What is the Great Plains?

The Great Plains is a large flat or gently rolling region in the central United States and Canada, extending from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Mississippi River basin in the east, and from the Rio Grande in the south to the Saskatchewan and North Saskatchewan rivers in the Canadian provinces in the north. The Great Plains covers about 502,000 square miles in the United States, including all or parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, plus eastern portions of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. The region is dominated by grasslands, although much of the original prairie has been converted to agriculture.

Geologically, the Great Plains rest on a thick layer of sedimentary rock derived from the erosion of the Rockies, with elevations rising gradually from about 1,000 feet at the eastern edge to about 6,000 feet at the foot of the Rockies. The region includes several distinct subregions: the High Plains (the western, drier portion), the Low Plains (the eastern, more humid portion), the Sandhills of Nebraska, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Llano Estacado of Texas and New Mexico, and the Texas Panhandle.

The climate varies from semi-arid in the west to humid continental in the east, with cold snowy winters, hot humid summers, frequent severe weather including thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes (Tornado Alley runs through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska). Annual rainfall varies from about 12 inches in the west to 32 inches in the east.

The Great Plains was originally home to about 30 to 60 million bison and to many Native nations including the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Pawnee, Crow, Blackfoot, and others, who developed equestrian buffalo-hunting cultures after acquiring horses from Spanish settlers in the seventeenth century. The Great Plains was the last region of the United States to be intensively settled by European Americans, with major settlement following the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, the Transcontinental Railroad of 1869, and the destruction of the bison herds. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s devastated farming on the southern Plains.

The region's modern economy is dominated by agriculture (the Plains produce much of the country's wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, cotton, and livestock), oil and gas (Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota), wind energy (the Plains have some of the strongest and most consistent winds in the country), and mining. Population has been declining in many rural Plains counties for decades. Major cities include Kansas City, Omaha, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Lubbock, Amarillo, Wichita, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Cheyenne. Sometimes called the breadbasket of America, the Plains feed the country and much of the world.