The tallgrass prairie

A prairie is not, as you may think, any old piece of flatland in the Midwest. No, a prairie is wine-colored grass dancing in the wind. A prairie is a hillside in the sun, bright with wild flowers. A prairie is a passing cloud shadow and birdsong. It is wild land that has never felt the slash of the plow.

Once the tallgrass prairie stretched from Ohio to eastern Kansas and the Dakotas, and from Texas into Canada. Try to imagine it as it must have been. There were hundreds of kinds of wild flowers. There were elk and bison, and prairie chickens calling on cool April mornings. Great trees along the streams floated like islands on distant horizons. And there was grass, dozens of kinds of grass. Eight feet tall in some places, belt-high in most, it was green and bronze and wine and gold, waving and shining in the sunlight.

It's almost gone now. The tallgrass prairie, the king of prairies, became the corn belt. Became Chicago, became Des Moines, became home for 25 million people. As the farmers' steel plows slashed through it, it almost vanished. Except in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. There the plow ran into thin and stony ground, and so today the Flint Hills are still covered in prairie and in peacefulness as well. The hills are dotted with quiet little towns. It remains a country of cattle and boots, and of stone barns and houses that seem as much a part of the land as the grass itself.

English G 2000 A 6, Cornelsen Verlag, Berlin, 2002, page 72