Once buffalo trod this land, back when it was a tableau of tall grasses and colorful wildflowers that reached almost to the horizon, unbroken but for the occasional leafy oak.
Today the buffalo are long gone and the land degraded by decades of plowing, planting and even bombing during military training exercises.
Still it fights to be what it was 150 years ago–American prairie, rife with goldenrods and blue-stem grass.
Now natural-resources officials here have joined the battle for its revival, making Michigan one of several states that see a renewed and vibrant prairie not just as a haven for rare plants and insects but also as a fount of tourist dollars.
Prairie lands have become rarities, not just here at the Fort Custer Recreation Area, where managers are trying to restore 1,000 acres, but across America. More than 90 percent of the prairie that once crossed the nation from Ohio to Kansas has disappeared, in many places plowed under for farms, houses and golf courses.
“What we’re trying to do is turn back the clock,” said Bill Kosmider, the supervisor at Fort Custer.
The park’s 3,000 acres are bordered by the military’s Fort Custer Training Center and the gleaming white headstones of the Fort Custer National Cemetery. As far as anyone knows, the names are honorific. Gen. George Armstrong Custer didn’t visit here, and it wasn’t until long after his army was wiped out at Little Big Horn anyone thought of naming a fort for him.
But the area retains its frontier aura. At night the wail of coyotes echoes over the fields, and in the day the animals’ carcasses dot the highways. When Kosmider pushes his green Dodge Ram down the dirt roads of the reborn prairie, grasshoppers and dragonflies flee from its front bumper, and purple and maroon flowers sway in its wake.
“There’s a seed bank out there, seeds from the original prairie,” he said, “and once they get a chance they’ll perpetuate themselves.”
At one time southern Michigan was awash in prairie, a 600,000-acre swath that stretched from Detroit to Kalamazoo, a gateway to the grasslands of the West. Today that prairie has dwindled to about 500 acres–less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its original size.
Foreign plants and trees–some brought here by the first European settlers–have pushed out native species, growing so tall and thick they block the sun, killing growth below. Open grasslands have mutated into dense forests.
To change that, officials have embraced the same simple tool used by American Indians but one that can arouse heated opposition from modern-day residents: fire.
On the prairie, agricultural specialists say, fire was as natural as sunlight, burning away exotic species and strangling underbrush while releasing nutrients into the soil. The Indians deliberately set the prairie ablaze, knowing the native oaks would survive and the indigenous grasses would quickly sprout anew.
But years of warnings from contemporary icons such as Smokey Bear have created a perception all woodland fires are bad, a mind-set Michigan officials have struggled to overcome. Some local government leaders have complained about the nuisance of soot and the danger of wind-blown burning debris.
Ray Fahlsing, a State Parks and Recreation resource specialist, said the fires–controlled burns monitored by fire departments–are a means to “put the natural disturbance back into the system.”
But he acknowledges, “It’s a new thing to see fire within a state park.”
Fire offers another advantage besides its historic role: It’s cheap, far less costly than hiring crews to cut brush across hundreds of acres. Cost is no small consideration to a state that has $83,000 a year to spend on prairie restoration.
Authorities say the prairie is invaluable not just for its plants and animals but also for its hold on America’s psyche. But the foundation of that vision has all but disappeared.
An estimated 98 percent of the original prairie has vanished–99 percent east of the Missouri River, according to a 1995 study by the U.S. Interior Department. Michigan similarly has lost 99 percent of its prairie lands.
“There’s a great historical and aesthetic resource to having prairies,” said Bob Grese, associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan. “There’s a great loss in our culture in people not being exposed to these kinds of places and not being able to see the beauty and dynamics of them.”
The push for preservation “isn’t coming any too soon, before we lose these last remnants,” Grese said.
Other states and agencies have reached the same conclusion, seeing prairies as a way to support fragile ecosystems and attract paying tourists and campers.
The federal government plans to spend $16 million during the next 25 years to buy land for a 75,000-acre prairie preserve in western Minnesota and northwestern Iowa, a sanctuary it says will support 141 jobs and produce $11.2 million in annual revenue. The area stretches for 520 miles and is 150 miles wide in places still less than 1 percent of the original prairie in those two states.
Oklahoma’s 8-year-old Tallgrass Prairie Preserve draws an estimated 30,000 tourists a year, while environmentalists in Joliet, Ill., hope to emulate that success on the grounds of an old Army munitions factory. They’ve begun tearing aged railroad ties from the ground and seeding 20,000 native plants to rebuild the prairie there.
At Michigan’s Algonac State Park, which hugs the St. Clair River north of Detroit, the reborn Blazing Star Prairie has become a popular locale for photography and bird-watching. The land is an explosion of color, where goldfinch feed on stems of tall coreopsis and viceroy butterflies float on the breeze.
Park officials say the prairie holds 150 different plants and 192 kinds of insects, 14 of which dwell only on prairies.
