I volunteer at the Museum of Natural Science and wrote this script for me to work off of at the Touch Cart for the Texas exhibit.  Only parts are used at any time.  The information is nothing new to people at this site, but I just thought I'd share.

The Coastal Prairie

The Vanishing Land of Our Ancestors

To visualize what life was like for the early Native Americans or early settlers here on the upper Gulf Coast, we need to first visualize the setting, the land on which they lived and depended for their livelihood.  Most people of today could not do this because that landscape has disappeared.  For millenniums to about the turn of the twentieth century, most of what is now Harris County was “a vibrant, windswept, grassy wilderness known as the coastal prairie.”[i]  This grassland, very similar to the tallgrass prairies of the American Midwest, once stretched over about 9.5 million acres extending from western Louisiana to the northern part of the King Ranch, just south of Corpus Christi. [ii]^,[iii]  It stretched in a band along the coast from the edge of the coastal marshes to about 100 miles inland.  {Show map}  Today, much more than 99.9% of this habitat is lost.  What remains exists in only very small remnants and unknown to most of the people who now live here.  {Show bison, Attwater’s prairie chicken picture}  Also gone from the landscape today are some of the wildlife this habitat once supported:  the bison, Attwater’s prairie chicken, pronghorn antelope, and red wolves.  The tallgrass prairie (both Coastal and Midwest) ecosystem is listed as “critically imperiled” by major conservation organizations.

{Show prairie photos}  Today, we cannot see what the pre-settlement Native Americans or early settlers saw.  Photography was developed only as this habitat was disappearing.  However, the early settlers did describe the land in their diaries and letters.[iv] 

• From Roemer's Texas, Dr. Ferdinand Roemer, somewhere near Houston Texas, January 1846 wrote, "After passing through the forest, I had my first view of a Texas prairie.  An unbroken, level, grassy plain extended for miles before us, on which a few islands of trees and shrubs were scattered in irregular order"[v]
• From The Explorers' Texas; The lands and waters, Unknown Traveler in 1831 wrote "The next day [leaving Lynchburg] going east we traversed a broad and beautiful prairie, where we could perceive no sign of a path, and where for miles there was not a tree to be seen, unless at a great distance”⁵
• From the Diary of Sarah Rebecca Lucas McClellan[vi]:  “Today [April, 1851] we reached the mouth of the Guadalupe river…all I see in this new, wild, but beautiful country whose unmeasured prairies seem to have remained as pure and unpolluted by the tread of man…Fancy a boundless prairie spread out before you on every side, covered with tall grass waving in the wind, and occasionally a gentle eminence rising out from its bosom…Those eminences are crowned with Mottes of timber, among which the Live Oak stands prominent…Often from the deck of our little boat have I stood and gazed away down its rushing water, then, far over the boundless prairie with its green grass waving in the breeze, its countless flowers blooming …
• In 1909, William W. Sloan[vi] wrote to the San Antonio Express about his travels in 1851 around Indianola and Victoria, “…I am carried backward through fifty-nine years, when my eyes for the first time beheld the vast expanse of a Texas prairie in all its springtime beauty, covered with the greatest profusion of wild flowers, of almost every hue and variety.  There was the Indian pink, prairie rose, phlox, blue-bells, the violet, wild verbena, touch-me-not, lupin and a great variety too numerous to name here…Mustangs were plentiful in that day and bounded over the vast open prairies in their wildest freedom.  And deer by the hundreds could be seen grazing quietly undisturbed.  The prairie chickens were abundant and when aroused they would fly for safety and the noise made by their wings resembled the roar of a strong wind.  Bear and panthers infested the bottoms of the Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers at that day…”

{Show map of battlefield}  The prairie played a role in the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, which was not fought on mowed St. Augustine grass.  Instead, “at the time of the 1836 battle, most of the battlefield was open prairie.  Bands of trees lined the bluffs overlooking the marsh and the creeks and gullies that emptied into the marsh, and a few small ‘islands’ of trees dotted the landscape.  Otherwise the battle was fought in grass ‘as tall as a horse's belly’.” [vii]  Sam Houston’s army had first travelled through the prairies as they approached San Jacinto:  “On April 19…the army continued on towards Lynchburg, only resting briefly late at night at a small ravine on the open prairie…April 20: Camp at San Jacinto.  The Army arrived at Lynch's in the morning and back tracked about a half mile to a high wooded ridge where they set up camp.  Mexican General Santa Anna arrived shortly afterwards and a brief skirmish ensued before the Mexicans set up their camp on the east side of the prairie at San Jacinto…”[viii]  [On April 21], “…Silently and tensely the Texas battle line swept across the prairie and swale that was No Man's land, the men bending low…From the moment of the first collision the battle was a slaughter, frightful to behold.  The fugitives ran in wild terror over the prairie and into the boggy marshes, but the avengers of the Alamo and Goliad followed and slew them, or drove them into the waters to drown…Santa Anna had disappeared during the battle, and next day General Houston ordered a thorough search of the surrounding territory for him.  In the afternoon Sergeant J. A. Sylvester spotted a Mexican slipping through the woods toward Vince's Bayou.  Sylvester and his comrades caught the fugitive trying to hide in the high grass…”[ix]

In later years, photos[x] of our cities carved from the prairie show spotty buildings in the middle of boundless flat plains of grass with only islands of trees and trees along river bottomlands where there is more water.  All these photos show the flat grasslands:  Black Cowboys Working on Galveston Prairie, 1868; Tomball, Built on the Prairie, late 1800’s; League City, 1896; Future Site of Rice Institute, 1910; and Rice Institute, 1912, where the first students went duck hunting in the prairie just a few steps from campus.  Photos from Jaime Gonzales, prepared for the non-judged Conservation Exhibit on Coastal Prairie at the Florescence Exhibit, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, April 19-20, 2011.

What happened to the prairie?  In the early years, settlers plowed the rich soil to grow cotton, rice and other agricultural crops.  Cattle, raised in barbed-wire fields, repeated ate the normally several feet tall grasses to inches, so they eventually died.  Then the ranchers imported grasses from other lands (bermudagrass, King Ranch bluestem, Vaseygrass, Johnsongrass, etc.) more suitable for repeated grazing.  These aggressive exotic grasses and other imported plants like the Chinese tallow eventually invaded and took over even fields undamaged by cattle or the plow.  In recent years, development bulldozed acres of remnant prairie land.  Finally, fire suppression occurs wherever there are settlements.  Fire is a very important element in sustaining the prairie.^{2, 3} Many species depend on fire for seed production.  Periodic fire prevents tree seedlings from developing.  Fires also remove the annual winter die-offs of the perennial plants and allow sunlight to reach the base of the plant for new growth.

The Coastal Prairie habitat once supported a diversity of plant life including native grasses (little bluestem, yellow Indiangrass, big bluestem, etc) that grew as tall as a man, some to 6 feet or more and wildflowers such as the gayfeather or blazing star, coneflower, Indian paintbrush, goldenrod, coreopsis, winecup, bluebell, to name a few.  The prairie once supported the many insects that in turn provided food for the grassland birds, many of which are as endangered today as the prairie itself.  An example is the Attwater’s prairie chicken {Show picture}.  However, even today, many waterfowl, red-tailed hawk, white ibis {Show picture}, and much more can be seen at preserved and restored prairies that surround Houston: Katy Prairie Conservancy (NW), Sheldon Lake State Park (NE), Armand Bayou Park and Nature Center (SE), San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site (SE), Brazos Bend State Park (SW) and more.  In recent years, many conservation groups and citizens have worked together to restore and preserve our prairies.  In the city, are several pocket prairies at Hermann Park (the Whistlestop prairie {Show picture} just opposite from the entrance to the Japanese Garden), at South Braeswood {Show picture}, just west of Buffalo Speedway (on the Brays Bayou easement), at Russ Pitman Park, at Mandell Park, and at the Houston Audubon Sanctuary at Sims Bayou.  Anyone wanting to help in this endeavor can contact Jaime Gonzales at Katy Prairie Conservancy or at www.CoastalPrairiePartnership.org.