Sea of Grass

A West of 98 special edition

Author’s Note: this is my first West of 98 essay with an audio voiceover. The wise

Nate Marshall

recently added that feature to his newsletters at

The Blue Scholar

and I thought it was a superb idea. I plan to make these voiceovers a regular feature, so that subscribers can either read or listen, as their schedule allows. This will also help me reinvigorate the West of 98 podcast feed(!) where you will hear these audio essays weekly, along with standalone podcasts. Check it out and subscribe on the Apple podcast app and wherever you download your finest podcasts.

It was October 20, 1541, when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado wrote a missive to King Charles I of Spain about a shocking discovery deep in the interior of North America. No, he had not found the purpose of his quest, the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola. Those cities of gold and the province of Quivira would prove to be mythical, much to the chagrin of the gold-hungry Spaniards. Yet, the ambitious conquistador had wandered on to something stunning in its own right:

I reached some plains so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues…with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea…there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.

It is a powerful visual of what is today called the Llano Estacado, a southern extension of the Great Plains that lies above the Caprock Escarpment in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. As you travel the West Texas plains today, there are a few more landmarks. There are occasional trees and shrubs. Even the most novice traveler can find a few reference points with the signs of human civilization—highways, power lines, fields of growing crops, the occasional town, maybe even the blessing of an Allsup’s convenience store on the horizon.

Even so, we understand Coronado’s vision. Some places in the world are hard to picture in their “prior” form. Having read much about the history and development of Central Park (to say nothing of my immeasurable viewings of “Home Alone 2”) it is still difficult to visualize the park as a quiet farming village much removed from the “City” on Manhattan Island. It is equally challenging to imagine a “Green Sahara” in which northern Africa was a savanna grassland.

But on the plains of West Texas, we understand Coronado’s vision of that sea of grass from almost 500 years ago. A few of us might be wistful to have seen it as Coronado did, before the plows, mesquite trees, and highways made their marks on large pieces of it. Even so, we can still feel the power of his visual. In “A Personal Country,” Abilene native A.C. Greene reflected on his own complicated love for West Texas. I think about a passage where he visits the site of old Camp Cooper, a pre-Civil War army post situated on the banks of the Brazos River just north of Fort Griffin in southern Throckmorton County.¹ Just a short distance from the site, Greene found a place where he could look around in full 360-degree view and not see any sign of human existence. There was nary a building, a road, or a power line in sight. He marveled at the unique opportunity in that locale. It was a rare 20th century evocation of Coronado’s vision, on a spot that is only about 30 miles from my house as the crow flies.² Sadly, this was written several decades ago and Greene has since passed, but if he were to visit today, he would surely see a few signs of “progress,” headlined by wind turbines looming over the horizon in several directions.

June 20-22, 2024 was National Grasslands Week in America. It is a designation by the U.S. Forest Service to recognize our nation’s twenty official national grasslands and the work by USFS and other agencies to preserve, restore, and strengthen almost 4 million acres of grasslands in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl. I wonder how much worse off our country might be if not for the appointment of Hugh Hammond Bennett as the first director of the Soil Erosion Service in 1933. Bennett revolutionized the concept of soil conservation in America, overcoming deep-seated foolhardiness embedded in government policy and American agricultural practices and he deserves to be lauded as an American hero.³ Perhaps we should again consider some of Bennett’s warnings on soil health and soil erosion, but that’s a rant for another essay.

National Grasslands Week was a good opportunity for me to wax poetic about the grasslands of West Texas, as I am wont to do. I’ll make no apologies for that. As we move in to a bitter presidential election season in America (gag), and as I dig in to another term as Mayor of Stamford, I want to focus on that which is most meaningful to me. It keeps me grounded and focused on the good work of local government and local culture. The grasslands of West Texas—as they were, as they are, as they can be again—are part of that. It is too deep into this essay to explore just *why* the grasslands strike my heart and my soul in profound ways that are inherent to my very being, but they do. “West of 98” exists because of those wide-open plains covered by a sea of grass.

I leave you with a quote from the legendary historian Walter Prescott Webb, author of “The Great Plains,” the book that spawned that very “West of 98” moniker that adorns this newsletter. Webb was giving his presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on December 29, 1958, when he described the importance of that book’s topic:

In the Great Plains I had chosen an environment simple in structure whose force was so compelling as to influence profoundly whatever touched it.

Without a doubt, the grasslands and the plains have profoundly influenced me just as Webb described. May the work of West of 98 do justice to that powerful place.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

The definition of a “league” as a unit of length is notoriously inconsistent (the Wikipedia article on the matter will cause your head to spin). A reasonable rule of thumb is that one league equals approximately three miles. BUT (there’s always a but), the Spanish mile varied slightly from its English counterpart, so a Spanish league would have been about 2.6 miles. Thus, Coronado’s description is understood to reference approximately 780 miles. Regardless, of the specifics, it’s a whole lot of grassland.

1. Camp Cooper and Fort Griffin each have their own illustrious history in our part of West Texas. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re both worth a read on

2. It may be 30 miles as the crow flies, but I would guess that the trip would be twice as far for a man to travel by automobile from Stamford to Camp Cooper. There may now be signs of human civilization in that area east of Lake Stamford and south of Throckmorton, but no man would call it “civilized,”

3. Bennett’s work is covered in some detail in “The Worst Hard Time” but as noted by my friend Lenny Wells on Twitter a while back, despite literally helping save U.S. agriculture, there is no recent biography of him, which is a shame.