Comprehensive Evaluation Report

Historical Context
Beginning about 12,000 years ago, various
Indian groups began to occupy and adapt to
the harsh conditions of the Great Plains.
The western portion of the Kiowa National
Grassland along the Canadian River was an
area of significant prehistoric occupation, as
was the Washita River corridor on the
Black Kettle National Grassland. A
prolonged drought in the 1400s caused
many Indian and Spanish groups to leave
the area, although populations returned with
the milder climate of the 1500s. From 1500-
1700, bands of Apache, Comanche, Navajo
and Kiowa Indians periodically occupied
the area, along with the Spanish. In the
1600s, white settlers moved in from the
eastern United States, causing unrest among
native populations. In the 1700s and early
1800s, the trade economy greatly expanded,
Figure 2: Dust storm approaching Stratford, TX
NOAA's National Weather Service Collection
large-scale buffalo hunts became common, and the Spanish herded sheep in various parts of the
Grasslands. There was an accelerated settlement period in the late 1800s, resulting in creation of
businesses, towns and counties. Hispanic sheepherders withdrew from the area as the cattle industry grew.
An open-range cattle industry thrived from 1866-1886 and then the land was fenced into smaller-tracts of
cattle ranches and family farms.
In the 1930s, cultivated food crops were in high demand. As a result of the combination of deeply plowed
tracts of marginal lands in some parts of the region and over-grazing by cattle and sheep herds in other
areas, much of the Great Plains was stripped of native vegetation. This loss of native grass cover,
combined with a severe drought, set the stage for an enormous loss of soil. Huge dust storms (Figure 2)
blew the topsoil throughout the Plains and Midwest as far as Washington D.C. There were 72 regional
storms in 1937 before they began to drop off.
Figure 3: Contrast between National
Grasslands and surrounding private
land.
Strong measures were needed to restore lands that
were severely denuded in the Dust Bowl. Federal
conservation programs began to acquire the devastated
farmlands to rehabilitate the area and replace outdated
farming methods with seeding, rotating crops, using
contour and strip plowing, terracing and planting trees
as wind breaks. The 1937 Bankhead-Jones Farm
Tenant Act required the Soil Conservation Service to
transform severely eroded farmlands into
demonstrations of good land conservation and
utilization. In 1954, some of these lands were
transferred to various federal agencies. In 1960, these
same lands were transferred from the various agencies
to the Forest Service and put into a National
Grasslands System.
The Grasslands are nearly the only public lands within
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