Prairie People

Lesson Introduction

The Great Plains was a much different place one hundred, two hundred years ago than it is now. People lived lives that were much more at the mercy of the harsh winters, occasional droughts, and lack of abundant timber for fuel than the lives that most of us live today on the Great Plains in big houses, eating foods from all over the world and using fossil fuels. Where the Great Plains is home to cattle and thousands and thousands of acres of planted corn and soybeans, it used to support huge herds of bison and hundreds of species of tall grasses and flowers that decorated a sweeping panorama of yellows, oranges, blues, across the width of the gently rolling horizon.

The prairies that met the settlers had created the rich, black loam that the settlers found to be ideal for cultivating crops. At first the people found the prairie roots extremely resistant to tilling, but when John Deere invented the steel moldboard plow, individual farmers were able to plow under their own land without hiring the service of traveling men with several teams of oxen. This was one of the many ways in which the settlers to the prairie changed it into a land which they imagined would suit their needs. These changes, though, have turned out to be detrimental to the health of the Great Plains ecosystems and, therefore, to the people who live on the Great Plains.

Illinois State Goal	Standard	Learning Benchmarks
16	D	3a. Describe characteristics of different kinds of communities in various sections of America during the colonial/frontier periods and the 19th century.
16	D	3b. Describe characteristics of different kinds of families in America during the colonial/frontier periods and the 19th century.
16	E	3a. Describe how early settlers in Illinois and the United States adapted to, used and changed the environment prior to 1818.
16	E	3b. Describe how the largely rural population of the United States adapted, used and changed the environment after 1818.

Lesson Objectives

• meet an individual whose work involves learning about the lifestyles of people who lived on the prairies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• ask questions about the lives of those people as they related to their environment.
• learn about the impacts of our lifestyles today on our environment.
• write a synopsis of what they learned from the interview.

Advance Preparation

Obtain a guest speaker who is a conservation biologist or an environmental historian or who somehow addresses changes to the land and changes in society over the years on the Great Plains. Contact the Illinois Natural History Survey at (217) 333-5986 for a listing of a variety of speakers who are free of charge.

Time Allotment

2 one-hour sessions

Materials

• chalk board, dry-erase board, or other large board for writing
• paper

PROCEDURE

Tap Prior Knowledge

1. Students will create a KWL list. Divide the black board into three sections. Label the first section K. Ask the pairs of students to list what they Know about prairies. Ask them to include anything they know about life during the time of pioneer settlement. Write their responses on the board.

Share with Neighbor

2. Label the second section W. Generate a list of questions about What they would like to know about the prairie and prairie life in the past. Guide students to include questions about what their lives would be like if they lived on the prairie a hundred years ago. What would they do for fun? What would they eat? What would their house be like? What would the land around them be like? The questions on this list can be used as interview questions for the guest speaker. Assign specific students to ask the questions.

Hands-on Activity

3. Introduce the guest speaker, who is either a historian who studies the lives of people who lived during this time, or a conservation biologist who studies the effects that people have had on the native landscapes of the Great Plains over the last couple hundred years. Tell the students they can ask the guest questions, and that they should write down the answers that the guest provides.

Introduce Scientific Principle/Environmental Issue

4. Since the settlers to the Great Plains were used to the tall forests and mountains of Europe, they saw the gently rolling, treeless prairies as boring and unsuitable for farming. They immediately thought that they would have to change the prairie in order to make it livable. As it turns out, the history of the prairie before the settlers had made the prairie a source of extremely fertile soil and wildlife, capable of supporting extremely productive farms. The changes that the settlers made to the prairies degraded the land's productivity for the rest of the future by causing increasing the amount of healthy soil that got washed away and for other reasons as well.

Relate Activity and Concept

6. Now the students are ready to finally fill out the L section of the list. The answers they received to their questions will guide them to organize what they have Learned from the speaker.

Learning Outcomes

• identify what life was like for settlers on the Great Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• learn how either conservation biologists or historians study the Great Plains or this time in history.
• explain why the natural environment is important to historians.
• explain why human history is important to conservation biologists.