Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie

1. Beyond the Wooden Country

1 Beyond the Wooden Country ONEOF THE FIRST THINGS that the new colonists must have known, as anchor chains rumbled down through hawseholes, was that they had never really seen trees before. Wherever they had begun -in the snug shires of England, the meadows of Brittany, or the diked fields of Holland-they had seen nothing to compare with this wall of forest that rose behind the coast of America. It loomed abruptly from rocky shores, or stood farther off beyond the salt marshes and open savannahs of pine, or behind coastal grasslands. But it was always there, a limitless wildernessof trees, the infinite and forbidding sweep of forest that extended from the portals of the New World as far west as any man knew, and beyond, the greatest forest that westem man had seen during the Christian era. It was a vast crazy quilt of trees in which forests of broadleaved hardwoods alternated with pure stands of white pine growing from old bums and storm-torn parts of the deciduous forests; there were communitiesof oaks and maples, and other communities of hemlock, beech, and basswood that drove deep into the unknown heart of the continent for a thousand miles, bordered on the north by the spruce-fir wilderness of Canada and on the south by southern hardwoods that opened into the savannahs of the Gulf Coast. This infinity of trees reached from the Spanish Sea to the 4 THE PLACE barrens of Hudson Bay, and westward into lands scarcely imagined, with some trees towering nearly two hundred feet above open forest floors that were too shaded for undergrowth . Many years later, Francis Parkman would call it à vast, continuous, dim, and silent as a cavern." It was said that a gray squirrel could travel inland from the Atlantic coast for nearly a thousand miles and never touch the ground. Old novels tell of the "pale woodsmen" of the eastern forests -not a reflection of race, but of lives spent under trees. An old Wyeth illustration for Last of the Mohicans has Leather-Stocking coming into a small glade in such forest and looking up at the sky, cap in hand, his face lit with sun and wonder. But about six hundred miles inland, somethingbegan happening to the thick fabric of deciduous forest. It began to show rents and gaps, with occasional openings. There were fewer tulip-trees, chestnuts, magnolias, and evergreen hemlocks . More and more, the forest consisted of oaks and hickories on the uplands, and maple and basswood on lower ground. There were places where the trees thinned and were undergrown with coarse grassesand strange shrubs. And here and there the trees ceased entirely, and the land opened up into meadows of tall grasses. The earliest land-lookers moving west from New England pushed through great forestsof oak, chestnut, and white pine. South of Lake Erie they began entering forests of hard maples and beeches. In what is now Ohio, they skirted great swamps and found small grassy openings in the forests beyond . Something was happening -no one was sure what. But out there back of beyond, far past the coastal ranges and the leagues of forest, the land changed and began opening to the sky. The Dutch and English colonists did not know just where this happened, or what it looked like, and they made little effort to learn more. It was a confused rumor, a vague impression of new lands lying out there beyond the familiar, of strange deserts and mountains in the Spanish country. Beyond the Wooden County 5 And north of the English settlements, certain churchmen and soldierswere growing restless in Montreal, looking westward and wondering about a water passage to the Pacific. The French were first to break free from the eastern settlements , voyaging west and southwest of Montreal and Quebec in a quest for new lands, new routes, and heathen souls. Late in the seventeenth century they plunged into the wilderness up the St. Lawrence and Ottawa, and west across the chain of Great Lakes. Past walls of fir, spruce, and pine they drove their canoes up dark rivers, across vast new lakes, through Lake Huron, and across Lake Michigan to Green Bay and the mouth of the Fox River, or down to the headwaters of the Illinois and south into the Mississippi. Staying with the water routes, traveling steadily on lake and river, they left the brooding conifer forests of...