Part 2:
The 1800s
The
Rise of "King Cotton"
The End of the Red Man's Civilization
The
European settlement of the prairie marked the end of the civilization
that had sustained it and been sustained by it for thousands
of years. The settlers were pioneers in the truest sense - with
a determination to survive and thrive under the harshest of
conditions, and to use the bounty of the earth to enrich not
only their own lives but the lives of others on this continent
and around the world. But the end of the red man's civilization
was a violent and bloody one. During the process the land also
changed dramatically, and in an incredibly short time.
Before the
Civil War, between twenty and sixty million bison roamed the
North American plains. By 1900, less than a thousand were still
alive. As Black Elk, the famous Sioux Indian chief recalled,
"I can remember when the bison were so many that they could
not be counted, but more and more Wasichus (white men) came
to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered
where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat;
they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they
took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take
the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats
came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues.
You can see that the men who did this were crazy..." The
activity of the white man in slaughtering the buffalo was as
incomprehensible to the natives of the plains as was their own
"primitive" lifestyle and nomadic behavior to the
European settlers.
An old holy
woman of the Wintu tribe, reflecting on the strange ways of
the settlers, said, "The white people never cared for land
or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.
When we dig roots we make little holes. When we build houses,
we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we
don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts, we don't
chop down the trees. But the white people plow up the ground,
pull down trees, kill everything... How can the spirit of the
earth like the white man? Everywhere the white man has touched
it, it is sore."
It was only
a matter of a few years before the European settlers, with their
belief in man's "dominion over the earth," and their
ingenuity in finding ways to conquer and exploit nature and
its resources, had fundamentally changed the character of man's
relationship to the land, and with it, the character of the
prairies themselves.
Cattle Country
The first Caucasian occupants of the Texas Blackland Prairie
were not farmers; the thick sod and heavy, droughty black clay
soils - later to be called the "dinner bell" soils,
too wet to plow before dinner and too dry after dinner - were
almost impossible to cultivate with the wooden mold-board plow
in use at the time. So those who wanted to take up farming when
the Spanish first opened Texas to colonization in the early
1800s settled in the southeastern part of the state near the
Gulf Coast, where the soils were more amenable to cultivation
with wooden implements.
Early land
grants in the Blacklands were mostly taken by cattlemen, where
the tall grasses - "high enough to hide cattle and long
enough to tie in a knot around a horse's back" - made excellent
forage. The grazing patterns of the cattle differed from those
of the buffalo, and this introduction of domestic livestock
was the first major disruption of the grasslands. While the
buffalo grazed the land intensively, they soon moved on, giving
the grasses time to recover. Under human management, cattle
grazing was concentrated in smaller areas, over longer periods
of time. The natural species competition and succession of the
flora was disturbed, favoring weedy annuals, the shorter, more
grazing-tolerant species of grass and species unpalatable to
cattle.
Barbed wire
was introduced in 1874, and within 15 years most of the state
was fenced, which concentrated livestock and resulted in even
more overgrazing of the grasslands. In 1885 the combined influences
of overgrazing and drought were so severe that hundreds of thousands
of cattle starved to death in Texas. By 1890 the grazing capacity
of many grasslands was reduced by one-half or more, and the
pre-settlement vegetation was permanently altered.
The Sodbusters
It was not until the 1870s and 80s that farmers became interested
in cultivating the Blacklands, when the development of the steel
plow and other implements had made it possible to cut through
the thick prairie sod. The roots were so dense - up to five
miles or more of roots might be found in one square meter of
grasses - that the prairie literally rang, or twanged, when
the steel plows turned over its dense underlayer - "a storm
of wild music" was the poetic description given by one
wheat farmer's daughter several decades later.
By 1900
most of the Blackland Prairie was under cultivation and was
recognized as one of the foremost cotton producing regions of
the world. Ellis County in Texas was at the center of this extraordinary
accomplishment, and many grand old Victorian homes in the cities
of Waxahachie and Ennis still exist, as reminders of the fortunes
that were made in those times.
Cultivation
was also, however, a catastrophic disruption of the prairie
ecosystem. It was a common farmers' joke to tell the story of
an old Indian who, having seen a plowed field for the first
time, said to the farmer, "Wrong side up." The story
was taken to be an illustration of the Indian's ignorance, but
in fact when the native grasses are turned under and the soil
aerated, the organic matter decomposes faster. This creates
a flush of nutrients available to cultivated crops, but when
the crops are harvested the nutrients are removed with the harvest,
and the soil continues to be depleted year after year. Today's
dependence on chemical fertilizers is evidence that perhaps
there was more wisdom in that old Indian's statement than was
recognized at the time.
Certainly
in terms of recovering the lost prairie, his statement was true.
Once the roots of the prairie are broken, and its recovery cycle
interrupted by conventional agriculture, the grasslands never
heal unaided. The prairie ecosystem is so vulnerable to manmade
disturbances that the wheel ruts left by the migrations of the
mid-nineteenth century are still visible, more than 140 years
after the covered wagons carried pioneers on their westward
journeys. Similar traces can be seen in prairie remnants of
the Chisolm Trail in Texas, including one site near Waco where
signs of the wagons which accompanied the great cattle drives
can be seen.
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