We can preface this poem by saying it is a lament for the genocide brought upon by the mass movement of uninvited immigrants from the European continent to the American West during the 1800s– Anglo-European settlers who killed sixty million bison and replaced them with nonnative species called bos taurus–originally from Iran–also known as the modern, domestic cow. These settlers, their cows, their barbed wire fences, and their religion destroyed God’s sacred wilderness including many native creatures including Indigenous tribes, bison and wolves. Like the author of the poem, I don’t see anymore wildness in West; just a bunch of yokels and their ever-present domestic pests.
They have tamed it with their barrows, they have broken it with their plows;
Where the bison used to range it someone’s built himself a home;
They have stuck it full of fence posts; they have girded it with wire,
They have shamed it and profaned it with an automobile tire;
They have bridged its gullied rivers; they have peopled it with men.
They have churched it, they have schooled it, they have steepled it–Amen!
They have furrowed it with ridges, they have seeded it with grain,
And the West that worth knowing, I shall never see again.
They have smothered all its campfires, where the beaten plainsmen slept,
They have driven up their cattle where the skulking coyote crept;
They have made themselves a pasture where the timid deer would browse;
Where the antelope were feeding they had dotted o’er with cows;
There’s a yokel’s tuneless whistling down the bison’s winding trail,
Where the red man’s arrow fluttered, there a woman with a pail
Driving up the cows for milking; they have cuts its wild extent
Into forty-acre patches till its glory is all spent.
I remember in the sixties [1860s], when as far as I could see,
It have never lord nor ruler but the buffalo and me;
Ere the blight of man was on it, and the endless acres lay
Just as God Almighty left them on the restful seventh day;
When no sound rose from vastness but a murmured hum and dim
Like the echoed void of Silence in an unheard prairie hymn;
And I lay at night and rested in my bed of blankets curled
Much alone as if I was the only man in all the world!
But the prairie’s passed, or passing, with the passing of the year,
Till there’s not West worth knowing, and there are no pioneers;
They have ridded it of dangers till the zest of it is gone;
And I’ve saddled up my pony, for I am dull and lonesome here,
To go westward, westward, westward till we find a new frontier;
To get back to God’s own wilderness and the skies we used to know–
But there is no West; it’s conquered—and I don’t know where to go.
–anonymous writer for the New York Times in 1907; reflecting nostalgia for the bison and God’s own wildnerness in poem called “Passing of the Prairie”
(from Return of the Bison by Roger Silverstro, p.16)
Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s. They were hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animals left behind to decay on the ground.