The Lawns of God
Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie (1995)
By John Madson
Iowa native John Madson (1923-1995) wrote on the natural history and resource conservation of rivers, prairies, plains, and deserts. His work has been extensively published in periodicals such as Audubon, Smithsonian, and National Geographic, among many others. His books include Up on the River, Out Home, Stories from Under the Sky, and Tallgrass Prairie.
Long ago, the prairie grasses taught me that I have more in common with Rip Van Winkle than with Leather‑Stocking. Oh, I'll rush around through the boondocks if the occasion demands. But even then I keep an eye peeled for prime loafing areas—especially through midday when most of the action is slow, anyway. Maybe I'll shut down beside a sandbar log by a creek riffle, dozing to water music and the rattle of kingfishers. And there's a favored place under a bur oak at the edge of a clay bluff where I can stretch out and look past the toes of my boots and down over the bends of my home river.
But the best loafing place of all, come high summer, is in the deep grasses of a certain quartersection of original prairie.
It is just below a swell of ground between the tallgrasses of the low flats and the midgrasses at the crest of the rise, a place where bunch‑forming prairie dropseed grows in solid clumps a few feet apart. The intervals between these little hassocks are heavily matted with dried grasses in a resilient bed, slightly curved and conforming perfectly to a horizontal man. The mat of last summer's grasses is springy and firm; beneath it is the deep bed of fluffy prairie loam that is wholly unlike the solid black soils of adjacent croplands. There are no clods, stones, sticks, or roots in this bed. With one of those firm sods of prairie dropseed as a pillow, it makes for as fine an afternooning as any loafer could want.
I lie there just under the wind, the grasses harping and singing faintly, their tones rising and falling, the prairie world washing over me. There is no point in moving; with a little time, the wind will bring the world to me in a steady and varied traffic. Watching under the brim of my hat I see a dragonfly, alias devil's darning needle, darting downwind to the slough off below. Next comes a squadron of monarch butterflies on their way to some crimson patch of butterfly milkweed. A male bobolink arrives twenty feet above me, hanging on the wind and stating his territorial claims with a flow of bubbling song, and then slides off to the east. His departure reveals the red‑tailed hawk that he had eclipsed—a mote that swings and drifts, too high to be hunting and too late to be migrating, and plainly soaring just for the sheer exuberant hell of it, exulting in the prairie thermals that cushion his pinions from below and the prairie sun that beats on them from above. The hawk appears to be busily occupied, but he doesn't fool me. He's just another loafer. It takes one to know one.
Thoughts while loafing:
Not even Rip Van Winkle could have slept for twenty years on a prairie. The place for that is a deep glen that encloses a man in a snug vessel of trees and hills, insulating him from the sky and wind. A grassland crackles and flows with stimuli, charging a man to get on with something. A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit anything else to rest. It has barriers to neither men nor wind and encourages them to run together, which may be why grasslands men are notorious travelers and hard‑goers, driven by wind and running with it, fierce and free.
Forests have surely housed many free and fierce people, but I somehow imagine them as being preoccupied with laying ambushes in thickets, worshiping oak trees, and painting their bellies blue. I could never take Druids seriously. They're not in the same class as Cossacks, Zulus, Masai, Mongols, Comanches, Sioux, the highland clans of treeless moors, and trail drovers tearing up Front Street. Grasslanders, all.
There was a vein of wild exultation in such men. It wasn't just the high‑protein diet, nor even that some of those men were mounted—although the horse people were among the wildest of all. I have a hunch that it was the mood of the land, stimulating its people with openness, hyperventilating them with freedom in a world of open skylines and few secrets. Such grasslanders never seemed to harbor the nasty little superstitions that flourish in fetid jungles and dank forests. Their superstitions were taller, their sagas and legends more airy and broad, and running through their cultures was a level conviction that they were the elite. While some forest people retreated into the shadowlands, men of the open had no choice but to breast the fuller world—and often came to do so with pride and even arrogance. It was a sense that was transferred almost intact when men left the land and took to the open seas, or learned to fly. They were all part of the same—wanderers beyond horizons, children of the wind who belonged more to sky than to earth, conscious of being under the Great Eye ...
High above the red‑tailed hawk are the steady ranks of cloud, coasting down the westerlies. When I first lay down here they were dragging their shadows across me; now they are driving their shadows ahead of them, telling me that the afternoon is wearing on. Which is as much clock as anyone needs. The hawk, not occupied with loafing thoughts, has already heeded his clock. He is losing altitude and returning to work. It's time that I did the same. Loafing done, I stand up in the wind.
I see each oncoming gust before I feel it—advancing swiftly across the prairie in a long wave of motion, sometimes escorted by patches of cloud shadow that change the tone and color of the grassland as the wind changes the shape. More than in forest, and even more than on sea or lake, it is here that the wind is most visible. The ripening grasses bend and winnow, the waves of our air ocean rolling over the wild meadows until, as Willa Gather put it: "The whole country seems to be running."
The wind will enter the distant grove of trees with a roar, for it resents the oaken strength of trees and shouts and growls as it wrestles them, tossing their crowns furiously. But out here on the open prairie that wind only sighs and whispers, passing over the grasses with little resistance. The grasses bow to the wind's force, acquiescing to its passage and letting it go unchallenged and undiminished.
Tallgrasses are adjusted to their lives with wind; their tough stems are resilient and slender, strong without weight or broad dimension, and slipping easily out of the wind's grasp. Much of this sinewy strength is provided by the outer rind of the grass stem, which is reinforced by an oxide of silicon—a sort of primitive fiberglass. This is the stuff that gives a glossy, polished appearance to maturing grasses and may comprise 70 percent of a grass's ash content. Certain bamboos contain so much silica that a knife can be whetted on their stems, and the hollow interiors of those stems may contain white residues of hydrous silica called tabishir—almost identical with the hydropane variety of mineral opal. Traces of biogenic opal in old soils may remain for thousands of years—fossil evidence that grasslands once existed in regions that have long been forested.
Silicon apparently serves grass as lignin serves trees; both reinforce the cellulose of cell walls and allow those plants to attain heights that they could never reach if they relied solely on the turgor pressure of their cells and were tightly inflated with their own juices. My favorite belt knife testifies to the mineral toughness of ripe grass stems. It is good steel, and kept very sharp, but cutting a few armfuls of ripe Indian grass will dull the knife almost as much as dressing a bull elk.
A lot of creative engineering has been lavished on grasses. The stems, or "culms," have joints called "nodes," which are solid partitions that reinforce the tubular stems at regular intervals and provide rigid anchor points for the base of each leaf. The internodes between these joints are usually hollow, although they may be filled with pith, as in corn. In all cases, the internodes of the culms are thin‑walled, light, flexible, and remarkably strong.
At each joint of the grass stem is a leaf whose lower part is a split sheath wrapped tightly around the stem. At the summit of this sheath the grass leaf flattens, departing from culm in a long, narrow blade. The junction of leaf sheath and blade may have a small "ligule"—a stiff little membrane in some grasses—that reduces the amount of water that might flow down the leaf blade and into the sheath, promoting the growth of fungi. Some grasses have semicircular auricles at the juncture of blade and sheath, tightly grasping the stem with pincers that reinforce the grip of the sheath and resist tearing by wind.
The leaves of many prairie grasses have special structures for adjusting to drought. Canada wild rye, the bluestems, and Indian grass have leaves of nearly uniform thickness, with groups of large "hinge‑line" cells in the upper epidermis of the leaf tissue These hinge cells lose water rapidly, contract, and cause the leaf to roll up in a long tube. The pores through which water vapor is normally transpired are on the inside of this tube, and the exposed lower surface of the leaf is highly impervious to water and allows no loss of precious water vapor during drought periods.
Grass leaves are also neatly adapted to withstand grazing by animals. These leaves grow from their bases on the stems, and not from the tips. If a grass blade is eaten, it continues to grow; if the stem itself is eaten, new shoots are produced by old stem bases near the surface of the ground. When such stem bases are numerous, the grass forms a characteristic tuft or bunch.
The flowers of grasses are insignificant little structures, lacking fragrance, nectar, and bright colors. There's no spectacular floral envelope, or corolla, but only two or three delicate scales. Grass flowers are wind‑pollinated, with no need to attract insects. The grass fruits themselves are usually small—but are amazing little packages of superbly balanced nutrition that are infinitely important to man. All of our tame cereals, of course, have been bred from wild grasses. Yet the wild grasses continue to be of immense value in their original form—anchoring and building soils, and producing meat and wool. And there may always be outdoor purists who insist that wild rice is the only acceptable stuffing for roast wild turkey and Canada goose, and that the split‑bamboo flyrod and citronella mosquito lotion are hallmarks of the ultimate trout fisherman.
As grasses depend on wind for pollination and fertile seed production, most also depend on wind for the spread of those seeds. Some tiny grass seeds float for great distances on wind; the little spikelets of Vasseygrass, Vaseyochloa multinervosa, have been recovered by research planes at 4000 feet. This grass, introduced into Louisiana from South America a century ago, has been wind‑spread from Virginia to Southern California.
Other grass seeds are transported by animals I have discarded wool socks (that I foolishly wore with low moccasins in late summer) rather than pick out the barbed spears of some needlegrasses and wild barleys that turned the socks into bristling masses that were torture to wear. Such seeds can be maddening to sheep and other heavy‑coated animals. Equipped with long bristles or "awns" that twist and untwist with changes in humidity and temperature, they can literally screw their barbed points through fur and into flesh to cause painful sores and infection. And during those barefoot summers of boyhood, we learned to dread the spiked fruits of another grass, Cenchrus pauciflorus, the sandbur.
For spreading out of place, the grasses depend on transport of seed by wind or animal. For spreading in place, they rely on special stems that creep underground or just above the surface. The underground stems, or rhizomes, are jointed culms that extend laterally below the earth's surface and produce new stems and rootlets from the tip of the rhizome or from its nodes. A stolon is a reproductive stem that grows along the surface of the ground, putting down rootlets from its growing tip. A perennial grass may form a dense sod, a mass of individual stems, by either rhizomes or stolons. All of which are anchored and nourished by a dense crowd of fibrous roots and rootlets that extend deep into the prairie loam and may support a clump of tallgrass for half a century.
Each stem of prairie grass stands straight, a slender antenna between the flood of solar energy and the deep banks of stored energy within the soil. Unlike the miserly trees, a grass does not hoard that energy by tying it up in woody structure. The grass spends itself freely and annually, deepening and fattening the black soils below and pouring strength into the animal biomass above. Climax prairie is the product bought with all this spending, an investment of energy that compounds itself. Each creature of the prairie community, from bison to corn farmer, has shared the dividends of the grass. Each, in its own way, has proclaimed that "all flesh is grass."
•
My loafing prairie has most of the main components of any tallgrass prairie, allowing for the fact that it's rather flat and poorly drained country of the type most recently glaciated—a sort of child land whose face hasn't really jelled into mature features.
Still, the lay of the land is modestly varied—with little swells and swales and enough physical relief to encourage some plants that like their feet moist and others that like their feet comparatively dry.
Off below me is a rank belt of sloughgrass, marking a wet swale of the kind that early wagoners learned to avoid by watching for "black grass." Although sloughgrass is a rather serious green, it can hardly be regarded as "black." But the sedges just beyond it are a somber conifer‑green that shows dark against the vivid tones of the upslope grasses.
Sloughgrass is the most hydric of the taligrasses, loving deep, moist, poorly aerated soils that other prairie grasses would never tolerate. It marks the last low advance of the prairie grasses to the edge of marsh and slough. Just beyond it begin the sedges, grading into cattails and bulrush. With time, sloughgrass will fill a swale of low land, raising it above its former cattail and sedge vegetations and converting the place to rich prairie soil that will be occupied by tall grasses that require slightly drier conditions. Almost transcontinental in its range, sloughgrass is a common land‑builder at the edges of water—from the brackish marshes of the Atlantic coast to wet swales in the Far West.
Also called "prairie cord grass" (presumably because of its tough leaves and stems), its Sunday name is Spartina pectinata Some call it "ripgut," and you need only run your hand along the edge of a leaf to see why. The leaf‑edge is finely serrate, with a stiff wire edge like a good butcher knife. Before I learned to wear gloves while cutting mature sloughgrass for dog bedding, I used to wonder who was harvesting whom.
That's a prosperous stand of ripgut down there; it's doing well, and by late summer the wiry floral stalks may rise nine feet above the boggy soil. It comes on rather late, often in midApril, but then grows faster than any other prairie grass. The root system is tough and dense—a tangled mass of coarse, gnarled, woody rhizomes and rootlets that form a sod as solid as a floor. In a woodless country, such a plant was put to special uses. Twisted faggots of tough sloughgrass leaves and stems made pretty good fuel, and sloughgrass sod was probably the best of any for building sod houses. The Mandans and other prairie Indians used the leaves to thatch their permanent lodges, covering that thatching with several inches of soil. Prairie settlers adopted this, and often used sloughgrass to thatch haystacks and outbuildings. If cut early in the summer, before it toughened, sloughgrass made good hay—but the leaves had a way of tangling so badly that it took a good man to pitch a great forkful up onto a hayrack. Even when loaded, the hay was still a problem. Old‑timers have told me that entire loads of fresh‑cut cord grass hay had an enraging habit of slipping off a wagon—and then the heavy work of pitching the hay began all over again.
In spring and early summer, sloughgrass is one of the preferred grasses for grazing, but by late summer it is much too coarse and tough for forage. When cured, however, it's useful for livestock bedding because it doesn't break down easily. I've never found anything better for a dog kennel. All in all, useful stuff.
The prairie around me appears to be a rather uniform, sunswept grassfield that varies somewhat in tone and texture. At a closer look, these grass patterns begin to resolve into rather distinct communities that are graded according to elevation and drainage. The lushest, tallest grasses occur lower down, through the poorly drained swales and flats. These are the hydric grasses such as ripgut, requiring plenty of moisture. Just beyond them are more mesic grasses, still in well‑watered soils but farther from the slough edge and extending up the gentle slopes. Even farther up are the shorter xeric, or "dry‑loving," grasses on the relatively exposed, welldrained crests of the prairie swells. Height classes of these wild grasses express water supply, just as trees do. The early settlers confused the picture by referring to "low prairie" and "high prairie"—an allusion to elevations of the land and not to the height of the grasses. Generally, low prairie has high grasses and high prairie has low grasses.
Downslope from where I stand, just this side of the dark swale of sloughgrass, is a lightercolored, less dense grass with strong glossy leaves and upper parts with a rather lacy, open look. This is switch grass, Panicum virgatum, another excellent hay and livestock food. It lacks the dense, jungly appearance of the sloughgrass; the ground beneath it appears to be more open, and its midsummer seed heads are opening into broad spangles up to two feet wide. The plants are not as tall as the cord grass, nor even as tall as some grasses farther up the slope, but some of the panicled seed heads may stand six feet high. Here and there among the patches of switch grass are the heavy, bearded heads of a wild grain—the Canada wild rye, Elymus canadensis, its green, heavy seed heads already nodding on the slender four‑foot stems. Greenish‑blue, and up to nine inches long, the heavy spikes of wild rye were used as food by some Indians.
Closer toward me—stretching up the lower and middle contours of the long gentle slope where I am standing—is an old friend. The symbolic grass of tall prairie, an official stamp of prairie authenticity, the big bluestem or Andropogon gerardi.
This is one of the great dominants of true prairie, the most universal of the prairie's tallgrasses and a marvel to the early settlers who plunged into it and left accounts of big bluestem so tall that it could be tied in knots across the pommel of a saddle. That, and the stories of bluestem pastures so dense and deep that cattle vanished in them and could be found only if a herdsman went to high ground or stood in his saddle to watch for telltale movement in the sea of towering grasses. Such anecdotes are so common that they are trite; yet there's no reason to doubt them. In my home county in central Iowa, early settlers carved routes through the big bluestem prairie by dragging heavy logs chained to teams of oxen. Big bluestem sod, with its coarse rootstocks and rhizomes, was a favorite for building sod houses. Almost as good as sloughgrass sod, it was far easier to cut.
The big bluestem association—the singular community of grasses and flowers commanded by big bluestem—has been called "the true prairie, the prairie." Big bluestem covered the secondary flood plains of broad stream valleys, advancing upslope along gentle hillsides and benches. In old Illinois, it was the climax grass of uplands as well as lowlands, and in Wisconsin and Iowa entire townships were covered with big bluestem—a reflection of the generous rainfall and gentle drainage of those regions. On some Kansas prairies, big bluestem apparently hid cattle even on some of the uplands, and the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas are still called "The Bluestem Hills" by some ranchers. Farther out in the drier prairies, this lofty grass retreated down into protected swales and ravines. But it reigned wherever good moisture levels prevailed—from the low valleys of Lake Winnipeg south, down through the alluvial flats of prairie rivers and wellwatered uplands with gentle drainage gradients, all the way to the Gulf Coast of Texas.
It is a mighty grass. The leaf growth may stand three feet above the ground, and the strong seed stems often rise over six feet high. In my little patch of backyard prairie, well‑watered and fertile, the culms of big bluestem extend higher than I can reach—at least nine feet tall.
It has other names, such as "bluejoint," which confuses it with similar grasses. One of the common names is "turkey foot," or "bluejoint turkey foot," because of the distinctive threebranched seed head that is unmistakable. It takes its most common name from the bluish‑purple bloom of the main stem. Although it is generally a lowland grass, big bluestem avoids the moist, heavy, poorly aerated soils in which cord grass thrives. Big bluestem wants plenty of moisture, but occupies a middle ground between the wet and dry, between the hydric and xeric. It is mesic in its moisture needs—an ecological analog of domestic corn. The finest corn habitat today is that in which big bluestem reigned yesterday.
For some obscure reasons, big bluestem tended to move up the slopes following settlement—giving rise to the old saying that "bluestem followed the settler." The well‑drained prairie uplands were usually the ones first broken and planted to crops, and the typical midgrasses of those uplands were the first of the wild prairie grasses to be wiped out by cultivation. If those plowed fields were left fallow, big bluestem and other tallgrasses often moved in and the growth of midgrasses was not renewed. Today, big bluestem is likely to occur in prairie relicts that were originally occupied by midgrasses, which is not to say that big bluestem was immune to the ravages of cultivation. Like other tallgrasses, it was a magnificent hay and pasture grass—although it had to be mowed for hay early in the season before it became tough and sinewy. But the upper parts of the prairie were usually the first to be broken and cultivated, giving the lower stands of big bluestem a slight reprieve—and a limited opportunity to replace midgrasses that the pioneers had found somewhat easier to plow.
The stands of big bluestem below and around me are an almost closed community as far as other grasses are concerned. Forming dense sod and thick foliage, turkey foot greatly reduces light penetration to the soil and discourages most shorter species. This apparently doesn't deter its own shaded seedlings; the leaves of big bluestem seedlings can synthesize food under light values that may be only five percent that of full sunlight. It is a tall, strong, vigorous "dominant"—in the sense that its influence largely dictates the conditions under which other plants in its community must develop. Even where there may be some open ground between the sods of big bluestem, the overwhelming influence of this mighty grass prevents occupation of that soil by lesser types. In the lushest parts of the tall prairie region, the Andropogon gerardi community is a terminal association that has maintained its integrity for thousands of years.
But there is something that I miss on this northern Iowa prairie—or know that I'll miss when the tall grasses are fully mature.
There is little Indian grass here, the Sorghastrum nutans so familiar farther south in my section of southwestern Illinois and more southerly parts of the tallgrass prairie country. It is almost identical with big bluestem in size and requirements, but isn't as happy on the northern prairies. There's quite a bit of it in the Flint Hills and points south, but even in its best range it isn't as abundant as big bluestem. It has a relatively weak spot in its life history—an inability to tiller and form underground rhizomes under tough competition, and it is unable to spread as strongly as big bluestem.
Yet it's a spectacular grass—every bit as tall and showy as turkey foot, with leaves that branch off the stem at a 45º angle instead of drooping and spreading as widely as big bluestem's. Ripe Indian grass is a golden lance that is usually a bit more erect than bluestem and is somewhat more likely to be found at all levels of the prairie—on certain uplands as well as slopes and bottom ground. The leaves are usually broader and a bit lighter in color than big bluestem's, and long before its plumelike seed head appears, Indian grass can be identified by a distinct little clawlike ligule on the upper surface of the leaf blade where it joins the sheath. (In their early stages of growth, before any floral parts appear, several features identify the tallgrasses. Sloughgrass has its finely serrated leaf edges; Indian grass has that special ligule. Big bluestem has a slightly flattened lower stem and usually has hairy lower leaves, and switch grass has a dense nest of fine, silvery hairs where the leaf blade joins the sheath. Of these wild grasses, Canada wild rye is the only one that has strong, pincerlike auricles tightly clasping the stem at the base of the leaf blade.)
Although Indian grass is less likely than big bluestem to be found in broad, dense stands, there is a four‑acre patch of pure Indian grass on an open hillside in the woods near my home. This lies along the route of my Saturday morning excursions with Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts—which still mix like oil and water in spite of the unisex trend. I've often led these yelling emulsions of boys and girls to that stand of Sorghastrum—priming them with a couple of suitable Indian yarns and then sending some of them into the tallgrass as ambushers, to be followed by the main wad of ambushees while I lounge on the hilltop. The rich yellow depths of the Indian grass—it's called "goldstem" by some—undergo a wracking convulsion. It seems a rather modest adventure, I know, but being an Indian four feet tall who's lost in a fastness of eight‑foot grass is about as much as you could ask of a September morning. And there's always a kid or two who gets lost in there. A search party is organized, solemnly charged with a sense of mission, and sent to the rescue giving me another half‑hour of idleness.
A big patch of tall Sorghastrum is the ultimate playground. The kids are safely lost in deep grass that soaks up their noise and energy, finally spewing them out tired, quieter, and almost human. Another plus for prairie.
•
Upslope from the big bluestem and Indian grass, the midgrasses begin—less rank, more finely foliaged, and standing little more than waist‑high at maturity.
Of all these (and there are more midgrasses than tallgrasses), the little bluestem Andropogon scoparius is the greatest dominant—as much the master of its upland realm as its tall cousin is of the lower ground. Together, the two bluestems constituted nearly three fourths of the cover on original tallgrass prairie. In some transition zones, as in the western parts of the Flint Hills and lower reaches of Nebraska's Sand Hills, big and little bluestem may grow in mixed stands of almost equal proportions. But farther west, in the mixed prairies lying between the taligrass country and the Great Plains, little bluestem may represent 90 percent of the grassy vegetation.
It is a shorter, finer, more delicate grass than big bluestem, without the characteristic turkeyfoot seed head. The flower stalks of little bluestem rarely grow more than three feet tall—the ripening seeds equipped with fluffy plumes that named the plant "prairie beardgrass." Like big bluestem, it is superb forage for tame and wild grazers, and the weight gains of cattle on wellmanaged bluestem pastures can be phenomenal. For over a century the vast bluestem pastures in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas have been prized for their spring and summer forage, and are historic finishing range for Texas cattle.
Little bluestem leaves are more slender and wiry than those of big bluestem, and until they mature the leaves are light green. Then they begin developing a distinctive reddish cast that deepens in autumn into rich russet, bronze, and maroons. An autumn ridge of little bluestem is unmistakable—the prairie's reply to the hard maples and sumacs of the forest. Big bluestem also develops a winey shade in late fall, but never matches that of its little cousin.
To see both bluestems in late summer is to see prairie. Especially under what Wallace Stegner called "the grassy, green, exciting wind, with the smell of distance in it." As you stand on a long prairie swell in summer fields of little bluestem, wind is apparent not only in waves of motion but in shades of varying green. Pressed downwind away from you, the little bluestem prairie is the light green of upper leaf surfaces. Turn and look behind you—there, upwind, the prairie is darkened with deeper underleaf tones and shadow. A puff of wind runs past not just as visible shape and motion, but as a shifting wave of color distinct from the whole, something like the undercurl of a tall ocean comber just before it topples.
By comparison to little bluestem, other midgrasses are rather minor characters in most portions of the prairie. However, my loafing prairie—a rather flat, poorly drained place with no uplands worth mentioning—has no little bluestem that I know of. The dominant "upland" grass here is prairie dropseed, a midgrass that is apparently tolerant of poor drainage because I can see it growing on some of the flats below. All around me are the distinctive sods of prairie dropseed. Early this spring, when part of the prairie was burned, these dropseed bunches emerged as firm little hassocks on the prairie soil—straight‑sided and rather cylindrical, up to six inches high and a foot across. At such times, my khaki‑clad posterior has a chronically charred appearance, for a dropseed sod is a perfect place to sit and take notes. Each of these sods becomes a dense clump of yellow‑green, gracefully drooping leaves that may be as much as eighteen inches high. By late summer the seed stems will be three feet tall, each terminating in a broad, spreading panicle that bears the rather large seed heads.
Farther north, little bluestem is increasingly mingled with needlegrass, June grass, porcupine grass (Stipa spartea) and the wheatgrasses. Yet, even in southwestern Manitoba, two of the commonest prairie species are big and little bluestem. And farther south and west, in warmer and drier regions, it's no contest. Little bluestem is king.
Needlegrass, one of the midgrass dominants of the northern prairies, once reigned over thousands of square miles of uplands. It is a grass of the sandy prairie rises, with long tapering leaves that are finely corrugated above and shining green beneath. No grass is more graceful in the wind, the shoulder‑high, heavily fruited stems bending and nodding in rippling fields. Unlike other prairie grasses that cure in shades of tan, yellow, or russet, needlegrass stems and leaves usually become dead white, and from a long distance the late autumn prairie appears to be drifted with snow.
Sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) is a common and more southerly midgrass with leaves that can be identified by fine leaf‑edge hairs with swollen bases, and flower stalks that zigzag up through the seed heads. Like the other common midgrasses, it is excellent livestock forage.
There are transitions among prairie grasses, from north to south as well as east to west. In the easterly, well‑watered portions of the tall prairie, big bluestem may be the dominant grass even on uplands—but farther west it tends to retreat into lower parts of the prairie, leaving the exposed, well‑drained uplands occupied by the little bluestem community. There are always exceptions to this; a certain upland prairie, by virtue of poor drainage, may wear tall grasses that are normally found farther down in well‑watered flats. It is conceivable that a stand of sloughgrass might exist in a high, "hanging" swale well above some lower slopes that are better drained and are dominated by little bluestem.
Latitude has a strong effect on the distribution of wild grasses, for some are of northern origin while others hail from southerly regions. Prairie grasses are generally classed as "coolseason" and "warm‑season" types. During the xerothermic postglacial period when grasses began to replace trees in drying, warming parts of what would be prairie country, certain grasses moved east out of dry western regions, and others moved north out of the southeast and southwest. The two types mingled freely, for their requirements had considerable overlap. But as the climate again cooled and moistened, some western species of grasses tended to shrink back toward the drier ranges from which they had come. The grasses of southern origin remained, for the general climate was still within acceptable limits for grasses that had evolved in more southerly climates. The most important grasses in the tallgrass prairie—big and little bluestem, Indian grass, and sloughgrass—are all of southeasterly origin and still occur today in forest openings and savannahs of the east and southeast. Prairie dropseed and switch grass are also warm‑season grasses that originated south of their modern ranges.
On the other hand, some prairie grasses are of northern origin: the cool‑season grasses such as June grass, needlegrass, Canada wild rye, and slender wheatgrass. Such grasses typically renew their growth in early spring and have usually reached maximum development from early April to early June. By late spring or early summer they have matured and produced their seed—usually becoming semidormant during the hot months and resuming growth during the cool autumn months. By contrast, the warm‑season grasses commence annual growth later in the spring—growing continuously all summer long and producing seed from late summer into early fall. After that there is no growth, and these grasses invariably "ripen" and lose their green tones after seed production. Big bluestem is a prime example of a warm‑season grass of southerly origin, growing continuously from April until mid‑August or early September—when its job of seed production is finished. A typical and familiar cool‑season grass is Kentucky bluegrass, which produces shoots, leaves, and seed heads in early spring, is dormant during the hot, dry summer, renews growth in the cooler, wetter days of fall, and may remain green until the first hard frost.
These traits are reflected in prairie latitude. Needlegrass is of little importance from Kansas south, and Indian grass shows decreasing importance in the more northerly prairie ranges. To the North Dakota prairie farmer, needlegrass and June grass are familiar parts of the homeland; to the Oklahoma farmer, Indian grass and broomsedge are just as familiar. Both farmers know big bluestem, for turkey foot is a universal component of tallgrass prairie.
There are about 150 kinds of grasses in tallgrass prairie, but probably no more than ten of these ever achieve any real dominance in their own special parts of the prairie. Most of the grasses are of minor importance, also‑rans in terms of total prairie cover but genuine prairie components nonetheless. In terms of total range, and density within that range, nothing can compare with the two bluestems. They are succeeded in rank by Indian grass, sloughgrass, switch grass, prairie dropseed, and sideoats grama—followed by dwindling proportions of Canada wild rye, June grass, porcupine grass, the wheatgrasses, needle‑and‑thread, the needlegrasses, and others.
•
In the smooth, undulating sweep of my loafing prairie there are no angular interruptions, no sharp gradients. Any breaks in the land are masked and smoothed by the summer waves of high grasses. But a few yards away from me, crowned by a mass of blue milk‑vetch, is an odd mound about twelve feet in diameter and two feet higher than the surrounding level. Forty yards away there is another. All in all, there are over a hundred of these strange mounds on the Kalsow Prairie.
Called "Mima mounds," they take their name from the Mima Prairie south of Olympia, Washington—a place that's studded with the little hillocks. They resemble burial mounds as much as anything, and were once thought to be Indian gravesites—although digging always fails to produce any bones or artifacts. Here at Kalsow these mounds range in diameter from six to seventy‑two feet, and some rise several feet above the prairie. They are most obvious in late winter when the prairie vegetation is flattened and the slightest relief in the landscape is revealed, but even in midsummer the strange, alien mounds are distinct because they support different plants than the prairie around them.
No one is sure how these Mima mounds are formed. The most common theory is that they were begun by animal digging—certain ants or perhaps pocket gophers—and enlarged by frost heaves and differential contraction and expansion of the soil, growing larger as they caught dust blown in from adjacent farmlands. There is no doubt that they attract animals; they often show signs of digging, and the mounds often are soft and friable, with the consistency of a new gopher mound, although gophers alone would never raise mounds as large as these.
The mound itself is a loose column of earth that may be six feet deep. It lacks any sort of soil profile, and is obviously created by a digging, heaving, and mixing action of some sort. Back in the late 1950s, a young graduate student named John Tester grew interested in Mima mounds in Minnesota's Waubun Prairie. He dug into the subject in late autumn and winter, and found large numbers of toads hibernating in the loose soil of the mounds, evidently moving up or down in relation to temperature and staying just under the frost line. One mound less than thirty feet in diameter held 3276 toads that had burrowed an average of three feet deep—moving nearly four tons of soil in one year. Toads may not have caused those Mima mounds, but they certainly helped maintain them. Other diggers did their part, too, and so did frost and soil expansion.
Whatever their cause, the Mima mounds are a broken thread in the native fabric of the prairie. They are intense, isolated foci of disturbance that are exploited by plants that otherwise would not invade the unbroken prairie. Some of the Mima mounds here are crowned with thick little stands of Kentucky bluegrass—a foreign invader that may occur nowhere else in the heart of this native prairie. The mounds often host weed species whose seeds were blown in or carried in from the surrounding farmlands: lamb's quarters, bedstraw, bitter‑weed, and bindweed. At the same time, the mounds seem to repel such prairie natives as rattlesnake‑master, leadplant, blazing‑star, and wild indigo. Each Mima mound is a microenvironment occupied by nonprairie—a beachhead of invasion, a sort of Ellis Island of the prairie world that accommodates foreigners. There may be a few prairie species that tolerate such disturbance: wild rose, sloughgrass, Canada wild rye, and a couple of native sunflowers may be found on or beside the mounds. But most of the originals seem to shun the mounds, and refuse to occupy them.
With some tactical support by man, those foreign invaders on their Mima mound beachheads could end up dominating a prairieland.
Original prairie plants are classed as "decreasers" or "increasers," according to their response to human land use. Most are decreasers, fading swiftly and vanishing in the course of heavy grazing, mowing, and plowing. Rugged and successful as they are in their climax habitat, they are often pathetically vulnerable to land‑use pressures—especially those wild legumes and grasses that are eagerly sought by livestock and are sensitive to the overgrazing and trampling that occurs in most modern pastures.
As the prime native plants are weakened by such intensive use, their dominant grip on the prairie is also weakened, and the increasers are released by this lessening of dominance. In most of the tall prairie, such forage grasses as big and little bluestem were simply unable to support the relentless pressures of cattle, horses, sheep, and mowing, and native grasses were replaced by Kentucky bluegrass—a type that can withstand almost unlimited grazing.
It isn't just a matter of livestock grazing on the grass leaves, for a grass leaf grows from the base and if the leaf tip is bitten off or cut, the leaf continues to grow. The critical factor is whether or not the growing point of the leaves is repeatedly removed.
A bluestem grass shoot is a succulent cylinder of leaf sheaths—the older ones outside, the younger leaves within. The first new leaves develop from the growing point of the individual grass plant, which remains in the surface soil. When the foliage of big bluestem is about two feet high, the growing point that produces the leaves may be several inches above the soil. If that growing point is far enough out of the soil so that it can be grazed by livestock, no new leaves will be produced. Switchgrass, one of the most sensitive "decreasers," extends its growing point far out of the soil as early as May, and is readily "grazed out" early in the growing season. And although a grass plant may survive without developing seed, it cannot survive long without foliage and root development. By contrast, such "increaser" grasses as Kentucky bluegrass maintain their growing points at a level with the soil surface, where they are protected from grazing and continue to produce leaves indefinitely.
Prairie grasses are rugged individuals that have adapted through millennia of heat, drought, fire, and competition. But as "decreasers," their growing points must be conserved and allowed to replace any leaf growth that has been lost. Light grazing that is limited to leaves has no serious effect. But heavy grazing and close, frequent mowing can tip the balance in favor of bluegrass, which is highly tolerant of close cropping—as every suburban lawnkeeper knows.
Under normal prairie conditions, Kentucky bluegrass has hardly a chance. For one thing, prairie is most combustible in early spring and fall when a maximum dry plant debris is present—periods when bluegrass is green and growing but when the native warm‑season grasses have either not begun their annual growth or have completed it. Bluegrass will be killed by fires that have no effect on big or little bluestem, and during the summer heyday of the native grasses shading is so intense that bluegrass could not thrive even if that was the bluegrass's strong growing season—which it is not.
But let the ancient continuum be repeatedly broken so that the native sod is weakened—decreasing plant detritus and fire, and increasing light intensity under the thinning native grasses—and bluegrass quickly gains mastery. Continually aided by its allies of overgrazing and trampling, it triumphs over the disadvantaged native species. Now the tables are turned, and even if the bluegrass pasture is left fallow indefinitely, a successful retaking of that lost ground by the full community of prairie plants is a painfully slow process that may require two hundred years.
Kentucky bluegrass, let it be said, isn't a "bad" grass. It is usually a highly valued grass. Generally regarded as a native of Europe that was introduced with other seeds by the early colonists, it can't even be condemned as an alien invader—for there is evidence that it is native in southern Canada. But as a strong increaser, it is bad in the sense that it almost irreversibly replaces native grasses when the latter are weakened. Welcome or not, bluegrass takes over.
Today, tall prairie in its vast original form has vanished. All the components are still there, but they have been fragmented and scattered, surviving in little outposts that are beleaguered and besieged by the trained armies of domestic plants. The original prairie plants no longer are joined in the great climax association in which they thrived for thousands of years. So it goes—for now.
And we drive along interstate highways through what was once tall prairie, past roadsides of brome, through landscapes of bluegrass pastures and neat fields of pampered grains, with woodlots and groves thriving where trees scarcely existed for fifteen thousand years. But up there in a neglected fence corner are a few towering culms of big bluestem. The wild grasses are waiting. The originals, bred and conditioned by a particular climate in special ways. Let those fields be abandoned by man—as they will all be, someday—and the tame grasses and interloper weeds will lose their strongest ally. The ancient war of selection and adjustment will be renewed more furiously than ever. For years, perhaps centuries, a riot of strong exotics may dominate the land. But sooner or later the old stocks will reassert themselves, and native prairie will reclaim its ancient holdings—with man beyond any point of rejoicing or interference.
•
I am asked, now and then, how one can know native prairie when he sees it. How does genuine prairie emerge from the landscape—what sets it apart from fallow pasture, or from cultivated land gone wild and weedy?
Most prairie relicts are small, lingering as scraps and edges in a tame landscape, and it takes a practiced eye to spot such little remnants. But there should be no question if the surviving prairie has enough size to retain something of its old character and integrity, for it is strikingly different from the fields and pastures around it.
Several years ago I was hunting for a small prairie preserve in Iowa that I'd never seen, and I was having a devil of a time finding it. The place had an area of only twenty acres, had just been bought by the state, and hadn't exactly been heralded as the newest thrill center of the Cornbelt. No one seemed to know much about it, or care, although one old farmer voiced the unsolicited opinion that it must be a waste of good corn ground. So I just moseyed around through that March countryside of spring plowing,brushy creek bottoms, and overgrazed bluegrass pastures, looking. Some of the pastures were greening up, and there were a few fields of vivid winter wheat; otherwise, the farmscape was a drab pattern of deep black and dull grays that lay in geometric blocks and strips.
Then I turned a corner and saw it, a half‑mile east of me, spread across two low hillsides that sloped down to a little creek lined with ash and box‑elder.
My first impression of Sheeder Prairie was of badly worn and weathered canvas, somewhat ragged and patched, and bleached into soft grays, off‑whites, and faded duns. It was entirely different in tone and texture from anything else in that landscape, with an indefinable shaggy, fierce look that drew one's eyes from the tame lands around it. From any angle it occupied stage center, fixing attention with that strange magnetic quality that can always be felt but never explained, that sure quality of wildness. The surrounding fields lay about like stolid domestic animals, passive and bland, awaiting the pleasure of their masters. The little prairie crouched on its hillsides, still its own master in a wholly mastered land, aloof and brooding and ordered by no commands save those of sun and rain. Once, long ago, I saw a buffalo bull in a small herd of domestic cows. This was the same. There was the same effect of surprise, and then the sharp sense of contrast between a wild original and its spiritless descendants.
As a game biologist and hunter, my second impression of Sheeder Prairie was that of a place worth going to and being in—a feeling that I found to be shared by a coyote, several pheasants, a couple of quail coveys, and the first upland plovers of the year.
At any season, there is variety in the prairie aspect. This is most apparent in original prairie with marked changes in elevation and varied communities of grasses—each different from all others at any time of year, and each lending its distinctive shade, pattern, and texture to the whole. In midspring and early summer, the varying greens and height classes all respond differently to wind and light. In late summer a prairie's tallgrasses are like nothing else, and there's no mistaking a stand of nine‑foot big bluestem that gives way to the midgrasses of the upper slopes, the whole scene shot with vivid flashes of color that vanish and reappear as the wind shifts the grassy screens before myriad flowers.
In winter, there is a differential weathering and bleaching that never occurs in monocultured fields and pastures. A prairie's cool‑season grasses tend to cure in tones of gray, white, and pale yellows, while the warm‑season grasses turn golden, tan, russet, and bronze. You'll see this in fall and winter, driving west of Topeka on Interstate 70 approaching the Flint Hills. It isn't just that the sky opens up, or that the land suddenly rises in tall ranks toward the West, but the hills are a winey russet with a richer tone than the croplands behind—and you know that you're looking into leagues of treeless bluestem pasture.
Those are the long looks. A closer look at a patch of native prairie will reveal a number of plants that you may seem to know from somewhere, with a sense of having seen them from the corner of your eye in some field edge long ago. Here in prairie they are all brought together, and reassembled in original community. But there are likely to be strange, spectacular plants that are new to you In all my ramblings through the Midwest, I can't recall ever seeing wild indigo or rattlesnake‑master that wasn't growing in a prairie relict of some kind. That's the only place you'll find them—they just aren't the sort to volunteer in a lawn or at the edge of a garden, and once you see them you'll never forget them.
Some tracts regarded as "prairies" are simply old pastures that have been neglected for a long time, and now contain a few native flowers and grasses and a number of foreign invaders. They invariably have a long record of plowing, mowing, or heavy grazing; and the marks of such practices may linger indefinitely. Such a history will usually disqualify a particular area as "native" prairie, although some light grazing and mowing won't seriously affect a prairie's pedigree.
There are certain prairie indicators that are quite accurate, for such plants do not occur in concert if the land has been intensively used. Well‑drained uplands of original prairie will invariably be occupied by stands of little bluestem, prairie dropseed, sideoats grama, and other native midgrasses. Farther downhill, of course, there will be vigorous stands of the tall stuff: big bluestem, Indian grass, sloughgrass, and airy patches of tall panicum. Depending on the season, there will be such forbs (any nonwoody plant that is not a grass) as compass‑plant, rattlesnake‑master, blazingstar, yellow star‑grass, blue‑eyed grass, black samson (also called purple coneflower), yellow coneflower, bottle gentian, wood betony, penstemon, and many others. Wild legumes such as leadplant, purple prairie clover, and wild indigo are usually sure signs of genuine prairie, for they are among the first to vanish from tamed land and are often the last to return. Conversely, a closed community of old‑stand prairie isn't likely to include such familiar invaders as purple vervain, Canada thistle, dandelion, ragweed, Kentucky bluegrass, red clover, or brome.
There are only a few tall prairies left today, but they are worth seeking—worth going to and being in. They are the last lingering scraps of the old time, fragments of original wealth and beauty, cloaked with plants that you may never have seen before and may never see again. If you are a man, stand in such a place and imagine that you hold your land warrant as a veteran of the War with Mexico, looking out over fields of lofty grasses on your own place at last, your own free‑and‑clear quarter‑section share of the richest loam in the world. If you are a woman, watch your children at play in wild gardens of strange flowers, and imagine your nearest neighbor twenty miles away.
If you are a child, lie in a patch of blazing‑star and dream of Indians.
Madson, John. "The Lawns of God." Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1995. 51-79.