The Great Plains

This is a land of extreme heat and extreme cold. It is a land where water is worth more than property. It is almost flat, until it suddenly meets the mountains to the west.

Nowhere is the rainfall more unpredictable or the climate more violent than on the Great Plains. For two or three years, there may be enough rain. Then there is a year when rain fails, when the streams from the mountains dry up and their channels are filled with sand. Often the weather destroys a year's work in a single day. Only the Native Americans knew how to exist in this place without trees or arable soil. They lived primarily by hunting the millions of buffaloes roaming the Great Plains.

In 1868 the railroads reached into the plains, and the builders and hunters brought death to the buffalo. In a few tragic years millions of them were killed, and without them the Native Americans were forced to abandon the plains. The cowboy and huge herds of cattle took their place. At that time the supply of good free farm land was exhausted, and therefore some settlers, lured by the promise of land, did stay in the Great Plains to coax life from the hard, dry soil.

These were the first of the "homesteaders" — farmers who received 64 hectares of free land from the federal government in exchange for living on the claim and cultivating it for at least five years. When the first homesteaders arrived, they found that Indians and cattlemen controlled the plains. To both groups, the homesteader with his fences and plowed fields was an interloper encroaching on the cattlemen's grazing land and the Indians' hunting grounds. For years, conflict between these three forces flared up in violence, but two inventions which reached this region in the 1870s assured the farmers' victory. The first of these was barbed wire which stopped cattle from overrun­ning the cultivated areas. The other was the windmill which saved the farmer's life during droughts by pumping surface water to irrigate his vegetables and water his livestock.

The farmers did not realize it, but they were wasting their land by "square farming".⁸ Wind swept over the square patches of plowed ground, and heavy rains washed the soil into the rivers. In the worst years all crops failed.

One May morning in 1934, the people of Boston, Massachusetts, stopped in the streets to look up at a dirty yellow sky. Thick dust hid the sun as millions of tons of fine soil were being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean by winds from the Great Plains. This was the beginning of the great drought that brought ruin to one-sixth of the nation's land. But the people were not defeated by the terrible years of drought and crop failure.

Today's farmer has learned to rotate his crops and also to terrace his land and to plant grass along the natural courses where the water drains away.

The Great Plains are also America's cattle country. The cattle were scattered over hundreds of miles of country and had to be rounded up by cowboys who knew how to ride, and ride hard. The drive to the meat packing plants in Chicago was long and slow. A herd might travel 20 miles during a day, and at night the nervous cattle had to be calmed. To keep them quiet, cowboys circled the herd throughout the night, singing to the animals. This was part of the cowboys' work and their sad ballads have become part of American culture.

With the development of refrigerated railroad-cars which permitted the shipment of fresh meat over long distances cattle-raising extended over the entire plains. But there were many difficuties. In summer the heat scorched the grass and there were grass fires. In winter farmers had to contend with extreme cold and blizzards of snow.

Today a new cattle industry occupies the Great Plains. Cooperative associations have been formed which divide the land among the members and decide on the number of cattle on each plot. Many problems remain, but the cattlemen are trying to restore the pastures just as farmers are restoring the soil.

Дата добавления: 2015-04-24