Sheyenne National Grassland: The Tallgrass Prairie That Survived in the Coulees

The Sheyenne National Grassland in southeastern North Dakota is one of the few places in the eastern Dakotas where the original tallgrass prairie survived in any meaningful extent. Most of the tallgrass was gone before the federal government had any mechanism to protect it. The homesteaders of the late nineteenth century were efficient. They plowed wherever a plow could go.

Where the plow could not go was the coulees, the steep-sided ravines cut by the Sheyenne River and its tributaries into the glacial till of the Red River Valley's western edge. The terrain in those drainages was too broken for wheat, too unstable for the steel plows that were turning the rest of North Dakota into farmland. The grasses that had been there since the retreat of the glaciers, roughly ten thousand years ago, held on in the coulees because the coulees were not worth plowing.

The Sheyenne River valley that the grassland protects is one of the last substantial tallgrass remnants in the Northern Plains. The grassland covers roughly seventy thousand acres, administered by the Dakota Prairie Grasslands unit of the Forest Service. It is also one of the few remaining habitats for the western prairie fringed orchid, a species that requires undisturbed wet prairie meadows and is listed under the Endangered Species Act. The orchid blooms in July. It is extremely difficult to find unless you know where to look and are willing to walk through tall grass up to your chest.

The Sheyenne was also part of the homeland of the Lakota and Dakota nations who hunted this country before the homestead era. The grassland's proximity to the eastern edge of their treaty territories makes it one of the few accessible remnants of what the prairie looked like when the treaty boundaries were drawn.