In the mid-ninetieth century the word spread around the world that the United States of American was about to begin a project that would alter the future of that new country, North America, and the world beyond. It would be an unparalleled engineering feat that would bring transfiguring prosperity to the Great Plains and to the country as a whole. The plan was to build a transcontinental railroad and the railroad's promoters heralded it as the agent that could bring settlement to the West, much needed raw products to the Coasts, and wealth to all Americans.

There was a slight economic problem. The promoters either did not have or did not want to risk the money to build the railroad. But they did have a solution: If the taxpayers of the USA would simply give them every other mile square section of land on either side of the entire length of the proposed track for six miles on either side, they could finance the railroad by selling that land to settlers and, in the process, populate the Great Plains with workers who would make the "desert flower." Of course the desert was not capable of flowering in the European or Eastern American sense because there was not enough rainfall, but that was a detail that could be worked out later.

There were few detractors at the time for the simple reason that, to be a detractor you needed to have a voice in the course of American History. The people who lived on the Great Plains, the Natives and scattered whites, did not have a voice and were certainly not included in the discussions that took place in smoky boardrooms and congressional offices of the East Coast. The product of those meetings was a scheme to use the psychology of manifest destiny and patriotism to mask perhaps the greatest land grab in history. The scheme of public payment to wealthy industrialist for settling poor, unsuspecting immigrants in a land that could not sustain them was, in fact, a scheme to transfer public wealth into the bank accounts of a few rich men. It was wildly successful. A few wealthy white men got even richer than they had been and the American people have been paying for the tragedy of Great Plains settlement ever since.

Once the railroaders had their tracks laid, the land sold off, and the riches reinvested in other projects around the world, they began to shrink their operations until the settlers they had brought to the the West were stranded. The effect has been that perhaps thousands of communities along the rail route have been depopulating for sixty years and now stand as deserted as the railroad tracts that spawned them. The taxpayers of America have been subsidizing the desperate struggle to care for these millions of people, and finally to relocate them back to the fertile lands from which they came. With the exception of a few cities along the railroad route we are almost back to those few voiceless Natives and whites that have been here since before the greed of the railroads stretched its steeling fingers onto the Great Plains. Those folks are left with the aftermath: abandoned buildings, ruined ecosystems, nightmares of unfulfilled dreams painted in their minds by railroad tycoons. The graveyards are left untended and the sizzle of industry-fueled global warming has settled with more apparent staying power than the immigrants could ever muster.

I got a letter the other day from the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad Corporation telling me that they intend to cross my land with a new, high-speed track that will carry approximately one train every forty-five minutes from the coal fields in Wyoming to the electrical generating plants in the east. They do not plan to build an over pass over our driveway so we will have to wait and stare at a lowered barrier with blinking lights. The trains will sound their horns and we will hear them from every square inch of the ranch. The trains will shatter the peace and quiet that is the bedrock of this part of the world, it will disrupt wildlife, it will start fires, and it will degrade the lives of every living thing in its path. The railroad wants to talk to me about the land they will take. Eminent Domain applies, but they want to work out an equitable accommodation.

What I've found out is that the railroad's plan to cross my land, and a lot of other people's land, is not a sure thing. It seems that the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad Corporation is a little short of cash and so has applied for 2.5 Billion dollar loan from the Federal Railroad Administration. There are some who say they can't, and perhaps do not even intend to, pay it back. The railroad men are not sure they will get that taxpayer's money, but if they do, they plan to carry millions and millions of tons of coal, the very worst agent of the global warming that is already crippling the Great Plains, through my home. The coal will travel at breakneck speed, screaming the arrogance of the railroad owners every forty-five minutes, day and night, everyday of the year, until they find a better investment.



by Gervase Hittle

A low profile part of our prairie grazing program, having little to do with the romance of building fence, moving the herd on horseback, seeing Curly Bill, the legend, or taking pictures of golden buffalo calves is obtaining a scientific baseline of the vegetation on the ranch to see what exactly is going on with the interactions of the flora, the weather and gazing.

Pat Murphy, an excellent and dedicated botanist and friend of the ranch, who volunteers his time and expertise, has, over the last four years, established nearly two dozen study sites, called transepts, to monitor the plant cultures within the grassland communities. The transects, from which the data are collected annually, consist of a plot of ground fifty meters long by two meters wide. The data include identifying each of the species that the plot contains and calculating the percentage of each of the species within each transect, which is then compared statistically to each of the other transects as well as to itself over the course of time.

The data is gathered in two stages and is relatively simple, if at times a little tedious. In the first stage a reading is taken with a specialized instrument at each meter on either side of the central axis. Stage two requires a close visual inspection and identification of everything that the one-meter increment locations missed. In each transect of fifty meters there are one hundred fixed identification points-at one meter on either side of the central line at each meter along the line. Each transect requires about one and one half hours to gather the data; so we're looking at several days work for two people to cover all of the sites.

We pack in on horseback to many of the sites; so this is pretty much an all day deal for several days. For the past few years Pat and I or Dan saddle horses and GPS our way to each of the transects to collect the data. Usually we also establish a few new sites selected by careful consideration of aerial photographs and then by on-site inspection. Site selection attempts to incorporate all of the diversity of grazing areas: riparian zones, high plateau meadows, badlands breaks, and watershed drainage and seeks to include all available species and plant cultures.

We are attempting to learn something scientific about what grazing does to and for grasslands. Obviously, weather plays a part because some species do well in wet years and others do well in dry years. The distribution of seeds by wind, water, and animals is important, as are the survival strategies of plants. For example buffalo frequently love to destroy yucca plants, but young yucca sprout from the root systems of the destroyed older plant. So the prairie is always changing, and we feel that it is our obligation to that prairie no longer to rely simply on anecdotal evaluations of the grazing quality and potential of the grasslands; it is our obligation to do our best to have and to understand scientific data regarding the flow and flux of what transpires on the grassland environment, particularly in relation to the grazing of these lands.

We produce meat from grazing these grasslands; so by extension, our obligation extends to you, our customers and friends.