Great Plains

The Great Plains is the broad expanse of prairie and steppe which lies east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In Canada the term prairie is more common, and the region is known as the Prairie Provinces or simply "the Prairies".

Subdivisions

The Great Plains is the westernmost portion of the vast North American Interior Plains, which extend east to the Appalachian Plateau. The United States Geological Survey divides the Great Plains in the United States into ten physiographic subdivisions:

• Missouri Plateau, glaciated – east-central South Dakota, northern and eastern North Dakota and northeastern Montana
• Missouri Plateau, unglaciated – western South Dakota, northeastern Wyoming, southwestern South Dakota and southeastern Montana
• Black Hills – western South Dakota
• High Plains – eastern New Mexico, northwestern Texas, western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, most of Nebraska (including the Sand Hills) and southeastern Wyoming
• Plains Border – central Kansas and northern Oklahoma (including the Flint, Red and Smoky Hills)
• Colorado Piedmont – eastern Colorado
• Raton section – northeastern New Mexico
• Pecos Valley – eastern New Mexico
• Edwards Plateau – south-central Texas
• Central Texas section – central Texas

The High Plains is used in a related, more general context to describe the elevated regions of the Great Plains, which are primarily west of the 100th meridian. The 100th meridian roughly corresponds with the line that divides the Great Plains into an area that receive 20 inches (500 mm) or more of rainfall per year and an area that receives less than 20 inches (500 mm). In this context, the High Plains is semi-arid steppe land and is generally characterized by rangeland or marginal farmland. The region is periodically subjected to extended periods of drought; high winds in the region may then generate devastating dust storms.

History

Pre-European contact

Historically, the Great Plains were the range of the bison and of the Great Plains culture of the Native American tribes of the Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and others. Eastern portions of the Great Plains were inhabited by tribes who lived in semipermanent villages of earth lodges, such as the Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee and Wichita.

European contact

With the arrival of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador, the first recorded history of Europeans in the Great Plains happened in Texas, Kansas and Nebraska from 1540-1542. In that same time period, Hernando de Soto crossed a west-northwest direction in what is now Oklahoma and Texas. Today this is known at the De Soto Trail. The Spanish thought the Great Plains was the location of the mythological Quivira, a place rich in gold.

In the next one hundred years the fur trade injected thousands of Europeans onto the Great Plains, as fur trappers from France, Spain, Britain, Russia and the young United States made their way across much of the region. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and subsequent Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1804, the Great Plains became more accessible. A major fur trading site was located at Fort Lisa on the Missouri River in Nebraska. This type of early settlement opened the door to vast westward expansion, with settlements rising across the Great Plains.

Early settlements on the Great Plains

• Cabanne's Trading Post
• Fort Lisa
• Fort Manuel
• Fontenelle's Post

Pioneer settlement

This settlement led to the almost near-extinction of the buffalo and the removal of the Native Americans to Indian reservations in the 1870s. Much of the Great Plains became open range, hosting ranching operations where anyone was theoretically free to run cattle. In the spring and fall, roundups were held and the new calves were branded and the cattle sorted out for sale. Ranching began in Texas and gradually moved northward. Texas cattle were driven north to railroad lines in cities Dodge City, Kansas and Ogallala, Nebraska; from there, cattle were shipped eastward. Many foreign, especially British, investors financed the great ranches of the era. Overstocking of the range and the terrible winter of 1886 eventually resulted in a disaster, with many cattle starved and frozen. From then onward, ranchers generally turned to raising feed in order to winter their cattle over.

Pioneer towns on the Great Plains

• Sioux City, Iowa
• Fargo, North Dakota
• Pierre, South Dakota
• Omaha, Nebraska
• St. Joseph, Missouri
• Las Vegas, New Mexico
• Florence, Nebraska
• Cutler's Park, Nebraska Territory

The Homestead Act of 1862 provided that a settler could claim up to 160 acres (65 hectares) of land, provided that he lived on it for a period of years and cultivated it. This was later expanded under the Kinkaid Act to include a homestead of an entire section. Hundreds of thousands of people claimed these homesteads, sometimes building sod houses out of the very turf of their land. Many of them were not skilled dryland farmers and failures were frequent. Germans from Russia who had previously farmed in similar circumstances in what is now Ukraine were marginally more successful than the average homesteader. The Dominion Lands Act of 1871 served a similar function in Canada.

After 1900

The region roughly centered on the Oklahoma Panhandle, including southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and extreme northeastern New Mexico was known as the Dust Bowl during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The effect of the drought combined with the effects of the Great Depression, forced many farmers off the land throughout the Great Plains.

From the 1950s, on, many areas of the Great Plains have become productive crop-growing areas because of extensive irrigation. The southern portion of the Great Plains lies over the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground layer of water-bearing strata dating from the last ice age. Center pivot irrigation is used extensively in drier sections of the Great Plains, resulting in aquifer depletion at a rate that is greater than the ground's ability to recharge.

The rural Plains has lost a third of its population since 1920. Several hundred thousand square miles of the Great Plains have fewer than six persons per square mile—the density standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American frontier "closed" in 1893. Many have fewer than two persons per square mile. There are more than 6,000 ghost towns in the State of Kansas alone, according to Kansas historian Daniel Fitzgerald. This problem is often exacerbated by the consolidation of farms and the difficulty of attracting modern industry to the region. In addition, the smaller school-age population has forced the consolidation of school districts and the closure of high schools in some communities. This continuing population loss has led some to suggest that the current use of the drier parts of the Great Plains is not sustainable, and propose that large parts be restored to native grassland grazed by buffalo, a proposal known as Buffalo Commons.

Further reading

• Chokecherry Places, Essays from the High Plains, Merrill Gilfillan, Johnson Press, Boulder, Colorado, trade paperback, ISBN 1-55566-227-7.
• Colorado Without Mountains, A High Plains Memoir, Harold Hamil, The Lowell Press, Kansas City, Missouri, 1976, Hardback, 284 pages, ISBN 0-913504-33-5.
• Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945, Michael Johnston Grant, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8032-7105-0
• The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, Paul Bonnifield, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1978, hardcover, ISBN 0-8263-0485-0.
• Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, David J. Wishart, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8032-4787-7.
• Woody Landscape Plants for the High Plains, D. H. Fairchild and J. E. Klete, Colorado State University, 1993, Technical Bulletin LTB93-1 (Contact CSU to buy this).
• Wolf Willow, A history, a story, and a memory of the last plains frontier, Wallace Stegner, Viking Compass Book, New York, 1966, trade paperback, ISBN 0-670-00197-X
• The Tie That Binds (1984), a novel about farming by Kent Haruf, Vintage Books 2000, paperback, ISBN 0-375-72438-9.

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