Great+Plains+and+Prairies

Great Plains & Prairies

The Great Plains and Prairies includes the southern portion of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in Canada, and North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, central Texas, as well as the eastern portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

ART "John Steuart Curry. Spring Shower; Western Kansas Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas." No other period has left an enduring characterization of the Great Plains as the Great Depression. When years of drought and poor land management turned the western grasslands into the Dust Bowl, farmers throughout the Plains were forced off their land by the thousands, and workers of all sorts faced unemployment. Along with this widespread suffering, however, art actually flourished. Gripping depictions of the difficult conditions throughout the Middle West and South in paintings and photographs captivated American audiences. Through federal relief programs and investments art was actually fostered and encouraged as well as related activities. Many of the art work produced in the Great Plains became the represented image of the period, and a testament to the region's enduring significance to the nation. FILM media type="youtube" key="J_pvgtMm0mg" width="560" height="315" align="center"

The Western is the genre most clearly associated with the Plains. Many Westerns are actually "placeless". Exact locations are usually ambiguous, because the West in these films is too big for any one place. The "placelessness" is accentuated by the fact that many Westerns were filmed on stage sets. Yet these Westerns, are clearly set in the Great Plains and often depict events in Plains history. These include cattle-drive films such as Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), which is based on the opening of the Chisholm Trail in the 1860s.

There are also Plains films that stand alone, outside of any genre. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) for example. The film opens in the sepiatoned Dust Bowl of Kansas; It goes from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz and then back to "no place like home." The film is based on the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum, who spent three years in South Dakota during the drought and economic depression of the late 1880s and early 1890s.

LITERATURE === Living oral tradition and transcriptions from literate observers managed to preserve countless of oral literature.The tradition began with the oral literatures of the many Native nations who have lived in the area and with the folktales and dramas of the early European and mixed-blood peoples.The first written literature to come from the Plains was the utilitarian recording of tribal histories as winter counts and the diaries and letters from early European American explorers. Narratives of a sacred or semi-sacred nature explain the origins of the universe, of the particular nation, of the hero figures of the nation, and of the holy ceremonies of the people ===

= MUSIC media type="youtube" key="RqxD3kxMGQg" width="560" height="315"

Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas. The famously bespectacled Holly, along with his band, the Crickets, was among the most innovative and influential pioneers of rock and roll music, an amalgam of white country and western and black rhythm and blues styles. A midwestern tour led to the fatal crash on February 3, 1959, of the small plane in which Holly and two other young performers (the Big Bopper and Richie Valens) were attempting to fly from their engagement in Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, North Dakota. The hits continued after his death, with the lonesome and defiant "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" climbing to number one. Holly was a member of the first group of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

 Iconic/Historic Site Mount Rushmore National Memorial, or, as its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, referred to it, the Shrine of Democracy. Mount Rushmore features 60-foot (18 m) sculptures of the heads of four United State presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The entire memorial covers 1,278.45 acres (5.17 km2) and is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level and is located near Keystone, South Dakota, in the United States.Each year, more than 2.5 million visitors gaze up at the faces of the Shrine of Democracy. They stand in awe of its magnificence and in appreciation for its remarkable sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, and his truly American image, Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

LANGUAGE/DIALECT  In his book The Great Plains (1931), Walter Prescott Webb noted that sign language was an essential early form of communication in the Great Plains. Using hand and arm gestures, sign language made intertribal communication possible among Plains Indians. Subsequently, the westward movement of European Americans during the nineteenth century established the basic geographical patterns of speech within the Great Plains that persist to this day. The vocabulary of this area includes the word "blinky" as an adjective to describe milk that has begun to sour. Another colorful term, "gully washer," refers to an exceptional amount of rainfall, and in Texas a compliment might be paid to someone who was said to be as "handy as hip pockets on a hog." The Spanish language has also had a profound impact on folk speech in this part of the Plains, as represented in terms such as "arroyo," meaning a dry gulch or deep gully cut by an intermittent stream. Native American and First Nation languages have also influenced Plains folk speech: in the Prairie Provinces, for example, the verb "ponask" has been borrowed from the Cree language to describe the practice of splitting a piece of meat, putting it on a stick, and roasting it over an open fire.

Beautiful Places The [|national park] covers 801,163 acres (324,219 ha),[|[][|1][|]] which is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Few other parks exceed this park's value for the protection and study of [|geologic] and [|paleontologic] resources. A variety of [|Cretaceous] and [|Cenozoic] [|fossil] organisms exist in abundance. [|Archaeologists] have discovered artifacts estimated to be 9,000 years old, and historic buildings and landscapes offer graphic illustration of life along the international border in the 19th century. For more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km), the [|Rio Grande/Río Bravo] forms the international boundary between [|Mexico] and the [|United States], and Big Bend National Park administers approximately 118 miles (190 km) along that boundary. The park was named after the area, which is bounded by a large bend in the river and Texas-Mexico border (//see map at right below//). Because the Rio Grande serves as an international boundary, the park faces unusual constraints while administering and enforcing park rules, regulations, and policies. In accordance with the [|Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo], the park's territory extends only to the center of the deepest river channel as the river flowed in 1848. The rest of the land south of that channel, and the river, lies within Mexican territory.
 * Big Bend National Park** in the U.S. state of [|Texas] has national significance as the largest protected area of [|Chihuahuan Desert] [|topography] and [|ecology] in the United States. It contains more than 1,200 species of plants, more than 450 species of birds, 56 species of reptiles, and 75 species of mammals.[|[][|3][|]]

Climate As you move from east to west, the rainfall in the prairies decreases. Climates are more moist close to the mountains and to the east and north; they are driest in the central portions. This creates different types of prairies, with the tallgrass prairie, known as the true prairie, in the wetter parts. Grasses such as  __big bluestem__ , and Indian grass <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18.66px;">, and many species of flowers grow here. The plants can sometimes grow to be 10 feet tall. Mixed-grass prairies are found in the central Great Plains, and shortgrass prairie towards the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. The rain shadow causes Pacific ocean moisture to rise and cool, dropping as rain or snow on the western side of the mountains instead of on the prairies. <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18.66px;">Precipitation in the prairies can reach from about 12.6 inches in the shortgrass prairie to 21.7 inches in the tallgrass prairies. <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18.66px;">The prairies were maintained in their natural state by climate, grazing and fire. Rainfall varies from year to year in the prairies. There is usually a long dry period during the summer months. Every 30 years or so there is a long drought period which lasts for several years. The most famous drought was in the 1930s, when the prairies were called the "Dust Bowl". <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 18.66px;">The climate of the prairies is influenced by its mid-continental location, and the sheltering effect of the Rocky Mountains. Being located far from the moderating effects of oceans causes a wide range of temperatures, with hot summers and cold winters. Strong winds blow across the endless plains during both summer and winter. <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 18.66px;">Every one to five years fire would spread across any given area of land. These fires moved rapidly across the land and did not penetrate into the soil very far. They killed most saplings, and removed the thatch of dead grasses, allowing early flowering spring species to grow.