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THE GREAT PLAINS , stretching west of the Mississippi through OKLAHOMA, MISSOURI, KANSAS, IOWA, NEBRASKA and SOUTH and NORTH DAKOTA , are lumped together in the popular imagination as an unappealing expanse of unvarying flatness and conservative "Middle American" values, a huge national joke to be passed through as fast as possible. Once, however, this was the West , a vast empty canvas on which outlaws, fur trappers, buffalo hunters and cowboys painted their dreams. In the 1870s, the wide open range of the lone prairie, which had originally been known as the Great American Desert but was then promoted as a bountiful Garden of Eden, inspired such fascination that General Custer was moved to call it "the fairest and richest portion of the national domain." As well as the main routes west (the Oregon and Santa Fe trails through Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska), the plains were crisscrossed by the Pony Express, cattle trails and railroads. Today the massive Gateway Arch in St Louis celebrates the traders, explorers and pioneers who followed their destinies further and further west. Early maps show the "Desert" as uninterrupted by towns or roads; even today there are fewer towns, spaced further apart, on the plains than anywhere else in the nation. One sinister note echoes through this openness and emptiness: most of the nation's nuclear missiles - marked by unprepossessing concrete blocks fenced into empty fields - sit beneath a land already ravaged by greed. The plains, today so apparently uneventful, share a troubled history. The systematic destruction by white settlers of the awesome herds of bison presaged the virtual eradication of the Plains Indians . Reservations, agencies and "assigned lands" dwindled as the natural resources of the area attracted white settlement; after 1874, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the fate of the Native Americans was practically sealed. However, thanks to warriors like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull , the struggle for control of the plains was by no means as easy as the Hollywood Westerns imply. Today the region is ambivalent about this history: many of its museums and monuments to Native Americans seem almost like a veiled celebration of the destruction of their culture. The plains are more comfortable playing cowboys , glorying in a romantic myth of the Wild West and flaunting sanitized versions of wicked old cowtowns like Deadwood in South Dakota, Dodge City (once called the "Beautiful, Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier") in Kansas, and St Joseph , Missouri, the birthplace of the Pony Express. Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley all left their mark here when this was the wild frontier, and today, in the sandy scrublands of northern Nebraska and North Dakota, you can still see real cowboy and cattle country. After Reconstruction, Southern blacks came here in search of an egalitarian future, and black colonies sprang up all around the region. The dreams soon died, though, and there are few black faces to be seen nowadays. There is, however, more evidence of nineteenth-century Russian and German settlement: many of the oldest families on the plains are descendants of European Mennonites who escaped religious persecution in the 1870s, bringing with them new farming methods that heralded the region's great agricultural prosperity. The Great Plains still provide the nation with much of its food and export two-thirds of the world's wheat , seas of which wave over the flat fields of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. The economy has also long been dependent on oil, especially in Oklahoma, and gold in the Dakotas. Defining the geographical limits of the plains is difficult, and the term itself is almost a misnomer - there are vast flat expanses and long uninterrupted roads, but there are also canyons, forests and splashes of unexpected color, as well as two of the nation's mightiest rivers: the Missouri , which weaves its course southeast from North Dakota, and the Mississippi , which it joins at St Louis. Since the 1950s, the siphoning of the underground Ogallala aquifer from Nebraska to Oklahoma has transformed much that was once dusty desert into verdant fields; the consequences of overuse (ensuring the depletion of the reservoir in another fifty-odd years) remain to be seen. The woods, caves and springs of the Ozarks , the lunar landscapes of South Dakota's Badlands , and stately Mount Rushmore are the region's most visited areas. Otherwise, there are few immediate attractions, and only St Louis stands out as an urban destination. Drama comes instead in the form of such unpredictable weather as freak blizzards, dust storms, lightning storms and the notorious "twister" tornadoes. Images of the devastating Thirties' dustbowl Depression (when topsoil was whisked as far away as Washington, DC) remain as potent as the fantasy of Dorothy and Toto being swept up from Kansas by a tornado to the land of Oz, while flooding is a constant threat - huge swaths of Iowa and Missouri were swamped in 1993. A car is practically obligatory in the plains, where distances are long, roads straight and seemingly endless, and the population sparse. The main routes (I-94, I-90, I-80, I-70, I-40) cross from east to west, while north-south travel is often limited to quiet, curving byways. Greyhound buses travel the interstates, but often bypass the small towns that provide a real sense of the region. Subsidiary bus lines include Jack Rabbit in South Dakota, and the Jefferson Line, which covers Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. True to their image as a crossroads rather than a destination, the plains are crossed by Amtrak trains almost exclusively at night, with South Dakota not covered at all. St Louis, Missouri, has the major airport , while Wichita, Kansas, is a regional hub.
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