December 27, 2001

Plains Folk: Nature of Nebraska

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

It's might be debatable, but I'll venture that no state or province has contributed more to the intellectual understanding of the Great Plains than has Nebraska, and no institution more than the University of Nebraska. Nebraska is the land of Neihardt, Sandoz, and most of all Cather, making it the literary capital of the region. Moreover, much as I admire Tom Osborne personally as a great plainsman in his own right, I know that it is the Nebraska ecologists, not the Nebraska Cornhuskers, who are the prairie jewels in the Lincoln jewel-box.

This goes back more than a century to the time when Charles Bessey and his botany students founded the field of grasslands ecology. The principles they fashioned--commonplace ideas like succession and climax, and the stories that go with them--are assumptions that underlie what we think about the place where we live. Looking back I see that they percolated through all the ways I learned to think about this place when I was growing up in western Kansas, because by that time the Nebraska ecologists had taken possession of university departments in such prairie citadels as Manhattan or Hays.

Running just a few years ahead of me was the man who best represents the Nebraska tradition of thinking about nature on the plains--Paul A. Johnsgard, author of about 40 books in the field, including, most recently (2001), The Nature of Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press). This new work, including its extended species lists and so on, is a monumental reference work, but it is much more than that. It is a memoir, it is a psalm, with spikes of lyric prose protruding from technical detail like yucca towers from prairie swells.

The story here is of a plains life. Again and again Johnsgard hearkens back to his boyhood in sandy southeastern North Dakota. There he drove his father's car out on the section roads to welcome the snow geese of dirty spring; there he stalked the remnant stands of big bluestem that stretched along railroad rights-of-way from his prairie village; there his mother told him of the gray wolves that had howled on her father's homestead.

In Nebraska the adult naturalist became full-voiced, authoritative and yet poetic. Do get this book as a reference, but also read and linger over those passages that offer unabashed affection for the land. In the end it is this mythic aspect, more than the informational, that invests the land with what wee need to live here. Listen to this --

• "If there is a valley of dreams in Nebraska, the Niobrara Valley is certainly it." 
• "The Platte must be appreciated for what it once was, like the once-pristine Parthenon, rather than for what it has now become, a ghost of a river and a frequent repository for trash."
• "Few sights are more charming than watching an upland sandpiper alight, balletlike, on a fence post, always briefly lifting its wings to the vertical as if it were congratulating itself on its dexterity before tucking them gracefully into its flank feathers."
• "The red-tailed hawk is one of those perfect hawks: a rodent-killing machine without peer, almost as much at home in the sky as a helium-filled balloon, and with eyes at least as keen as the best human eyes magnified by a resolving factor of four or more."
• "No Nebraska plant is more distinctive than the yucca; it can be recognized from as far away as one can see it. In June, when it is in full bloom, it lights up the Sandhills like Christmas trees illuminated by dozens of pendant white bulbs."

I read and write now in my leather chair, hours before light, at a time of year when dusk is at five and dawn at eight, and I imagine the advent of pendant white bulbs in a Junefield prairie.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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