From the Panhandle of Texas to the southern regions of South Dakota, the High Plains has a landscape generally characterized as flat and monotonous. American explorers traveling west from the eastern wooded areas were not impressed with the “sea of grasses” they found covering the region, and proclaimed the area to be part of the “Great American Desert” unfit for agricultural settlement.
American settlement arrived later, but this sea of grass was already home to many pastoral tribes, including the Comanche - peoples who had developed a nomadic lifestyle, following and hunting the more than 60 million buffalo that moved in herds across these vast grasslands. As you will read in the Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne, the buffalo was key to the Comanche’s survival, providing food, shelter, and tools.
Life on the High Plains has never been easy. Our summer sunshine can be unrelenting. Small cloud in the afternoon summer sky can become immense thunderheads, producing winds, torrential downpours, flooding and damaging tornadoes. Winter precipitation can arrive with howling winds, blowing snow and blizzard conditions.
To survive we’ve readily embraced technology. High Plains settlers, faced with unreliable surface water, used windmills, such as those on HPPR’s logo, to tap shallow aquifers for domestic water use. As technology improved electric and gasoline pumps tapped the deeper water of the Ogallala Aquifer as well as our vast petroleum and natural gas deposits, giving rise to the corn fields and pump jacks that dot our landscape.
High Plains agriculturalists have embraced immense tractors, self-propelled combines, and a variety of ever larger accessories to obtain economies of scale, resulting in larger farms and fewer agricultural families. Modern trucks and autos allow us to shop at larger retail centers for a greater variety of goods and services than our local communities can provide, resulting in town abandonment. Of the remaining towns, many have chronic problems, including empty storefronts, aging populations, consolidated schools and few jobs.
Yet, “Ad astra per aspera” still identifies the region. Yes, we have difficulties, but we still reach for those stars – clearly visible in the night sky. In many ways we see ourselves living in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where religion and tradition shape our morals, and know that for all our talk of independence, our individual success is dependent upon the larger High Plains community.
