all the new possibilities. Occupying an ancient place and adding new elements, it built on old trade networks to exchange bison products both for crops and now for European industrial metal ware. Even the horses the Comanches rode, bred, and collected into herds of great personal wealth became a trade resource. Starting in the 1770s, the Comanche Empire traded tens of thousands of horses and mules annually to American traders from towns like New Orleans and St. Louis. The very success of the empire the Comanches built rested atop the most fundamental of Big History principles: with bison, and now an added grazer, the horse, theirs was an empire erected as directly as possible on most intense use of solar energy any humans had so far harnessed on the plains. The Comanches actually saw that connection and made the sun their primary object of religious veneration. Visitors to their villages said that in the morning Comanche men would hang their shields in full view of the sun. Through the day they would rotate them, like a field of painted leather sunflowers, to absorb streaming sun power—puha, or medicine.

For millennia the size of the bison population had been linked with climate, and except for a dry period in the late 1820s, the first four decades of the nineteenth century was a time of above-normal rainfall on the Plains. The carrying capacity for bison and horses was high. In retrospect, it was one last, brief, shining moment of 13,000-plus years of Indian life on the plains. Beginning in 1846, Southern Plains rainfall plunged as much as 30 percent below the median for nine years of the next decade, and did so for six of those years on the Central Plains. Drought on the Great Plains in the fifteen-year stretch before 1865 is one of the most severe “short” droughts on record. What was happening was that the Little Ice Age, which had cooled and moistened the plains for almost 300 years, was ending in a shockwave of dry and hot.

Nomadic villages of horse herders and bison/pronghorn hunters still characterized the Great Plains as late as the 1880s. Dan Flores photo of a Steven Spielberg movie set from Into the West.

Beyond drought there was the global market’s insatiable hunger for the animals of the plains, which it needed dead and at least modestly processed. The market hunt took out the bison first, then the elk and the sheep. Pronghorns were next. The remnant straggling grizzlies went quickly. Plains buffalo wolves took longer and significant effort, as did the rest of the wild horses. No amount of effort directed at them made any difference with coyotes, but their persecution hardly made them the lucky winners. All this plus the advance of the railroads, and American imperialist intentions towards the grasslands, made the endgame for the Comanches more complicated, if not less tragic, than was the case for Clovis or Antelope Creek people. As so many times before in plains Big History, when the end came it was sudden and shocking.

Big History patterns did not fade away just because Americans arrived to push aside the New Mexicans (who had quickly directed yet another grazer, enormous flocks of sheep, onto the grasslands). Out on now silent sweeps, like a stage abandoned by its players, Americans initially saw the grazing possibility and populated the region with cattle, trail drives, ranches. By the early twentieth century on the Southern Plains, and the early twenty-first on the Northern, with deep-drilling (and ultimately fracking) technology available to them, American plains dwellers discovered the fossilized carbon wealth in the Permian and other formations buried underfoot. By the 1920s the realm of the elephant and bison had become a booming oil and natural gas bonanza that, burned for energy, began to contribute to a carbon buildup in the atmosphere that not only threatened Great Plains climate but that of the world. Along with de-buffaloing and de-wolfing the country, the new residents also came close to de-grassing it, turning much of the region into wheat and cotton grown by tapping the fossil lake beneath the surface. Did the new plains have anything of the romance and poetry of the earlier versions of the plains, with their grand herds and hunts and natural drama? Only if you’re exceptionally unromantic and ahistorical.

It took 13,000 years but the one, singular charismatic megafauna that walked upright did finally succeed in vanquishing, indeed nearly obliterating, all the others and bending the plains to its will. An observation like that makes this sketch of longue durée human history seem more simplistic than it ever was, of course, but the thing about Big History is that inside its broad-stroke narrative, individual humans were still living out their lives, full of the pathos and drama inherent in the human condition. Events of such great importance to us that we mark the passage of centuries by them—the collapse of a civilization, the emergence of a religion, the invention of some technology that transforms how we live, the rise or fall of noteworthy figures, the demise of diagnostic regional animals—all these were playing out inside Big History. They were what we normally think of as “human history.” Admittedly, thinking in these grand, sweeping terms does miss some of those more normal markers of the human trajectory, a kind of scent of flesh as we live it. What the story I’ve just told does do to compensate, though, is to give us a history of the human animal quite a bit more like the kinds of histories we ought to have about bison, wolves, horses—about species other than ourselves, in other words. Like us, each of the last big animals of the Great Plains has a biography, its own distinctive story. I am convinced their stories, too, are an essential part of North American history.

Standing out in the sunlit horizontal yellow sweeps today, far enough from roads that I can focus my mind on the matter, by an act of the imagination I can sometimes conjure up the historical imagery that played out here. Out in the physical space where all those dramas unfolded, the Big History of the Great Plains can make you feel as if you’re standing at the end of an immense line of dominos, which wind and curl far beyond your sight, but you know stretch back to elephant hunters, to giant animals, to vast panoramas of grass and distance and unbelievable animals in unfathomable abundance, the whole tableau domed by an endless blue that everyone from Clovis times until now must have paused to marvel over.

These are spans of time vaster than most of us can imagine and ways of living we may struggle to recognize as part of our past. The eerie emptiness enveloping a place like Blackwater Draw does not lie, though. This is who we are, and across a stupendous setting where millions of charismatic creatures once made up one of the wonders of the planet, this is what we’ve done.