ABSTRACT
When the first European settlers saw the North American continent, it appeared to them that a great sea of forest stretched endlessly westwards. In Canada, New England and Virginia the further inland they penetrated, generation after generation, the more boundless forests they discovered. It was not until the nineteenth century that, ultimately, they emerged at its western edge and discovered that the forest was not endless; an equally vast sea of grassland lay beyond it. The American and Canadian peoples who had achieved nationhood in a forest environment had now to master a very different kind of landscape if their territories were to expand still further. The grassland lay in a continuous north-south belt from the forest edge in Alberta and Saskatchewan to the Gulf Coast in south-eastern Texas; it also had extensive outliers in the basins and on the plateaux to the west and in the Central Valley of California as well as smaller outliers to the east, particularly in the Kentucky Blue Grass Region and the Nashville Basin of Tennessee. Apart from these outliers it also bulged far eastwards on to the Middle West plains in Illinois and western Indiana. Westwards from the forest edge the grassland stretched, without interruption, to the foothills of the Rockies.
