30 THEY Ai DUB OLN ©B Ugi tei 
THE PRAIRIE WORLD, by Costello. 
Thomas Crowell Co., 1969 
As the early homesteaders coaxed their covered wagons, families, an 
livestock across and through the sea of rolling grass, they left little writte 
record of their impressions of the pioneer prairie. The hardships, priv: 
tions, adventure, escaping Indian attacks, finding a suitable new home n 
doubt were more urgent, even had they been literary-minded. 
The prairie presented special problems of building materials and fue 
to warm sod-houses and cook their food. Many were not equipped to with 
stand the severe hardships of droughts, lack of water, shelter in sever 
hardships of windstorm, and blinding dust of the prairie trails. 
In “Prairie World” the author has made an attempt to picture th 
basic inter-relationships that existed in the main prairie grasslands < 
the United States. 
Native grasslands may be divided into tall prairie grasses with repre 
sentive big and little blue stem, switch grass and Indian grass...high, dr 
prairie, and low, wet prairie...and short grass prairie with grain an 
buffalo grass as types. Typical prairie flora include iron wood, sunflower 
composs plant, rattle snake master, blazing star, false indigo, asters, daisie 
phlox, gentians, mallow, fleabane. In low wet prairie we find sedges an 
cord grasses. 
Typical fauna includes the buffalo, coyote, antelope, meadow lar! 
dickcissel, prairie chicken, prairie dog, upland plover, mourning dov 
meadow mouse, white footed mouse, rattle snake, blue racer. In the lo 
prairie lakes originally were countless mirgrating waterfowl: ducks, gees 
curlews, herons, and sand hill cranes. 
Life on the prairie demonstrates a dynamic living complex pattern 
diversity. Intricate food-chains formed interlocking links in the web « 
life. Energy from the sun transferred to green plants in the process < 
photosynthesis made food available to insects, rodents, predators, coyot 
buffalo, and men in the prairie world. 
The original prairie covered one third of mid-America, ranging fro! 
Illinois on the east to high, dry short-grass prairie of Colorado and fro! 
Minnesota on the north to the coastal plains of Texas, each with the repr 
sentive forms of plants and animal life. Much of the eastern prairie wé 
patchy, bordered by wooded streams and interspersed with “oak grove 
islands. 
Early explorers and settlers left scant records of their impression (| 
the vast expanse of rolling blue stem, more often described as “ripplir 
in the winds like billows on the sea, a sea of grass” of undulating ligl 
and color. The poetry of grass in motion. 
In 1849, four thousand assorted wagons and 50,000 animals bound fi 
California rumbled and meandered the perilous buffalo trails across tl 
prairie. 
The prairie was probably formed before the Ice Age of the Centozo 
Era, 60 million years ago. This was the age of mammels when countle: 
horses and camels grazed and roamed and in turn provided food for sabe 
toothed tiger and prairie wolves. 
Here evolved countless bison, where giant bulls fought over the 
harem and prairie cocks gathered on their ancestral booming ground 
displaying their colorful mating ritual, heralding the coming of sprin 
The Prairie Indians following the bison in their nomadic existence did n 
