Prairie - The Land as it was
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In the middle of North America is a large area of land that was once covered with grasses and colorful wild flowers. The French called the rolling plains of grass “prairie”, from the word for meadow grazed by cattle. The prairies are a type of grassland dominated by herbaceous plants and grasses. Very few trees grow on the prairies and are usually widely scattered.
The prairies form a triangular area from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba down through the Great Plains to southern Texas and Mexico, and 1,000 miles from western Indiana westward to the Rocky Mountains. They cover about 1.4 million square miles.
In Illinois the natural landscape can be divided into 14 Natural Divisions, based on topography, glacial history, bedrock, soils, and distribution of plants and animals. The prairies of Illinois fall into six main subclasses of prairie including:
• black soil prairie,
• sand prairie,
• gravel prairie,
• dolomite prairie,
• hill prairie, and
• shrub prairie.
The largest original prairie type was the Grand Prairie (black soil prairie) of central Illinois. This prairie had deep rich loess soil. This soil type is excellent for agricultural development.
Along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Illinois, Kankakee, and Mississippi rivers are extensive sand deposits, often forming dunes or ridges and swales, and several kinds of sand prairies can be found in such areas. An easily accessible sand prairie is just North of the Quad-Cities at Savanah, IL.
Hill prairies are found on dry, southwest-facing, loess-covered hill tops above bluffs overlooking flood plains of rivers, especially the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
Most prairies in Illinois are on thick layers of sediment deposited by glaciers and glacial streams. However the Drummond Dolomite Prairie, located on the western edge of Midewin, occurs on thin soils overlying dolomite bedrock. The dolomite, which is a calcium magnesium carbonate, lies within a meter of the surface. As a consequence, the thin overlying soils are alkaline and have very high magnesium content an important plant nutrient.
Today very little of the original prairie survives, only one to two percent. Much of the land has been converted to agricultural use, urban areas are overtaking the land and the fires are suppressed. The huge herds of animals have been killed off or driven from the land. The natural ecosystem for sustaining the prairies has been all but destroyed.
Information for this cache has been extracted and adapted from an article “North American Prairie” published by “blueplanetbiomes.org”. Also from the article “The Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois” by Ken Robertson
Permission to place this cache is granted by Mr. Scott Roman, Blackhawk State Historic Site, Site Manager
To log this cache post a picture of the prairie with your GPS unit. Inclusion of the sign in the picture is optional. E-mail me the answers to the following questions. Do not put the answers in your log:
1. When the settlers arrived in the early 1800s how many acres of prairie existed in Illinois?
2. Of the six categories of prairie listed above, in which category would the Blackhawk Historic Site prairie be?
3. Approximately how many acres of prairie remain today?
Congratulations to Waterfallfrog for being the first to visit the Prairie.
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