In Praise of Plains 
Early explorers told of being overwhelmed 
by the silence and vastness of the grasslands 
by Marilyn Coffey 
“I drink the wind like wine.” 
Hamlin Garland 
The Great Plains region of the United 
States, where I was born and raised, is 
part of an enormous strip of flatland 
that stretches alongside the Rocky 
Mountain chain for more than three 
thousand miles, from the plateaus of 
northern Mexico to the Mackenzie 
River in subarctic Canada. In sheer 
extent, this North American grassland 
has no equal on earth although similar 
areas exist on other continents: the 
steppes of Siberia, the pampas of South 
America, the veldts of Africa. Shaped 
roughly like the crescent of the waxing 
moon, the Great Plains swells to its 
maximum in central United States, 
tapers to near points at its termini. 
Once, not much more than a hundred 
years ago, this plain was nothing but 
meadow, a tangled profusion of grasses 
and wildflowers broken only by an occa- 
sional tree-lined river or stream mean- 
dering slowly downslope or by buffalo 
and Indian trails, which crisscrossed 
each other in an intricate network that 
led from waterway to waterway. 
I never actually laid eyes on virgin 
prairie when I was young. Except for 
scattered fragments, some of which can 
still be seen today, virtually all of the 
native grassland of the central plains 
had been plowed under long before I 
was bom. In fact, my great-grandfathers 
James Thomas Coffey and Isaac Matts 
Smith were two of the hundreds of small 
farmers who resolutely overturned the 
sod, Smith in 1883 and Coffey in 1885, 
burying the last generation of native 
meadow deep in the Tertiary soil out of 
which its ancestors had sprung millions 
of years ago. But that didn’t matter to 
me. I knew how the prairie must have 
been, not because I had been told, but 
because some vestige of it seemed to 
cling to me, as though knowledge of 
A storm sweeps across the Plains. 
Jim Brandenburg 
