Creating a PRAIRIE MAP of Missouri

Creating a
PR AIRIE MAP of Missouri
Dr. Walter Schroeder is legendary among prairie supporters
for his mapping of Missouri’s presettlement prairie in the 1980s.
Here, Dr. Schroeder looks back at his painstaking work,
and explains the importance of historic landscape mapping
to conservation work today.
WHEN I RETURNED TO MY
HOME STATE OF MISSOURI
IN 1964 to join the faculty of the
Geography Department of the
University of Missouri, I introduced
local field study into my graduate
seminars. That first year we worked
on the settlement history of
Howard County. Where were the
first lands selected for farms, and
why? Presumably they would have
been those lands most desired for
settlement. We discovered that most
of those choice lands included the
prairie uplands and grassy, open
woods, and the worst lands were
the most heavily forested. This was
counter to the general teaching of
the time, which was that westering
peoples stayed in forests as far west
as possible and avoided prairies,
considering them unplowable and
undesirable. Location of prairies
became a major factor in my study of
the historical geography of Missouri.
12  Missouri Prairie Journal 
Vol. 32 Nos. 3 & 4
WALTER A. SCHROEDER
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
By Walter A. Schroeder
Walter Schroeder’s map of presettlement
prairie of Missouri was published in
1981—the result of years of meticulous
examination of hundreds of volumes of
field notes of the U.S. public land survey.
In all, Schroeder’s map identified 18,474
square miles, or nearly 12 million acres,
of prairie landscape in Missouri prior to
European settlement.
To find the location of prairies I
used the field notes of the U.S. public
land survey. The field notes are well
known today to ecologists and those
interested in environmental reconstruction, but they were virtually unused
in the 1960s. To my knowledge, only
Professor Clair Kucera, my colleague in
the (then) Botany Department at MU,
had used the Missouri notes in reconstructing vegetation in three Missouri
counties.
When I used them in the 1960s and
1970s, the field notes existed only in
two sets of bound volumes: the original
notes handwritten in the field by campfire and the faithfully rewritten copy in
legible penmanship. (Now both sets are
available on microfilm.) Both sets of
650 volumes are tightly bound and difficult to keep open without resting one
arm, or a heavy brick, across them. They
were housed on dusty, wooden shelves
in a tiny room inside one of the hollow,
supporting pillars of the state Capitol,
across the corridor from their guardian,
Secretary of State James C. Kirkpatrick
himself. He graciously gave me unlimited access to the dungeon-like room,
wondering who on earth would want to
look at those old things, except for the
rare surveyor researching property lines
for a legal dispute.
Contracts for surveying were
awarded by congressional township
beginning in 1818 and proceeding over
the years as settlement progressed across
the state until 1855, when the survey
finished in Howell County. Since I was
working by county, but the field notes
were arranged by township and bound
chronologically, I was forced to jump
here and there among those volumes to
find all the townships of a given county.
Good thing an index to location in those
650 volumes was available.
I mapped according to the presence
of the word “prairie” in the notes. I soon
realized that I was overlooking some
grassland tracts where surveyors used the
word “barrens” or “grass” or noted that
the closest trees to a section corner were
a quarter mile from a section corner,
common in the Ozarks. I also learned
that “prairie” was a term that the French
used in the continental interior, and
that “meadow” was the term the English
used for grasslands in their eastern colonial settlements. English-speakers did
not begin using the word “prairie” until
I sat at a makeshift table made from a
long, 10" board stretched between two
empty shelves. A single 60-watt light
bulb, without reflector, hung from the
ceiling on a long electrical cord, probably there since the Capitol was completed in 1917. I replaced it once with
a 100-watter. I worried that an evening
janitor might inadvertently lock me in
that secluded space behind its heavy,
soundproof, mahogany door.
MDC
Looking for Prairies in a Closet
they westered across the Appalachians
into lands already named by the French.
In other words, had the French not
preceded the English in Missouri,
our organization would be called the
Missouri Meadow Foundation instead of
the Missouri Prairie Foundation. How
many of the land surveyors, all of whom
were educated in the East, did not pick
up the French word prairie? Maybe
that was the reason some surveyors in
Missouri did not call some grassland
tracts prairies. Despite these concerns, I
persisted rigidly with my search for the
word “prairie,” believing consistency in
method was paramount. The resulting
map is therefore a conservative interpretation of prairies in Missouri. The map,
in short, is a map of the occurrence of
the word “prairie” in the U.S. public
land survey field notes.
Surveyors commented on the abundance of grass in the Ozark woodlands
(they never used “forest” for what native
Missourians call woods), but they did
not call it prairie. The presence of grass
was important for the surveyors to
record in their notes for the benefit of
the incoming hunter-woodsman settlers
whose cattle grazed on the abundance
of natural hay. I later learned that all
the French colonial settlements in the
Mississippi Valley, from Prairie du
Chien in Wisconsin to St. Louis, Ste.
Genevieve and all others in Missouri
and adjacent Illinois, were located in
what the French called prairies naturelles. They chose prairies probably because
they did not have a tree-felling ax as the
Americans did and needed the natural
prairie and grassy Ozark woods for grazing cattle. In retrospect, I regret that
my map did not divulge the widespread
occurrence of grass in the Ozarks and on
the sand ridges of the Bootheel.
Field notes of the U.S. public land survey.
Vol. 32 Nos. 3 & 4  Missouri Prairie Journal 13
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
By 1978 I had finished with all 114
counties and St. Louis City. My eyes
had read pages covering some 115,000
miles of survey lines. It was truly incredible, as I look back in retrospect, how I
did this without any funding and with
only sharp pencil and paper and good
eyesight! As I think about it, the work
was more similar to that of a monastery
monk than even a poorly paid graduate
student.
Assembling a State Map
Each of my county maps was at first
nothing but hundreds of tick marks
along section lines, because that was
what the field notes could divulge about
the vegetative pattern, for example,
“leave timber, enter prairie.” I had
only linear information, and I needed
to create areal information from it by
connecting the tick marks across the
interiors of the sections. The only way
to do this was to refer to topographical
quadrangles and available county soil
maps for clues to connect the sectionline tick marks. This was not as much
guesswork as it would seem. Then, about
halfway through the state, I learned
that county maps showing the prairie/
timber distribution, based on the land
survey, were published in a few of the
very early county geological surveys and
in Campbell’s Gazetteer of Missouri of
1873. Also, some of the congressional
township plats created by clerks in the
land survey office showed lines in section
interiors. Although I finished my county
maps keeping to my original method,
these sources served as valuable checks.
Surveyors sometimes gave no clear
indication where the prairie-timber
boundary was. These were places where
either open woodlands or extensive
brush made the change transitional rather than abrupt. I thought these places
14  Missouri Prairie Journal 
Vol. 32 Nos. 3 & 4
needed to be differentiated and used
dashed lines for them. Unfortunately,
these transitional locations were not
retained when the state map was published.
A special geographical problem was
how to find information on land the
U.S. public land survey did not cover.
These are the lands the U.S. government
acknowledged to be in private hands
before the Louisiana Purchase, lands
that are often erroneously lumped under
the term “Spanish grants.” I discovered
the original French-language surveys
of Antoine Soulard 1798–1806 in the
Missouri State Archives, then shabbily
housed in a metal, un-air-conditioned
Butler building on Industrial Drive in
Jefferson City. In addition, the U.S.
government had to survey these thousands of land claims to ascertain their
locations. The pre-1818 surveys contain
environmental information, including
such things as locations of sinkholes in
St. Louis City, and they enabled me to
fill in the places left blank from U.S.
land survey records.
These various sources mean that
any state map based on land surveys
cannot have a single date for it, because
the surveys extend over more than a
half-century. Sources begin in 1798 and
continue to 1855. But that may not be
as bad as it would suggest, if we assume
that vegetational change was greatest
just after the first permanent EuroAmerican settlers arrived. More on this
topic and the effect of American Indians
and changing climate is in the booklet
accompanying the map.
I ended up with dozens of
individual county maps at 1:125,000 (or
approximately one inch to two miles)
from which I had to create one singlesheet map for Missouri at 1:500,000.
This I did by carefully transferring
lines manually, section by section,
onto a state map with all the squaremile sections already on it. I used the
surface of an old, oak dining room table,
polished smooth as glass by a century
of folks eating off it. The Department
of Geography had a pantograph to
reproduce polygons at different scales,
but it proved too unwieldy for my map’s
intricate patterns.
Publishing the Map
Rick Thom, then in the Natural History
Section of the Missouri Department of
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
Conservation, learned of my prairiemapping project and suggested that his
agency would be interested in publishing it. Among other things, it could be
a visual tool to draw public attention to
the unappreciated, great expanse of the
state’s original prairie, and it could also
be used to locate and identify remnants
for possible purchase and restoration.
I readily accepted the offer. However,
Rick believed the map should have an
accompanying booklet to help readers
interpret it. This was all right with me–
although it became another unfunded
research project–because it enabled me
to put forth some of my ideas on what
happened to Missouri prairies when they
were settled by Euro-Americans.
To do this, I read every one of the
pre-1930 county soil and geological
surveys, which contain insightful historical information on settlement. I read
numerous county histories. I read all the
accounts of travelers that I could find,
whether in English, French, Spanish, or
German, to discover comments on early
encounters with the Missouri prairie.
While doing this I accumulated a list of
more than 250 names of Missouri prairies. The booklet is an essential comple-
ment to the state map, because anyone
using the map needs to know its limitations and sources of error. Of course,
now thirty years later I would change
some things and add some things, based
on huge amounts of research since the
1970s.
Rick Thom added botanical material to the booklet, and June Hunzeker
edited it. While I was writing it, Mike
Haeffner, cartographer for the Missouri
Department of Conservation, converted
my hand-drawn map to one for publication, by scribing it on film. His work
was meticulous. His cartography is as
precise as the data allow. In 1981 my
work was over.
Re-mapping Prairies by
GIS Technology
In the mid 1990s, geography graduate
student James Harlan demonstrated
to me not only his interest in working with the field notes to understand
the historical environment, but also
his state-of-the-art command of thendeveloping spatial computer technology called Geographical Information
Systems, or GIS. I told Jim that ecologists were longing for information on
These two maps are for the same region
where the Missouri River makes its big bend
around Saline County, with Carroll County
in the upper left and, to the east across the
Grand River, Chariton County. The map on
the left is from Schroeder’s presettlement
prarie map; the one on the right is from
James Harlan’s Missouri Historic Landscape
Project. Prairies are shaded. The Schroeder
map shows timber more consistently in the
bottoms, and is noticeably less fragmented
overall. A notable difference is in the
Missouri River bottoms opposite Glasgow
in the lower right. This region of the state
was chosen for comparison because it shows
more differences in mapping presettlement
prairie than most parts of the state. In
general, the presettlement maps created by
both geographers are remarkably similar.
the total historical vegetation cover, not
just prairies. He saw how a database
could be done using GIS. I knew he
was indeed the right person to use the
land survey notes to create the database
and a map of all types of historic vegetation, including prairies, of course. His
research came to be called the Missouri
Historic Landscape Project. It is the
most thorough historical landscape reference available in the United States at
the state level. Jim Harlan is currently in
the Geographic Resources Center in the
Department of Geography, University
of Missouri-Columbia.
Jim’s work is for him to explain. It
should be noted that by this time federal bureaucratic funding had exploded
enormously. That is, money was now
available for research like never before in
the history of mankind. Jim masterfully
put together grants from federal and
state agencies and private groups to fund
his decade-long research program. How
I envied him, recalling my 60-watt light
bulb!
Essentially he entered every shred
of information in the field notes into
a database, and I do mean every shred.
Among many other things, he used
Vol. 32 Nos. 3 & 4  Missouri Prairie Journal 15
programs to derive density of trees from
distances recorded in the field notes.
This enabled handling those transitional
zones by developing categories of forest, woodland, open woodland, barrens/
scrub, and prairie. The permutations
from his enormous database are endless.
Jim Harlan’s map of prairies differs
from mine because we defined “prairie”
differently. My map was based exclusively on the presence of the word “prairie”
in the field notes, which, as explained
earlier, has shortcomings. The map, a
simple spatial dichotomy of prairie and
everything else, is a conservative rendition of the extent of prairie. The Harlan
map is more “scientific,” in the sense
that it is based on calculations derived
from measurements in the field notes.
Both our maps are “objective,” in the
sense that both follow a consistent methodology and are reproducible by anyone
following that same methodology. My
map is visually simple and more readily
understood by most anyone. The Harlan
map more faithfully reflects the historic
spatial complexity of the land cover, but
requires more careful examination.
The total amount of prairie on my
map is 18,794 square miles or 27% of
the total state area. The total amount
of prairie on the Harlan map is 19,514
square miles or 28% of the state. The
difference is remarkably small considering the different methodologies. But
consider this: “barrens/scrub” on the
Harlan map totaled 10,812 square miles
(15.5%) and “open woodland,” 17,013
square miles (24.5%), both of which categories would have included substantial
grass tracts that some might have called
prairies.
16  Missouri Prairie Journal 
Vol. 32 Nos. 3 & 4
Why a Map of
Presettlement Prairies?
A map with one third of the state colored bright orange (green was already
taken for forests) impresses people
visually of the enormous former extent
of natural prairie in the state and how
much of it has been lost. It serves as a
visual publicity tool to organize people
like the Missouri Prairie Foundation and
persuade land managers and legislators
to take action to preserve and restore the
prairie ecosystem.
No less important, a map based on
the public land survey, done just before
Euro-American settlement radically
changed the land cover, serves as a critical baseline against which we can measure change. Ecology, which was emerging as an approach to land management
when my map was published, asks us to
look at the land as a functioning system
rather than by its individual components. To establish a healthy, perpetuating ecosystem, we need to know what is
normal before wholesale human disturbance. We are now putting into practice
what Aldo Leopold wrote in 1941: “A
science of land health needs, first of all,
a base datum of normality, a picture of
how healthy land maintains itself as an
organism.” Missouri, in contrast to the
eastern states, Europe, and much of the
rest of the world, is very fortunate to
have had the presettlement public land
survey to establish this base datum. We
should use a prairie map based on these
valuable records to our great advantage
in land management.
Editor’s note: Along with his booklet,
Presettlement Prairie of Missouri, which
contains his maps, Walter Schroeder
has written a number of other articles
or co-authored books that are excellent
resources on the topic of presettlement
vegetation. MPF has scanned and loaded
on its website (“Prairie Resources” page) the
following four:
—The Grand Prairie and “Report of a
Geological Reconnoissance (sic) of the part
of the State of Missouri adjacent to the
Osage River . . .”, Missouri Prairie Journal
10(4)(1989):10–11.
—The Presettlement Prairie in the Kansas
City Region (Jackson County, Missouri),
Missouri Prairie Journal 7(2)(1985): 3–12.
—The Early Prairies of St. Louis, Missouri
Prairie Journal 2(4)(1981): 4–11.
—Presettlement Prairie of Missouri, Natural
History Series No. 2. Missouri Department of
Conservation, Jefferson City, Mo. 1981. 40
pp. Reprinted 1983 and 1990, with revisions
in 1990.
Additional Schroeder publications:
Co-author: Timothy A. Nigh and Walter A.
Schroeder, Atlas of Missouri Ecoregions.
Missouri Department of Conservation,
Jefferson City, Mo., 2002. 212 pp., text,
maps, tables, and photographs; full-color
throughout. (The presettlement prairie map
was an essential tool in creating the ecodivisions and is reproduced in the atlas.)
Committee member/member of sixauthor team: The Biodiversity of Missouri:
Definition, Status, and Recommendations
for Its Conservation. Missouri Department
of Conservation and the National Forest
Service, Jefferson City, Mo., 1992. 53 + viii
pages.
Author of “The Environmental Setting of
St. Louis” chapter in Common Fields: An
Environmental History of St. Louis, Missouri
Historical Society Press, 1997.
Walter Schroeder, a Jefferson City native,
has B.A. (Missouri), M.A. (Chicago), and
Ph.D. (Missouri) degrees. He was on the
faculty of the Department of Geography,
UMC, from 1964 to 2002 and received the
University of Missouri Curators Award for
Scholarly Excellence in 2002. His research
centers on environmental and historical
geography of Missouri.