I’m really delighted to be here. I have never been to Dickinson or to the Badlands, but I have long wanted to come here and I look forward to getting out into the Badlands tomorrow.

As a preface to the panel discussion, I’d like to talk a little about how to think about the future of the Great Plains. I’m a historian, and historians often take a point in time and look backward, not forward. It’s difficult to translate the lessons of history into the future. Hardly anyone has been successful in doing so, and I can’t claim that I’m going to be able to do it today. But I think we can learn from history and that, by looking back at history, we can get a sense of what we might expect. I also have a particular point of view to share about your Little Missouri and Badlands country, as it compares to my experience of living on the southern Plains and writing about that region.

W. H. Auden, a famous writer and literary critic from Great Britain in the early 20th century, once wrote, “I cannot see a plain without a shudder. Oh, God, please, please, do not make me live there!” Auden’s sentiment, in a lot of ways, is how the rest of the world, especially the rest of America, tends to think of the Great Plains today. The Great Plains isn’t loved in the same way that the Rockies or the Sierra Nevadas or the Colorado Plateau country or the southwestern deserts are loved, at least not in a general way. Certainly, in a regional and local way, the Plains are very much adored. But the general take on the Great Plains is that it’s flyover country. It’s a place that you drive through – quickly, and maybe at night.

Teddy Roosevelt and so many other people, especially from the 19th century, had exactly the opposite reaction, and I think this is a cause for some celebration and excitement, for those of us who live here and love the plains. I want to share with you a few examples of people who reacted very differently to the Great Plains than W. H. Auden did, and then offer some explanation for why their reaction might have been different.

My favorite quote about the Great Plains, which upends this sort of scorn about them from the coasts, is from a little-known mountain man named Albert Pike. Pike and his party of trappers had mostly stripped the beaver out of the southern Rocky Mountains, so in 1831 they went out onto the Plains looking for beaver to trap. After a few months of roaming around in what is now Colorado and Kansas and Oklahoma, Pike, who turned about to be a remarkably good writer for a mountain man, wrote this: “The sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie…The prairie has a stronger hold upon the senses. Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still, unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of echo, and, in fine, its power of throwing a man back upon himself.” (1831-32, Journeys in the Prairie)

One of Alfred Jacob Miller’s paintings from the 1830s captures that sense, I think. Miller portrayed a mountain man reacting to the open spaces of the plains with something like adoration – true love for the landscape.

Closer to where we are now, near present-day Williston, and only a dozen years after Albert Pike wrote those lines – the precise date of this description is June 10, 1843 – the painter John James Audubon created a potent word picture for why the Great Plains was, in the 19th century, the West’s most admired landscape: “We passed some beautiful scenery today, and almost opposite of where we camped had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or bighorns on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but we could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. If there ever was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it is the one we are now in. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes, with many calves among them that were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter, producing a beautiful picturesque view. We have seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts.”

What Audubon was describing, and what so many people in the 19th century perceived, was that the Great Plains was literally the Serengeti of North America. The Plains drew people from all over the world, primarily because of this tremendous abundance of wildlife.

Another voice in this conversation is that of young Georgia O’Keeffe. In the perception of her friends back East, she was “sentenced” to a career as an art teacher in outback Texas during the time of World War I. Writing her friends from the Texas panhandle, she said this was the most entrancing place she’d ever been in her life. She marveled at how you could drive or walk “off into space.” Even as late as 1949, after she’d been living in New Mexico for many years, she wrote a friend of hers, Daniel Catton Rich, and said, “Crossing the Panhandle of Texas is always a very special event for me…driving in the early morning towards the dawn and the rising sun—The plains are not like anything else and I always wonder why I bother to go to other places.”

In the 21st century, there are still a few of us who experience a rush of excitement on finding ourselves on the Great Plains, as opposed to what seems to be the coastal reaction of wanting to escape them. We know this landscape as a tremendous enigma. The following is a short passage from an essay I wrote that I think says it better than I can summarize it spontaneously:

“Seemingly the simplest and humblest of topographies, in fact the Plains was long the biological Eden of North America. Today America’s poster child region of dwindling towns and an aging population, more than once in the past it’s drawn the human imagination as if it were the Elysian Fields. Find a piece of native prairie on the Great Plains even today, preferably out of hearing distance of interstate traffic, and a few minutes of imagining brings the Plains’ enigma home with a jolt. Ten centuries ago, elephants and camels and lions could have been in view. For thousands of years after that, herds of buffalo, likely trailed by wolf packs and bands of native hunters, would have grunted and grazed past your spot like wildebeests on the Masai Mara. But not quite 150 years ago, cattle drives tacked across the grass ocean towards the pole star. Then the homesteaders came, fences arrived, tractors appeared, followed by center-pivot irrigation, libraries, churches, universities. Yet now, except for a handful of cities—the Lincolns and the Amarillos and the Bismarcks—in many places on the Plains, modern America seems to be receding. What on earth?”

I want to try to convey a couple of points here. One is that the Plains is probably the most anciently lived-in spot in North America. There might be a case to be made for Beringia, I suppose, but the first great migrations came into the plains country. Our first major cultures that we associate with ten centuries and twelve centuries in the past are Great Plains cultures.

But one of the patterns that you find in the history of the Great Plains, going back ten centuries or more, is a pattern of embrace and farewell. Time and time again in the historical record, human beings have come to the Great Plains, stayed here while the weather was good, and retreated either eastward or westward when the weather turned bad. In this part of North America, climatic history has regulated the ebb and flow of the human population. For historians, that makes this a fascinating place, because it is so unlike the steady, relentless growth of many other American regions. This embrace and farewell is evident in the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture, the unregulated market hunts that devastated keystone animals like bison, cattle die-ups and sell-offs, homesteader failures, dustbowl outmigrations, declining water tables, and the slow bleeding away of the 20th century population. All of this has made the Great Plains an important site in environmental history.

I think we can see that Teddy Roosevelt, with his ranches, the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn, certainly felt the undeniable power of life on the Great Plains. I think we can also say that coming here and settling and remaining here generation after generation hasn’t been anybody’s mistake, by any means. We’ve all loved being on the Plains when we’ve been able to stay. And clearly we’re not going to go away, we’re going to be here, so we’re going to inhabit the place a century from now.

So I think the question is not so much abandonment anymore. At least I hope it’s not. Rather, I think the question is how we create, as Wallace Stegner put it, a “society to match the scenery” here. In order to think about that question, I want to pose to you a couple of points about the long-term history of the Great Plains and our much briefer experience.

We’ve only been here, particularly in this part of the Great Plains, a little more than one hundred years. And in the short amount of time we’ve been here, we have produced an extraordinary transformation of this place, especially in ecological terms. We managed in a very brief period of time to de-buffalo and de-wolf and sometimes de-grass an ecology that was 10,000 years and more in the making. Across a lot of the Great Plains, that process has left the landscape a kind of empty stage. Looking at depictions of the plains in the 1800s, with all its wildlife, what we’re occupying now seems an eerie sort of ghost place, a kind of spectral of what it once was. We read the marvelous descriptions of Lewis and Clark and John James Audubon, and then we look out across a landscape that seems strangely empty of all this excitement and all this life.

It’s not just the highly visible and charismatic species that are now just a shadow of themselves – the bison, the plains grizzlies, the lobo wolves, the Eskimo curlews, the Merriam’s elk, the Audubon bighorn sheep – all of those have been virtually rubbed out of the landscape. Today the Great Plains is also the landscape in North America that has suffered the sharpest population decline in bird life of any region in the United States. From 25% to 65% of birds and bird species have disappeared over just the last three decades. There are 55 Great Plains species that are threatened or endangered and 728 species are candidates for listing as threatened or endangered. That reflects an extraordinary dismantling of an ancient ecology.

Stunningly enough, the disruption of the ecology of the Great Plains was brought about by a very small population of people. Just a few tens of thousands of people lived in the region in the 1870s through the 1890s, but they had a devastating impact in a very short time.

An image painted by William de La Montagne Cary stands as an emblem of some of what took place here. In 1874, Cary was on a steamer heading up the Missouri River into Montana Territory, and he saw this scene through his field glasses from the deck of the ship, a drama that absolutely transfixed him: “About a mile off, an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away, and behind the bear came two men, superbly mounted, armed to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear, who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers.” The steamboat stopped soon after, and Cary interviewed some of the people who were involved in the chase. He went back east and painted what he was told about the finale of the scene he had witnessed. The painting, “Cattle Men Tracing Grizzly to Den,” depicts mounted stockmen with rifles drawn, wheeling their horses to the mouth of a den where a massive sow grizzly is roaring in defense of a pair of cubs that she’s protecting.

This scene is a kind of reiteration of the conquest of the continent. And this conquest happened very rapidly on the Great Plains. Teddy Roosevelt, speaking about hunting grizzly bears, put it this way: “No other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory” of killing a grizzly.

Settlement of this region, though – the Little Missouri River drainage and Badlands country – was a 20th century phenomenon. Stockmen had been here since the 1870s, running cattle and sheep and horses across an open range. But the Little Missouri country had very little stock in the census of 1880 and only 10 to 50 cattle per square mile – in some of the western areas, not even that much – by 1900. The break-out began in western North Dakota during a really good and wet period, starting in 1904 and up to about 1920. Entities like the Golden Valley Land and Cattle Company began marketing real estate to farmers. Land prices started at about $5 an acre, but by 1915 they were up to $15 and even $30 an acre.

It is important to realize that despite the real estate boom in the Little Missouri drainage, only about a quarter of the region was ever plowed. The historical low of native grasslands came in 1978, and 78% of the prairie was still intact at that time. One reason, of course, was the Badlands, which were not arable. That’s a very different situation from the southern Plains. In Lubbock County, where I lived in the 1980s, for example, as much as 97% of the grass cover had been removed, with only about 3% of native grasses remaining.

One other fact to note is that, in the short period we’ve been here, we have not been impervious to the vicissitudes of climate change, either. The classic example of climate change and its impact on the Great Plains is the dustbowl of the 1930s. And while we tend to think of the dustbowl as having affected the central and especially the southern plains, North Dakota didn’t get a reprieve from this most vivid modern historical experience. In fact, the Little Missouri drainage, which normally gets about 15 inches of precipitation a year, received for several consecutive years in the 1930s only about 7 or 8 inches of rainfall. During that time period, a quarter million acres of broken-out cropland in the region failed. Area ranchers ended up liquidating huge numbers of cattle to New Deal programs. The Alexandre Hogue painting, Mother Earth Laid Bare, depicts the dustbowl experience vividly.

One other important point in seeing the big picture regarding the history of the Great Plains is that in the American national landscape tradition, we’ve always confused the vertical with the monumental. This is expressed in the saying “altitude equals beatitude.” Because the Plains are not very vertical and not very high elevation, they were perceived, for much of the early 20th century, as an aesthetically deficient place. This was especially true once all the wildlife was gone.

During the time when Teddy Roosevelt was helping to create a great national forest system, hardly anything developed in terms of preservation of Great Plains landscapes. This is ironic when we consider that the first great call for a national park was for one on the plains. In 1834, George Catlin was the first person in American culture who argued that the government should create something like a national park, and he wanted it in the plains along the Missouri River.

The Great Plains is the most underrepresented region of the American West in the entire national park system. Through the end of homesteading in the 1930s, the National Park Service found proposed parks in places like the Little Missouri country in South Dakota and Palo Duro Canyon in west Texas “not sufficiently monumental” compared to the parks of the far West. There were three existing Great Plains parks – Sullys Hill in North Dakota, Platte in Oklahoma, and Wind Cave in South Dakota, and they totaled fewer than 30,000 acres. Not only did the National Park Service not want to add to these; it did everything it could to “lose” the three it had. In one NPS report an investigator stated, “Sullys Hill lacks even comic value.”

In the 1920s, though, ecologists started becoming interested in parks for ecological purposes. Victor Shelford, a prominent early landscape ecologist in the United States, studied eleven Great Plains sites, and the one he advocated the National Park Service consider for a national park was Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle. It’s a really dramatic landscape. It’s perfect for creating what Shelford and others thought should be a million acre park of the Great Plains. – about half the size of Yellowstone. You could turn buffalo loose again on a large Great Plains landscape.

It didn’t happen. Not only did Palo Duro not measure up, in terms of verticality, to other parks in the far West, but much of the land in the proposed area was homesteaded, and therefore privatized, and the National Park Service doesn’t have an acquisition budget. NPS has to depend on entrepreneurs and wealthy CEOs to provide the money to acquire private lands for parks. In Texas, these people were simply uninterested. They didn’t want a federal Great Plains park.

In the northern Great Plains, Roger Toll was the NPS investigator sent to evaluate proposed sites, and when he visited the Badlands of South Dakota in 1928, he reported: “It’s not a supreme scenic feature of national importance. The badlands are surpassed in grandeur, beauty, and interest by Grand Canyon and Bryce.” However, since 60% of the badlands of South Dakota were still in the public domain, and the state of South Dakota promised to acquire the rest and turn it over to the National Park Service, Toll recommended that a national monument be designated in the South Dakota Badlands. Such a designation was allowed under the Antiquities Act, which Teddy Roosevelt signed in 1906. So Congress approved Badlands National Monument in 1929, and President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed it such in 1939.

Something similar happened with the Little Missouri badlands. Toll said in 1928-29 that they were just too barren for a national park. It might be made a national monument, he said, but the idea seemed to be opposed vehemently by local landowners, especially ranchers in the area. A few years later, with the droughts of the 1930s, rancher opposition withered away; and in 1947 the National Park Service acquired the area which eventually became Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

I want to reference the southern plains again by way of comparison. The Park Service tried again on the southern plains in 1938. This time they proposed a more modest 140,000-acre national monument in the region, the canyons of the Red River around Palo Duro Canyon. But again there was no interest in the state of Texas. The Park Service didn’t have the money to acquire these private lands, and no one in Texas was willing to step up. People from Oklahoma and Colorado and New Mexico and Kansas were all excited about it, but in Texas they didn’t seem to be interested.

In that part of the world today – in a region that was considered by the National Park Service twice for a park or a monument – there is only a pair of state parks totaling about 40,000 acres, about 30 miles apart from one another. The region is suffering a dramatic loss of population. It’s not a particularly enjoyable place to live anymore. There is no predator larger than a coyote remaining. The area seems to be becoming a national sacrifice area to hog farms and miles and miles of wind turbines along the rock escarpment. It’s probably not a candidate for collapse, the way Jared Diamond describes it in his book, but it’s not an economically healthy place. In sum, it’s not the Little Missouri country. You got what I always wanted the southern plains to have.

I’ll share one last thought and then yield the floor to the rest of the panel. In the 19th and 20th centuries we were preserving and conserving places; in the 21st century, we’re restoring them. The concept of restoration goes all the way back to George Perkins Marsh who, in his 1864 book Man and Nature, described how humans needed to reconstruct the fabric of the world that we had been dismantling.

Restoration’s most well-known advocate, though, is probably Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau captured the whole premise behind restoration beautifully. He wrote in 1856 in his journal, “I am that citizen whom I pity. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”

Charlie Russell was even an advocate for restoration. To accompany his drawing of a buffalo skull which he sent to his friend Frank Bird Linderman, he wrote this verse: “I wish I could clothe your frame with meat and hide and wake you up today.”

Restoration is going to be controversial. It’s going to force us to confront whether the most sustainable landscape in places like the Great Plains is the one that geology and evolution and ecology fashioned. We are going to have to grapple with things like whether we want to re-introduce native species to the Great Plains. We’re getting black-footed ferrets and swift foxes back, but the question will be whether we are going to re-introduce the keystone predator, wolves, as is being done in the Rocky Mountains. And heaven forbid, what about grizzlies. I live in part of the West where we have grizzly bears around all the time, and we somehow seem to do it without any great problems. It seems like once the bears are gone, people develop an aberrance for having them back again; but when you live around them, you don’t think too much about it.

We may have to decide whether wild horses are a part of the West. They evolved in the West, then became extinct here, and we brought them back 500 years ago. I know you have them in the Little Missouri country. That’s the kind of question that restoration begs for us to address, in the Great Plains country especially.

I don’t want to go into the whole issue of the “Buffalo Commons” or the “Big Open.” Those are very controversial. Depending on your politics, that’s either Shangri-La or Eden in the future, or it’s the worst disaster one could possibly imagine. But it is the kind of thing that is happening in a piecemeal fashion.

We’re also confronting the whole issue of global climate change. As indicated by the dustbowl of the 1930s, climate change is likely to hit the Great Plains especially hard. Some people argue that the Chihuahuan Desert may advance hundreds of miles northward into the Great Plains.

I think what we are likely to confront on the Great Plains is a future that looks a little more like what the Rocky Mountain region is today – with more public lands, not necessarily owned or managed by the federal government, but maybe in the John Wesley Powell fashion, owned and managed by local commonwealths. I think it’s going to be a more restored environment. We’re still going to have plenty of ranching and farming, but with more of this kind of restoration, like the Little Missouri Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park have. I think that heritage tourism and eco-tourism of the kind you’re getting with the Park is the future for the whole Great Plains.

I’ll leave you with this from Teddy Roosevelt’s A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. Roosevelt seemed to believe that the kind of future I’m describing would have made for a more authentic life of the kind he wanted to live. Roosevelt seems to have this in mind when he wrote, “For him who seeks adventure in the wide, waste spaces of the earth… the grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses… The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking… The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.” That’s the kind of future I think Teddy Roosevelt would have wanted for this area.