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Prologue THEY WERE BLIND MEN describingan elephant, those first Europeans , sendingback word of the New World in terms of the forests or swampsthat lay a few leagues beyond the tidelines. They had no clues to the heartland itself. There was no hint of the freshwater seas that lay farther west, of mighty rivers draining watersheds the size of central Europe, of mountain ranges that ran from subarctic to subtropics. Least of all was any consciousness of the great interior grasslands that lay far from any ocean. They knew nothing of that country and could not have understood it had they known it was there -for grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. The newcomers brought no real knowledge of grasslands; it is doubtful that any had seen the open steppes of Eurasia, and few had even heard of that region. They surely knew nothing of African veldt, South American pampas, or Australian lowlands. To those first European explorers and colonists , grassland probably meant snug meadows, deer parks, and pastures safe behind fence and wall. They had no basis for even imagining wild fields through which a horseman might ride westward for a month or more, sometimes traveling for days without sight of trees. xii Prologue And even when the grasslandswere finally met and shakily framed in some sort of geographical context, they were not really comprehended. Most arrivalsventured timidly into the edges of the grass and clung to the outriders of forest like mice hugging a wall. For this was alien land, not only in physical appearance but in its harsh rejection of familiar custom ; it diminished men's works and revealed them to a vast and critical sky, and forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves, and changed them forever. The world had opened into a light-filled wilderness of sky and grass that would open its people as well, freeing them of certain dogma, breaking old institutions, and shaping new ones to fit the land. Each wave of American settlement from east to west had progressively deepened New World naturalization , and no settlers were altered more deeply than those who drew away from the treelands and became true grasslanders at last. Most easterly of the interior grasslands, and first to be entered by settlers, was the vast domain of tallgrasses that lay against the wall of deciduous eastern forest. It was a belt of grassland that hooked down out of southern Canada, broadened to six hundred miles through the Midwest, and ran for more than a thousand miles toward the Gulf of Mexico. It was a temperate savannah of unbelievable fertility, as those who put roots into the deep black soils would learn. It was flowing emerald in spring and summer when the boundless winds ran across it, a tawny ocean under the winds of autumn , and a stark and painful emptiness in winter when the great long winds drove in from the northwest. It was Beulahland for many; Gehenna for some. It was the tall prairie. ...

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