Chapter 2 - Where and What Are the Great Plains?

Summary

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

(Cather 1966:232)

The Great Plains which I cross in my sleep are bigger than any name people give them. They are enormous, bountiful, unfenced, empty of buildings, full of names and stories. They extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Their hills are hipped, like a woman asleep under a sheet. Their rivers rhyme. Their rows of grain strum past. Their draws hold springwater and wood and game and grass like sugar in the hollow of a hand.

(Frazier 1989: 214)

Infinity was never an abstraction on the High Plains.

(Egan 2006: 40)

In 1541, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led an expedition of Spanish soldiers and others out of Pecos Pueblo in northeastern New Mexico and onto the southwestern Plains. After crossing the Pecos River valley, he ascended onto the High Plains of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas. On this landscape, he saw “no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea … there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by,” and he noted that “the country is so level that men became lost when they went off half a league. One horseman was lost, who never reappeared, and two horses, all saddled and bridled, which they never saw again. No track was left of where they went” (Hammond and Rey 1940).