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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
  • Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:40:21 -0700

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
by Anne Matthews
http://dieoff.org/page65.htm

Caprock covers much of the High Plains, and the Ogallala owes its recharge
to the caprock. The aquifer is not an underground sea, as the name
suggests, but rather a subterranean layer of saturated stone (five-sixths
gravel, one-sixth water) built by millennia of raindrops absorbed into
Plains grassland. The recharging process is still going on at a stately
pace, a portion of every meager rainfall percolating down, centimeter by
centimeter, through sandy topsoil and thirty feet of caprock. But caliche
is lime hardened to the consistency of cement, strong enough to resist
anything but a charge of dynamite. Water can get through caliche, but it
takes a while. In Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, a billion
water-feet are lifted yearly from the ancient aquifer for irrigated
farming. In 1950 central Kansas had 250 wells sunk into the aquifer; in
1990 it had over 3,000. In 1950 the Kansas portion of the aquifer was
fifty-eight feet thick; today, in some places, less than six feet of
moisture remain. The Great Plains would have to enjoy the rainfall of a
Brazilian jungle for the Ogallala to keep pace with so relentless a draw.

The strain is showing. Near Floydada, Texas, one county southwest of
Quitaque, the water table has fallen nearly one hundred feet in one hundred
years. Cracks and sinkholes have begun appearing in the earth from Texas to
Nebraska as the traumatized Ogallala settles, and settles again. Beyond the
Ogallala's reach, drought and the politics of water are no less worrying.
Periodic water rationing has been declared in towns and cities across South
Dakota since 1989; South and North Dakota and Montana are currently suing
the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers for increased access to the waters of the
Missouri. To which the Corps replies: Get real. Every water-foot is spoken
for, and then some.

Like the residents—the former residents—of other sections of the
Plains, Quitaque's citizens appear to be voting with their feet. On a warm,
clear Saturday afternoon, the silence in the central business district is
absolute; no bird cries, no voices, no engines. Nothing. We wander the
sidewalks and talk in whispers, like tourists at an archaeological site.

We do not know Quitaque's population, official or actual. Deborah has only
the 1980 census figure (696 people); her 1984 Hammond atlas, beloved by
geographers for its completeness, shows Quitaque on the map, but the town
in which we stand has disappeared from the Texas index. Unlike in Gotebo
there is no one to ask or even to talk to. On the door of the town's one
semifunctioning hardware store hangs a sign, Call If You Want Anything,
followed by a home phone number. The other stores along Quitaque's main
street are not in ruins, like their Goteboan counterparts, but neither are
they in business. Instead, each front window in each locked and defunct
shop houses a still life, neatly arranged and labeled, of artifacts from
Great Plains life circa 1870-circa 1960, when Quitaque still thrived. Visit
Our Sidewalk Museum, says a sign painted on the side of the downtown's last
building. [p.p.128-129]

On the plane back to Denver I sit beside a rancher and a sugar beet farmer.
All the way across northeast Colorado we look out the window in silence.
Like smoke from a hundred prairie fires, mile-high plumes of thin, dry dirt
are rising in the golden afternoon light. The dust plumes are shortgrass
topsoil, released by the spring tilling, blowing east and away.

"Hate to see the dust rising this early," says the rancher with a sly
sideways glance at his seatmate. "Shouldn't ever have broke the sod in the
first place." The farmer flushes, turns abruptly from the window, and
buries his nose in Forbes.

In Colorado alone nearly 750,000 acres of marginal grasslands were plowed
between 1978 and 1987, in the interests of efficient,
fencepost-to-fencepost crops. In 1989, after 10,000 acres of nearby range
were plowed up for planting, one ranch owner in the terrain below us saw
flying topsoil bury her grazing land up to the fencetops. Her neighbor
called it an act of God. The rancher sued, saying, "It's not an act of God.
It's an act of greed. God doesn't have a plow." [p. 153]

A few days later the U.S. Soil and Conservation Service reports that more
than 14 million acres on the Great Plains have been damaged by wind erosion
alone since the previous November—the worst damage since record-keeping
began in 1954. Reported damaged in November and December 1990 were
1,844,437 acres, up from 1,743,000 acres in the same two months of 1989.

I try to call Kenny MacDonald and the Fries family, to see how they are
getting along in the drought. It is just a year since Jeffrey Aaronson and
I stood in their fields and watched the spring plowing for wheat. The
Kansas operator searches her computer, then tries all the little towns
nearby, but cannot find a phone listing. "Must have moved away," she says
at last. [p. 172]

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM, Anne Matthews; Grove Weidenfeld, 1992.
ISBN-0-8021-1408-3






  • [Livingontheland] WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM, TradingPostPaul, 01/10/2007

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