The Great Plains, the vast plateau of grassland between the Mississippi and the Rockies, was ignored by early settlers. Was it because they didn't know how fertile the land was? Was it because they feared Native Americans? Or was it because huge herds of animals destroyed subsistence farms?

Lewis and Clark's 1803 expedition took a year to cross the Dakotas and Montana. They reported few trees. The earth was black, which suggested it was fertile. In North Dakota Clark wrote:

"I ascended to the top of the cut bluff this morning, from whence I had a most delightfull view of the country, the whole of which except the vally formed by the Missouri is void of timber or underbrush, exposing to the first glance of the spectator immence herds of buffaloe, elk, deer, and antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture."

In the early 1800s, treeless mean "desert" regardless of dryness. In 1806 another exploration crossed the southern plains, led by Zebulon Pike. His notes and papers were lost when he was captured by Spanish soldiers. But Pike returned with a strong opinion: the Great Plains were a desert "incapable of cultivation." In 1823 another expedition leader, Major Stephen Long, reported the plains were "almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsitence."

400,000 people crossed the plains on the Oregon Trail between 1846 and 1869, going to infertile farmland in tree-filled Oregon. As they crossed the most fertile farmland in the world, were they oblivious to it's value?

Movies and histories show that people were afraid of native Americans, especially plains Indians. But neither mass media, nor historians, have explored how the presence of so many big animals pushed land beyond settler control.

High-tensile, tall fences are needed to prevent buffalo movement. Wire fences weren't invented until the 1870s, and these were short. After the 1880s, cheap barbed wire prevented sheep and cattle incursions, which is said to have made homesteading possible. But that's only because bison and elk, which these fences didn't stop, were gone.

If barbed wire made farming possible because otherwise cattle roamed in, how much greater was the impact of buffalo, which these fences could not hold?

The government must have been interested in removing large animals to spur agriculture. This has been curiously unexamined.

Unless we can imagine the impact of millions of animals, we can't get our head around it. Movies, serials, video games present images, and some of them present images of the Great Plains, calling it the wild west. When it really was something different, a fertile land home to massive animal populations. Until those animals were removed, farmers couldn't move in.