what the land had once been entered me 
through my very pores, carried, per- 
haps, by the ceaseless wind. It was, 
paradoxically, the most beautiful land I 
had ever seen. 
Reports of the virgin prairie’s beauty, 
written by early explorers and natural- 
ists, confirm my childhood intuition. 
Journal entry after entry describes the 
vast meadows as profusely decorated — 
“gilded” — with myriad flowers. The 
fields of Quivira, in central Kansas, 
were “covered with flowers of a thou- 
sand different kinds, so thick that they 
choked the pasture,” wrote the Spanish 
explorer Onate in 1601. “A thousand 
young flowers gemmed the grassy 
plains,” wrote Thomas J. Farnham some 
two hundred years later. There were the 
sky blue flowers of spiderwort and the 
light red phlox, the “showy” yellow sun- 
flowers and purple asters, fields full of 
white flowers and long garlands of wild 
roses, whose single corolla of pale pink 
petals surrounded a chunky golden sta- 
men and whose fragrance lay heavy in 
the early spring air. “These vast plains, 
beautiful almost as the fancied Elysium, 
were enamelled with innumerable flow- 
ers,” wrote English botanist Thomas 
Nuttall in 1819, “an uncommon variety 
of flowers of vivid tints, possessing all 
the brilliancy of tropical productions.” 
As profuse and varied as the flowers, 
although less spectacular, were the 
grasses, which ranged in height from the 
short stubby buffalo and grama grasses 
of the semiarid western prairie through 
the thick luxuriant mixed grasses of the 
subhumid central prairie, about ten 
inches high, to the great swaying blades 
of bluestem and Indian grass in the 
humid eastern prairie, blades that rose 
eight feet high. These heights were di- 
rectly proportional to the rainfall, which 
tapers off from east to west, as can be 
seen today by the commercial grasses 
that have replaced the native strains. In 
the east, corn, a grass, rustles higher 
than a man’s head, while the less humid 
central region is renowned for another, 
shorter grass: winter wheat. The semi- 
arid western prairie, then as now, was 
good primarily for grazing, its clumps of 
short grass mixing with prickly pear and 
with the sunflower: a tiny wildflower in 
the west, taller than a tulip in the central 
plains, and eight feet high in the east. 
The central plains, where I grew up, was 
a transitional area, dependent on the 
intermittent rain that never seemed to 
fall twice in the same place. In dry 
years, needlegrass and other short 
