The vast grassland running down the center of North America — from the Canadian prairies to Texas — a system built by grass, fire, drought, and grazing that produced one of history's most dynamic mobile cultures after the horse arrived, was stripped of its defining animal and violently remade through the dispossession and confinement of Plains nations within a single human lifetime, and was then nearly destroyed as farmland by the same forces of soil and sky that had always ruled it.
The grass goes down six feet before the roots end. On the Great Plains, the real life of the land is underground, where roots outweigh everything above them. That investment in depth is how the grass survives fire, drought, and the hooves of millions of grazing animals. For ten thousand years it worked. Then, in the space of roughly fifty years in the nineteenth century, the bison were slaughtered, the Plains nations were broken and confined, the sod was plowed, and the land nearly blew away. The same deep roots that had made the grassland indestructible could not survive a steel plow.