In 1913, my Danish grandparents settled near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Their view included one tree and, at night, a single light in the distance.
Even today, airline pilots flying the cross-country red-eye call a large, dark chunk of Kansas and Oklahoma "the black hole."
The Great Plains-- bounded by the Ozarks to the south, the Mississippi to the east, the North Woods to the northeast and the true short-grass prairies of Montana and Wyoming to the west--remain as yet uncolonized by hordes of ex-Californian suburbanites. In fact, much of the Plains are actually losing population, as fewer farmers work larger holdings.
In this empty, expansive country there's still room to follow a pointing dog forever or glass for distant whitetails until your eyes hurt.
The majority of the Plains are privately owned, and most of the land has been long since converted from prairie to row crops. Millions of acres of grass, however, await the adventuresome sportsman on federal lands where access is no problem at all. These lands, as Plains native Woody Guthrie (born in perfectly alliterated Okemah, Oklahoma in Okfuskee County) would most assuredly have pointed out, belong to you and me.
The states of the Plains and Prairies are home to National Grasslands covering over two million acres, sprawling Corps of Engineers Reservoirs stretching literally across entire states, National Wildlife Refuges sown densely throughout the northern plains, the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota and other sundry federal areas, including the Army's Fort Riley in Kansas, a well-known destination for bobwhite hunters. To the southeast lie 1.4 million timbered acres of the Mark Twain National Forest in the Missouri Ozarks and the Ozark National Forest just across the state line in Arkansas.
The Ozarks and Black Hills aside, this is a land relentlessly devoid of mountains and forests. The majority of the Plains and Prairies are, in a word, flat, although we natives prefer to call them "rolling."
These flat lands and open spaces make a perfect stage for awe-inspiring displays of prairie weather, which bounces schizophrenically from one extreme to the next. On a recent pheasant hunting trip to Nebraska, an early November snowstorm blew in overnight, the temperatures dropping from unseasonably warm 60s one day to high 20s the next. Thirty mph winds hurtling down from Canada drove stinging flakes sideways, frosting beards, sticking our eyelashes shut. By Plains standards, of course, this storm was the merest of love taps, a gentle reminder that the weather could bury us on a whim.
In Bismarck, North Dakota, you take two sets of car keys when you go Christmas shopping and leave your car locked and running so the engine won't freeze. Plains summers, perversely, are as hot as the winters are cold. In "Tornado Alley" running from central Iowa southwest through Kansas and into Oklahoma, the constant prairie winds churn into deadly twisters with astonishing regularity.
People of the plains are almost naturally selected for helpfulness; they are genetically programmed to aid neighbors and travelers in trouble almost as a pure reflex action.
To appreciate this landscape both bleak and bountiful, try looking at it from a different perspective: maybe trees just clutter up a vista. There is space here in unimaginable quantities, an endless, gently undulating land beneath a huge bowl of a sky that fills you with a sense of sublime loneliness and insignificance.
Stand under that sky just for a moment, and you understand exactly why one prairie settler wrote: "When I saw a child tripping out of home bounds, I had a feeling it would never get back again. It was like putting out into Lake Michigan in a canoe."
Nowhere can you sense the solitude and melancholy of the pioneers as keenly as on the National Grasslands. There are two million acres of grasslands in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, most put together parcel by parcel out of farms abandoned once their soil blew away in the Dirty Thirties, when huge clouds of dust darkened the skies at noon.
Today, the native grasses have been painstakingly restored and the dusty soil healed. There's time to explore the old farmsteads and wonder about the people who lived here, their hopes, dreams and hardships. There are also only so many hours in a day, and the dog, likely not a deep thinker, will be impatient to hunt. You can find prairie chickens, bobwhites, scaled quail, sharptails, ducks, geese, and pheasants in the National Grasslands.
Come back during big game seasons and you can hunt mule deer, whitetails, antelope, even elk.
Heading east, out of the Dust Bowl states, you cross the 98th Meridian, a line which, more than the legendary 100th, marks the boundary between the arid mixed prairies and the lush tallgrass. The 98th runs down through the middle of the Dakotas, eastern Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
In Nebraska, you know you've crossed the line when you no longer see boots stuck over fence posts, a sure sign you've left the West. Around Council Bluffs, Iowa you leave the last of the center-pivot irrigators that scribe real-life crop circles throughout the dry, flinty soil of the Near West.
East of the 98th, the black soil and ample rainfall that nurtured the tallgrass prairies in Iowa, southern Minnesota and northern Missouri now produces record crops of corn and beans, year after year. If you're still in an elegiac mood, you don't mourn for the people who settled here, as you do in the Dust Bowl, but instead for the prairie they conquered.
The tallgrass prairies that survived harsh winters, blazing summers, droughts and torrents, and thrived on fire were victims of their own richness; the black glacial till bound by the deep roots of the grasses and enriched by their ashes was too fertile to leave unturned, and now only the smallest fragments of the original tallgrass prairie have escaped the plow--a few acres here, a road ditch there, scattered in among the corn and beans.
The scarcity of remaining tallgrass prairie makes the new Walnut Creek National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City, Iowa, a true national treasure in the making. Full rehabilitation of the grasses and burr oaks will take many years, but once completed, Walnut Creek will be the largest tallgrass prairie restoration in the country, covering 8,000 acres on a site previously intended for a nuclear power plant. Elk and bison will roam the area as they once did. Meanwhile, there's fine hunting at Walnut Creek for native whitetails and naturalized ringneck pheasants.
One early settler called the Prairies "a country so full of game," and while no doubt he had deer and bison in mind, he must also have been thinking of the elementally huge clouds of waterfowl that traded across the Plains with the seasons. Across the northern plains and prairies, the prairie pothole states glisten in the spring from the reflected light of thousands of small marshes.
Settlers in the last century wrote of poling boats to town in wet years and a train called the "Duck Special" regularly rolled north out of Des Moines through the towns of Mallard, Curlew, and Plover, Iowa, full of eager sportsmen and complete with a refrigerator car to haul their enormous bags of waterfowl.
Tile lines, dredges, and bulldozers have taken a steady toll of the prairie potholes over the years, but in a good year these marshes still produce half the annual duck flight in the U. S. Federal Waterfowl refuges throughout the Dakotas and, to lesser extent, Iowa and Nebraska, play a key role in sustaining the continental waterfowl population.
Nor, should I add, are the refuges are inviolable sanctuaries. Their charter permits "compatible uses," which often include hunting and fishing. Ringneck pheasants, who come from rice-farming country, positively love marshes. You may be required to hunt pheasants with steel shot on most refuges, I am here to tell you they succumb readily to a well-placed load of 4s.
On the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska, anglers have discovered a world-class bluegill ice fishery on Pelican Lake. If "world-class bluegill" strikes you as a contradiction in terms, you've never hauled a limit of 2-1/2 pounders through a hole in the ice.
When the talk turns seriously to fishing in the Plains, however, three names dominate any conversation: Sharpe, Oahe, and Sakakawea. As befits this vast country, they are mind-bogglingly huge: this trio of Army Corps reservoirs creates a lake hundreds of miles long, running from southern South Dakota all the way through North Dakota to the Montana border. These three boast walleye fishing unparalleled across the country. In the fall, when the angling for 10-pound-plus walleyes gets good, smart hunters pack a shotgun in the boat to ward off flocks of ducks and geese.
Below the Dakota dams, the Missouri River, which once meandered and sprawled over a wide flood plain full of fish and game, has been constricted by the Corps of Engineers into a fast-flowing ditch for barge travel. Now, after years of channelization, the Missouri River may flow a little more freely again. Having toiled for half a century to harness the river for barge commerce, the Army Corps of Engineers may spend the 21st century restoring the Missouri to its former glory.
Already projects are underway in places like Deroin Bend near Corning, Missouri. There the Army Corps, in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Conservation, is rebuilding chutes, side channels, and backwater pools on hundreds of acres of river bottom.
"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made," wrote Nebraskan Willa Cather in My Antonia. Let that sense of space, possibility, and freedom draw you to the Heartland.
Spend time exploring the federal lands on the Plains and Prairies and sample their abundance of fish and game. Eventually, you may find yourself nodding in agreement with the Mesquakie Indians, who settled in central Iowa after years of hardship and relocation. "The North," they said, "is too cold, the West too barren, the East too bloody. This place is just right."
Copyright (c) 1997 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.