by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

This book, originally published as “Passage of Discovery“, is an ecologist’s guide to the first half of the Lewis and Clark trail, their travels up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Three Forks, MT.  I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  Comparing what Lewis and Clark saw with what we see today is one of the best insights we can get of how nature and environment in American has changed since European settlement.   I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

16. The Allwine Prairie: Once Vast Prairies Are Now Rare

At 144th and State streets, Omaha. There are several routes from downtown Omaha.  You can take Route 64 west to 144th Street and go north on that street to the intersection with State Street.  Or you can take Interstate 680, the beltway, to Exit 6 and go northwest on Route 133 to the intersection with State Street.  Take State Street west to 144th St.  Permission is required; contact the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

We were standing at the corner of 144th and State Street in Omaha, Nebraska, looking for a prairie.  It was a sunny late afternoon in August, and we had left a large, sprawly Ramada Inn on the westside of Omaha, driving for more than an hour through dense rush hour traffic.  The air was hot, the paved landscape busy.

Following the directions we had been given, we reached the outskirts of the city, where the land opened into active farms, suburban homes, and tree-shaded roads.  We had been told to look past the intersection where we were and that we would see a sign.  There it was, attached to a tall chain-link fence:  “This is the Allwine Prairie Preserve, a Research Area of the University of Nebraska, Omaha.”

We parked on the side of the road and got out to stare at the peculiar site.  The fence protected the prairie preserve from us and us from the prairie.   For the past week, we had been searching the Nebraska and Iowa countryside, with advice from many friends and prairie experts, for remnants of the tallgrass prairie, and here was one, but locked away, protected, preserved.

It was an ironic sight.  In the pre-European settlement landscape, the landscape of Lewis and Clark, prairie once covered more land in the United States than any other kind of vegetation – more area than the green deciduous forests of the East that spread from Maine to Georgia; more area than the deserts of the southwest; more than that of the boreal forests that covered our northern border from Maine to Minnesota and spread into Canada to Hudson Bay.

Prairies dominated the landscape where it was too dry for forests, but not so dry as to allow cacti, coyote bush and sagebrush.  Here, most of the rain occurs in the spring and summer — from April through September — and averages about 29 inches a year – wet for prairie land.  In this wetter end of the prairie, fire keeps forest out, and in this experimental preserve, fires were lit regularly to maintain the grasslands.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, the prairie reached from the middle of Minnesota and the western side of Iowa to the Rocky Mountains.  Prairie reached north to the tundra in Canada, covered much of Saskatchewan and Alberta, covered eastern Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, western Illinois and Ohio, eastern Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas, western Missouri, the eastern edge of New Mexico, and spread into Oklahoma and Texas, ending at the edge of the desert in Arizona.  Separate outliers extended in the far West: the Palouse grasslands of Washington and the grasslands of California’s Great Central Valley.  These vast and often seemingly empty lands were the home of the Apache, Assiniboine, and Cheyenne; the Chippewa, Comanche, and Crow; the Kiowa, Mandan, Omaha, Osage, the Otee, Pawnee, Ponca, Sioux, and Wichita.   Prairies at one time covered one-fourth of the Earth’s surface: the steppes of Asia, the pampas of South America, the veld of South Africa.

I stared at the fence and the sign.  Why look for a prairie within a great city rather than in the countryside? Because it is only in tiny remnants, like the Allwine Prairie Restoration, that prairie exists today.  I thought about the typical impression of the Midwest by those who do not live there and only pass through it.  Easterner friends always say to me “drive as fast as you can from the mountains of the East to the mountains of the West; get past all that corn and soybeans, it’s so flat and boring.”  But originally prairies not only covered vast areas, they were, in that vastness, beautiful, overwhelming.   Staring at the locked up prairie, I could only think about the early impressions of the tall grasses by Lewis and Clark.   It was in the prairies that Lewis and Clark began the transition from the civilization they knew to the land unsettled by people of European descent, and it was through the prairies, on their return, that they re-entered their civilization.   So it was the prairies that first gave them the sensations of wild America.

Reading accounts of early travelers across America had fascinated me for years, and I remembered the descriptions of later travelers.  One was Josiah Gregg, who traveled the prairie by horseback some decades after Lewis and Clark and wrote that the land of tall grasses was “as level as the seas” and was so immense and wide that “the compass was our surest, as well as our principal guide.”  It was the big sky country.

“North America’s characteristic landscape,” Walt Whitman wrote, “while less stunning at first sight” than Yosemite, Niagara Falls and the upper Yellowstone, the prairie scenes “last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest.”

But the American prairies contain some of the best farmland in the world, wonderful soils under a good, if fickle climate, and the land first opened up by Lewis and Clark was rapidly converted to corn and wheat and other small grains, and later to soybeans.  There was so much prairie that it seemed not a valuable commodity by itself, and few paid attention to its rapid disappearance.  In the nineteenth century, this vast, fertile and beautiful landscape had no hero, no John Muir, no Aldo Leopold.

And so the prairie all but disappeared.

We parked and got out and walked over to an interpretative sign that told us that the Prairie Preserve was “a reestablished bluestem grassland research area” on 140 acres that had been previously farmed.   The land had been donated to the University in 1959 and seeded in 1970 with native grasses – mainly big and little bluestem (known to botanists as Andropogon gerardii and Andropogon scoparus), with smaller amounts of side oats grama, Bouteloua, and Indian Grass (Sorghastum nutans), all major grasses of the eastern prairie.

We walked over to the restored prairie and saw some tall forbs (tall flowering plants that are not grasses) about six feet high, scattered among the grasses that grew about four feet tall.  Above, swallows swirled over the prairie.  Beyond, to our right, there was a large farm field where a John Deere tractor was pulling a hay harvester.   The tractor growled and shifted gears.  The harvester-bailer opened its huge jaws and vomited out a great cylinder of brown hay, neatly tied.  The jaws clanked shut and, almost with a smack of lips, settled down as the tractor began to mow once again, driving through a perfection of geometric uniformity.  In contrast to the farmland, the prairie vegetation appeared very patchy – a bunch of tall forbs in one place, some patches of grass, then a bunch of another flower; upslope the grasses had the reddish hue of little bluestem.

Seeing little bluestem was like visiting with an old friend, because this prairie grass found its way east thousands of years ago – during an especially warm period after the end of the last glaciers – a tongue of prairie that stuck out from Iowa into Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, east past New York City and all the way to eastern Long Island where, if you look carefully, you can see its pretty rusty-hue on the slopes along the Northern State Parkway as you drive to Orient Point, the far end of that island.

So here we were, viewing a restored prairie, and a tiny patch of one at that.  It was better than not seeing prairie at all, but there was none of the sense of vastness, of that special wind-wavy wildness.  Standing between farm field and restored prairie, we could see that the two fit together easily.  Unlike a lot of other conservation issues, there wasn’t a conflict here except for space.  Prairie and farmland can exist side by side.

In our century, the novelist Wallace Stegner, who grew up in the northern remnants of the prairie landscape called it “this grand ocean of wind-troubled grass and grain” which had “the biggest sky anywhere” and “a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent.”  He wrote that “the drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. . . looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their aweful perfection on the observer’s mind.”  It was that feeling of the big sky and the big grasses as far as the eye could see that I was searching for, a kind of wildness unfamiliar to modern America.  We returned to our car and set out once again to look for a larger patch of that aweful perfection, somewhere to the north, perhaps.