Illinois Prairie

Once nomadic Asians crossed the snow-crusted arctic

land bridge, they discovered a virgin continent previously

unknown to human habitation.  Over thousands of years,

stone age tribes of the North American plains survived 

by following the animals they hunted in cyclic migration.     

Stretching far to the south of the City of Big Shoulders,

a pair of rails winds over undulating glacial moraine

left in place ten thousand years after retreat of the last

northern ice age.  Hoary mammoths, saber-tooth cats, herds

of wild buffalo have long ago disappeared from this land.

Chocolate colored soil, rich with loam one hundred feet

deep, is the legacy of the last ice age. Untilled in human

history until little over a hundred years ago, its swamps

now drained  (but precious moisture maintained with 

underground tiling), our flat Illinois prairie has become

an inexhaustible and versatile bread basket for the world.

Millions of acres of grassland have given way to the reach

of the tractor. A sea of ten foot high waving grass has been

breached and tamed.  Billion bushel corn and soy crops now

flourish where ground hogs and foxes once scurried.  Loping

highways carry citizens of far-flung towns across this prairie.

But the sun still rises gold in the East and sets red in the West,

as it has ever since man’s first encounter with the great plains.