Pawnee National Grassland: The Buttes at the Edge of the Rockies

Drive east from Fort Collins and the Front Range disappears behind you. The land flattens into the short-grass prairie of the eastern Colorado plains, where the horizon is an abstraction and the sky takes over most of the landscape. Forty miles out, two pale sandstone formations rise from the grassland like outposts, visible from twenty miles in any direction. These are the Pawnee Buttes, and they have been landmarks on this prairie since long before anyone was keeping a written record.

The Pawnee National Grassland surrounds them. It was assembled through the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of nineteen thirty-seven, when the federal government purchased failed homesteads across eastern Colorado after the Dust Bowl had defeated the dryland farming economy that had replaced the bison-hunting economy before it. The grassland covers roughly one hundred ninety thousand acres in two separate units, the western and eastern Pawnee blocks, bisected by privately held ranch land.

The buttes themselves are capped by rock tens of millions of years old, eroded from the Brule and Arikaree formations that cover much of the Great Plains. The badlands surrounding them yield marine fossils from the Cretaceous interior seaway that covered this region eighty million years ago. Bones erode from the wash banks after heavy rains. The Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado has collected extensively from this area.

The Pawnee people, for whom the buttes and the grassland are named, lived east and north of here, in what is now Nebraska, until their removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma in eighteen seventy-four. Their path through the country is older than the buttes' designation, and considerably older than the cattle economy that followed them.