When the Land Belonged to God

Having spent considerable time over the last two decades as a youth, and young man on the plains, I can only strain to imagine the descriptions one reads in the accounts of the Corps. Of Discovery and various Mountain Man journals. Vast expanses, teeming with herds that have not been seen since the middle of the 19th Century and already dwindling by the late 1830s, often numbered in the tens of thousands of beasts. The richness of biology once present in America’s Serengeti, must have been an incredible wonder to behold. Oh what a lovely place it is still, however it’s as if it is a vacant, aged, mansion at times. The structure is there, with the inhabitants of the domicile long deceased, vanished from the home. Their footsteps no longer echo in the halls or coulees, their calls silent. The plains are nearly empty, the bluffs bare of bison herds, the elk scarcely seen amidst the cottonwood lined Missouri, flocks of birds that once blotted out the sun, now only dot the sky. Here is a painting of what it may have looked like. Here’s, WHEN THE LAND BELONGED TO GOD, by Charlie Russell.