Ep. 32: Loving the Plains, Hating the Plains, Rewilding the Plains | The American West

While conservation focused national parks creation on the vertical mountains and canyons of the West, the Great Plains ended up de-buffaloed and mostly ignored. But with new, 21st century approaches to reversing that historical slight, the Plains Serengeti is on its way back. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:37Speaker 04

  Despite its role as the central region of the frontier story in the West, the Great Plains in the 21st century is requiring novel conservation approaches to recapture its former magic. I'm Dan Flores and this is The American West.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Loving the plains, hating the plains, rewilding the plains.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  I know almost nothing useful about W. H. Auden, the 20th-century British writer/critic, except that he once wrote these lines, which I committed to memory. "I cannot see a plain without a shutter. Oh, God, please, please, don't ever make me live there." Auden put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence. His sentiment is one I suspect a great many modern Americans would agree with as they drive through or fly over America's vast plains country. The Great Plains is not, by any usual measure of landscape aesthetics, an admired part

• 3:04Speaker 04

  of America these days. We no longer love the plains the way we love mountains, or oceans, or even deserts.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  A few of us are outlier exceptions, though. In the 1980s and 1990s, I built a house in a shallow canyon set into the horizontal yellow prairie sweeps of west Texas. And today, I live in another house I've built in Pinion Juniper foothills only 20 miles west of the high plains of New Mexico. In an experiential refutation of W. H. Auden, I can say honestly that no other landscape has ever moved me the way the plains have done. So, try to suspend disbelief over that sentence for a moment.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  I grew up in southern forests, lived for two decades in the heart of the Montana Rockies, and am passionately in love with deserts, especially where saguaros loom like cactus redwoods. And I travel to oceans since, like most of us, I find something hypnotic and satisfying to my genetic memory on an ocean beach.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  But the woods, the mountains, the sea, even the deserts, all of which appear at first glance richer and more varied, lack the simple minimalism, the vastness of earth and sky that's so powerful with an aurora sunrise or on a glittering night on the plains.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  I realize few other Americans, even other Westerners, react this way. Driving a car across America's prairies and plains, to many, the horizontal yellow spaces are hardly inspiring. What most of us see, if we bother to look, is emptiness. No water, no trees, no green, almost no people. What there is in abundance is wind, which buffets and rocks your car as you drive. The horizon encircles the world like the rim of an enormous plate. No matter how fast you go, that horizon recedes in front of you, eventually placing you in a kind of twilight zone of suspended forward motion.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  There are stretches where if you roll down the windows, the country smells of ammonia, feedlots, and hog farms. And those aren't pretty scents. At midday, the light can be almost too bright to look at, or else it's a diffuse brown pall. Agriculture going airborne.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  As for our presence on the plains, the human infrastructure often looks beaten and discarded. Dying towns memorable for the amount of wind-blown waste snagged on chain-mesh fences loom and recede along laser-straight highways. Billboards unintentionally advertise a kind of 21st-century great chain of being. Jesus, cowboy boots, farm machinery, banking loans, moving truck deals, maybe diversions like the Minnesota Vikings or the Denver Broncos.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Beyond the frequent sight, oddly in these seer expanses, of thousands of waterfowl threading the blue bowl overhead, you're in a world of erasures. Maybe you see pronghorns if you look hard, or a coyote rocking across the road, or the occasional prairie dog struggling for a comeback after the prairie dog holocaust. This is the West that everybody prefers looking down on from 20,000 feet. If you feel this way about the plains, maybe what I'm about to say next will nudge you in a different direction. It was not always this way.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Not very long ago, reactions to the plains west were very different. Let me quote a few of those past reactions. They're about the same place I just described and that most of us have experienced. 200 and a few years ago, a Scottish scientist from Natchez, Mississippi, who President Thomas Jefferson engaged to help him plan young America's western explorations, recreated for Jefferson the sense of excitement western travelers had about traversing the Great Plains. Raised in Elgin-Moreshire on the northern coast of Scotland

• 7:55Speaker 04

  and educated at the University of Glasgow, William Dunbar spent his early life in a very different kind of landscape than the American plains. Now situated on the forested edges of fascination with that country farther west, Dunbar recreated for Jefferson a thrilling world. "By the expression plains or prairies," he told the president, "it is not to be understood a dead flat without any imminences." The western prairies are very different. The expression signifies only a country without timber. These prairies are neither flat nor hilly, but undulating in gently swelling lawns

• 8:39Speaker 04

  and expanding into spacious valleys. Dunbar went on, "Those who have viewed only a skirt of these prairies speak of them with a degree of enthusiasm as if it were only there that nature was to be found truly perfect." They declare that the fertility and beauty of the vegetation, the extreme richness of the valleys, the coolness and excellent quality of the water found everywhere, the salubity of the atmosphere, and above all, the grandeur of the enchanting landscape which this country presents, inspires the soul with sensations not to be felt in any other region of the globe.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  In later letters, Dunbar told Jefferson what he called "wonderful stories of wonderful productions" on the Great Prairies. "Especially compelling" were the accounts of the wildlife riches there. "In this natural pasturage, there were buffalo and other grazers in numbers beyond imagination, even herds of wild horses like zebras in Africa. There were bears, tigers, wolves, all the animals that lived off those grazers. There were accounts of giant water serpents, which a scientist like Dunbar did not credit." All of it he passed on to an American president whose house at Monticello was decorated with maps of the West.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Americans in the Jeffersonian age were obviously not the first to see the wonders of the continent savannas, but they were among the first since the 16th-century Spanish explorers to write extensively of what they saw. Meriwether Lewis, for one, as his party was just entering the plains in today's South Dakota, described how "the shortness and verdure of the grass" gave the plains the appearance throughout its whole extent of beautiful bowling greens in fine order. The party could hardly believe the wildlife spectacle on those bowling greens. This scenery, already rich, pleasing, and beautiful, was still farther heightened

• 11:01Speaker 04

  by immense herds of buffalo, deer, elk, and antelopes, which we saw in every direction, feeding on the hills and plains. Zebulon Pike, exploring farther south two years after Lewis, found the high plains along the Arkansas River more barren than green. In fact, he thought the southern plains a match, as he put it, "for the sandy deserts of Africa." This was the same part of the plains that would inspire the Stephen Long Exploring Party a few years later to pronounce the central and southern stretches of the plains unfit for agriculture, and thus a barrier

• 11:45Speaker 04

  to any advancing frontier settlers planning to farm. Yet, traveling over this dusty plain of sand and gravel, barren as the deserts of Arabia, was never tedious, they said, because the wildlife spectacle was absolutely thrilling.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Returning to civilization down the Canadian River in today's western Oklahoma, Long's party traveled through inconceivable numbers of herbivorous animals and innumerable birds and beasts of prey. Hordes of wild horses, 500 strong, surrounded them. "All these animals were so tame that they appeared wholly unaccustomed to the sight of men," they wrote. The bison and wolves moved slowly off to right and left, leaving a lane for the party to pass. Long's official report claimed that the western plains

• 12:52Speaker 04

  "seemed peculiarly adapted as arranged for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game." As a result, these explorers thought the plains best left just as they had found them. Other 19th century Americans were amazed and too curious not to go see. The famous writer Washington Irving was enthralled enough to go himself and then write Travels in the Prairie. New York novelist James Fenimore Cooper wrote a leather stocking novel about the plains. The painter of Indians, George Catlin, was besotted and did his best, which often wasn't so great, to capture prairie landscapes and wildlife.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Germans who trained with the legendary naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored around the world, but one of the places they sought out was the American plains. Prince Maximilian of Vied Neuved brought with him the amazing animal and landscape painter Carl Bodmer, whose collection of oils dawned on the Missouri in the early 1830s are some of our very best Great Plains time travel machines. And of course, there was John James Audubon, who left us wonderful accounts from his 1843 trip up the Missouri with his sons, accounts I've laid out in prior episodes.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Even after the Civil War, when travelers, naturalists, and artists going west were responding to America's so-called Hudson River School painters and their rapture over mountains, the plains remained unforgettable for many. America's poet laureate of the 19th century, that ultimate lover of being alive in a vibrant time, was captivated. Walt Whitman saw the plains for the first time after the Civil War, when the animals and native inhabitants still held sway and the frontier was then hosting one of the greatest dramas in the world. His reaction was simple and direct. I can almost quote it from memory.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  "While I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I'm not so sure, but the prairies and the plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape."

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Consider that when you look out the car window for mountains as a signal that traversing the plains is finally over.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  As long as the wildlife spectacle lasted, the plains continued to intrigue the same set of eclectic adventurers from Europe who searched out the sources of the Nile in Africa or became white hunters there. Prairie fever is what they called this fascination in the 19th century. Even in the 20th century, after five decades of killing had rendered the plains eerily silent, but before agriculture pulled the grass up wholesale, the region could still entrance. For New York bohemian Mabel Dodge, journeying by train to New Mexico, the plains seemed

• 16:23Speaker 04

  a desert but a beautiful one, that in her words, "rolled away for miles and miles, empty, smooth, and uninterrupted. I thought I had never seen a landscape reduced to such simple elements." Young Georgia O'Keeffe, sentenced to a career as an art teacher in outback Texas during World War I before becoming an internationally known painter, out on the undulating sweeps near Amarillo, marveled at how you could just drive or walk off into space, as she said. "It's absurd the way I love this country."

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Writing her friend, Daniel Katton-Rich, as late as 1949, O'Keeffe told him, "Crossing the panhandle of Texas is always a very special event for me. Driving in the early morning toward the dawn and rising sun, the plains are not like anything else, and I always wonder why I go other places." The Western writers Mary Sandoz and Willa Cathar reacted in a similar way to the country that produced them. Cathar told a back home newspaper in 1921, "I go everywhere. I admire all kinds of country, but when I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea, it's the grand passion of my life. I've tried for years to get over it. I've stopped trying. It's incurable." Even without the great herds, without the wolf packs or the sight of a grizzly suddenly standing upright in river willows, when the landscape itself was still intact, the Great Plains could excite the eye with a rhythmic ocean-like topography.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  There's an obvious question to pose here.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  What's happened to make the modern reaction to the Great Plains so different? How, in other words, do you get from Walt Whitman and Willa Cathar to flyover country? That answer has to do with the stunning transformation this part of the West underwent at our hands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the relative wink of an eye, we dismantled and demolished a 10,000-year-old ecology, one of the most exciting natural spectacles in the world. For the women tuned into the plains, Sandoz, O'Keefe, Cathar, it was not wildlife beyond

• 19:17Speaker 04

  imagining that stunned them, but in their case, a sense of freedom at being in vast natural spaces that appealed. "A country like the ocean" was a phrase that served as a code for feeling free. But historical forces that mounted as railroads and ranching and farming arrived destroyed much even of that Great Plains. True enough, reducing 30 million bison to 1,000, 15 billion pronghorns to 5,000, rounding up all the wild horses for pet food, erasing all the wolves entirely, all done so the cow and the sheep could replace them, was the unkindest cut. But there was more.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Act Two was the agricultural assault. Levelled grasslands didn’t present the obstacles to monocrop market agriculture that other landscapes did. So from the 1850s to the 1930s, homesteading policies privatized the vast bulk of the former American Serengeti. In Kansas and Colorado, the big breakout took place on either side of the 20th century. In Oklahoma, the land rushes resulted from Indian reservation allotments. Settlers broke out Nebraska, the Dakotas, eastern Montana, and plains New Mexico after

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Congress passed an enlarged Homestead Act in 1909. In Texas, with its anomalous lands history and long devotion to privatization, the breakup of the gigantic XIT Ranch in 1915 brought farmers by the trainload to the Yano Estacado and the rolling plains of Texas. Entirely transforming a 10,000-year-old ecology in the space of 150 years is a staggering thing to contemplate. On the southern blackland prairie of Texas and Oklahoma, agriculture has by now reduced the ancient grasslands there to only 1% of their original coverage.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  By 2001, even Saskatchewan had only 19% of its native prairie left. North Dakota possessed only 28% of its remaining prairie at the beginning of this century, and that was before the Bakken oil boom. Texas has an overall average of 20% of its prairie left today, although the part of the high plains I know best, the Yanow Estacado, is in far worse shape. Lubbock County, where I once lived, by 1980, had lost 97% of its native grasslands.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Literally, all that remained was in Yellow House Canyon, a grassy gorge ranchers had settled because there was a little stream threading it, and it was too rugged to plow and put in cotton. Economics left Yellow House to the cows and to me. Back in the west of 1806, homeward bound Lewis and Clark were desperate to escape the wildlife-poor and difficult Rocky Mountains and return to the plains. Two centuries of history have accomplished a reversal of that. Now, the national forests of the Rockies are home to most of the west's wildlife. But in one of the more exciting plains developments in recent years,

• 22:49Speaker 04

  elk, grizzlies, and wolves have once again started to push out of the mountains and into their former Great Plains homelands.

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  This is a three act story. Once, when its ecological health was fulsome and intact, we thrilled to the plains part of the west. Then we homesteaded it and wreaked havoc on its natural world, creating flyover country. For the past three quarters of a century, a third phase has been building momentum. Stage three is still a vision, a vision to reimagine and recreate the setting that

• 25:02Speaker 04

  once infected us with prairie fever. Rewilding the Great Plains with its traditional charismatic big animals means finding places where the antelope can still play. Natural grasslands and prairie ecosystems are now among some of the most under-preserved natural regions on the continent, and indeed in the world. Despite acclaimed examples of grassland parks that now preserve the charismatic wild animals of the African plains, such as the Masai Mara and Kruger Parks in Africa and the Elmas in Brazil, conservation in the United States for a very long time overlooked the plains.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Irony doesn't even capture knowing that the first call for an American national park by artist George Catlin in 1832 was for a park on the Great Plains. But all of us are aware that the most famous western national parks are nowhere near the plains. The National Park Service during its early history was embarrassingly apathetic toward parks on the grasslands east of the Rockies. That began to change in the 1930s, but not before there were huge misses. During the initial phase of national park history, the scenic ideals of the Romantic Age was for scenery thought to be sublime. Sublime landscapes were always vertical.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  The more monumentally vertical, the better. The horizontal was decidedly not sublime. So the major conservation initiatives that gave us our national park public lands a century ago focused on western terrain that was like the European Alps. In other words, soaring mountain peaks, gasp-inducing canyons. This meant that the Rockies, the Sierras and Cascades, and the Colorado Plateau became the bastions of the parkland public lands. The powers that fashioned the western scenic parks in the Lower 48

• 27:11Speaker 04

  almost entirely ignored landscapes like the western deserts and the plains grasslands. Yellowstone and Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Parks, along with the great canyons like Yosemite, Zion, and the Grand Canyon, thus became the Naple Ultra examples of American parks. These landscapes aren't just vertical, they're monumentally vertical. Though landscapes on the plains seemed very interesting to an American public with an aesthetic taste based on European ideals, or a park service with this value of scenery. Except for tiny Wind Cave Park in South Dakota, the only significant plains nature preservation

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  in the early years of the 20th century, the heydays of the grand parks, came when Teddy Roosevelt's administration proclaimed a small mountain range in southwestern Oklahoma, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  With the emergence of the science of ecology, by the 1930s, the Park Service gradually began to appreciate the idea of preserving ecologies. But now, a new problem surfaced. Until the creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in 1964, the Park Service in America had no budget to acquire parks. That hadn't been an issue when parks and monuments came from the public lands, but it became an almost insurmountable obstacle on the prairie, where widespread privatization had meant that almost every potential site for a prairie national park would have to be purchased.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  In the 1920s, the American pioneer of the science of ecology, Victor Shelford, and a group called the Committee of Ecology of the Grasslands, began to press for large Great Plains preserves based on ecological factors rather than scenic spectacle. They studied 11 sites, found four more than acceptable, and eventually submitted one spanning 3/4 of a million acres in Nebraska and South Dakota to the Park Service and Congress. But lacking an acquisition budget for new parks, nothing came of their work. The philosophical direction the Park Service took in its early years

• 29:41Speaker 04

  was the result of the personal vision of its first director, New Englander Stephen Mather. The prime directive in Mather's criteria was that new parks had to possess scenery so extraordinary as to be of national interest. While scientists like Victor Shelford were thinking of representative ecosystems, the Park Service still had the Mather scenery inertia to overcome.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  So as the NPS began to look beyond mountains and canyons to heed the scientists' interest in the Great Plains, they concentrated not on the rolling, grassy uplands most typical of the region, but on the more dramatic bandlands and canyonlands country, the plains' erosional equivalents of the Colorado Plateau. The success of Yellowstone had them thinking about animals, too, about game parks like Africa's. But scenery was always first. The problem was that little on the Great Plains measured up against the Grand Canyon or Zion.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Park Service disappointed the ecologists by turning down one proposal after another. One area, though, the South Dakota Badlands, did set the plains on the road eventually to a sizable national park. Local advocates had proposed the yellow and cream South Dakota Badlands as a park as early as 1909. Since much of its acreage consisted of Indian lands left over from allotment and parcels passed over in the homesteading process, it was a good candidate for an agency with

• 31:36Speaker 04

  no money. But it was a badlands. Its sparse grass cover seemed too thin for wild herds on the Yellowstone model. At the time, the broadly experienced Roger Toll, a man who would lose his life in a tragic car accident a few years later, was the chief investigator for new parks. Toll visited the area in July of 1928 and, within days, decided that it is not a supreme scenic feature of national importance. The Badlands, he explained to his Washington superiors, are surpassed in grandeur, beauty, and interest by the Grand Canyon National Park and by Bryce National Park.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Toll would have had to tour Mars to find another Grand Canyon.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Sixty percent of the Badlands had remained part of the public domain, though, and when South Dakota agreed to acquire and transfer to the Park Service, ninety percent of the remaining private holdings toll-proposed a consolation. He recommended that the service use the Antiquities Act, whose targets were usually landscapes of unusual archaeological or geological interest, to proclaim sixty-eight thousand acres of the area a new national monument. Congress approved Badlands National Monument in 1929. Eventually enlarged to some 250,000 acres, it became the Great Plains' largest chunk

• 33:10Speaker 04

  of public lands when the monument opened in 1939. Bison were gone from it, pronghorns very nearly so, and across the gray and saffron mounds hunters had long before wiped out the famous local population of Rocky Mountain bighorns. All three species could be and were recovered, but the Badlands' sparse grass cover and small size has kept it from becoming a plains' Yellowstone. Something similar happened with North Dakota's Little Missouri Badlands, which the NPS initially found too barren for a national park. At first, local ranchers there vehemently opposed the park, but rancher opposition

• 33:54Speaker 04

  swirled away with the Dust Bowl and the Depression, and the Park Service finally acquired the area in 1947, but as a historical memorial park based on President Theodore Roosevelt's presence in the area. With its pronghorns and bison herd, and eventually wild horses, North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park came closer to the Great Plains Ecosystem Park Shelford and the ecologists were calling for. But the park's two units were small, barely seventy thousand acres total, and the Park Service had promised that none of the big, original predators like grizzlies or wolves would ever return.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  The public lands reserved on the Northern Plains that would eventually have the most promise as a catland-like wild possibility began life modestly in 1936 as the Fort Peck Game Range, initially managed by the Bureau of Biological Survey. The survey had sent its well-respected ecologist, Olas Murray, to report on the area surrounding a damned reservoir the Corps of Engineers was creating on the Missouri called Fort Peck, expecting Murray to suggest a waterfowl refuge. Murray surprised his bosses by arguing that the broken Badlands-studded valley held much greater promise

• 35:32Speaker 04

  as a preserve for big, wild animals. From small things, large results. By the 1970s, what had now become called the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge was the second-largest one in the Lower 48, of a size that made it a real possibility for modern rewilding. With its 1978 Omnibus Parks Bill, that same decade, the Park Service upgraded both the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt to full national park status. Along with Wind Cave and Saskatchewan's Grassland National Park,

• 36:17Speaker 04

  established in 1981, and eight national grasslands, all these gave the Northern Plains at least a start in recapturing the wildlife spectacle and ancient poetry of the American Prairies.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I've already told the story in episode 22 of the NPS attempt to create a national park of the plains, on the southern plains around Palo Duro Canyon, a 60-mile-long canyon carved by the headwaters of the Red River as it slices through the Texas Panhandle. A thousand-foot-deep roar of color, Palo Duro was certainly scenic and vertical, but it wasn't scenic or vertical enough to suit Roger Toll. Plus, it had long since gone under private fence. Without a commitment from Texas to acquire the land, it failed as both a national park candidate in 1934

• 37:20Speaker 04

  and as a 135,000-acre national monument in 1938. Geologist Charles Gould argued that Palo Duro, as he put it, is well worthy of being made into a national monument. It is the most spectacular canyon carved by erosion anywhere on the Great Plains of North America. But no one in Texas stepped forward to help with the $294,000, roughly 6.7 million today, the NPS needed in the 1930s to acquire a Palo Duro Canyon National Monument.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  Losing that, which ultimately would have also become a national park, was among the biggest misses on the plains in the 20th century. So the southern prairies have ended up entirely lacking a national park. South of the Arkansas River, there are a handful of national wildlife refuges and two small national monuments, Alabaz Flent Quarry in the Texas Panhandle and Capulon Volcano in New Mexico. Today, on the southern plains, only 3.6% of the landscape is in public ownership. Here, in the 21st century, in a country its 19th-century explorers said

• 38:44Speaker 04

  "seems particularly adapted as arranged for buffaloes, wild goats, and other game", no great preserved or rewilded landscapes exist on the southern prairies.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  In our time, restoring the Great Prairies to their former glory is assuming a different form than the last century's grand national parks. Since the turn of the 21st century, this new approach has conservation organizations like the Southern Plains Land Trust in Colorado and American Prairie in Montana employing a market approach, acquiring Great Plains ranches that they then work to rewild. The Southern Plains Land Trust owns a 45,000-acre ranch called Heartland in southeastern Colorado,

• 39:45Speaker 04

  where it's now removed all internal fencing and recovered bison, pronghorns, wild horses, elk, and extensive prairie dog towns. Once 5 billion strong, prairie dogs are today down to just 1% of their former numbers. But ecologists find a striking correlation between existing prairie dog towns and the remaining populations of iconic prairie species like burrowing owls, furuginous hawks, golden eagles, and endangered species like mountain plovers, swift foxes, and black-footed ferrets, which prior to mass poisoning of dog towns preyed on prairie dogs the way wolves culled elk.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  In fact, in October of 2024, my wife, Sarah, and I had the thrill of helping to release 33 endangered black-footed ferrets into Heartland's prairie dog towns. There's more public land on the Northern Plains, though, and the best hope for a great prairie wildlands on the scale of the game parks of Africa is there, specifically in the state of Montana. Conservation biologists say that to work ecologically, a Catlin-esque plains park should cover at least 2.5 million acres, the size of Yellowstone. And let's be honest, fashioning something this grand is a conservation act on the level

• 41:14Speaker 04

  of creating the first national parks in world history, or passing a Wilderness Preservation Act. And America achieved both of those in the 19th and 20th centuries. Do we still have that kind of vision? There's something close to it, although in our present political climate, it must have necessity take a different form than the federal actions that got us parks and wildernesses. The bookends of a grand prairie preserve emerged from President Bill Clinton's 2001 proclamation of an Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument draped along 150 miles of that river.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Downstream of it is the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge I mentioned, now grown to a whopping 915,814 acres. And in between those two vast public lands, private ranches looking for buyers. American Prairie opened offices in Bozeman, Montana in 2001 to see if the Rockefeller family's strategy of buying up private ranches to create Grand Tetons Park might work on the 21st century Great Plains. The organization has money, there are big time donors on both coasts, although the vast

• 42:39Speaker 04

  majorities of AP's donors are small contributors, and it has an epic plan to acquire a critical half-million private acres in order to stitch together the existing public lands along the Missouri into a restored Great Plains Preserve that could approach 3 million or more acres in size, larger even than Yellowstone. Despite a rousing affair... Firestorm in the conservative media and the present strongly conservative Montana state government. Major players, including National Geographic, are all in on American Prairie's project.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  It envisions a rewilded Great Plains preserve, including not just bison, elk, and pronghorns, but the full ecological array of animals and ecologies of the historic plains, including grizzlies and wolves. American Prairie, in other words, would be what we never got. A version of the Maasai Mara or the Serengeti in America. Recreating our American Serengeti means a reversing of the arc of recent history on the Great Plains. That enrages some people, but it is, after all, a realization of the Stephen Long idea

• 44:04Speaker 04

  from 1820, that the best future for at least pieces of the plains is to preserve the region in the state we found it. That state of nature, after all, had 10,000 years of prior existence going for it.

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• 45:59Speaker 07

  All right, Dan. So in this episode,

• 46:04Speaker 07

  you're standing up for the plains as a landscape that should be celebrated. And

• 46:12Speaker 07

  I think you, one of the things that I really appreciated about this episode is you describe driving across the plains and what you see. And a lot of times, I think the impression that it gives to folks is that time is standing still out here. Yeah. And you point out that there's this huge irony between the impression that people have of a timelessness on the Great Plains and the tremendous amount of change that they've gone through that's invisible to us now. And I kind of wonder.

• 46:49Speaker 07

  If you think we'll ever wake up as a country to the reality of that history, right?

• 46:56Speaker 04

  You know, I wrote a book a few years ago that I titled American Serengeti. And I did it very deliberately to try to wake people up.

• 47:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Because I wanted them to realize, I mean, we're all enamored on the nature channel and PBS of the wonderful documentaries about, you know, the great game parks in East Africa and Tanzania and Kenya and South Africa and elsewhere. I mean, and those are kind of bucket list things for a lot of people, including me. Sarah and I are going to Kenya, in fact, this October, having tried to go in 2019. It was gonna be the summer of 2020 that happened to be the summer of the pandemic.

• 47:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  So we weren't able to go that summer and are finally gonna get over to Kenya this coming fall. And the reason I wanted to make that kind of analogy is because of all of those quotes that I used in the script of this particular episode in the 19th century and even in the 20th century, after, even after some of the animals were gone, but the landscape, as plains people put it, still had the hair on it. The grass was still there. And so that topography still had a kind of an appeal. I wanted to make the point with

• 48:24Speaker 04

  American Serengeti and with an episode like this, that we Americans had one of the natural marvels of the world, like East Africa, right here in the near American West, the West on the east side of the Rocky Mountains. And we sort of myopically and without very much thought, it seems, just frittered it away. We destroyed all the wildlife. We de-buffaloed, de-wolfed the entire countryside of the Great Plains that had so inspired so many people.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  And then unlike the mountainous west or the Colorado Plateau, or even the deserts of the American West, all of which ended up getting a lot of public lands, the plains looked to American policymakers like the perfect place to plunk down farmers and ranchers. And so we ended up privatizing most of that world. And those two steps wiping out all the wildlife that had been there, that had made it into an American Serengeti, and then the next step of tearing up even the grasslands themselves in many cases, in order to produce farms and ranches and privatized empires,

• 49:53Speaker 04

  made it really difficult for us to sort of redress the historical error of not preserving some of this Great Plains country as some semblance of what it once had been. I mean, I try to point out in this particular episode that it's beyond ironic that the first call in American history for a national park, it wasn't in Yellowstone, it wasn't in Glacier, it wasn't in Yosemite, it was for a national park on the Great Plains. But we ended up instead with the Great Plains being almost completely ignored by the great movement to establish America's Western parks. And so we've only in the 21st century begun to, I think,

• 50:38Speaker 04

  circle back and try to, try to come up with some sort of of new 21st century solution to how we get some rewilded part of the plains back again.

• 50:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, you, I think a lot of people, when they imagine the Western national parks, like Yosemite, Grand Canyon, all the Utah parks, Yellowstone, Glacier, it's like...

• 51:12Speaker 07

  I think there's sort of a unconscious assumption like, yeah, that's exactly where the park-like landscapes are. Where else would they be?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 07

  You know, it's like, these are natural settings for these parks to be.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 07

  But you point out in this episode, sort of how the site selection for national parks has been based throughout the park services history on sort of a changing set of criteria that in some instances privileges certain landscapes over others, or maybe ecological values. Like, there's been sort of an always shifting set of rules about what's a national park and what's not. And it's not etched in stone anywhere on a tablet that these places are fit to be parks and these other landscapes are not.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I tried to provide the audience for this particular episode with some sense of the history of that. And it's pretty clear in the early years of the designation of parks. And of course, we designate quite a number of parks before we ever have a national park service.

• 52:22Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  In order to kind of codify what sort of landscapes we're looking for. But when we do have a national park service, that happens in 1916, and we have an initial director, Stephen Mather is his name, he's a New Englander, very wealthy, Harvard-educated, New Englander, who sort of imposes his will on site selection for additional national parks. What you start to realize is that in these early stages, from the time that Yellowstone had been set aside, down through the creation of a park service, is that we had looked for parks

• 53:04Speaker 04

  based on a kind of a European model that centered around what was thought of as the most scenic part of Western Europe, which was the Alps.

• 53:12Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  And so, we were looking for mountain ranges that looked like the Alps. We were looking for, in the more arid parts of the West, at least really vertical-walled canyons, because verticality was regarded as the sublime scenery.

• 53:31Speaker 07

  Right.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  And of course, the Great Plains is anything but vertical. It's basically a horizontal landscape. And so that kind of model immediately put the Great Plains, and privatization is taking place too, but that model put the Great Plains on a back burner. And then when we finally start getting ecologists beginning to weigh in and telling the park service, so what you need to do is you need to have some representative pieces of different ecologies to preserve, to preserve American nature. By this point, many of the public lands parks had been created, and since the plains has been privatized, the park service is now confronting,

• 54:14Speaker 04

  wow, so how do we actually get a park if we want one on the plains? That means we're gonna have to buy it, and we don't have an acquisition budget. Our park service has always just created parks out of existing public lands.

• 54:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  And that then becomes the next big hurdle in an effort to try to turn back towards the Great Plains and begin to preserve some of those landscapes that are there.

• 54:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, you, you allude in this episode, when you're discussing American Prairie and this new model that's emerging here in Montana, you allude in that discussion to the case of the Rockefellers in Grand Teton National Park. And I think that's a story that maybe is not as well-known, because you look at that place and you think, oh, of course, this has always been a park. It's, it's a postcard, you know? But I wonder if you could tell that story in a little more detail for folks that aren't familiar with the, the role that the Rockefellers played in that?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, so Grand Teton National Park, obviously, as you say, it's a, a piece of the West that we would say, okay, that, right along with Yosemite and Glacier and Yellowstone, that is a park from the very beginning. Well, it's actually not. It's a part of a forest reserve in western Wyoming, and so the-

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Peaks themselves, the Tetons, become a part of the public lands. But in order to create a national park there, you need some of the valley floor. You need a longer stretch of the mountains. And much of the country around the peaks themselves had been taken up under the homestead acts by ranchers. And so what the Rockefeller family did, starting in the 1930s, was very quietly, as ranches came for sale, they began buying up the ranches around the great Tetons and the Grand Tetons

• 56:19Speaker 04

  and in the Jackson Hole Valley and quietly conveying title to the National Park Service. I mean, it reached a point in the 1940s where the ranchers realized what was going on. And there was a tremendous kind of pushback, some ranchers refusing to sell, no matter what the price was, because they were steadfast against turning the Tetons and the Jackson Hole Valley into a national park. But the Rockefellers basically managed to get most of the lands that went into Grand Teton National Park by buying up private ranches. So that was kind of the model.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  When American Prairie began imagining the possibility of, okay, here's this big public lands that Bill Clinton has just created along the Missouri River as a national monument. And we've long had this now almost million acre sized Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge downriver, and here are these ranches in between, many of which are being offered for sale. And so let's do the same kind of thing in Montana that the Rockefeller family had done in Wyoming.

• 57:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think that's part of. Sort of the popular, maybe it's a blind spot and sort of popular discourse surrounding American Prairie is that this isn't sort of a, a brand new invention. The Rockefeller story is actually a sort of very insightful.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  It's a precedent, really.

• 57:57Speaker 07

  Context, precedent. Yeah, yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is.

• 58:00Speaker 07

  And today, you know, we think of Grand Teton National Park and we don't associate it with controversy is how sort of short the historical memory is with that place.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right, Randall. And I mean, I first heard of American Prairie, in fact, when a friend of mine, a historian named Bob Ryder, who had written about the creation of Grand Teton National Park, was invited by this organization that was forming in Bozeman to come over and talk to them about the creation of Grand Teton Park.

• 58:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  And so I remember, you know, having a conversation, because Bob and I, he was one of my backpacking buddies for many years, and we were off on a backpack and I was saying, so what do these folks in Bozeman have in mind? He said, well, I think they're going to try to do something kind of like what the Rockefellers tried. That's what they wanted me to talk about.

• 58:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, I was up on American Prairie two weeks ago, helping out with a bison hunt, and this is sort of a non sequitur, we're just getting up, but it popped into mind, because we were talking about the Grand Teton precedent up there and, and we were watching the prairie dogs. And it's one of those, prairie dogs are one of those animals, you, you mentioned this in the piece, that they don't get the credit that they deserve as sort of a native fauna, but.

• 59:31Speaker 07

  We were, we were watching them and I was thinking to myself, man, if these were African animals, they'd be the most popular animal at the zoo.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 07

  Right? Um, you think of like the meerkat and it's sort of just the, the exoticism of, of that animal gives it like a spark in your mind that the prairie dog just doesn't seem to elicit. And I don't know, I find sometimes when I've kind of rearranged the furniture in my head and try to take a different perspective on what's right in front of me, I get this new appreciation for it. Um, and you kind of begin to really see the prairie dog for what it is. And I, I don't know, I think you, you went through that experience in all your time living on the, on the plains. Um, but I just wonder what more there is

• 1:00:22Speaker 07

  to do to, to rebrand some of our local Serengeti, right?

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think that we, in a lot of ways, one of the reasons we're struggling with this today is that because we didn't act the way, for example, a colonial power like England did in Kenya and Tanzania, where they moved to help these emerging governments establish parks to preserve all the wildlife that they had. Because we didn't do that here, in some respects, we allowed the American public to sort of lose interest

• 1:01:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  in a lot of these, these creatures. I mean, when you read those accounts in the 19th century, people were fascinated by animals like prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets and swift foxes. And I mean, everybody was just, you know, they were, prairie fever, in fact, is the term that everybody used for a fascination with being on the Great Plains and seeing all these animals. And because of the way our history played out, we lost the sense of the magic of it. And so along with the creation of the landscapes themselves, I mean, we're kind of going to have to, I think, reacquire the magic. And I think if

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  American prairie does succeed in its grand vision of not just having buffalo

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  and elk and pronghorns, but also having Gray wolves, grizzly bears, prairie dog towns, all of the complete kind of ecology that so thrilled people in the 19th century. I think we've got a chance to get it back.

• 1:02:07Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Well, Dan, I'll, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, me too, Randall.

• 1:02:11Speaker 07

  All right. Thank you.

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