Imagine, if you will, a family or two heading past the tallgrass prairies and scattered woodlands into the sunset. Imagine them cutting through some trees and shrubs somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska, expecting to find yet another open space with a line of trees in the distance. Instead, they find this:
They had heard stories before, of course. Government surveyors, French beaver hunters, even caravan merchants headed for the Mexican markets in Santa Fe had come and gone through the cities of St. Louis and Chicago for decades, telling tales of a vast, empty dry land that opened up beyond the sunset. They heard stories about many things. Now the reality of the stark open lands was set before them. But almost immediately, as a traveler from these days will find, they would discover that the Great plains would end up being far more than just a thousand miles of flat barren sands.
They would find rolling hills.
They would find incredibly rich soils, plentiful rains, and hundreds of species of wildflowers which blanketed the ground.
They would even find places where the eastern forests would refuse to give in to lighter rains and frequent, sweeping fires. They would find large open expanses where there was more sky than planet, where the wind would constantly howl, where the horizon would go on forever.
They would choose to stay in the "Great American Desert" while others would turn back to the eastern lands and still others would follow the wagon ruts and rivers west to the lands of promise in Oregon and California. For a brief time, things were peaceful. Americans, both immigrants and those born in the lands further east, would herd animals, plow and plant what they could, and hunt the Buffalo that teemed throughout the rolling lands of grass. They would live in peace with their neighbors, the Osage and Pawnee. They would build homes dug into the ground and roofed with turf (there were trees, but there were few of them and they were not of construction quality or size). In Canada, they would move out onto these lands and even marry some of the Cree and Assiniboine people there.
Then in the lands of the south, men from further east would insist on ownership of the land. They would run metal rails across it, they would kill all the Buffalo (sometimes for fun), they would let their herds eat through the grass so fast and often that it would not regrow, and they would find shiny metals in the ground that would cause human stampedes. The Osage and Pawnee would die from diseases, and the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Crow would point fingers at the newcomers and one another. Much blood would be spilled. In Canada, the descendants of the First Nations who married the French settlers and company men of the Hudson Bay company would perhaps see what had happened to their south and would rise up against the easterners before they could do the same to them. Their leader would die for their struggle; their voice would echo far into the future.
The winds would carry these voices of the north and the south. They would be so loud that no one would forget what had happened on these open expanses of grass. Perhaps they have been heard, for few people would ever live in these lands again. In many ways, the plains remain as they started. They are still very much a land of frontier. The buffalo are largely gone, Indians are a memory and the object of memorial battlefields rather than a presence, and barbed wire fences in different range lands.
Yet the grass still blows beneath a broad sky.
The land seems to go on forever.
The plains seem to retain a quality of the great unknown that they had two hundred years ago. Many people dismiss them as something to quickly pass through, a stretch of land between the friendly trees and farms of the east and the grand vistas of the mountain west. People insist they died of boredom! Others call Oklahoma through Alberta the "fly-over" lands.
Then some people, like me, know they have truly made it to the west once they see those last trees grow shorter and shorter and cling to riverbanks. Not that the trees out there are unimpressive, mind you. Plains Cottonwoods and Green Ash can be quite the welcome site along rivers like the Platte and Canadian.
Yes indeed, such trees can be a welcome sight if the prairie becomes too monotonous. Then again, very few of the crossings are. Sure, I-70 has about 200 miles of pretty bland terrain in western Kansas, but most of the other routes follow river valleys, pass by volcanoes, and roll up and down with sweeping terrain.
And yes, in some places, you can stand literally in the middle of nowhere and see nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. Even then, though, you notice the small things. The grass gets shorter. The air gets drier. You start seeing sagebrush everywhere, and tumbleweed blows across the road. Shrubs get replaced by cacti.
And then, just when you thought you were going to reach the end of the world, where the ground dries up and you think for sure that nothing can be past that next hill but more endless plains...
You see this.
This then, is the point where you know you have not been going into endless wastelands, but you have been swallowed already by the immensity of the North American West.
This is why I did not include much of the plains in the Midwest, because they are truly part of the west. The air is dry, the horizons are grand, and even the towns have more to do with silence and the war against a hectic pace of life then they do with being towns. They stick up from the plains like small oases, little islands of trees, often with a church steeple in the middle, and broad dusty streets that still have tumbleweed flying across them in high winds.
Are you expecting a saloon fight to break out? I sure was. That is, until I realized that here are people who could care less about a good fight. Or government. Or how prosperous the downtown boutiques are. Here, the most prominent features of town are the local eating/drinking establishment with the most cars outside (which depends on what is on the menu a given night) and the roundabout in the middle of town where sits the modest county hall and a statue to either a famous explorer or famous Indian. You might see a statue of Truman in Independence or some army colonel in any given town in Illinois, but here you are more likely to find one of Black Kettle or Pierre DeSmet. This is a land of farming immigrants, native peoples in love with the sheer immensity of the land rather than what can be grown from it, the descendants of French explorers and fur traders, Mexican and Texan ranchers, and homesteaders, even freed men looking for a new future. This is where the western lands begin.
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