The Great Plains is the broad vast area of gently rolling land, which was once covered in short grassland. To the east of that was an area of more rain and taller grass and which made up the Prairies.
This area includes the states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota and parts of the states of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming and the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
This land is about 500mi (800km) east to west and 2,000mi (3,000km) north to south. It was the natural home of the millions of American bison before they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century. This whole area used to be called the High Plains, which is more accurate, as the tallgrass prairies (Midwestern states)in the east are on lower ground. Today the High Plains is a term used for the Great Plains nearest to the Rocky Mountains.
The Great Plains lie to the east of the Rockies, and so are a region called a rainshadow. But this does not mean they get no rain at all. In winter, cold, moist air flows down from Canada bringing snow, and in summer, hot moist are is pulled in from the south bringing fierce thunderstorms and tornadoes. The southeastern portion of the Great Plains is the most tornado active area in the world, and is sometimes referred to as Tornado Alley.
The high altitude of these lands means that the air is relatively thin and does not hold heat overnight. This, coupled with the rainshadow effect, means that there is a large number of sunny days – pleasantly warm in summer, but very cold in winter.
The flatness of the land means that there are no obstacles to airflow, and wind speeds are high. Wyoming is the windiest state in America.
The rainfall is seasonal and irregular. But there is another feature of the weather on top of this. The weather goes in long term cycles, with a few decades of wetter conditions followed by a few decades when it is drier. This is why it is a land with few trees, for trees need more water than the High Plains can reliably provide.
The grasses that grow in this environment are very deep rooted. They can stand up to deep frost in the winter, and to long periods of drought. The growing buds are below the surface, so they can survive the bison and other grazing animals, and also fires that may follow lightning strikes. In fact, in this dry area, fire is important, for it helps burn off the dry dead grass leaves that would otherwise build up. By burning the leaves, the nourishment in them is turned to ash which can be used by the plants to make new leaves.
The bunch grasses that make up the High Plains are very tough, and because they are not easily dislodged, they form an effective protection for the soil below. Much of the soil in this area is very silty, which is the easiest soil of all to blow away. When it blows, its fineness makes people talk of dust storms rather than sandstorms.
For thousands of years, these lands were home to Native Americans who lived in a semi-nomadic way, following the buffalo herds. The numbers of Native Americans was in balance with the environment , and they did not disturb the grassland surface.
The first European settlers crossed this land as they went west to the fur trapping areas of the Rocky Mountains. The earliest people sometimes saw it in times of low rainfall and called it the Great American Desert. They could not see a use for such land, and in any case the plows that people owned at the time were not capable of breaking up the thick turf created by the bunch grasses. It was this thick turf - or sod- that gave the first new generation plows the nickname of ‘sod-busters’.
In the 1830s, the first of the pioneer wagons moved across this land on their way to Oregon and California. Some people founded way stations, or supply depots along the routes they took, and these would later become the beginnings of the towns of the Great Plains. But these early pioneers did not stop.
Even as the first fur traders moved west, so they brought diseases for which the Native Americans had little resistance, and up to two thirds died. This meant that the Native Americans were put at an increasing disadvantage compared to the millions now pouring west.
During this early time, the land was still open. It was the cattle farmers who moved in first, trying to manage great herds of almost wild cattle. This was the time when the legends of the cowboys grew up, and the Wild West largely belongs to the land of the Great Plains.
At first it was not very profitable to rear cattle, as they was no way of getting them to market. But when the railroads moved into this area, there were suddenly railheads that could take animals to a welcoming market in the east. This was the time when the cattle drives began, the most famous of all being the Chisholm Trail. At each trailhead a cattle stockyard developed, and later still this became a town. Many towns of the Great Plains (for example Wichita and Dodge City) started this way. Between 1866 and 1895, cowboys herded 10 million cattle north to railheads.
Even at this stage the dangers of the Great Plains weather were becoming clear. As soon as the railroad came, many wealthy people financed the early great ranches. Overstocking of the range and the terrible winter of 1886 resulted in many cattle starving and freezing to death. Cattle were simply not as hardy as the native bison. (President) Theodore Roosevelt, who was a rancher in the Dakotas, lost his entire investment, forcing him to return east to politics. But the lesson was learned: from this time on, ranchers generally raised feed to ensure they could keep their cattle alive over winter. This, and the invention of barbed wire, meant that the range became gradually more and more fenced in – to the detriment of any remaining bison and the Native Americans.
This the Great Plains were mostly settled long after the time of the Oregon Trail, during the early years of the transcontinental and other railroads. The railroad owners had been given vast tracts of land either side of their tracks as a way of encouraging them to put in the investment for the railroads. Now the owners were keen to make money on this land. But they saw two problems: the Native Americans (who were mostly not hostile) and the bison. They set about removing both, so that they could then open up the land to new homesteaders whose produce would need to be carried on the railroads. At the same time, the US Homestead Act gave away land to people willing to settle on the Great Plains, and as a result, huge numbers of inexperienced, and poor, would-be farmers and their families moved into an area where the climate was among the harshest and unreliable that you can find. Some were so poor they had to make their houses from slabs of the very turf (sod) they were cultivating.
But they also arrived at a time in the weather cycle where the rains appeared to be good. So, with new plows, they were able to grow crops and survive. The railroad enabled them to sell wheat for shipping east. Their costs were so low because they had got the land at a very low price or even free. This meant that they could sell their produce cheaply, and still make money, and merchants could sell it on cheaply to the world's markets. In this way America started to become the breadbasket of the world.
The majority of the immigrants to the Great Plains were from from Germany and Scandinavia. All were married, as it was absolutely vital to have the entire family, including children, working the land. This saved paying for too much hired help.
Whenever they could, these early settlers got together to be social as well as helping each other with things that a single family could not do alone, such as barn raising, corn huskings (shucking), and quilting. There were also many church and school functions.
But in the process of all this farming, the farmers removed the protective sod from the land, so that when the cycle of drier conditions arrived and the winds blew, so the soil began to blow away and the crops would not grow.
This was the area and the time about which the famous novel "The grapes of wrath' was written.
The region from the Oklahoma Panhandle, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, suffered worst in the 1930s. It became known as the Dust Bowl. Drought and blowing wind was made worse by the fact that the country was in the grip of the Great Depression, which meant that the farmers could not raise loans. Many of these people, who all came to be called 'Okies', were forced to move west to seek a new life, leaving the land abandoned.
It took a lot of effort by the Department of Agriculture and retraining of farmers to get the land productive again. But by the 1950s, farming was once more thriving, this time with the help of irrigation from the huge aquifer that lay in the rocks below the plains. Today, center-pivot irrigation is used, but there is a long term threat of a new disaster when the aquifer has been exhausted.
The 1920s was the time when the number of people in the Great Plains was at its height. Since then, the Dust Bowl tragedy and mechanization have reduced the population by a third. There are hundreds of ghost towns in the state of Kansas, for example.
Although the winds of the plains have traditionally been a curse, today, they do have some benefits. This 'wind corridor' is one of the best places in the US to generate electricity from wind turbines.
