Caddo and LBJ National Grasslands: Prairie Remnants in the Post Oak Belt

Two national grasslands sit within two hours of downtown Dallas, and most people who live in the Metroplex have never heard of either one. The Caddo National Grassland and the Lyndon B. Johnson National Grassland, together covering roughly forty thousand acres in north Texas, are the southernmost units in the national grassland system, and they represent something unusual for this part of Texas: a landscape that was never primarily cultivated, or that was cultivated, failed, and is being allowed to recover.

The Caddo Grassland lies in Fannin County near the Oklahoma line, taking its name from the Caddo Nation whose homeland covered northeastern Texas and adjacent Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas for more than a thousand years before European contact. The Caddo were among the most sophisticated agricultural societies in the pre-contact South, building platform mound complexes and maintaining trade networks that connected them to communities from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains. The Spanish documented their settlements beginning in the sixteen eighties. By the mid-nineteenth century, repeated treaty revisions had reduced the Caddo to a small reservation in Oklahoma, where the Caddo Nation remains headquartered today.

The LBJ Grassland lies to the west, in Wise County near Decatur. It is named for President Lyndon Johnson. The name does not refer to the LBJ Ranch in the Hill Country, which is a separate site several hundred miles south.

Both grasslands were assembled under the Bankhead-Jones Act of nineteen thirty-seven from failed farms and eroded cotton land. They are managed today primarily for recreation, wildlife, and watershed protection. Caddo Lake, the large cypress swamp on the Texas-Louisiana border, lies forty miles to the east. The grasslands sit at the edge of a landscape that has been substantially altered and is incrementally recovering.