|
Lewis and Clark encountered vista after vista of undulating prairie grasses and wildflowers that in places reached over their heads, toward the sky. It was a truly remarkable sight. At the time, America’s vast prairies stretched across one-third of the country, spanning about 90 million acres. Their abundance supported a tremendous diversity — from large herds of animals like pronghorn, to birds, to butterflies — that led the Corps to call this land a Garden of Eden.
As Lewis studied the prairie plants, he would find one grass growing in profusion: big bluestem. It tickled the bellies of bison that fed on its highly-nutritious leaves, which, at times, covered swaths several acres wide. Its immense size allowed it to crowd out competing plants, making it the most plentiful grass on the prairies.
Settlers longed to farm the great, open prairies, but found their immense root system too much to bear. Roots make up about 70 percent of these plants and reach depths of 10 feet. The 1837 invention of the steel-bladed plow changed that, allowing pioneers to slice through the dense roots systems and plow huge pieces of land.
Writer Herbert Quick talks of this transformation in Vandemark’s Folly: ”Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, most epochal, the most hopeful, and as I look back on it, in one what the most pathetic things man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end."
|
In Their Own Words... |
|
"We Camped in the plain, one of the most butifull Plains I ever Saw, open and butifully diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the river covered with grass and a few scattering trees, a handsom Creek meandering thro."
~ Clark | | Once plowed, people discovered the roots of prairie plants — like big bluestem — had created some of the world’s richest soils. These abundant soils turned the Midwest into the nation’s breadbasket. But plowing the prairie also brought problems. The dust bowl disaster in the 30s, for example, is linked to plowing the prairie, which removed much-needed prairie plants to keep strong winds from blowing away soil.
Only remnants of these once vast natural prairies remain today. America’s tallgrass prairie is considered the most-imperiled grassland in the world, with less than 1 percent of it surviving. | 
