A lawn is an open field. A blank slate. A bare stage. A lawn underfoot should not be noticed. Ideally it’s something you hardly focus on, a perennial backdrop designed to show off what’s behind it or on it–a mansion, a picnic, a baseball game. When a lawn is noticed it’s usually because it diverges from manicured smoothness–when it’s suffered an outbreak of dandelions or crabgrass, or has grown to an unruly length.
On the Great Plains, wrote Willa Cather, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” If lawns and fields and prairies are backdrops, then perhaps the great flat, grassy midsection of the United States is a good place to study the way our culture has used the land–the place where patterns of use could be established without reference to forests, mountains, and other natural obstacles. That, at least, is part of the motivation behind a new book by journalist Richard Manning, Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie. In this wide-ranging book the grasslands that stretch from western Ohio to the Rocky Mountains and beyond become the best place to read the story of how the American political and economic system collided with a place ill-equipped to deal with it. Or maybe that should be read another way: to Manning, it’s clear that the grasslands, however much they’ve been converted to lawns and fields, will be around a lot longer than our contemporary culture.
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On open plains grass is too diffuse a resource to support permanent human settlements. People can use wild grasses only by eating the animals that can digest them, and so nomadic grassland peoples always followed the animals. In North America that meant an utter reliance on bison. Plains Indians, Manning writes, ate bison “liver, kidneys, tongues, eyes, testicles, fresh fat, marrow from leg bones, and the hooves of unborn calves. Some tribes first removed the stomach from a freshly killed bison, filled it with blood, pieces of liver, and other choice bits, suspended it, and cooked the mass by adding hot rocks. The intestines were diced up and dipped in bile, then fed to children like candy.”
But 160-acre parcels could support a family east of the Mississippi; on the Great Plains, where the land is drier, they could not. As the majority of the homesteads failed they were bought up by neighboring landowners, a process that, coupled with the high costs of modern industrial farming, has caused the decline of the family farm and of farming communities. Today on the western, dry side of the Great Plains, ranch land typically comes up for sale in parcels of 20,000 acres–31 square miles–or more. The resulting concentration of land, wealth, and power helps explain why the average worth of Montana ranchers is $800,000, and why an organization like the National Cattlemen’s Association, which represents only 230,000 members, can wield extraordinary influence in Congress–the organization has consistently and successfully opposed reforms that would restrict ranching on public lands throughout the west. (Conservationists didn’t put much effort into saving the plains, because they were busy preserving mountains and forest.)
But the reader senses that the practicalities of economics and conservation aren’t quite enough for Manning. He’d like to see a little more reverence, please, for the landscape that still makes up four-tenths of the country, an acknowledgment that just because a place lacks trees or mountains doesn’t mean it lacks interest. Reverence may entail eating a bison steak, or ripping out buckthorn in a forest preserve, or replacing a lawn with a yard full of native wildflowers. At the very least it may entail enjoying the openness of a prairie that a lawn echoes.
