Thinking
the prairies worthless--since land which could not raise a tree
certainly could not raise crops--these first occupants of the
Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the
heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long in
settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in
that region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or
better, and that these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would,
in a few generations, be studded with great towns and would form
a part of the granary of the world.
But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the
Missouri, found valueless the region of the Plains and the
foothills, not so the wild creatures or the savage men who had
lived there longer than science records. The buffalo then ranged
from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, from the Missouri to the
Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have concluded in those days
that there was after all slight difference between the buffalo
and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in untold
thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure
the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the
Plains.
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