CHAPTER 4
[A]nd the grass of which is yearly burnt down by the Indians.—Beltrami 1828
It is good testimony in favor of my opinion that all the prairies watered by the Mississippi and the Missouri are the work of the Indians who destroy by fire the rich vegetation to assure themselves of animal food. Let the vast and unshorn prairies that we cross remain untouched and the forests, with time, will appear.—Nicollet 1838
They are magnificent spectacles. I have stood upon the roof of our large hotel in the evening, and looked into a sea of fire which appeared to be unbroken for miles.—Farnham 1846
All the country in every direction, having been burnt over, was perfectly black.—Featherstonhaugh 1847
To still others the Prairie Peninsula represents a pyropyrrhic victory of the Indians and pre-Indians attempting to enlarge native pastures, or to capture their grazing meat supply.—Transeau 1935
To a limited extent, the results could have been obtained by lightning fires, but the known incidence of dry lightning in Wisconsin is totally incapable of explaining the huge areas influenced by fire.—Curtis 1959
IN ONE OF MY PREVIOUS JOBS, we used to discuss a loose cluster of a few bur oak trees in the center of a certain prairie in northwest Minnesota over lunch. Some of us argued that this area should be managed as prairie and that those trees needed to go, even if they were bur oaks. Others argued that those oaks were indicative of a former forest or savanna at that site and therefore needed to stay.
After a couple months, I stopped on my way home and cored several of the largest and presumably oldest trees. We then looked up the approximate time period when the prairie sod in that part of the county was first plowed under. Presumably this was when fires became smaller and less frequent. Those years roughly correspond to the age of these oaks. Are those oaks a vestige of a former woodland or oak savanna? Or are they a product of plowing the surrounding prairie and a resulting reduction in fire frequency? We’ll probably never know.
There are two primary sources of fire: lightning and people. One question for both historians and ecologists is the relative role of each in prairie fires. Did lightning or humans ignite more fires in the tallgrass prairie? Lightning starts a large percentage of western forest and grassland fires. These western regions often have what are called dry lightning storms. There’s lots of rain and lightning, but the air is so dry the rain evaporates before it gets to the ground. In the humid Midwest, if there’s lightning it’s usually raining buckets.
Lightning could hit a tree, smolder, and a couple days later a branch falls off, igniting the now dry grass at the base of the tree. We can also imagine a strike in an area with thick thatch, the thatch smoldering, and then igniting the grass after the storm passes. There are occasional instances of lightning-started fires in the tallgrass prairie region. However, occasional fires and the historic references to frequent or annual fires don’t match up (McComb and Loomis 1944; Curtis 1959).
It may be stated that the writer has no record of a prairie fire produced by lightning. (Gleason 1913)
That leaves people as the primary ignition source for prairie fires. Using fire, Native Americans had dramatic impacts on the vegetation (Grimm 1984; Mann 2005), and indirectly on the wildlife. People affected the prairie with their fires from the very beginning. There’s no such thing as a presettlement tallgrass prairie (Costello 1969). There may be few other ecosystems in North America more directly affected by people.
With this one tool, the Indians changed a very large portion of the entire vegetational complex of Wisconsin. . . . The presence of nomadic hunting tribes throughout the state in the entire postglacial period means that man-made fires were an important if not sole cause of the fires. (Curtis 1959)
What this may mean is that the distributions and locations of people controlled the locations and frequency of fire. That in turn may have affected regional vegetation patterns. If that’s the case, would there have been a prairie, especially an eastern prairie, without people?
Inasmuch as Indians controlled the probability and location of fire ignitions in the study area (Minnesota prairie-forest border), they strongly controlled the fire probability. (Grimm 1984)
The vegetation pattern of the study area was closely associated with Indian sites of the agricultural Potawatomie and Winnebago tribes. Soil associations, climate and topography appeared to have little effect on the vegetation pattern. This leaves Indian-caused fires as the likely cause of the vegetation patterns. (Dorney and Dorney 1989)
Fires exerted strong constraints on vegetation composition and patterns. Historical patterns of Native American occupancy in the region are consistent with the reconstructed vegetation and fire histories. (Batek et al. 1999)
Without the very frequent burning that the Native Americans conducted, the tallgrass prairie region would be a forest. This was recognized by some of the earliest observers (Freeman and Custis 1806; R. W. Wells 1819).
The [Illinois] soil is well adapted to the growth of timber, and, when protected from fire, is soon covered with a vigorous growth of young trees.
But here, as in other parts of the west, when the prairies are protected from fire, a growth of young timber soon springs up. [Minnesota] (Van Tramp 1868)
Not only were there changes with the disruption of the fire cycle, the changes happened over the course of a couple decades. The earliest Euro-American settlers noticed the rate of change just as modern prairie managers notice trees invading today’s prairies.
Native Americans and early European explorers used fire for a number of reasons, including offensive and defensive warfare (Bradbury 1810), to make travel easier (Bourne 1820), to attract game animals to the tender new grass after a fire (Featherstonhaugh 1847), and to signal others (Nicollet 1838). Hunting was the most common use of fire. Most of these fires were in the fall, especially October. In the fall, game animals are at their fattest and healthiest after feasting on nutritious food all summer and early fall. Fall is also when people are looking to store up food for the long cold winter.
The historical records reveal some interesting patterns in prairies. First, fires occurred very often. Many accounts describe the “annual” or “yearly” fires.
Every autumn the Indians within the entire circuit of their possessions hold a grand hunt. They set fire to the dry grass of the prairie, and the flame with incredible rapidity spreads over all the country. (Ernst 1819)
One point of caution is that it’s easy to interpret this as every acre burned every year. Clearly that couldn’t have been the case or the abundant wildlife so often described would have no place to nest. We can imagine a scenario where people see fires every year. However, they may see fires to the north one year, to the south the following year.
Fires in prairie leave few traces in the long term. However, when intense fires reach the trees on the edge of the forest, they can do enough damage to the tree trunk to form fire scars. Dendrochronologists, scientists who study tree rings, study the frequency and intensity of these fires by studying scars within the rings. Studies from Oklahoma found a fire return interval between two to six years (S. L. Clark et al. 2007; DeSantis et al. 2010; Allen and Palmer 2011). Parts of Missouri had an average fire frequency of 2.8 years between 1740 and 1850 (Cutter and Guyette 1994). Put another way, fires were frequent.
Most studies find scars in any one year on only a small percentage of the trees (Guyette et al. 2003). This means that fires weren’t intense enough to cause scarring on every tree or that fires were patchy in nature. Fire scars are a minimum estimate of fire return intervals as not all fires leave scars.
Another issue with making inferences about prairie fires, especially pre-Euro-American settlement fires, is the age of the trees in the study. Most studies go back only to the late 1700s and early 1800s. That leaves at least two centuries of disease spread, conflicts with European expansion in the east, and displacement of local Native American communities where we don’t have any records.
Along with frequency, there are questions about the size of historic fires. Before a modern prescribed fire, managers spend significant amounts of time cutting or mowing firebreaks to control the perimeter of the fire. Historically, no one was cutting any firebreaks anywhere and there was unlimited fuel to the horizon to carry the fire. Individual fires could have been immense (Beltrami 1828; Farnham 1846).
The plains are burned almost everywhere; only a few small spots have escaped the fury of the flames. (Henry and Thompson 1799)
Every acre of these vast prairies . . . burns over during the fall or early spring leaving the ground of a black and doleful color. (Catlin 1844)
In many cases, streams and rivers provided natural firebreaks. But during a drought or with high winds, it’s pretty easy for a fire to jump a creek. Humidity might have limited some fires. In the Flint Hills of Kansas, many ranchers like to burn in the evening when humidity levels are higher and, as a result, flames are shorter. One could imagine some fires being completely extinguished on a night with heavy dew. But it would take only a few embers to survive the night in deep thatch and get caught in the following day’s wind to start the fire again.
In addition to size, frequency, and seasonality, many early settlers recorded their impressions of fire at night. Night fires were both a source of terror and fascination for many early settlers (Brunson 1835; Featherstonghaugh 1847; Catlin 1844; Palliser 1853).
Few sights can be grander than that of the prairie on fire during the night; the huge body of flame spread far and wide, leaping and plunging like the waves of the sea in a gale against a rocky coast. (Oliver 1843)
When night came, the whole sky and countryside were lighted up. One could lie in bed in a curtainless room and read by its light. (Quick 1925)
We often blame the plow for much of the destruction of the prairie. However, there were also indirect effects of plowing. The bare soil left behind the plow provided a very good firebreak. Without fire, trees quickly expanded. So, with the aid of the plow many acres of prairies were lost directly to row crops, and the plow stopped fires that indirectly led to further loss of prairie to forest.
As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the [oak] grubs grew up into trees. (Muir 1913)
In the 1840s a new animal, the settler, intervened in the prairie battle. He didn’t mean to, he just plowed enough fields to deprive the prairie of its immemorial ally: fire. Seedling oaks forthwith romped over the grasslands in legions. (Leopold 1949)
What did the prairie peninsula look like in the 1400s before diseases ravaged Native American populations and probably changed the use of fire? It’s hard to imagine continuous prairie all the way to the Hempstead Plains (Harper 1911) along the East Coast. However, we can imagine the peninsula extending much farther to the east. Were the patchy oak openings and barrens that dotted Ohio and nearby areas connected into one much wider prairie before European settlement (Braun 1928b)?
After frequency and size, the last issue to consider with historic fires is their seasonality. They are out there, but it’s difficult to find references to spring fires in the historic literature. References to autumn fires, especially during October, are common. This is simply because many fires were related to hunting and most hunting occurs in the fall. What’s more interesting, and still not perfectly answered, is why we switched to April burning (McClain and Elzinga 1994).
Historically researchers just couldn’t believe that Native Americans were able to have significant impacts on the landscape. While they may have been able to affect a localized area, the view for much of the early twentieth century was that Native Americans couldn’t “be responsible for a plant cover of such a tremendous area” (Stewart 1955). Native Americans in New England (Cronon 1983) and Yellowstone (MacDonald 2018) had profound, large-scale impacts on the land well before Europeans arrived. It’s hard not to read some racist undertones into the ideas that Native Americans had no impact or weren’t capable of altering the environment (Callicott 1994; Krech 1999).
So where does that leave us? Fires maintain the tallgrass prairie. We know from the frequency and seasonality that people controlled the fires. So what does that say about the prairie and humans’ role in the prairie?
These relics are still being invaded by the forest and unless some of them are acquired and the forest succession halter artificially, the prairie will disappear from Wisconsin. (Thomson 1940)
When the annual burning ceases, then the trees may invade the artificially maintained prairies. (Thomson 1940)
Was the Prairie then “unnatural”? If so, when was it natural? (Kuchler 1951)
Is the prairie artificial or unnatural? Why or why not? Is the tallgrass prairie a legitimate plant community or ecosystem? Was it artificial simply because people played and still play as much a role in the prairie as the bison or any other animal? Does human involvement have a place in the natural world? What human actions are or aren’t natural? Is a person with a herd of cattle natural but a person with a plow unnatural? What about a person with a drip torch? Or is all human involvement or intervention always unnatural?
The prairie asks a lot of tough questions of both ecologists and historians. And who knew prairies were so philosophical?
Prairie Wilderness
IT HIT ME when I opened Testimony by Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams to pages 113 and 114. There was a map of the US with designated wilderness areas. The intermountain West was heavily dotted and the eastern forest lightly stippled. But in the middle of the country, there was a giant blank triangle of emptiness, the land of the tallgrass prairie.
Looked at another way, there are no blank spots in the Midwest. Every inch of land has been measured, mapped, gridded, plotted, and labeled. And plowed. Most of the year, the land is blank of vegetation or wildlife, bare earth blowing and washing away. All the lines are straight and meet at right angles at section corners. It’s hard to walk a mile and not hit at least a gravel township road.
Most of the writing and philosophy around wilderness focuses on the idea of a landscape untouched or unaffected by human hands. Section 2c of the 1964 Wilderness Act begins, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Later, the act defines wilderness in part as a place “primarily affected by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”
Of course what was meant by this was by Euro-American hands. Today we can include American hands of all skin colors and nations of origin. Before 1492, the tallgrass prairie was very much a hands-on landscape, well-trammeled by dozens of cultures. Especially in the east, these prairies were largely created, or at least expanded, by fire. The prairie is itself an imprint of “man’s work,” not to mention woman’s work.
With less than 1 percent left, there just aren’t places within the tallgrass prairie region to establish a prairie wilderness based on the remaining tracts of native prairie. So, this begs the question of whether we can create wilderness. Is that question a statement of hubris or a way to try to give back? If wilderness is defined as a place without people or evidence of people, can people create a wilderness? Leopold (1949) states that “the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.” However, Stegner (1969) writes “better a wounded wilderness than none at all.”
Because we can restore a reasonable facsimile of the prairie in only a few years, prairie gives us one of the few opportunities to actually create habitat, and when large enough, an experience that at least has some of the components of true wilderness. We can’t create a mountain, grow an old-growth forest, or build a cascading waterfall, at least within anyone’s lifetime. We can plant a prairie.
The language of the Wilderness Act continues with itemized points further defining wilderness as a place with “opportunities for solitude,” “at least five thousand acres,” and “may contain ‘features . . . of value.’” The five thousand acres will be a stretch in most places, but even forty or eighty acres can provide some solitude, at least for a short period of time, and provide value.
A trip to a prairie may not be the same as a two-week paddle in the Boundary Waters or a trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but we don’t always need that experience every day. Sometimes we just need to go and sit and watch and listen, even if only for a few minutes.