The second of converted slide show scripts. While I cannot remember where we got all the text, some of it was taken from Love Song to the Plains, by Mari Sandoz of Nebraska. We were so infatuated with the short grass prairies of Eastern Colorado and her writings, as well as the writings of the several advocates of this part of the earth. I am sorry to not have the exact authors’ cited.
Typing this into a blog thirty years after we first encountered the Plains and put together this show, I realize how true much of what we saw then still exists. Cycles.
(A creation story) “Once long ago, all things were waiting in a deep place far underground. There were the great herds of buffalo and the antelope too and wolves, deer, and rabbits. Everything. Even the little bird that sings the tear-tear song. Everything waited as if in sleep. Then, the one called Buffalo Woman, awoke, stretched her arms, rose and began to walk. She walked among all the creatures. Everywhere as she passed there was an awakening, and a slow moving as when the eyes were making ready for some fine new thing to be seen. She went on to a dark round place that seemed like a hole and she stood there awhile, looking. Then, the bowed her head a little, as on does to pass under the lodge flap and stepped out.
Suddenly, the people could see there was a great shining light all about her, a shining brightness that seemed blinding as she was gone. And now a young cow arose and followed the woman, and then another buffalo and another, until a great string of them was following. When the last of the buffaloes was up and moving the people began to rise too. All the people, young and old and weak and strong went out through the hole out upon the shining warm and grassy place that was the earth, with a wide river, the Platte, flowing below. And over everything a blueness, with the “tear-tear” bird flying toward the sun, the warming sun.
The buffaloes were already scattering over the prairie, feeding, spreading in every direction toward the circle that was the horizon. The people looked all around a knew this was their place, the place upon which they would live forever, they and the buffaloes.”
When Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux, speaks of the “beauty and strangeness of the earth” he speaks of reverence for the everyday environment. (seven slides) The Indians knew the way of the land. Their lives centered around the buffaloes and the horse, their noblest companion. For the Indian, the earth was the floor of the sky. The animals were varied and bountiful. (six slides) And, like the Indian were proud. The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for living, growing things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So, he kept his youth close to its softening influence.
Just as each season turns and disappears, so did the Indians vanish. “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the White Man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the East came, and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began. “
“The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands
and how they pawed the prairie sod into
dust with their hoofs, their great heads
down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.”
“The first whites to attempt permanent settlement of the Plains were the cattlemen.” The long horn steer became as common a sight as the vast herds of buffaloes had once been.
“The bawl of a steer,
To a cowboy’s ear,
Is music of sweetest strain;
And the yelping notes
Of the gay coyotes
To him are a glad refrain.
“For a kingly crown
In the noisy town
His saddle he wouldn’t change!
No life so free
As the life we see
Way out on the Yaso Range.
“The rapid beat
Of his bronco’s feet
On the sod as he speeds along,
Keep living time
To the rapid rhyme
Of his rollicking cowboy song.
“The winds may blow
And the thunder growl
Or the breezes may safely moan;
A cowboy’s life
Is a royal life,
His saddle his kingly throne.”
“During the early part of this short era the cattlemen succeeded in development a mobile and flexible way of life that grew out of the conditions in the region. A close study of his way of life would have avoided much of the tragedy that followed the coming of the homesteaders.” Humid area man came with his old institutions of towns and organized government, “…seeking…to utilize the land in the manner of men in the humid timberlands.”
Barbed wire was patented on November 24, 1874 and became one of the most important inventions in American history. It changed the face of the west and it made possible to include or exclude cattle. The settlers won the battle against the semi-nomadic cowboy because of pressures from institutions outside the Great Plains, such as the Homestead Act.
“The homeseeker’s wagon rode the ridges as the gray wolf traveled them, hunting both side and ready to dodge out of sight either way at any sign of danger….But no Indian scare ever really stopped the settlers coming. For they were under the protection of the United State Cavalry whose purpose became, not one of defense, but one of extermination of the native people of the Great Plains. This land was indeed difficult for man coming from the east, unprepared for adaptations. So, they came in wagon trains, at first passers through.”
“Somewhere, some evening, the homeseeker would drop the wagon tongue with finality, water and hobble the tea, while his wife bent over the supper fire of dead wood or buffalo chips. Afterward, they might lean against a wagon wheel, the baby at the woman’s breast, and look out over the prairie gilded by a sky that blazed beyond anything they ever saw in the country left behind them. The man might test the grass with his teeth, consider last year’s sunflower stalks to gauge the earth’s fertility, the height he could expect his corn to grow. Perhaps he dragged a spade from the wagon, struck it deep into the ground, shook out a sod to examine the root system, tried a ball of soil in his hand, and nodded to himself. This was the place.”
So, they came in droves, beguiled by sweet sounding advertisements, reports of free or inexpensive land and a good husband. The families survived hunger, wild animals, ticks, flees, grasshoppers and drought. And came to establish themselves. “In the end the Plains woman night be as weather beaten and wrinkled as an old boot top, but still standing firm beside her husband and children, grown strong together while overcoming the calamities that dog the vulnerable.”
Many changes accompanied the settlers. They wanted their own section of land. Cattle to be profitable must be fat. To have fat cattle you must have grain. (two slides quickly)
Also changing the face of the west were the windmills, which began to appear in the early 1890s. They made it possible to raise cattle in formerly barren, dry areas.
Humid area man, unaware of the delicate nature of the Great Plains over plowed, over-grazed, and over produced the land. Rain did not follow the plow to the detriment of all. Early settlers came to love their adopted land thought they did not understand the balance of nature. They suffered and prospered together.
Transportation, at first slow and crude, improved, thus encouraging more people to settle the plains. “May 10, 1869, the Gold Spike was pounded near Promontory Point, Utah, uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific. Emigration to the Plains was encouraged to provide material for the trains to transport.”
James J. Hill became the railroad baron of the west. Once isolated homesteads gave rise to towns, mere clusters of flat-roofed buildings. Those who chose not to live by the plow, often lived by the gun.
“Though historians may blame the farmer for over plowing , he was the victim of many things vbeyond his control. The whole nation was in the midst of a depression. Prices were low and costs were high. In desperation, he intensified his efforts, plowing land that should have been allowed to lie fallow. He gambled that the rains would come…they did not. By the mid-thirties the land had been baked to death. The farmers left.”
Through trial and error the technology of today has become sophisticated. The towns are often cultural centers. The essence of the modern Great Plains is measured by functionality.
If you go into the Prairie what will you see? (five slides)
“To look upon that landscape in the early morning with the sun at your back is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this you think is where creation began.”
Thanks for reviewing this history. It is good to know where we came from and how much we can learn, as time goes by. This Earth Day is proof that we must care for the Earth as part of ourselves, as the essence of our soul.Ruth