(From the chapter "The Grassland Ecology" in Isenson's "Destruction of
the Bison". My guess is that will turn into a desolate wilderness much
sooner than anybody expected.)
Early Euroamerican explorers of the Great Plains found the desiccated
grassland mysterious and exotic. To Henry Brackenridge, an American fur
trader who ascended the Missouri River in 1811, the plains seemed
especially foreign. He compared the grassland to "the Steppes of Tartary
or the Saharas of Africa." To other early observers, the landscape
seemed cheerless. Farnham called the plains an "arid waste" and "a scene
of desolation scarcely equalled." The impressions of Brackenridge and
Farnham were typical of nineteenth-century characterizations of the
plains; Euroamericans generally saw the region as a desolate wilderness.
Yet in one seemingly incongruous sense the shortgrass plains were
abundant: the region teemed with animal life. Stephen Long, a New
Hampshire native and Dartmouth College graduate who explored the
southern plains in 1819 and 1820 at the head of an Army expedition,
remarked that although the plains were "wholly unfit for cultivation,
and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for
their subsistence," they were nonetheless "peculiarly adapted as a range
for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game." Josiah Gregg, who
traveled through the southern plains in the 1830s, agreed that the
plains were "all too dry to be cultivated. These great steppes seem only
fitted for the haunts of the mustang, the buffalo, the antelope, and
their migratory lord, the prairie Indian."
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