Book excerpt: ‘Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie'

Yahoo

10-07-2025

(Photo by Dave Hage)
Editor's note: A new book, 'Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie,' was recently published by Penguin Random House. Written by Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, it tells the story how the tallgrass prairie was transformed into an agricultural landscape, the environmental consequences, and the choices we face for a better future in farming, and for protecting what's left of the tall grass prairie and the critically important grasslands in the West. This excerpt was drawn from the chapter called Prairie II, which details the history of the Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Area in northwest Minnesota near Crookston, the largest prairie restoration in the United States. Ask your local library or find the book at Magers & Quinn or your other favorite independent bookseller.
Driving north on Highway 75 today, through the middle of what long ago was a diverse prairie complex of marshes, fens, and grasses, you travel through farm fields stretching uninterrupted to the horizon. Drained and plowed, the land in the Red River Valley produces the crops that feed many of America's habits — corn for livestock and ethanol fuel, sugar beets for sweets, potatoes for McDonald's french fries. Alongside the road the edges of the fields are shaved as precisely as a fade haircut. Groves of trees in the distance mark where farmhouses stand, and in the cemeteries, gravestones stand up like tiny buildings against the sky. On any given afternoon the land seems empty of people, animals, and even insects; after hours of driving on a warm summer day, the windshield is clear of dead bugs. The only remnants of the prairie are patches of wildflowers in the ditches, great layers of clouds that climb into the sky, and the big winds that sweep down from the northwest.
The road cuts through the town of Crookston in the northwest corner of Minnesota, past grain silos, endless freight trains, and a sugar beet processing plant, and turns straight east. Here the land begins to roll a bit, like swells on an ocean. On the satellite images it's obvious what these once were — beaches of the massive lake. The sandy ridges rise like giant curved steps as you drive east, stretching from far north in Manitoba to central Minnesota and South Dakota. Thousands of years ago, these were the constantly moving edges of Lake Agassiz as it grew and contracted, the place where wind and water dumped the sand and gravel.
Seven miles or so east of Crookston, the cornfields end abruptly and there is nothing but grass. A dragonfly smacks into the windshield, and overhead a flock of ducks comes in for a landing on an open stretch of shallow water. A sign at the edge of a mowed parking area provides an explanation: This is Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, the largest prairie restoration project in U.S. history.
Today, it is one of a handful of places left in the United States where you can walk for miles across a tallgrass prairie and get a taste of what the landscape once was. The silence, heightened by the sigh of wind through the grasses and the trill of birds, is immense. Green leopard frogs race ahead through the grass. In early spring, giant clacking sandhill cranes descend on the wetlands by the thousands as they stop on their way north to nesting grounds in Canada, and the ethereal booming song of prairie chickens greets the rising sun as they do their annual mating dance in the grass. From May until October wildflowers bloom in waves — pink coneflowers, false indigo, goldenrod, coreopsis, purple lead plant. In some parts of the refuge, the grass grows so high you have to stand on top of a car to see over it.
The story of Glacial Ridge explains how restoring grasslands, where it's possible, can deliver huge rewards. But it also illustrates how extraordinarily difficult it is to claw the land back from some other economic purpose, often igniting deep cultural conflicts over land use. Today the people who succeeded in restoring the prairie on Glacial Ridge — conservationists mostly — look back in amazement at what they achieved. And they recognize that it is even more difficult in places other than this part of Minnesota. Here, there was an unusual combination of poor farmland, the deep pockets of the federal government and national conservation groups, and a culture that embraces hunting, fishing, and heading 'up north' for vacations in the wild outdoors. It was that mix that made re-creation of the prairie possible.
People have lived in the Red River Valley for at least thirteen thousand years, and their way of life evolved along with the climate and the changing landscape. Some eight thousand years ago, the climate warmed and the prairies pushed the forest border eastward. The people in the valley learned to use tools like flint for knives and spear-throwers that made them formidable hunters, of bison in particular. Over time, rainfall increased and the forest border moved westward again to where it is now, in central and northeast Minnesota. The Red River Valley and the parkland areas east of it — that mix of aspen trees, brush, and wetlands — became a cultural melting pot. It attracted people with forest traditions and ways of life from the east, the Great Plains nomadic people from the west, and others who lived farther south in the Mississippi River Valley. They hunted moose in the forest and bison on the plains, fished for sturgeon in the Red River and its tributaries, and grew crops around permanent villages.
Early Europeans universally described the wide Red River Valley as a patchwork of grassland, marshes, and impenetrable swaths of brush. In the winter, bison would congregate on the twisting, frozen rivers, and when the ice broke up in the spring, the animals would drown in vast numbers, their carcasses floating downstream for days on end. The land rose slowly eastward from the forested floodplain along the Red River, becoming tall grassland on the flat, former lake bottom, then rising a few hundred feet up to the grassy, rippled beach ridges that marked the eastern edge of Lake Agassiz. Water and silt collected between the ridges, creating long shallow marshes and lakes, quaking bogs, and, in places where mineral-rich groundwater welled up from below to feed them, the rare wetlands called calcareous fens.
When the first European traders arrived in the 1700s, the forest-dwelling Ojibwe occupied the northern reaches of the valley, and the bison-hunting Dakota lived in the south. When the fur traders arrived, the people's economy changed dramatically, as both Indigenous groups competed to supply the beaver, muskrats, and other furs to make the hats and coats that were in huge demand in eastern and European markets. In exchange, they received tools, blankets, guns, and other goods — the technology of another culture.
Settler colonialism in the Red River Valley began in earnest in the mid-1800s, driven by the growth of railroads and the land speculation that came with it. Steamboats moving up the Red River fueled development as they carried timber and other goods north, and buffalo hides south. Later they carried immigrants from southern Minnesota and Europe, who began to grow wheat that was carried south. Their numbers accelerated with the 1862 passage of the Homestead Act, which gave each farmer 160 acres of land, and the arrival of the railroads, which created a permanent link between Manitoba and St. Paul. The Native people were pushed to the western plains, where the fierce Lakota still reigned, or onto reservations established in the 1860s in northern Minnesota. European farmers raised barley, oats, and potatoes — and wheat. To spur colonial expansion, the federal government gave land to the railroads as well, and they sold it to settlers and land speculators.
Though productive, the clay soils left behind on the flat bottom of the ancient lake were poorly drained, and when wet were called 'gumbo.' They were so deep that horses would sink up to their bellies and couldn't be pulled out. Sometimes, farmers would equip them with wooden 'snowshoes' to stop them from sinking into the mud.
Steam power came to the valley in the late 1800s and so did drainage, funded in part by the railroads. The Red River Valley Drainage Commission was created in 1893 to coordinate the construction of ditches and water movement across the land, which was frequently inundated with spring floods. By 1899 there were twenty main ditches totaling 135 miles, many of them draining railroad lands. Then plowing up the prairie began in earnest. As global demand for wheat increased and crop diseases devastated the harvests farther east, bonanza farms, which were up to tens of thousands of acres in size, flourished on the valley floor.
By 1890, 70 percent of the valley was plowed for crops, and a few decades later, just as in the southern and eastern grasslands, the prairie was largely gone. In the Red River Valley, with its flat landscape and gumbo soils, drainage was especially critical to the advance in agriculture. By 1920 roughly three thousand miles of ditches that dropped just a few inches for every mile on the flat land drained three million acres along the Red River.
But the ancient beach ridges left behind by Lake Agassiz, which cover thousands of square miles on either side of the Red River, were a different story. Compared to the big agricultural operations on the former lake bottom, farms on the ridges were smaller and more diversified. Farmers grew wheat and oats on the dry land and hayed the wet meadows where they could, and cattle ranching was common well into the 1970s. But it was poor farmland — the ridges dried out in the summer and the lower swales fed by groundwater stayed wet well into the late spring. Compared to the broad river valley farther west, this higher ground had more trees, more ponds, more livestock, and more grass. And in those small refuges, many of the prairie plants and animals that are now rare or endangered survived.
In the 1980s, 24,000 acres of grazing land on the beach ridges east of Crookston were purchased for $1 million by an out-of-state owner. At the time, rising prices for corn and wheat, together with a string of dry years that shrank the wetlands, made row crop agriculture possible even on the unforgiving soils of the beach ridges. Conservationists looked on in dismay as the big plows and bulldozers began tearing up the remaining prairies, and replaced them with soybeans and corn. Among them was Ron Nargang, who worked for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and, later, The Nature Conservancy. He figured the new owner and the local farmers who leased land from him could make money only because during bad years they could claim payments from federal crop insurance programs.
In the late 1990s the rains returned, and, as a result, so did the wetlands. As yields declined, the property came up for sale again. The Nature Conservancy staff spent hours examining maps of the region, trying to decide which scraps of land to buy, and finally someone said, 'Why not buy the whole thing?' In 2000 The Nature Conservancy took the extraordinary step of putting down $9 million to buy the entire property: thousands of acres of plowed fields, drained and undrained wetlands, 165 miles of ditches, fragments of native prairie, a gravel pit, a grain elevator, and an old feedlot that came with a pile of livestock carcasses.
Across the midsection of the United States, only a few large tracts of native grasslands remain — the Flint Hills in Kansas, the Sandhills in Nebraska, and the Loess Hills in western Iowa. Northwestern Minnesota has the Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge — more than sixty thousand acres of native grass and wetlands. Glacial Ridge, however, was something else. It would become another example of the human capacity to transform landscapes, only this time it would be from cropland back to prairie.