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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 east to west and 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

.

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

File:Johnson 1920 HighPlains.jpg|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)File:Homesteader NE 1866.png|Homesteaders in central Nebraska in 1866.File:NDLands.jpg|Great Plains in North Dakota where communities began settling in the 1870s.

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 Blackfoot, 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 European settlements on the Great Plains

French

British

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 house out of the very turf of their land. Many of them were not skilled dryland farmer 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

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.

File:DSCN5136 abandonedgasstation e.jpg|Abandoned gas station west of North Platte, Nebraska

File:Great PLains 2004.JPG|A portion of the Great Plains in Eastern New MexicoFile:GreenMountainWindFarm Fluvanna 2004.jpg|Wind farm in the plains of West Texas

Wind power

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. Sweetwater was a struggling town typical of the Plains, steadily losing businesses and population, until wind turbines came to the surrounding Nolan County

. 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

.

References

Wishart, David. 2004. The Great Plains Region. In: Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. xiii-xviii.
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)

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