Tallgrass Prairie: Eleven Thousand Acres of What Was Once Everything

Stand here in the Flint Hills and look in any direction. The grasses run to the horizon, and if the light is right and the wind is moving, you are seeing something that once covered one hundred seventy million acres of the middle of North America. The tallgrass prairie was the largest terrestrial ecosystem on the continent. It stretched from what is now southern Manitoba down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas. Bison moved through it in herds that could take days to pass. The Kansa, the Osage, the Cheyenne, and dozens of other nations built their lives on it.

Less than four percent of it remains.

The eleven thousand acres at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve represent one of the largest surviving tracts of original tallgrass on the planet. The rest was broken by the plow. The federal Homestead Act of eighteen sixty-two encouraged settlers to break the sod, which they did with steel plows strong enough to cut through the dense root systems that had bound this soil against wind and erosion for thousands of years. The broken sod produced extraordinary crop yields for a decade or two. Then the rains failed, and the roots were gone, and the soil that had no roots to hold it blew.

Black Sunday, the dust storm of April fourteenth, nineteen thirty-five, was not a weather event. It was the end product of thirty years of systematic sod-breaking, the consequence of removing what had held this landscape together. The Dust Bowl drove an estimated three hundred thousand people to migrate to California alone, out of roughly three and a half million who left the Plains states altogether during the decade. Most of the communities they left are gone.

The preserve here was established as a partnership between the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy. Bison graze it again. The annual burning regime that the Kansa and Osage had maintained for centuries to keep the prairie open and productive is being partially restored. What you are seeing is a fragment of what this region was, preserved precisely because this corner of the Flint Hills was too rocky and steep to plow.