The Great Plains

The Great Plains are the vast, nearly treeless grassland that fills the heart of the continent, sloping almost imperceptibly upward from the Mississippi lowlands in the east to the foot of the Rocky Mountains in the west. They run from Canada to Texas across roughly a dozen states, and their flat-to-rolling expanse of shortgrass and tallgrass prairie was once home to immense bison herds and the Plains Indian nations who followed them.

Settled late and farmed hard, the plains became the nation's wheat and cattle country, drawing groundwater from the great Ogallala Aquifer beneath them. Their thin soils and erratic rainfall produced the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a lasting warning about dryland farming. Big sky, fierce winds, blizzards, and the tornadoes of "Tornado Alley" all belong to this open, often overlooked middle of America.