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Boots on Fence Posts
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13433 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
4,217 Words |
| Author
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Roger L. Welsch
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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 efforts, and without question the sand and grass will eventually reconquer what has momentarily been taken from them.
Homesteaders on the Plains generally had a hard time finding the materials they had been accustomed to using in erecting structures. There were few trees worthy of the name and thus no logs for log houses, no clay from which to mold bricks, no fuel to fire them, little natural building stone. Instead, the homesteaders made small houses of prairie sod, baled hay, and discarded railroad ties - fortresses not so much against a human enemy as a hostile environment.
As large as some eastern states, the region is transversed by a single north-south, one-lane paved road; two east-west highways lie on its edges. In winter, children and wives of Sandhills ranchers often live in second homes
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