Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie

by Richard Manning

Walt Whitman and Willa Cather, and Wild Bill Hickok. An elk called Earl. Thomas Jefferson. The plains Indians of North America, and the Mongols of Asia. Cain and Abel, and Job. The mammoths of Hot Springs, fossil horses, big bluestem, and bison.

Richard Manning's Grassland is, to borrow a term from historical romances, sweeping. Subtitled "The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie," the book very nearly lives up to its intentions.

This story of grass ranges like the prairie's hills, and like the hills, is best taken from the small to the large, from the specific to the general, and from the material to the spirit. In the end, though, it is a story of spirit.

This opening paragraph of Grassland reflects well both the style of the rest of the book, and its goals. Were Manning not quite as good a writer, Grassland would fall of its own ambition. He is, however, a good writer, and I think in the end that he does tell a story of spirit, and tells it well.

True to his word, Manning opens Grassland with the specific: with the story of an elk, called Earl, and its inexplicable 1800-mile journey from Montana to Missouri. From there, Manning segues into a visit to a Montana wheat farm and the surrounding community; and he's off and running.

Manning traces the history of the prairie since the ice age, when Clovis man (and woman, presumably) migrated across the Bering land bridge sometime around 10,000 years ago. And as he traces this history, he writes about the prairie in paragraphs that seem to jump all over the map, but that turn out to go exactly where he intended all along. Successive paragraphs, for example, cover fossil horses, grinding teeth, grasses and the rain shadow which caused them, the Rockies, and prairie sod. From the early extinctions of the prairie, of mammoths and camels and ground sloths, which occurred at about the same time Clovis appeared, Manning describes the "lasting peace" that Clovis, and ultimately the American Indian, made with the prairie. And from this beginning, he goes on in subsequent chapters to chronicle the devastation of European industrialism.

Throughout, Manning drops sentences that, by themselves, could constitute entire theses for PhD students:

"This tension between civilization and nomads erupts wherever grasslands exist."

"Jefferson's theory of agrarian democracy was inherently expansionist and derived from a devotion to law."

"In fighting the fences [cowboys] were really no different than a Mongolian prince fending off the irrigating Chinese horde."

I found these chapters fascinating, and am willing, for the sake of a thesis that requires it, to accept his brush that paints in broad strokes. The chapter that begins with Jefferson, for example, describes Jefferson's idea of "yeoman farmers" as the bedrock of democracy; the enactment of the Land Ordinance of 1785 that quartered the west into a grid of 160-acre allotments; John Wesley Powell's ideas of settling the prairie according to its inherent capabilities (something that would have accorded well with Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" a century later); and finally the loss of Powell's ideas:

[Today], one must look hard for the natural contours of the land, raised only subtly by shadows. One must even look hard for the rivers, drained as they are...

But in flight, one need not look hard for Jefferson's grid.

Grassland continues with the recent story of the prairie: the genocide of its inhabitants; the rise and fall of the cattlemen; the disappearance of the buffalo; the history of the prairie farm. And finally, it tells of the current state of the prairie: almost non-existent, irrigated at great expense, cultivated, overgrazed, and invaded with aliens. These chapters make me remember why, for a long time, I did not read environmental literature. We have lost, or destroyed, much of the glory of the prairie, and regardless of what replaced it, the loss is real.

Manning argues further that all the energy that went into transforming prairie into what we thought it should be was, perhaps, essentially useless. The prairie remains almost as unsettled as it was 100 years ago. We have approximately 45 million cattle in the same states that once held about 50 million buffalo. Family farms have been disappearing since the turn of the century, and the yeoman farmer is a myth.

As he promised, though, Grassland is in the end a story of spirit.

Our goal must change from preserving nature as separate from humans to the more necessary task of remaking ourselves so that we might function as a part of nature.

I sometimes wonder what our country would be like if certain pivotal events of history were changed. Not isolated and individual acts, like the assassination of Lincoln, but fundamental moral decisions. What if the Cherokee nation had never walked the Trail of Tears, and there was now an Indian-based U.S. state where part of Georgia is? What then would be the moral fiber of our country, had we been that honorable? What if our original constitution outlawed slavery, or even if the South, upon secession, had freed the slaves? How would major problems of today, poverty and crime, be different? How poor or prosperous would Louisiana and Mississippi be? And to this list I will now add, what if we had settled the prairie with John Wesley Powell's model, rather than Jefferson's? What would our relationship to the land be like now? Would we, perhaps, have avoided acid rain and ozone holes?

Manning, as perhaps an author has to be, is an optimist. On our relationship to the prairie, at least, he thinks we may yet get it right.

There is more at stake here than a concern for the integrity of the landscape; this story has its roots in a concern for the integrity of one's culture and one's own life...

© 1995, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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