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Boots on Fence Posts
| Article
# : |
13433 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
4,217 Words |
| Author
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Roger L. Welsch
Plains folklorist Roger L. Welsch is professor of English and
anthropology at the University of Nebraska. |
The western hemisphere's largest sand-dune area is Nebraska's Sandhills, a hauntingly vacant landscape that has been described by every novelist treating the region, from James Fenimore Cooper to Wright Morris, with language reminiscent of the sea. The wind "scuds" across the grass. The vehicles of the frontier were "schooners." In one novel, a lonely wagon kept its bearings across the landmarkless Plains by dragging a rope behind it, exactly as mariners of the period maintained a straight course in the absence of compass or sun. Small wonder that maritime metaphors prevail in a relatively arid region: The two landscapes are sculpted by the same force - the wind.
Like the sea, Sandhills are beautiful but dangerous, compelling yet intimidating. Charles Kuralt has called Nebraska Highway 2, slashing directly through the middle of the Sandhills, "one of the ten most beautiful highways in America," adding, "It is not just a way to get somewhere. It is somewhere." Other travelers carefully avoid the route because of its empty, endless vistas.
Ranches in the Sandhills consist of twenty or thirty sections, but sixty- and seventy-section parcels are not unusual. A section is a square mile, an area, I should remind the urban reader, measuring twelve city blocks by twelve city blocks. So we are talking about a single agricultural economic unit encompassing twenty to seventy square miles. The land here seems cheap, selling for as little as $150 an acre, but there are 640 acres to a section, and so even a modest twenty-section ranch, not including the value of buildings, equipment, and stock, can cost in the neighborhood of $2 million.
The population density of the Sandhills, a region measuring roughly one hundred by two hundred miles, is less than one person per square mile. While the land is used primarily for grazing livestock, the severity of the geography limits even the cattle population to less than one head per square mile in many parts of the vast region.
There have been efforts to force the Sandhills into submission, to make them conform to what European and eastern American settlers thought it should be when it was opened for homesteading in 1904, but they have proven mostly futile. Nebraska's only state forest is in the Sandhills. It is an artificial frustration, in which every tree has been planted by man. Annually there is a struggle to keep the survival rate of trees above or at least even with the mortality rate. But inevitably the harsh landscape's natural inclinations toward sand and grass grind away at puny human
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