Word: tallgrasses
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When Louis Jolliet wrote these prophetic words, after a 1673 voyage on the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, the great tallgrass prairie of central North America covered a quarter of a billion acres, a shimmering sea of grass stretching from what is now Indiana to Kansas, from Canada into Texas. But the soil was indeed ideal for corn, and in the three centuries since, that cultivated cousin of the tallgrasses has thrived. Only a few patches of the original tallgrass prairie are left, many of them scattered across the country in such small plots as old cemeteries and railroad rights...
There are still, however, some places where the tallgrass prairie remains nearly as the pioneers saw it--vast, rolling expanses reaching beyond the horizon. U.S. environmentalists would like to keep it that way, and so would the National Park Service. Last month Park Service Director William Penn Mott toured the proposed site for the nation's first Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve: 50,000 acres near Pawhuska, in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma. "You have a jewel here," he told ranchers and conservationists at a barbecue on the Foraker Ranch, one of the properties that could make up the preserve...
...bison and elk are virtually gone, and preserving what remains of the prairie has long been a challenge for conservationists. An effort to establish a tallgrass park at a site in Kansas foundered seven years ago because of local opposition. Ranchers were reluctant to surrender commercially exploitable land...