Goodlands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains

Abstract

Roswell Fort WorthNo one, not even I, bothers to cook up the yellow goatsbeard.The plants are allowed to dry out and disintegrate on the paths or are carefully bagged in plastic for the trash.I can see them now at any distance across the field, their shade of yellow entirely distinct from any other yellow, their silhouette of leaf and stalk standing out, now that I have hunted them for so long, from all the other grasses, forbs, and woody shrubs.Except for Autumn, the strong travois dog (licensed as an Australian cattle dog because the City of Calgary has no categories for Indigenous North American dogs), the dogs and I are as much invasive exotics as the yellow goatsbeard, as the brome and dandelions, as the Hungarian partridges who fill the niche once claimed by prairie chickens, as the English sparrows and city pigeons.Yet sometimes we find coyote scat or surprise a jackrabbit hurrying off with stiff-legged bounds.I give thanks for the pin cherries and strawberries, the wolf willows and wild roses, the spruces and poplars, the fescue grasses and the spring crocuses, the ears of the prairie, and I wonder by what right I uproot my fellow invasive, the pretty yellow flower that, if left alone, produces a perfect hoary globe, like a giant dandelion plume, that might delight a small child; the flower that, if left alone, could be harvested in the fall as food and medicine.On most fall and winter and spring mornings, the dogs and I leave the big old farmhouse in Nebraska and walk down our driveway, past the pond that feeds the well, along the abandoned railroad tracks, then up the Cardinal, Harold,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.