Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Six

101 Six B Y THE MIDDLE OF APRIL I WAS ENGULFED IN A HIGHER education malaise. Spring was burgeoning, but in a Minnesota way. The birds were returning, to be sure, but in Minnesota you have to stand still or creep slowly around a tree trunk to see them. The geese are of the golf course variety. They exude none of the mystery of the long-distance flyers that are heralded by faint honking and appear over the grasslands a mile high and five miles out. There are no diurnal owls to speak of. Things are always moist. The greening of grass is a certainty. No magic there. The trip to Belwin lingered in my mind. I continued to think about the tallgrass prairie that once had stretched along the eastern flank of the Great Plains from far southern Canada to parts of eastern Texas. Scholars divide the Great Plains into three parts. Ostensibly , the differentiation is by vegetation: tallgrass, mixed grass, and shortgrass. Vegetation type and fertility in the form of increased organic matter are determined mostly by rainfall, with the height of the grass diminishing as the rainfall tapers off—from over thirty inches of moisture in the eastern tallgrass to around ten inches in the shortgrass along the Rockies. The lines between the grass types are not hard and fast, and elevation and proximity to water courses play a part. But the bulk of the Great Plains, where buffalo are most at home and where the Cheyenne River Ranch is located, is mixed grass. In many places the suite of species that historically made up the mixed grass prairie, though stressed, is still intact. The tallgrass, of course, is nearly gone. 102 P A R T T W O Buffalo probably did not spend much time in the tallgrass. The big herds likely moved from the west to Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota after sections of the fuel-rich tallgrass had burned with summer thunderstorms. They would have loved the new, fast-growing grass shoots. There were some visitations of fair-sized herds after the homesteaders began to fill those regions, but sighting a buffalo was something special. In fact, prairie species began diminishing as soon as Europeans began violently changing the ecosystem in the early 1800s. Because of the ample rainfall and the deep topsoil, built from eons of decayed tallgrass, European agrarian lust for that land was understandable. What is less understandable is the contemporary American nostalgia for tallgrass prairie that no living person remembers. In the historic tallgrass landscape there are scores of postagestamp -sized restoration projects that can never right the wrongs of the past. Those museum-scale preserves can only serve as perpetual reminders of the already past wrongs. Without a paradigm shift they will function only to salve the consciences of the beneficiaries of the great tallgrass exploitation. Carleton College has such a reminder that is called, ironically, Cowling Arboretum. It was established in the1920s by college president Donald Cowling and Professor Harvey Stork as an educational open area adjacent to the college. It is a tremendous asset to the college and has grown to an 880-acre laboratory for the enjoyment and study of what was once the northeastern edge of the tallgrass region of the Great Plains. What is most striking to me is that the perception of its value seems to have shifted in the ninety years since the “Arb’s” inception. The genesis seems to have been rooted in the same nineteenth-century landscape philosophies that led to a cascade of ecological catastrophes . By its name we know that the arboretum’s founders held trees in high regard. There is a hint of European landscape control and “improvement” in the early plantings which can still be discerned from the seeming chaos of Mother Nature clawing her way back to dominance. Somewhere in the Arb’s history, restoration ecologists embedded in Carleton College’s faculty were able to wrestle 103 control away from the nature controllers; now the educational thrust is focused on 150 acres of tallgrass prairie fighting to reestablish itself. It is a ferocious battle that may not be winnable. In the last century the perennial grasses were expatriated by an onslaught of mechanical and chemical farming. Naturally occurring fires were outlawed, so even in the field corners where the tractors could not reach, the more fire-vulnerable invasive annuals were given the advantage. Weeds...