CHAPTER 1
[T]he utter impossibility of producing any just impression of them by description. They inspire feelings so unique, so distinct from anything else, so powerful, yet vague and indefinite as to defy description, while they invite the attempt.—Van Tramp 1868
[T]his utter negation of life, this complete absence of history, has struck him with a loneliness oppressive and sometimes terrible in its intensity. Perhaps so; but, for my part, the prairies had nothing terrible in their aspect, nothing oppressive in their loneliness.—Butler 1872
Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.—Quayle 1905
They were afraid of the prairies; they looked empty and lonesome. Instead of water they held only marshes; there were rattlers and ague there and nothing over your head, nothing at your back.—Peattie 1938
Human intervention helped create, eliminate, and shape what we know as eastern tallgrass prairie.—Howe 1994a
A good test of “education” would be to ask a hundred people what is meant by prairie. . . . Most, I fear, would answer that a prairie is a flat monotonous place good for sixty miles per hour.—Leopold 1999
ONE OF THE MOST common phrases in the historic, modern, and scientific literature is “presettlement prairie” or some variation on that idea. There never was a time on the prairie before people. Native Americans were here when the ice sheets receded. “Presettlement prairie” is at best uninformed, ignoring the role of Native Americans on this continent. Our views of the roles of people in nature has changed over the decades as seen in the following quotes; note the dates of each.
More than a century ago when Lewis and Clark set out upon the memorable journey across the continent of North America (1803–6), they were the first to traverse the great climaxes from deciduous woods in the east through the vast expanse of prairie and plain to the majestic coniferous forest of the north-west. (Clements 1936)
When Lewis and Clark headed west from the eastern edge of the central grasslands, they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans. (Lott 2002)
The vegetation and vegetation pattern that the earliest European explorers and Euro-American settlers found were the result of thousands of years of intensive manipulation by Native Americans. Were the prairies “pastures” Transeau (1935) or “prodigious game farms” (Mann 2005)? Were the prairies a wilderness? Before 1492, was the tallgrass prairie an untamed wilderness or a highly manipulated environment?
As Euro-American settlers moved west from the forested east, they occasionally came to what they called openings or barrens. These were fragments of tallgrass prairie and oak savanna embedded in the eastern forest. A couple hours or couple days more travel brought them back to the safety, security, and familiarity of the forest.
However, once they crossed the Wabash River in western Indiana, many would not see a continuous forest until they made it to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, literally half a continent away. Several early accounts mention the Wabash River as a somewhat arbitrary jumping off place from forest to prairie (Volney 1804; Birkbeck 1817; Thomas 1819).
If the traveler from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to this point has grown weary of the endless journey in the forests, then he believes himself transferred to another region of the world as soon as he crosses the Wabash [River] and beholds these great prairies. (Ernst 1819)
[B]ut it was not until the white man crossed the Wabash River in his westward advance that he beheld the prairies in all their splendor, and all their monotonous magnitude. (Shimek 1911)
For some, emerging from the shadows of the eastern forest was like a great awakening, moving out of the darkness and into the light.
Yet, the view of that noble expanse was like the opening of bright day upon the gloom of night, to us who had been so long buried in deep forest. (Birkbeck 1817)
There is always an expansion of feeling in looking upon these boundless and fertile wastes; but I was doubly conscious of it after emerging from our “close dungeon of innumerous boughs.” (Irving 1835)
Once they moved out from the edge of the woods into the prairie, attitudes changed quickly. A few pages after the previous quote, Washington Irving writes the following.
[T]here is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of the prairie: the loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it. There the view is shut in by trees, and the imagination is left free to picture some livelier scene beyond: but here we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation. (Irving 1835)
The latter quote seems to be more typical of the loneliness people wrote about on the prairie. When they arrived on the prairies, some found only a “hopeless hopefulness” (Shimek 1911). The words lonely or lonesome are a recurring theme throughout the literature of the prairie.
If human loneliness can be defined as a bleak desolation of spirit—a sort of gray hopelessness unrelieved by any color or joy—then winter prairie on an overcast evening is surely one if its embodiments. (Madson 1993)
What did they find when they arrived on the prairie? Some would say they found nothing or a great nothingness.
One saw here the world as it had taken shape from the hands of the Creator. (Butler 1872)
There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. (Cather 1918)
Some people didn’t even think God or the angels could help them out, out there on the prairie, out past . . . well . . . everything.
[T]he unpathed spaces where no stars light their lamps nor any angels happen by. (Quayle 1905)
Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be. (Cather 1918)
[E]ven angels proceed at their own risk. (Norris 1993)
With no reference point for the eye, determining relative distances and sizes on the prairie can be a challenge. This is another theme in the prairie literature.
I could now understand why a bear had been mistaken for a buffalo; for it seems that upon these immense prairies, where there is nothing to interrupt the general level, any object, however small, is, for want of something to compare it with, invested by the imagination with dimensions that do not belong to it. (Featherstonhaugh 1847)
Another peculiarity is the great difficulty a person unaccustomed to the prairie finds in ascertaining the relative distance of objects, and consequently estimating their size. I have frequently made, myself, and seen others make the blunder of mistaking a buffalo bull for a crow, or more frequently a crow for a buffalo bull. (Palliser 1853)
Perceiving distance is a large part of travel. Travelers in the forest have mileposts to mark time and distance traveled, even if they are only counting the trees. Travelers in the mountains can always notice peaks becoming larger and closer. On the flat prairie of the 1800s, there were only grass and cloud to mark the passing of time and distance.
He may travel from morning until night, and make good speed, but on looking around him, he fancies himself at the very spot whence he started. (Atwater 1818)
In a perfect circle the sky curved down the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact center. All day long Pet and Patty went forward, trotting and walking and trotting again, but they couldn’t get out of the middle of that circle. . . . Next day the land was the same, the sky was the same, the circle did not change. (Wilder 1935)
That bigness assaults multiple senses, including sound, which it simply absorbs. There’s nothing out here to hear, except our own thoughts, for better or worse.
[O]ne feels the stillness, hears the silence, the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible, the stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as intense. (Butler 1872)
Silence, so deep, that it roared in the vacuum. (Aldrich 1928)
There’s nothing out there for sound to bounce off, nothing to return an echo.
It is truly remarkable how greatly the sound of objects becomes absorbed in these extensive woodless plains. No echo answers the voice. (Nuttall 1821)
[W]here a man could call and call but there was nothing to send back an echo. (Peattie 1938)
It is quiet out there. It’s quiet if you can ignore the howling winter winds and yipping coyotes, the crackle and roar of a spring fire and booming of prairie-chickens, the call of meadowlarks and bobolink or the awesome mid-summer crack of thunder that can shake a person’s soul with its violence, the buzz and drone of countless insects, the hiss of grass blade rubbing blade, and the whirring explosion of a quail covey.
Explorers who could pass through and know they didn’t have to stay will have different impressions than settlers who know they are going to be marooned out there . . . somewhere . . . or nowhere.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. (Cather 1918)
She did not regard her present situation as romantic; her family had simply chosen to move far out into loneliness. (Peattie 1938)
That said, many writers and poets had a favorable view of the prairie compared to other habitats.
The spacious prairie is a helper to a spacious life. Mountains shut us in; prairies let us out. Mountains are barrier builders; prairies are barrier destroyers. Prairies make level roadways for the soul to walk. (Quayle 1905)
A river closes in, rounds the bend, runs between banks. . . . The Plains, on the other hand, open out, unfold, beg the long and trackless view. The river draws a line; the Plains reveal a space. (Gruchow 1988)
Probably the ecosystem that most people reference when discussing the prairie is the ocean. Allusions to ocean in the prairie literature are “almost universal in the early accounts” (Curtis 1959). One of the most famous books on the prairie, William Quayle’s The Prairie and the Sea, directly compares the two right in the title. Grass blowing in the wind does invoke the same feeling as waves in the ocean.
To the north, as far as I could see, the land billowed like a russet ocean. . . . I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely marveled at it. (Garland 1917)
As I looked out about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. . . . And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. (Cather 1918)
I approached writing this book from a scientific perspective, wanting to study prairie plants and animals. I think the most interesting parts of my research were the personal and emotional responses people had to the prairie as well as the role people had in expanding and maintaining the prairie. In my own life, a walk in the prairie, alone with the pup, always provides me with whatever I need that day, intellectually and emotionally.
A Prairie Education
IT STARTED about three decades ago, in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at Wabash College. One of my professors, Dave, said he was visiting a remnant prairie that afternoon. He asked if I wanted to come along. Although I didn’t know it at the time, that innocent question and afternoon trip set my life on a new trajectory. One afternoon at Smith Pioneer Cemetery, just south of Covington, Indiana, and I was hooked.
Three years later I was taking my final field exam at The Nature Conservancy’s Spinn Prairie. My notes from that day mention puccoons and shooting stars, both still among my favorite prairie wildflowers. In between were many other trips to Indiana remnant prairies.
Dave also took students each fall to his undergraduate field station, Green Oaks, just east of Knox College in western Illinois. Green Oaks is probably the second large-scale prairie restoration in the world after Curtis Prairie in Madison, Wisconsin. There he introduced me to Pete, his undergraduate professor. Three decades have passed. I visited Pete for a day earlier this summer and periodically call him to catch up. Dave and I have contacted each other daily to weekly for all these years. Directly and indirectly the two of them have had a profound effect on my entire adult life.
Wabash College is a liberal arts school where students spend just as much time studying a wide range of other subjects as they do studying for their major. Without a doubt, the part of my education that was and still is the most valuable is the focus on connections within my biology major, as well as connecting those courses to classes in many other departments on campus. I received a unified and interconnected education, not a collection of disparate facts. The other skill I developed in those four years is learning how to learn.
In 1942, Aldo Leopold gave a presentation titled The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education. He stated, “The objective is to teach the student to see the land. . . . I say land rather than wildlife, because wildlife cannot be understood without understanding the landscape as a whole. . . . Perhaps the most important of these purposes is to teach the student how to put the sciences together in order to use them.”
As a naïve young college student, I assumed I needed to know the science to fully understand the prairie. I pictured my future, mid-career self with a pair of binoculars and a clipboard, in the field with a good dog by my side, counting birds and plants. I was wrong. Today I find myself sitting in a cubicle in a downtown office building going to lots of meetings about policies, testifying or presenting proposals to councils and legislators, budgeting, and dealing with dozens of competing interests.
To know the prairie, it’s not enough to be a good botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. Those skills are good to have, and hopefully they help inform decisions, but they just aren’t enough.
Prairie conservation is complicated. Protection could include a landowner selling their land in a fee title to a wildlife agency or conservation group such as The Nature Conservancy, or putting an easement on the land. Conservationists need to understand the range of programs, program options, and funding mechanisms. Effective conservationists need to have an understanding of local politics and economic concerns as well as an effective communication strategy and sales pitch when discussing conservation.
Conservationists need to understand not only the science of grazing but also how to safely conduct prescribed burns. They also need to understand the politics and perceptions of prescribed fire and public lands grazing.
To effectively implement conservation programs in the Midwest, a conservationist needs to understand land values, farm economics, and the concerns of farmers. Those are influenced by farm policy, commodity markets, international trade policies, tariffs, embargoes, or how a war or natural disaster halfway around the world affects corn and soybean prices here.
My education gave me a firm base to start from, but my career took me in directions I never anticipated. Writing this book showed me quite clearly that, even after all these years, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Am I smarter than that college student? I know a lot more facts, but for every fact I have ten, or a hundred, new questions.