American Prairie Preservation :: Tallgrass Prairie Preservation

American Prairie History

American Prairie Before 1850, the great mid-continental grasslands stretched from southern Wisconsin to western Montana, from central Texas to Canada. In wet periods the tall grasses of the eastern edge of the prairie might advance deeper into the midgrass territory. In years of drought the hardier short grasses, which extended all the way to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, might expand their range to the east.

Prairies exist in areas too wet for desert yet too dry to support healthy forests. Prairies respond to their environment, which includes soil type, water availability, and natural forces such as grazing and fire. These have resulted in three distinct prairie regions. In the West, in the dry Rocky Mountain rain shadow, there is the ankle high short-grass prairie with its buffalo grass and blue grama. The eastern prairies are wetter and support tallgrass prairies with Big Bluestem, Indian Grass, and Switch Grass growing to heights of eight feet at times. Between lies the mid-grass prairie dominated by side-oats grama and wheatgrass, with a mixture of shortgrass prairies in dry sites and tallgrass in wetter sites. The prairie is well known for its fauna.

Native People and Wildlife

Before the arrival of the Europeans, this sea of grass is estimated to have contained approximately one person per 5000 acres. The native peoples lived off the land, as hunters of vast herds of bison and the pronghorn antelope, deer and elk that roamed the prairies. They used hides for their clothing and shelter, and supplemented their diets with native plants; some built homes using the abundant prairie grasses.

Elk, deer, and antelope also grazed in astounding numbers. Large predators preying on the grazers included the grizzly bear and wolf. Hoards of smaller wildlife from birds to pocket gophers were inhabitants adapted to this unique ecosystem.

Their relationship to the land was a spiritual one; they said that the trees spoke to them, and that the animals were their brothers and sisters. The sky was their father, and the earth was their mother. It was a relationship that lasted perhaps 10,000 years before the white man came.

European Settlement

When the first European explorers crossed the middle of the North American continent they were met with an awesome expanse of grassland. They didn't even have a word for it - the French, in a characteristically dismissive vein, described it as a meadow. The English were apparently more awed; they adopted the romance of the French language, if not its literal meaning, and called it a "prairie." Later, one of the early settlers wrote, in 1841, that "for miles the prairie gently sloped, hardly presenting a bush to relieve the eye. In the distance, the green skirting of woods, which fringed either border of a large stream, softened down the view. Occasionally a deer would jump suddenly from his noonday rest, and scamper off..."

The European settlement of the prairie marked the end of the civilization that had sustained it and been sustained by it for thousands of years. The settlers were pioneers in the truest sense - with a determination to survive and thrive under the harshest of conditions, and to use the bounty of the earth to enrich not only their own lives but also the lives of others on this continent and around the world. But the end of the red man's civilization was a violent and bloody one. During the process the land also changed dramatically, and in an incredibly short time.

Before the Civil War, some authors have estimated that there were between twenty and sixty million bison roamed the North American plains. By 1900, less than a thousand were still alive. As Black Elk, the famous Sioux Indian chief recalled, "I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus (white men) came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy..." The activity of the white man in slaughtering the buffalo was as incomprehensible to the natives of the plains as was their own "primitive" lifestyle and nomadic behavior to the European settlers.

An old holy woman of the Wintu tribe, reflecting on the strange ways of the settlers, said, "The white people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts; we don't chop down the trees. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down trees, kill everything... How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore."

It was only a matter of a few years before the European settlers, with their belief in man's "dominion over the earth," and their ingenuity in finding ways to conquer and exploit nature and its resources, had fundamentally changed the character of man's relationship to the land, and with it, the character of the prairies themselves.

Man discovered the rich soils that exist in the prairies about 150 years ago. Finding the prairie soils outstanding for crop production, they plowed the prairie everywhere they could for the production of wheat, corn, and other domestic crops. Today, the most fertile and well-watered region, the tallgrass prairie, has been reduced to but 1% of its original area. This makes it one of the rarest and most endangered ecosystems in the world. The largest remaining area still left unplowed is in the rocky and hilly region of Kansas called the Flint Hills. This physiographic region averages 60 miles wide and stretches from the Nebraska border, south into northern Oklahoma.

Michael Martin Murphey on the Prairie

Tallgrass Prairie

Tallgrass prairie is a complex ecosystem, including flowers, trees, birds, mammals, insects and microorganisms. But grass dominates. Like other grasses, tallgrasses do not form woody tissue nor increase in girth. Their stems are hollow except where the leaves join, leaves are narrow with parallel veins, and flowers are small and inconspicuous. Tallgrass prairie is so-named because the component grasses - big bluestem, little bluestem, indiangrass and switchgrass - can reach 8 or 9 feet!

The eye sees only half the prairie; the other half is underground. Roots several feet deep tap moisture in times of drought. Another advantage of deep roots is that they store energy, which can produce new growth. Since grass grows from below the plant will survive weather extremes, mowing, grazing and fire

Tallgrass prairies are an extremely complicated web of life. At first sight, one sees a landscape dominated by grasses. Eighty percent of the foliage is indeed made up of grasses, from 40 to 60 different species. The other 20% of the primary vegetation is made up of over 300 species of forbs or flowers. The prairie also has over 100 species of lichens and liverworts as well as numerous species of woody trees and shrubs along creeks and protected areas. Prairie landscapes vary in soil types and depth, moisture, and slope. This creates many different situations and niches for specific plant communities to fit into. For example, in the wet seeps, sedges and prairie cord grass thrive but bluestem and buffalo grass would drown. In the bottomland prairie areas, different grasses and flowers grow. Species that require more moisture and deeper soils thrive in the bottomland. On the other hand on the dry, shallow, wind-blown hilltops, the drought hardy hairy grama thrives.

Plants have evolved on a landscape that can be difficult to survive on. Climates on the prairie range from extreme heat and drought in August to bitter cold winters locked in ice and frigid winds.

Fires

Another very significant early disturbance was the settlers' natural desire to eliminate fires. Periodic prairie fires had for centuries kept woody species to a minimum and had cleared the ground of dead vegetation, enabling the tall grasses to thrive and creating new opportunities for secondary and tertiary grasses and forbs to establish themselves. Once the fires were eliminated, a rapid invasion of woody plants followed.

Fires sweep across the prairie consuming everything in its path. On top of this there is a barrage of organisms feeding on these plants as fast as they grow. The secret to the survival of the prairie plants in such a hostile environment is that 75-80% of the prairies biomass, or plant material, is underground. The visible plants seen on the landscape are merely the photosynthetic leaves gathering sunlight for a much larger community underground. Just beneath the surface lies the main stems or rhizomes, running horizontally. Here they lie protected from drying, grazing, trampling, fire, and frost. Tough fibrous roots descend from these rhizomes deep into the ground. Roots of some plants such as dotted gayfeather have been reported to go 10 to 15 feet deep. On these roots, are microscopic "rootlets" numbering in the billions and utilized by the plant. Even smaller than rootlets are mycorrhizae that support plant growth by drawing in nutrients too little for even rootlets to obtain. The roots of plants are so numerous; that were one plant's roots placed end to end they would stretch for miles. The competition for nutrients and resources is fierce, so thickly interwoven are plant roots that early settlers were able to cut bricks out of the sod to build homes and schools.

Mosaic Prairie

Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains lies the grassy expanse once dismissed as the Great American Desert. Early 19th century expansion advocates urged settlers to skip the interior and proceed directly to the far west. A land official wrote in 1868 that the plains were "an obstacle to the progress of the nation's growth...in not yielding that sustenance for increasing population." When homesteaders settled in, they discovered what the native Plains tribes had known for centuries: that the "desert" was a mosaic of different regions, each with its own climate and vegetation, each with its own character. Throughout the plains and prairie, different varieties of grass indicate different climatic regions. In the rain shadow east of the Rockies is the high plains shortgrass, consisting of foot-high buffalo, blue grama and needle grasses, which need little water. A ways east, in the wide belt of land bisected by the 100th meridian (near Red Cloud, Nebraska), shortgrass combines with other varieties, including June grass and western wheatgrass, in the mixed-grass terrain. This is the land of the cattle empire of the mid-19th century and later the homestead soddies. Still farther east toward the lower Missouri valley, thriving on increased moisture, reigns the tallgrass that the settlers encountered when they emigrated from Iowa to southeastern Nebraska in the 1860s.

Cultivating

The Sodbusters, farmers, during the 1870s and 80s became interested in cultivating the land, when the development of the steel plow and other implements had made it possible to cut through the thick prairie sod. The roots were so dense - up to five miles or more of roots might be found in one square meter of grasses - that the prairie literally rang, or twanged, when the steel plows turned over its dense underlayer - "a storm of wild music" was the poetic description given by one wheat farmer's daughter several decades later.

In the early days of cultivation, mules were the source of power. Many farms maintained a hay meadow where the native grasses were cut for hay or used for pasture. As late as 1930 the practice of maintaining these hay meadows was still common. And although the mowing and grazing altered the species composition of these small "prairies," their root systems and seed banks still contained a living map of the complex prairie ecosystem that had once spanned the continent from north to south, however, with the advent of tractors most of these meadows and pastures were plowed.

Cultivation was also, however, a catastrophic disruption of the prairie ecosystem. It was a common farmers' joke to tell the story of an old Indian who, having seen a plowed field for the first time, said to the farmer, "Wrong side up." The story was taken to be an illustration of the Indian's ignorance, but in fact when the native grasses are turned under and the soil aerated, the organic matter decomposes faster. This creates a flush of nutrients available to cultivated crops, but when the crops are harvested the nutrients are removed with the harvest, and the soil continues to be depleted year after year. Today's dependence on chemical fertilizers is evidence that perhaps there was more wisdom in that old Indian's statement than was recognized at the time. Certainly in terms of recovering the lost prairie, his statement was true. Once the roots of the prairie are broken, and its recovery cycle interrupted by conventional agriculture, the grasslands never heal unaided. The prairie ecosystem is so vulnerable to manmade disturbances that the wheel ruts left by the migrations of the mid-nineteenth century are still visible, more than 140 years after the covered wagons carried pioneers on their westward journeys. Similar traces can be seen in prairie remnants of the Chisolm Trail in Texas, including one site near Waco where signs of the wagons which accompanied the great cattle drives can be seen.

Cattle Country

The tall grasses - "high enough to hide cattle and long enough to tie in a knot around a horse's back" - made excellent forage. The grazing patterns of the European cattle differed from those of the buffalo, and this introduction of domestic livestock was the first major disruption of the grasslands. While the buffalo grazed the land intensively, they soon moved on, giving the grasses time to recover. Under human management, cattle grazing was concentrated in smaller areas, over longer periods of time. The natural species competition and succession of the flora was disturbed, favoring weedy annuals, the shorter, more grazing-tolerant species of grass and species unpalatable to cattle.

In the state of Texas barbed wire was introduced in 1874, and within 15 years most was fenced, which concentrated livestock and resulted in even more overgrazing of the grasslands. In 1885 the combined influences of overgrazing and drought were so severe that hundreds of thousands of cattle starved to death in Texas. By 1890 the grazing capacity of many grasslands was reduced by one-half or more, and the pre-settlement vegetation was permanently altered.

Looking Forward

Although overgrazing and cultivation were the most dramatic disruptions of the natural prairie ecosystem, there have been a number of simultaneously occurring phenomena, which have contributed to the destruction of all but a few isolated prairie relics, and to the degeneration of many of these surviving remnants.

Most of the prairie remnants found today are those in out-of-the-way places, difficult to cultivate. These too are often invaded by woody species, along with exotic non-native plants, which have been cultivated or allowed to spread on nearby land, and then introduced by wildlife or carried on the winds to these otherwise native areas.

These grasslands had existed, in one form or another, for millions of years, as a result of the innumerable interactions of sea and wind and earth, which formed the world, as we know it today. Fossil evidence indicates that most plants of the modern prairie were present during the Pleistocene time, about a million years ago. At the time the United States was being settled, however, few of the settlers had any botanical training, and most descriptions from journals of the time are written by people who described the grasses in layman's language. Those who did know plants were not very much better off - these New World species were for the most part unfamiliar to them. Whatever we know today about the composition of these prairies must be inferred from the few relics which have survived the grazing, agricultural and urban uses of the past hundred and fifty years.

Once this prairie covered millions of acres; now only isolated remnants exist. The homesteaders saw it as a nuisance to be replaced as soon as possible with crops that paid their way. Today, prairie is being brought back in places using a land management technique borrowed from the Plains tribes: controlled burning. Spring fires clear out non-native grasses before the later "sun-seeking" native grasses begin to grow. Fire also burns up dead plant debris on the ground, allowing the sun and rain to penetrate the soil, and releases nutrients, promoting growth and increasing seed yields. This and other prairie restoration methods help ensure that, at least in some places, we can look out over a sea of grass and feel the wonder of the first homesteaders.

Future Generations

While we look across this once magnificent land that supported so many before the European settlers came, we need to look deep inside of ourselves and ask, “what can I do to bring the mighty prairie back?” Together, we will work hard to bring the ecosystem of the great American prairie back for future generations through the help of the American Prairie Partners. Please do not wait, get involved and contact American Prairie Partners today!