The 'Great Plains'

By Paul A. Johnsgard

The Great Plains cast a footprint-shaped imprint over the heartland of North America that covers a million square miles, the heel resting gently on the glacial-shaped plains of eastern Alberta and the toes touching the muddy shorelines of Texas and northeastern Mexico. Across much of this 1,800-mile north-to-south distance perennial grasslands once exerted their quiet dominance, sustaining the lives of the ecologically and culturally diverse tribes of Native Americans and of the hundreds of species of mammals, birds and reptiles. These grasslands also supported myriads of smaller vertebrates and invertebrates that are much less well known and tend to be overlooked by present-day casual observers.

Michael Forsberg is no casual observer and has spent several years visiting remote corners of this grand but now sadly fragmented ecosystem, photographically documenting the best of what remains. And it is a glorious documentation; most of the photos are not only highly artistic but also ecologically informative. Most of the images occupy an entire page, but sometimes spill over to cover two pages of this coffee-table-sized book. Any photographer perusing the book will repeatedly be brought up short with envy and admiration, wondering how in the world some of the images could have been obtained. As one who has wandered with camera in hand over much of the same country as Mike, I am often reminded of the fact that I have seen many of these same places and species but also never captured them in the same way that Mike was able to do so effectively. I would never have believed that one could, for example, obtain salon-quality photos of a wild cougar in western South Dakota or a full-frame scene of a prairie-nesting Sprague’s pipit, a will-o’-the-wisp grassland spirit that I have rarely been able to approach any closer than about 50 yards.

Mike managed to assemble a blue-ribbon team to help tell his story. Ted Kooser compares Mike’s photos to the brief flashes of distant landscapes visible through the open doors of boxcars as a freight train whizzes past a Dakota railroad crossing. And I have often thought that, of the tens of thousands of photos in my own collection that were acquired in over a half-century of photography, the total exposure times for all these images would add up to only a few brief seconds of one’s life. Effectively choosing how and which of those tiny slices of time should be saved for visual posterity is the mark of a great photographer. Mike has chosen very well.

Dan O’Brien is a rancher-falconer-writer who, in the words of Shakespeare, truly knows a hawk from a handsaw. He is also a great storyteller and in this book recounts some of his experiences with Mike, with the bison that he has been raising commercially for more than three decades on the shortgrass prairies of South Dakota and with the Great Plains generally. He points out the critical importance of water in sustaining life on the Plains; the true Holy Grail of the Great Plains is not some mythical chalice, but rather the subterranean reservoir of our region’s purest water, the Ogallala aquifer.

David Wishart is a University of Nebraska geographer who has been documenting geography and human history for several decades, with a special interest in the near-destruction of the Native American culture following European settlement. Professor Wishart provides historical overviews for each of four major sections, which consist of an overall historical introduction plus separate accounts of the northern plains, the southern plains and the tallgrass prairies that form a dynamic eastern boundary connecting the grass-dominated plains with the deciduous forests of America’s Central Lowlands. There are also four accompanying maps that identify national grasslands, national parks and monuments, prairie preserves and similar natural attractions in the Great Plains.

Wishart’s text is laced with many historic photos, dating from as early as 1859. One especially memorable one is a 1933 photo of some 1,600 dead prairie dogs, their corpses artistically arranged so as to spell out U.S. BIOLOGICAL SURVEY across a badly overgrazed landscape. Now part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and renamed the Division of Animal Damage Control, poisoning prairie dogs and coyotes is still a favorite pastime for many government employees, while other federal and state biologists are trying equally hard to protect prairie dogs in order to preserve the nationally endangered black-footed ferret. Speaking of irony, Dan O’Brien describes how the nests of some threatened least terns and endangered piping plovers, for which the U.S. Corps of Engineers had constructed artificial nesting islands at great expense in the Missouri River, were flooded and the chicks drowned when the Corps raised the river level high enough to let a barge pass to provide a load of turkey feed to a downstream farm. About the same time, Mike managed to photograph a hawkmoth pollinating some nationally threatened western prairie fringed orchids just a few days before the ditch-growing orchids were all cut down by a mowing crew. Such heartbreaks are all too common experiences for those people who love spending time in the natural world.

The book concludes with a list of addresses, phone numbers and Web sites of 41 private and governmental organizations concerned with the conservation and management of our natural resources, plus 23 literature citations that relate to Professor Wishart’s introductory sections. Assuming that your bookshelf is strong enough to withstand the book’s weight (over four pounds), this is a volume that any lover of the Great Plains should certainly have. Considering the hundreds of marvelous color plates, the book’s relatively low price is probably a reflection of subsidies by The Nature Conservancy and many private benefactors. One cannot view these natural treasures, even if only vicariously, and fail to appreciate that, in the facing of ever-mounting environmental crises, we must preserve as many of these remnants of our grassy Eden as is humanly possible.

“Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild”
Photographs and Field Journals: Michael Forsberg, Foreword: Ted Kooser,
Essays: Dan O’Brien, Chapter Introductions: David Wishart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (2009)

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