northern plains region, by contrast—north and east of the Missouri River, from Alberta to Manitoba and south through the Dakotas—is less apt to be buried in loess, but it nonetheless bears the imprint of the Ice Age. Here the terrain is an unmade bed of glacial rubble, or till, lying exactly where it dropped when the ice sheets retreated from the landscape thousands of years ago. And protruding above this jumble of knobs and kettles is an assortment of sprawling, flat-topped uplands, including Turtle Mountain, Wood Mountain, and the Cypress Hills, which straddle the boundary between past and present. Like miniature versions of the High Plains, they are the last surviving remnants of an ancient, preglacial landscape that has otherwise been lost to erosion.
Finally, and most surprising of all, are the honest-to-goodness mountains that jut out of the northern plains, particularly on the unglaciated reach of country south and east of the Missouri River. From the glowering Black Hills to the jagged Crazy Mountains, they stand as a peak experience (if you’ll forgive the pun) for anyone who has been led to believe that the prairies are monotonous.
THEN AND NOW
IT IS ONE thing to send our minds running across the contours of the Great Plains Grasslands and their unexpectedly varied landforms. It is quite another to bring these spaces to life, to try to perceive them in their full, natural vitality and splendor. What would it have been like to step out onto the round bowl of the southern grasslands with Coronado in 1541, aware that at any moment our progress might be blocked by a dusty, pawing, milling herd of bison? Or, precisely 150 years later, in 1691, to have traveled with Henry Kelsey and his Nēhiyaw and Nakota guides from Hudson Bay through the northern forest and onto the prairies of the Saskatchewan River country? What emotion would have seized us when a blocky, hunched shadow gradually resolved into the form of a massive and potentially lethal grizzly bear? Or what if we could slip back in time to 1804–6 (little more than two hundred years ago) and join Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition up the Missouri River?
Plains grizzly bear
Imagine: Bison beyond counting. (“I do not think I exaggerate,” Lewis wrote as he crossed the Dakota plains in 1804, “when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compre[hend]ed at one view to amount to 3000.”) Flights of pronghorns at every turn. Elk coming up out of misty valleys to graze on the prairie at dawn. Bighorn sheep perched on the steep, crumbling walls of the Little Missouri badlands. Wolves threading across the prairies, trailing the herds.
Two hundred years isn’t very long on the geologic timescales of planet Earth. These memories lie at the very threshold of the present, so close that we half expect to be able to walk into a fold in the landscape and encounter them. And something like this still occasionally happens when we stumble across a physical trace of the past, whether it’s a flaked stone tool that once belonged to a bison hunter or a shallow, saucer-shaped hollow that was worn into the dirt by generations of rolling, grunting bison. The animals have vanished, but the imprint of their flesh and blood is still on the land. It is all so mind-bogglingly recent.
There are not many places where the wild is as close at hand as it is on the Great Plains. In Europe and Asia, no one can quite remember what “natural” looked like, because the land has been successively shaped and reshaped to meet human needs for hundreds or thousands of years. But on the prairies—right up to the moment when agricultural settlement began—humans had lived off the natural productivity of this vast, sun-swept expanse of grass. The First Peoples drew their sustenance from the animals and plants, experiencing both feast and famine as hunters and gatherers. This is not to say that they sat back passively and let nature take its course. They were active participants in the ecosystem, ready and willing to use whatever technologies they could command to improve their chances of survival. For example, they had no qualms about setting the prairies on fire, to green up the grass and draw bison in for the hunt. They tilled the soil of fertile river valleys and planted gardens of sunflowers, corn, and squash. They eagerly adapted to the new culture of firearms and horses.
Yet despite these human innovations, the underlying dynamic of the ecosystem—the interplay between climate and grasses, grazers and predators—remained robust. A landscape that had evolved to support large herds of grazing animals was still doing exactly that, as life ebbed and flowed in time with the seasons. Then, in the early to mid-1800s, the pace of change accelerated. In far-off Washington and Ottawa, ambitious governments began to assert their claim to the land and resources of the Great Plains. As a prelude to agricultural settlement, Indigenous people were confined on reserves and reservations, whether by persuasion or by brute force, and the bison on which they depended—the multitudes of “humpbacked cattle” that had darkened the plains—were virtually wiped out in a bloody orgy of killing. Tellingly, the final stages of this slaughter were motivated by the discovery that bison hides could be cut and sewn into leather belts and used to power machines in the burgeoning industrial complex in the East. (The last free-roaming bison were killed in Canada in 1883 and in the United States in 1891.) Modern times had arrived on the prairies.
And then came the settlers, an onrush of humanity that reached full flood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Determined to make a stand in this challenging country, the incomers quickly progressed from temporary shacks and shanties into substantial homes, making them the first people ever to establish permanent, year-round dwellings on the open plains. This was a bold experiment, occasioned with far more risk than anyone at the time seemed to recognize or, at least, was prepared to admit. But whatever the hazards, the way forward was clear. The object was to assert control over the ecosystem and redirect its natural vitality into the production of commodities that could be bought and sold on the world market. Beef, not bison. Wheat and corn instead of prairie wool.
The result of this revolution is the landscape that we see today, a colorful patchwork of fields and rangelands, where geese feed in the stubble, foxes hunt in farmyards, and meadowlarks sing their hearts out on fence posts. These are the prairies that our generation was born to, and they are beautiful in their own right.
Yet the more we love this place as it is, the more we feel the pain of what it so recently was. The wild prairie ecosystem is gone. And this tragedy is compounded by the realization that we don’t even know exactly what it is that we have lost. “Civilization” and “progress” overran the grasslands with such an urgent rush that the ecosystem was disrupted before anyone had a chance to make a systematic study of exactly what was here or to figure out how all the pieces interacted with each other. The people who might have had the most to teach us—the last generation of hunters and gatherers—went to their graves largely unheeded by the newcomers, taking their knowledge of the prairie and its life ways with them. We are left with little to guide us except for knowledge handed down by Elders and fragments of written descriptions in the journals of explorers and early settlers—partial lists of species, brief sightings, and offhand remarks—that leave many basic questions unanswered.
The depth of our ignorance is startling. Question: How many bison were there on the plains before the slaughter began? Answer: No one can tell us with any assurance. By working and reworking the available strands of evidence, experts have estimated the precontact population at anywhere from 12 million to 125 million animals, a variance that leaves more than 100 million bison in limbo. These days, experts acknowledge that bison once numbered in the millions and probably tens of millions, but that’s as far as they’re prepared to go. And if we cannot account for big things like bison, how much less do we know about the smaller and less conspicuous organisms—little things like insects and spiders, fish and frogs, rodents and songbirds—that lived and died in their untold variety and interest and abundance? Yet if the wild past is lost to us, we can still look ahead. Despite everything that has happened, it is not too late to acknowledge the natural forces that continue to animate the prairie world and that, even today, shape the lives of all its creatures.
ECOREGIONS
