50 Fun Facts About The Great Plains

Which icon of Western films is a Russian weed that reached South Dakota in 1870s flax seed?

Tumbleweed is mostly Russian thistle, which snaps off at the stem once it is dry and scatters its seeds as the wind rolls it across open country.

Which mail relay to California lasted only 18 months before the telegraph killed it off?

Pony Express riders cut coast-to-coast message time to about 10 days, but the transcontinental telegraph, finished in October 1861, made them obsolete almost at once.

What nickname for the storm-prone central US began as the title of a 1952 weather research project?

Tornado Alley has no official boundaries: it is simply where warm, humid air meets cold, dry air from Canada, helping give the US more twisters than any other country.

What name did a 1935 news report give the drought-hit southern Plains after the Black Sunday storm?

The Dust Bowl got its name from Associated Press coverage of April 14, 1935, a day when an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil blew off the prairie.

Which mountain range walls in the Great Plains on the west, from Alberta south to New Mexico?

The Rocky Mountains run about 3,000 miles, and the Plains spread east from their base for 300 to 500 miles before giving way to wetter, lower country.

Which fencing patented by farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874 ended the open range on the Great Plains?

Barbed wire made enclosing huge expanses cheaper than hiring cowboys, and cattlemen who lost free grazing hit back in the Fence Cutting Wars of the 1880s.

Which cone-shaped dwelling did Plains nations make by stretching bison hides over long poles?

A tipi is set apart by the adjustable smoke flaps at its top, which vent a fire burning inside. The wigwam it is often confused with is a domed shelter covered in bark.

Mount Rushmore is carved into which mountain region of South Dakota that the Lakota hold sacred?

The Black Hills rise out of the surrounding grassland to Black Elk Peak, the highest point in South Dakota.

Which Plains state has the only one-house legislature in the US, elected without party labels?

Nebraska voters scrapped their two-chamber system in a 1934 ballot initiative, and the first single-chamber session met in 1937.

Which army scout and railroad meat hunter later took a Wild West show to Europe?

Buffalo Bill is said to have killed 4,282 bison in eighteen months feeding Kansas Pacific crews, and from 1883 William Cody's touring company turned frontier life into a circus-like spectacle.

Which river, nicknamed the Big Muddy for its load of silt, is the longest in the United States?

The Missouri River runs 2,341 miles from Montana across the northern Plains, about 200 miles less than in the 1800s because engineers have straightened its channel.

Which underground water reserve under parts of eight states keeps the dry High Plains farmable?

The Ogallala Aquifer underlies about 174,000 square miles, but large-scale pumping only began after World War II, when car engines were adapted to drive the wells.

Which explorers first described the prairie dog in 1804, one later calling it a barking squirrel?

Lewis and Clark came upon a whole village of the animals in September 1804, on the expedition President Jefferson sent to explore the West.

Which 1862 law signed by Abraham Lincoln gave settlers 160 acres of public land for farming it?

The Homestead Act opened up millions of acres, but it only passed once the Southern states had seceded and their members had left Congress.

With wood and stone scarce, what did Plains settlers cut from the ground and stack into house walls?

Sod held together because prairie grass has a much thicker, tougher root mat than a lawn, and it was abundant and free.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family, driven out by drought, west to California?

The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Which Plains animal, often wrongly called an antelope, is the fastest land mammal in the Americas?

Pronghorn can run at up to 55 mph, slower than a cheetah, but can hold their top speed for much longer.

Which cavalry commander died with five troops of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn in June 1876?

George Custer attacked a vast Native encampment in Montana with about 700 men; two of his brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law died alongside him.

Which 2,170-mile wagon route across the Plains gave its name to a classic educational computer game?

The Oregon Trail carried about 400,000 emigrants west, and the game began in 1971 as a classroom project by three Carleton College students.

Which state holds the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, near the town of Lebanon?

Kansas lost the wider title in 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union and pulled the center of all fifty states northwest into South Dakota.

Which land deal nearly doubled the size of the United States and took in most of the Great Plains?

The Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million, or about $18 a square mile, for 828,000 square miles of the continent's interior.

Which blacksmith's polished steel plow of 1837 could cut sticky prairie soil without clogging?

John Deere, a Vermont-born smith working in Illinois, saw that soil slid off polished steel; one early version of the idea used an old saw blade.

Which Little House author spent her teenage years in the prairie town of De Smet, South Dakota?

Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish the first of her pioneer novels until 1932, when she was in her mid-sixties.

Which cattle town, dubbed queen of the cow towns, made lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson famous?

Dodge City took over the Texas cattle trade in 1876, when a quarantine line shut out rival railheads, and its gunfights soon filled the dime novels.

Which Plains national park of eroded pinnacles has the richest known Oligocene mammal fossil beds?

Badlands is a straight translation of the Lakota name for the place, and its rock layers give a glimpse of life there 33 million years ago.

Which stone monolith rising from the Wyoming plains became the first US national monument in 1906?

Devils Tower stands 867 feet from base to summit, and visitor numbers jumped after it hosted the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

Which Hunkpapa Lakota leader led his band into Canada in 1877 and stayed for four years?

Sitting Bull had foreseen soldiers falling into the Lakota camp before the Little Bighorn; he came back in 1881 and was killed by agency police in 1890.

Which holiday began in 1872 when Plains settlers planted about a million trees in a single day?

Arbor Day was founded by newspaper editor J. Sterling Morton, who was just as fierce in opposing the felling of healthy trees for Christmas decorations.

Which state's heartland opened at high noon in April 1889 as 50,000 settlers raced to stake claims?

Oklahoma owes its nickname, the Sooner State, to settlers who slipped in before the official start to grab the best of the two million acres on offer.

Which Kevin Costner Western shot in South Dakota, with much dialogue in Lakota, won Best Picture?

Dances with Wolves won seven Oscars and is credited with reviving the Hollywood Western, even though several studios had turned the project down.

Which Oglala Lakota warrior is the subject of a South Dakota mountain carving begun in 1948?

Crazy Horse is emerging from Thunderhead Mountain, 17 miles from Mount Rushmore; sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Rushmore, set off the first blast.

Where in South Dakota did US troops kill between 250 and 300 Lakota people in December 1890?

Wounded Knee began as a failed attempt to disarm a Lakota camp, and 19 soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their part in it.

Which shallow, braided river's valley led the emigrant wagon trails west across the central Plains?

The Platte was useless for boats, with its shifting sandbars and many shallow channels, but its valley gave wagons an easy road toward the mountains.

Which map line did John Wesley Powell call the boundary between the humid East and the dry West?

The 100th meridian roughly marks how far moist air from the Gulf of Mexico usually reaches, and Powell noted the sharp change in rainfall across it in the 1870s.

Which folk song, first a poem by an 1870s Plains doctor, is called the West's unofficial anthem?

Home on the Range began as a poem called My Western Home, and its original verses did not even contain the phrase that became the title.

Which insects swarmed the Plains by the trillion in 1875, though the species died out within thirty years?

Locusts in the 1875 swarm were put at up to 12.5 trillion, the greatest concentration of animals ever estimated, yet the species had apparently died out by the early 1900s.

Which invention by Colorado farmer Frank Zybach draws giant green circles of crops across the dry Plains?

Center-pivot irrigation swings a long sprinkler pipe on wheels around a point in the middle of the field, so the watered crop grows as a perfect disc.

The word prairie was borrowed from which language, in which it simply means meadow?

French speakers use the word for an ordinary meadow; it descends from the Latin pratum, and English picked it up in the late 1600s.

Which nation's last free band, led by Quanah Parker, gave up in 1875 and moved to Fort Sill?

Comanche people were once part of the Shoshone of the Great Basin, splitting away after they took up a nomadic life on horseback in the early 1700s.

Which president launched the Shelterbelt project that planted 220 million trees across the Plains?

Franklin Roosevelt wanted a 100-mile-wide band of windbreaks from North Dakota to Texas to stop the soil blowing away, and the planting gave jobless men work.

Which warm wind, nicknamed the snow eater, once heated a South Dakota town by 49 °F in two minutes?

Chinook winds blow down the eastern side of the mountains, warming as they drop; Spearfish jumped from −4 to 45 °F on January 22, 1943, the fastest rise on record.

What label did Major Stephen Long's 1823 map give the Plains, branding them unfit for farming?

Great American Desert stuck as a name for decades: settlers hurried across toward better land, which left the region one of the last strongholds of independent Native nations.

Which long-legged birds stop over in a single Plains river valley each year, up to 450,000 strong?

Sandhill cranes pour through that one valley on the long flight north, making it the most important stopover the birds have.

Which prairie dog predator was declared extinct in 1979, then found alive in Wyoming in 1981?

Black-footed ferret numbers crashed along with their prey: prairie dogs make up as much as 90% of the animal's diet.

Which novelist drew on her Plains childhood for My Ántonia and The Song of the Lark?

Willa Cather grew up in the frontier town of Red Cloud, yet her 1923 Pulitzer Prize came not for a prairie book but for a novel of World War I.

Which Spanish conquistador marched onto the Great Plains in 1541 in search of the land of Quivira?

Coronado was hunting the mythical Seven Cities of Gold; he found no riches, though his expedition made the first European sightings of the Grand Canyon.

Which A-shaped pole frame did Plains peoples load with goods and drag behind their dogs?

A travois has two poles lashed together at one end, which rests on the animal's shoulders, while the splayed ends trail along the ground.

Which Plains upland, never plowed by settlers, holds North America's densest tallgrass prairie?

Flint Hills soil was too full of stone for the plow, so the land went to cattle ranches instead of crops and the native grass survived.

Which tableland of Texas and eastern New Mexico is among the largest mesas in North America?

Llano Estacado is so flat and featureless that an early Spanish explorer compared crossing it to being swallowed up by the sea, with not a stone or tree to steer by.

Which long-lasting Plains food mixed dried bison meat with rendered fat and sometimes berries?

Pemmican takes its name from a Cree word for fat, and fur traders and polar explorers such as Ernest Shackleton later came to rely on it.