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Great Plains

 
Dictionary: Great Plains
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A vast grassland region of central North America extending from the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba southward to Texas. Much of the area is used for cattle and wheat ranching.

 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Great Plains
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Continental slope of central North America. It stretches from the Rio Grande at the U.S.-Mexico border in the south to the Mackenzie River delta along the Arctic Ocean in the north and from the Interior Lowlands and the Canadian Shield in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. The plains embrace parts of 10 U.S. states and 3 Canadian provinces, covering an area of about 1,125,000 sq mi (2,900,000 sq km). A high plateau of semiarid grassland, these prairie regions in both the U.S. and Canada produce the major proportion of wheat grown in each country and are also important cattle- and sheep-herding areas. Parts of the plains have reserves of coal and lignite, petroleum, and natural gas.

For more information on Great Plains, visit Britannica.com.

US History Encyclopedia: Great Plains
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Great Plains, a geographically and environmentally defined region covering parts of ten states: Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Running between Canada and Mexico, the region stretches from the 98th meridian (altitude 2,000 feet) to the Rocky Mountains (altitude 7,000 feet). This eastward-sloping, treeless, semi-arid, shortgrass plateau's annual rainfall is between thirteen and twenty inches, and the region's continental climate creates an environment of extremes: excessive heat and cold, and violent weather patterns. Along with deep, rich soils, its other valuable resource is the Ogallala Aquifer, a large, nonrenewable water source underlying much of the region. The region's culture, its boom and bust economy, and its importance to American history cannot be understood apart from its environment.

Evidence suggests that the first human occupation of the Plains occurred at the end of the last ice age (around 10000 B.C., when the Clovis and then Folsom peoples inhabited the region). Between 5000 and 2000 B.C., a long drought made the region uninhabitable. Around 1000 A.D. the drought receded and the Eastern Woodland culture entered the central Plains to farm stream bottoms. The climate shifted again and many of its inhabitants withdrew, as others took their place.

The first documented European visit to the Plains was made in 1540 by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. One hundred and fifty years later, the French investigated trading opportunities with Plains tribes in the region. American interest in the Plains was cemented with its purchase from France in 1803. In the twenty years after the Louisiana Purchase, three government expeditions led to the common perception of this region as the Great American Desert. Trails were blazed through the Plains from the 1830s, taking settlers to California and Oregon, and, by the late 1870s, the military had forced many Indian nations such as the Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Apaches onto reservations.

Euro-American settlement began at the close of the Civil War. Peace, the sense of manifest destiny, technological developments, and an unusually generous period of rainfall between 1878 and 1887 made the Plains appear especially inviting. Relying on free access to land and water, cattle ranching boomed in the 1870s and 1880s, but later declined as a result of the increasing number of small farmers and the harsh winter of 1886–1887. Boom times came in the mid-1910s, as Plains farmers increased production to supply World War I. An economic bust followed due to overproduction, and this, combined with the prolonged drought of the 1930s and poor agricultural practices, led to the region's most terrible ecological and social catastrophe, the Dust Bowl.

Post–World War II farmers sought to minimize weather unpredictability by mechanizing irrigation in order to utilize the Ogallala Aquifer. From 1940 to 1980, production tripled even as crop prices declined. By 1990, 40 percent of America's beef was fattened and slaughtered within a 250-mile radius of Garden City, Kansas. The decline in the aquifer, combined with low commodity prices, led to a depressed regional economy, and a decreasing and aging population at the turn of the twenty-first century. Unlike many other American regions, the Great Plains resists the traditional story of progress: its environment sets the context for repetitive boom-and-bust economic cycles.

Bibliography

Opie, John. Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land: A Historical Study in the Possibilities for American Sustainable Agriculture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Reprint of the original 1931 edition.

West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Great Plains
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Great Plains, extensive grassland region on the continental slope of central North America. They extend from the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba south through W central United States into W Texas. In the United States the Plains include parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.

Physical Geography

The Great Plains slope gently eastward from the foothills of the Rocky Mts. at an elevation of 6,000 ft (1,829 m) to merge into the interior lowlands at an elevation of roughly 1,500 ft (457 m). The 1,500 ft (457 m) contour line, the 100th meridian of longitude, and the 20-in. (51-cm) isohyet of precipitation are arbitrarily used to mark the region's transitional eastern border. In places, however, it is clearly marked by an escarpment. Much of the Great Plains was once covered by a vast inland sea, and sediments deposited by the sea make up the nearly horizontal rock strata that underlie the area. Intrusive igneous rocks account for sections of higher elevation. The Great Plains region has generally level or rolling terrain; its subdivisions include Edwards Plateau, the Llano Estacado, the High Plains, the Sand Hills, the Badlands, and the Northern Plains.

The Black Hills and several outliers of the Rocky Mts. interrupt the region's undulating profile. The Saskatchewan, Missouri, Platte, Republican, Arkansas, Cimarron, and Canadian rivers flow in wide beds, generally from west to east, and are important sources of water. Rainfall decreases from east to west. Except for its easternmost margin and the elevations, the Great Plains have a semiarid climate, averaging less than 20 in. (51 cm) of precipitation annually. There are wide seasonal temperature ranges and winds of high velocity. In the westernmost sections the chinook, a warm winter wind, brings relief from bitterly cold and snowy winters. The dominant type of vegetation consists of shortgrass prairies; trees grow in moister areas and along water courses.

People and Economy

Although overall the Great Plains are sparsely populated, with much of the grassland devoted to farms and ranches, about half the people live in small to medium-sized urban areas; Edmonton, Alberta and Denver, Colo. are the largest cities in the region. Soils throughout the region are fertile and very productive when water is available. The principal crop is wheat, concentrated in the Spring Wheat Belt (generally N of Nebraska), where the colder climate delays sowing until spring, and the Winter Wheat Belt (centered in Kansas and Oklahoma), where the milder climate allows for winter sowing. Other crops include sorghum, flax, and cotton. Cattle and sheep are raised throughout most of the Great Plains. Oil, natural gas, coal, and gold are among its mineral deposits.

History

The Great Plains were long inhabited by Native Americans, who hunted the teeming herds of buffalo (see bison) that roamed the grasslands and, due to wholesale slaughter by settlers and the U.S. army, were nearly extinct by the end of the 19th cent. The region was explored by the Spanish in the 17th cent. Until well into the 19th cent., the central Great Plains were called the Great American Desert. The first westward-bound pioneers bypassed the Great Plains. The railroads were largely responsible for their development after the Civil War. An initial wave of settlement was followed by emigration in times of drought. By the mid-1930s, decades of overgrazing and poor soil management in many of the Plains states had resulted in dust storms and the devastation of crops (see Dust Bowl).

Bibliography

See W. P. Webb, The Great Plains (1931, repr. 1981); N. R. Peirce, The Great Plains States of America (1973); B. W. Blouet and F. C. Luebke, ed., The Great Plains: Environment and Culture (1979).

Geography: Great Plains
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Grassland prairie region of North America, extending from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, in Canada, south through the west-central United States into Texas.

  • Now characterized by huge ranches and farms, the Great Plains were long inhabited by Native Americans.
  • In the 1930s, areas of the Great Plains were known collectively as the Dust Bowl. Poor agricultural practices led to depletion of topsoil, which was blown away in huge dust storms. The area was called the Great American Desert well into the nineteenth century.

Wikipedia: Great Plains
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For other uses, see Great Plains (disambiguation).
The Great Plains
Region
Country  United States  Canada  Mexico
Region North America
Length 3,200 km (1,988 mi)
Width 800 km (497 mi)
Area 1,300,000 km2 (501,933 sq mi)
Great Plains (green) with the 100th meridian (red)
Website: Library of Congress

The Great Plains are the broad expanse of prairie and steppe which lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and into Mexico. In Canada the term prairie is more common, and the region is known as the Prairie Provinces or simply "the Prairies".

The region is about 500 miles (800 km) east to west and 2,000 miles (3,200 km) north to south. Much of the region was home to American bison herds until they were hunted to near extinction during the mid/late 1800s. It has an area of approximately 1,300,000 km2. Some current thinking regarding the geographic location of the Great Plains is shown by a map at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.[1]

Contents

Geology

The Great Plains are the westernmost portion of the vast North American Interior Plains, which extend east to the Appalachian Plateau. The United States Geological Survey divides the Great Plains in the United States into ten physiographic subdivisions:

  • Missouri Plateau, glaciated – east-central South Dakota, northern and eastern North Dakota and northeastern Montana
  • Missouri Plateau, unglaciated – western South Dakota, northeastern Wyoming, southwestern South Dakota and southeastern Montana
  • Black Hills – western South Dakota
  • High Plains – eastern New Mexico, northwestern Texas, western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, most of Nebraska (including the Sand Hills) and southeastern Wyoming
  • Plains Border – central Kansas and northern Oklahoma (including the Flint, Red and Smoky Hills)
  • Colorado Piedmont – eastern Colorado
  • Raton section – northeastern New Mexico
  • Pecos Valley – eastern New Mexico
  • Edwards Plateau – south-central Texas
  • Central Texas section – central Texas

The High Plains is used in a related, more general context to describe the elevated regions of the Great Plains, which are primarily west of the 100th meridian.

During the Cretaceous Period (145-65 million years ago), the Great Plains was covered by a shallow inland sea called Western Interior Seaway. However, during the Late Cretaceous to the Paleocene (65-55 million years ago), the seaway had begun to recede, leaving behind thick marine deposits and a relatively flat terrain where the seaway had once occupied.

Climate

In general, the Great Plains have a wide variety of weather throughout the year with very cold winters and very hot summers. There is usually plenty of wind, too. The prairies support abundant wildlife in undisturbed settings, but people have easily converted much of the prairies for agricultural purposes or pastures.

The 100th meridian roughly corresponds with the line that divides the Great Plains into an area that receive 20 inches (500 mm) or more of rainfall per year and an area that receives less than 20 inches (500 mm). In this context, the High Plains is semi-arid steppe land and is generally characterized by rangeland or marginal farmland. The region is periodically subjected to extended periods of drought; high winds in the region may then generate devastating dust storms.

History

Historic photo of the High Plains in Haskell County, Kansas, showing a shortgrass prairie with a buffalo wallow or shallow circular depression in the level surface. (USGS photo, 1897) [2]

Homesteaders in central Nebraska in 1866.

Great Plains in North Dakota where communities began settling in the 1870s.[3]

Pre-European contact

Historically, the Great Plains were the range of the bison and of the Great Plains culture of the Native American tribes of the Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and others. Eastern portions of the Great Plains were inhabited by tribes who lived in semipermanent villages of earth lodges, such as the Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee and Wichita.

European contact

With the arrival of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador, the first recorded history of Europeans in the Great Plains happened in Texas, Kansas and Nebraska from 1540-1542. In that same time period, Hernando de Soto crossed a west-northwest direction in what is now Oklahoma and Texas. Today this is known as the De Soto Trail. The Spanish thought the Great Plains were the location of the mythological Quivira and Cíbola, a place rich in gold.

In the next one hundred years the fur trade injected thousands of Europeans onto the Great Plains, as fur trappers from France, Spain, Britain, Russia and the young United States made their way across much of the region. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and subsequent Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1804, the Great Plains became more accessible. A major fur trading site was located at Fort Lisa on the Missouri River in Nebraska. This type of early settlement opened the door to vast westward expansion, with settlements rising across the Great Plains.

Early Eruopean settlements on the Great Plains

French

Further information: List of French forts in North America

British

Further information: List of Hudson's Bay Company forts and List of Nortwest Company forts

American

Pioneer settlement

This settlement led to the near-extinction of the bison and the removal of the Native Americans to Indian reservations in the 1870s. Much of the Great Plains became open range, hosting ranching operations where anyone was theoretically free to run cattle. In the spring and fall, roundups were held and the new calves were branded and the cattle sorted out for sale. Ranching began in Texas and gradually moved northward. Texas cattle were driven north to railroad lines in cities Dodge City, Kansas and Ogallala, Nebraska; from there, cattle were shipped eastward. Many foreign, especially British, investors financed the great ranches of the era. Overstocking of the range and the terrible winter of 1886 eventually resulted in a disaster, with many cattle starved and frozen. From then onward, ranchers generally turned to raising feed in order to keep their cattle alive over winter.

The Homestead Act of 1862 provided that a settler could claim up to 160 acres (65 hectares) of land, provided that he lived on it for a period of five years and cultivated it. This was later expanded under the Kinkaid Act to include a homestead of an entire section. Hundreds of thousands of people claimed these homesteads, sometimes building sod houses out of the very turf of their land. Many of them were not skilled dryland farmers and failures were frequent. Germans from Russia who had previously farmed in familiar circumstances in what is now Ukraine were marginally more successful than the average homesteader. The Dominion Lands Act of 1871 served a similar function in Canada.

After 1900

Abandoned gas station west of North Platte, Nebraska

The region roughly centered on the Oklahoma Panhandle, including southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and extreme northeastern New Mexico was known as the Dust Bowl during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The effect of the drought combined with the effects of the Great Depression, forced many farmers off the land throughout the Great Plains.

From the 1950s on, many areas of the Great Plains have become productive crop-growing areas because of extensive irrigation. The southern portion of the Great Plains lies over the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground layer of water-bearing strata dating from the last ice age. Center pivot irrigation is used extensively in drier sections of the Great Plains, resulting in aquifer depletion at a rate that is greater than the ground's ability to recharge.

The rural Plains have lost a third of their population since 1920. Several hundred thousand square miles of the Great Plains have fewer than six persons per square mile—the density standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American frontier "closed" in 1893. Many have fewer than two persons per square mile. There are more than 6,000 ghost towns in the State of Kansas alone, according to Kansas historian Daniel Fitzgerald. This problem is often exacerbated by the consolidation of farms and the difficulty of attracting modern industry to the region. In addition, the smaller school-age population has forced the consolidation of school districts and the closure of high schools in some communities. This continuing population loss has led some to suggest that the current use of the drier parts of the Great Plains is not sustainable, and propose that large parts be restored to native grassland grazed by bison, a proposal known as Buffalo Commons.

Wind power

Wind farm in the plains of West Texas (2004)

The Great Plains contribute substantially to wind power in the United States. In July 2008, oilman turned wind-farm developer, T. Boone Pickens, called for the U.S. to invest $1 trillion to build an additional 200,000 MW of wind power nameplate capacity in the Plains, as part of his Pickens Plan. Pickens cited Sweetwater, Texas as an example of economic revitalization driven by wind power development.[4][5][6] Sweetwater was a struggling town typical of the Plains, steadily losing businesses and population, until wind turbines came to the surrounding Nolan County.[7] Wind power brought jobs to local residents, along with royalty payments to landowners who leased sites for turbines, reversing the town's population decline. Pickens claims the same economic benefits are possible throughout the Plains, which he refers to as North America's "wind corridor."

Flora

The Great Plains are part of the floristic North American Prairies Province, which extends from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian mountains.

An American Bison

References

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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)
  1. ^ Wishart, David. 2004. The Great Plains Region. In: Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. xiii-xviii.
  2. ^ Darton, N.H. 1920. Syracuse-Lakin folio, Kansas. United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Folios of the Geologic Atlas, No. 212, 10 pp. (See Plate 2)
  3. ^ Rees, Amanda (2004). The Great Plains region. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 18. ISBN 0313327335. http://books.google.es/books?id=v0MpNai3xdMC. Retrieved 2009-09-04. 
  4. ^ "Legendary Texas oilman embraces wind power". Star Tribune. 2008-07-25. http://www.startribune.com/business/25868279.html. Retrieved 2008-08-24. 
  5. ^ Fahey, Anna (2008-07-09). "[http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/200Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate An-break-the-addiction Texas Oil Man Says We Can Break the Addiction]". Sightline Daily. http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/200Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate An-break-the-addiction. Retrieved 2008-08-24. 
  6. ^ "T. Boone Pickens Places $2 Billion Order for GE Wind Turbines". Wind Today Magazine. 2008-05-16. http://www.windtoday.net/info/articles.html?ID=57318. Retrieved 2008-08-24. 
  7. ^ Block, Ben (2008-07-24). "In Windy West Texas, An Economic Boom". http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008271.html. Retrieved 2008-11-05. 

See also

Bibliography

External links


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Coordinates: 37°41′20″N 97°20′10″W / 37.68889°N 97.33611°W / 37.68889; -97.33611


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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Geography. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Great Plains".  Read more