Tom McHugh. Photo Researchers 
Winter’s blizzards, above, give 
way to spring’s wildflowers, left. 
grasses from the west would intrude to 
mix with the central prairie’s June grass 
and wheat grass at the top of sunbaked 
ravines; in wetter years, bluestem would 
creep in from the east, taking hold along 
moisture-laden ravine bottoms. 
This stunning panorama of wildflow- 
ers and native grasses, their species de- 
scribed meticulously by early botanists, 
would probably strike the modem eye as 
one vast impressionistic canvas swept by 
variegated colors that changed with the 
prairie’s moods. How delicate this 
meadow must have appeared in the blue 
light of an early morning, as bland 
morning breezes bent the tips of grasses, 
displaying the muted colors of the 
blades’ undersides. How vivid at mid- 
day, the sky as clear as in a Chinese 
painting, when through the crystal light, 
according to artist Thomas Mails, you 
could see a spot of color twenty miles 
away. Or after a shower when, accord- 
ing to Maj. Stephen Harriman Long, 
the grass was “gemmed with the reflec- 
tion of innumerable pendant raindrops.” 
And how serene under the purple light 
of a calm evening, when deer might be 
seen stepping through the shoals that 
separated sandbars on a meandering 
river like the Platte: a “stilly scene, like 
shadows of phantasmagoria, or Ossian’s 
deer made of mist,” wrote Henry Marie 
Brackenridge. 
Not only did colors shift with the 
various moods of each prairie day but 
Tom McKjgri. Photo Researchers 
also with each season: white in winter, 
green in spring, yellow in summer, and 
red-orange in autumn, says Mails. But 
that simplifies the matter too much in a 
land where winter may look like a mir- 
ror as a sudden drenching of February 
rain turns the Plains into a continuous 
sheet of water. Or brown, as snow melts 
to reveal the stubborn remnants of the 
prairie grass, some of which live for 
twenty years. In early spring, the slender 
shoots of bright new grass may well 
sprout up a sharp and tender green in 
the winter-yellowed sward. But spring 
and autumn are when the wildflowers 
reach their peak of intensity, glazing the 
meadow with purples, pinks, red, yellow, 
and white. In the overplus of August’s 
brittle light, sere stubble may suddenly 
mirage into an islanded lake, while 
through the October haze of a reddened 
Indian summer sun, the prairie colors 
are seen as though wrapped in smoke. 
The beauty of the Great Plains, how- 
ever, was not for everyone. The space I 
took for granted as a child, what the 
Plains Indians called the waho — the 
great circle of the horizon — was more 
than most newcomers, whose ideas of 
space had been formed in hilly, tree- 
studded country, could bear. “The first 
experience of the plains, like the first 
sail with a ‘cap’ full of wind, is apt to be 
sickening,” wrote an early viewer. Colo- 
nel Dodge. More than one joumeyer, in 
diary' or letter, told of standing still and 
lonely, overwhelmed by the silence and 
vastness of the place. “Magnificent, 
though melancholy,” wrote Henry 
Brackenridge in 1811, while Thomas 
Famham noted, in 1839, that his eyes 
ached from his attempts to embrace the 
view. More than one writer mentioned a 
general feeling of emptiness or dwelt on 
their “nauseating” loneliness. Even 
Coronado, who must have been re- 
minded of portions of his native Spain 
when he entered this dry, treeless land, 
expressed surprise at its scope, saying, 
“I came upon some plains so vast that in 
my travels I did not reach their end, 
although I marched over them for more 
than three hundred leagues” — nearly 
one thousand miles, as we measure land. 
The Plains were most frequently com- 
pared, by early journal writers, to an 
ocean, an ocean where one swell melted 
imperceptibly into another. Some, like 
expedition leader Wilson P Hunt, used 
this figure of speech literally. “The lim- 
its of the visible horizon,” wrote Hunt, 
“are as exactly defined, and the view as 
extensive as at sea, the undulations on 
the surface of the earth here bearing no 
greater proportion in scale than the 
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