REBIRTH OF THE PRAIRIE

Oh! those early years! their memory is full of brightness to me. From April to November the prairies were a perpetual flower garden of ever-varying hue. Wild game was abundant; in summer and autumn the groves were full of fruits and nuts; nearly all the year round the streams furnished fish for our tables.

Those who maintained their homes through industry and frugality (might gain) wealth, while those who lived in idleness or unrest came to poverty.

There is a tinge of elegy in those rhapsodic memories, written by the Rev. Thomas Leake in 1893 for a chapter of a book on the lives of prairie pioneers in Lee County in north central Illinois. By then, most of the prairie he wrote of, which had once covered almost all of the county’s 729 square miles, was gone. Indeed, most of the tallgrass prairie, which once had covered 70 percent of Illinois, about 40,000 square miles, was gone. It had been plowed under, destroyed by pioneer plows.

The plow was to prairies what the chain saw is to rain forest. In about 50 years, from 1830 to 1880, Midwestern pioneers plowed under nearly all of the great tallgrass prairie. Besides Illinois, it once covered most of Iowa, half of Minnesota and Missouri and great swaths of Indiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

In terms of rapidity and scale of destruction of a vast, complex ecosystem, probably the only thing that compares is the current removal of the Amazonian jungles. The difference is that the prairies were gone before science was aware that they were there. We will never really know what they were and what we lost.

We do know that, for thousands of years, the prairie had been a great natural factory, producing an ever-deeper, moist mantle of the most fecund soil on Earth. Once that fertility was discovered, it attracted pioneers like Leake’s father, John, a butcher from Leicestershire, England. He and two cousins came to homestead about 10 miles south of Dixon in 1840.

Only one-tenth of 1 percent of Illinois’ original prairie survives. But Rev. Leake might be pleased to know that a little scrap of it now thrives just a few yards from where he, his father and his uncles are buried in Temperance Hill Cemetery, 9 miles south of Dixon. It was discovered many decades after their deaths by Dr. Robert Betz, a biology professor and prairie enthusiast at Northeastern Illinois University.

Betz, 71, now retired, came upon the idea more than 30 years ago that the one part of the land pioneer farmers avoided plowing was their cemeteries. He searched hundreds of them and found 44 that, indeed, had never been plowed and still had prairie remnants struggling to survive.

Many of those remnants, such as the small scrap at the south end of Temperance Hill, have been nurtured back to good health. They stand now as invaluable windows into the state’s natural history, a gift to scientists trying to piece together what the prairie was and how it functioned as an ecosystem.

But the prairie cemetery relics are also a window into the pioneer past. Until the 1820s, Illinois was known as “The Big Barrens,” thought to be an infertile wasteland because so few trees grew here. But after early settlers figured out how to cut through the massive, tough prairie root system with special “breaking” plows, they soon discovered the soil was incredibly rich.

The word began to get out late in the 1820s. The first mass migration came primarily from Kentucky and Indiana, settlers breaking up the sod in Illinois’ southern prairie regions. Thomas Lincoln of Spencer County, Ind., was one of them. He came with his family, including a lanky 21-year-old son named Abraham, in 1830.

By the time Thomas Leake’s father arrived in 1840, the state was filling up with settlers from every corner of the U.S. and Europe. They were people acutely aware that this prairie land was going to be their main chance in life. They transformed a natural wilderness into the world’s most bountiful agricultural region. It was a national saga, but for the Leakes, it was a family saga, too.

Leake’s father came to be known as “Butcher John” Leake around Temperance Hill because of his trade back in England. But when he came to the U.S. with two cousins, he did so with the express purpose in mind of putting his old occupation behind him. He wanted to be a landowner, and although he was nearly destitute, he became one almost immediately, bartering away the few possessions he brought with him from England to get his start.

His first bargain, the family recorded, “was to exchange his overcoat for a pair of oxen, `Line and Brin,’ a fine dress coat for a wagon, a plush vest for a stack of hay, and a pocket-knife for a whip.” When his wife and children arrived, he sometimes had to hire himself out as a laborer to neighbors to make ends meet. The going rate was 25 cents a day or the equivalent in food.

For many years the Leake cousins fended off poverty and fought off raging prairie fires that nearly consumed their farms and families. They gradually expanded their holdings, plowing under thousands of acres of former prairie, parlaying hard work into a measure of wealth and stature. The Leakes of Lee County eventually emulated the landed gentry of their native Leicestershire, spending their Sundays riding across their land on fine horses with baying hounds in pursuit of fox.

And now the Leake family headstones, of Butcher John and his settler cousins, and of dozens of descendants, including Thomas, are among the largest and most elaborate at Temperance Hill. They stand almost in testament of the immense wealth yielded by the prairie.

“The pioneers were wonderful, great people, but I wish they could have left us with something more of the prairie as it existed than they did,” Betz laments.

Betz is sometimes called “Mr. Prairie” by fellow ecologists. In his retirement he is the principal consultant on Fermi National Laboratory’s 1,000 acre tallgrass prairie restoration on its sprawling grounds in Batavia. But his real legacy is his work over the last 33 years in locating and preserving pioneer cemetery prairie relicts.

In August 1961, Betz was walking along the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway tracks in northeastern Will County, looking for prairie remnants along the railway right-of-way. Just south of 95th Street, he glanced up and spotted old tombstones jutting up among towering prairie growth.

Betz had come across the old Vermont Cemetery, an abandoned, one-acre graveyard established by a group of sod-busting pioneers who had immigrated to the area from Vermont in the 1850s. Badly neglected, the graveyard was a haven for teenage glue-sniffers. Most descendants of those buried there evidently had moved from the area. Many headstones were toppled, others had been carted off, apparently by souvenir hunters.

What excited Betz about the sorry old graveyard was that, once abandoned, it was soon overgrown with prairie plants. That told him that the cemetery was set aside unplowed by those pioneer families, burying their dead directly into virgin prairie soil.

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“That got me going,” Betz says. “I started digging and sifting through old county maps and records from all over Illinois and northern Indiana, looking for the earliest cemeteries. I ended up visiting more than 800 of them, looking to see if they had been established on virgin prairie land.

“Prairie things are long-lived. A single plant of big bluestem grass lives for decades and centuries. We were looking through the lawns in these cemeteries and finding tiny little prairie plants, so harmed, so hurt, but they had hung on.”