August 4, 2026 • 55 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the vast North American grasslands of which poet William Cullen Bryant wrote, “These are the gardens of the desert, these the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name — The Prairies.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome this Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we are back with the second part in our
series on the Prairie, the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America.
This subject was inspired Robbed by your recent family visit
to Colorado, spending some time in the western Prairie. I
guess this is in the region just before the landscape
(00:36):
turns into the rocky mountains. I couldn't remember if you
mentioned last time. Did you see bison on your trip?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
We did. Yeah, at the Arsenal, we saw some bison.
Like I say that, that area has a number of
bison and there's a lot of bison conservation that is
focused there, and so we got to drive through that
area and we got to see the bison, not super
close because they're going to do exactly what they want
to do, but we still got to see them at
(01:02):
a distance, which was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It's not a petting zoo there, right right.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
This is not one of those places where you hold
potatoes out your window the livestock comes over. No, No, they
do what they want and if you are close enough
to see them, and then you're lucky.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
So in the previous episode of this series, we talked
about the definition of our prairie and its similarity to
other ecosystems like the step. Prairies are relatively flat or
rolling landscapes that are dominated not by trees and shrubs
but by grasses and flowering herbaceous plants called forbes, and
(01:40):
so one of the questions that we talked about in
the last episode somewhat extensively was why are prairies filled
with grasses and forbes instead of trees? What historically has
kept the trees out. The answer to this question turned
out to be kind of complicated, involving, but possibly not
being limited to factors of climate and rainfall, pressure from herbivores,
(02:05):
and very importantly, frequent fires, fires to which native grasses
and forbes are very resilient, while young trees and shrubs
are typically not. Of course, human behavior in recent centuries
has altered basically all of the factors that are upstream
of the natural plant balance, and as a result, North
America's prairies are seriously endangered. The vast majority of the
(02:30):
original Eastern tall grass prairie is already gone, as we
talked about last time. There are different ways of calculating
how much of it remains, but some estimates say like
four percent, others say less than one percent. It's mostly gone,
and so this is a very precious, endangered type of
landscape and there are ongoing conservation efforts to try to
(02:53):
return some of this landscape more to its original plant
balance and original ecosystem characteristics. After that, we went on
too a fascinating sort of historical niche subject about the prairie,
which was about grizzly bears, grizzly bears of the plains.
Today most people think of grizzlies as animals that live
(03:15):
exclusively in like remote mountain forests, but grizzlies used to
be apex predators of the prairie as well. And we
talked extensively about the journals of the Lewis and Clark
expedition in the early nineteenth century, which had lots of
encounters with prairie bears, and we analyzed at least one
of those encounters at length. We are back today to
(03:36):
talk some more. Now, Rob, I understand for today's episode
you got somewhat obsessed with prairie madness.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
That's right. The other topics have had quite an effect,
but this one will drive you absolutely mad.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I'd never heard of this, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I wasn't really familiar with it either, though it certainly
makes sense considering some of the things we talked about
in the last episode. On one hand, you discussed your
own personal response to the treeless openness of the prairie,
that it had maybe a sort of uncanny or even
threatening feeling to it, like, you know, too much space,
(04:12):
not enough trees.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, as I said in the last episode, I don't
like that I feel this way. I feel like I
want to I should be able to appreciate, you know,
the beauty of all different types of landscapes equally. But
for some reason, maybe just the environment I grew up with,
I do have a kind of bias or preference for
forested landscapes. And when there is not anything taller than
(04:36):
me vertically in an area and it's just you know,
vast open space all around, that does feel kind of
exposed and vulnerable and uncomfortable to me. I need tall
things around me, I think, And I don't know, maybe
this is something I could get over one day, spending
more time in the prairie.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
But I do have that tree bias.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I think, well, this, I think this is going to
arguably play the scenario here. But another thing that I
think plays into the scenario that we touched on last
time is how we have a lot, a great deal
of writing and poetry about the about about the planes
the great American prairies. Particularly, we talked about the words
of William Cullen Bryant, the poet who described this sense
(05:20):
of awe at beholding the prairies. And yeah, I think
both of these examples steer us naturally into discussion of
prairie madness, sometimes called prairie sickness, and so forth. And
I do want to stress at the outset here. This
is not a scientific term. This is not a medical term,
and it is primarily reported as a phenomenon of the
(05:42):
nineteenth century, and specifically in cases where you had European
and American homesteaders, American homesteaders from the East who ventured
out onto the prairies, you know, trying to you know,
creating a new life, grabbing some land, you know, trying
to make a lot life out there, who then experienced
(06:02):
an array of psychological symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, behavioral changes,
and in the extremes, even violence in response to the crushing, vastness,
the open landscape and the howling wind of the prairie.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Now, based on what you were reading, would you say
that this is something that is probably culturally contingent. You
mentioned it's among like European American homesteaders, European colonizers basically
in the prairie landscape. It's not something typically reported by
like indigenous peoples of the prairies.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Correct, And that is very important to note, Like there's
been indigenous people living on the prairies for more than
ten thousand years, so this is not something that they experienced.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
And so probably also not something that's like an objective
human body response to the prairie landscape. It's probably more
like a conditioned cultural type of response.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Right, if you fly into Denver, people will warn you
about the altitude difference, but nobody's going to warn you
about prairie madness because it's not really a thing in
terms of it's not something that is going to just
objectively be a factor in anyone's life. And again, it's
really mostly talked about within this particular historic context and
(07:21):
among particular people who were venturing out into this landscape.
And there are a number of other factors that are
involved here. So the explanation for what's going on or
allegedly went on here have more on that in a minute,
and is that you could basically underline by two examples
that we've already touched on. First, the poetic awe of
(07:44):
the prairie, of which there are many examples, and this
awe kind of finds its dark reflection in the fiction
and nonfiction of the time that cast the prairie is
something ominous and unnatural. Part of that is just sort
of the power of poetry and literature. If you're going
to describe a landscape, you know you're going to lean
into one direction or the other. Is it awesome and
(08:07):
does it make you feel like a god? Or is
there something creepy about it? It makes you feel less than
you know? Both There are you know, potentially rewarding directions
to go in in definite choices in any given work
of fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, I think every landscape on earth has this this
dual quality. I mean, is the forest a soothing, calming,
shady landscape, where you are, you know, covered nicely in
these calming greens, or is it a spooky place where
you hear sounds that echo between the trees and maybe
spirits are trying to lead you off the path.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, and kind of going into something we talked about
last time. I feel like, and this is highly subjective,
but I feel like the desert environments they tend to
speak more clearly on this way, and it's like, oh,
it's a land of death, but it's alive, you know.
It seems like the back and forth there's a lot
more balanced. Prairies can maybe I'm just making them the
personal argument here that they can maybe be a bit
(09:07):
harder to wrap your head around because they're not barren.
They are full of life. But then there is the
more or less flat topography and some other factors environmentally
that we're going to get into here. And then the
other factor is there was this frequent observation that these
lands were fundamentally different compared to the lands that homesteaders
(09:29):
called home, either in the eastern United States or elsewhere
in Europe and on the literary front, some of the
some really famous examples of this, and some of the
most famous examples stem from Oliovog's nineteen twenty seven novel
Giants in the Earth. This is a book that concerns
(09:51):
pioneer Norwegian immigrants in the Dakota territory, with the character
Barrett Hansa particularly experiencing literary, very prairie madness. Joe, have
you ever read this book?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I had to read it in junior high or high school,
and this is one of those books that was assigned
to me, and I do not think I give it
a very dedicated reading. I remember virtually nothing of it
except for the you know, the the obvious that it
concerned no actual giants in the earth or no actual
FLM crawling out and attacking anyone.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
So I really false advertising.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
One star false advertising, I guess if you're in you know,
junior high or high school, well whatever age I was.
But looking back on it, and you can find the
full text online and you can, you know, find it
in print very easily to get a copy of this book.
But there are some beautiful passages that deal with this, again,
particularly concerning the character Barrett, and it's it is telling
(10:52):
that she's the one that experiences it because a lot
of the alleged cases of prairie madness are very gendered
in their general focusing on the housewife in a given scenario.
So I'm going to read a few passages from giants
in the earth. After they had bustled about for a
little while, the others left her. The moment they had gone,
(11:13):
she jumped up and crossed the tent to look out
the door. How will human beings be able to endure
this place? She thought? Why? There isn't even a thing
that one can hide behind. Her sensitive, rather beautiful face
was full of blank dismay. She turned away from the
door and began to loosen her dress. Then her eyes
fell on the center pole, with its cross piece hung
(11:34):
with clothes, and she stood a moment irresolute, gazing at
it in startled fright. It looked like the giants she
had read about as a child. For a long while
she was unable to banish the picture from her mind.
And then here's some more that gets I think, gets
back to the landscape. The broad expanse, stretching away endlessly
(11:55):
in every direction, seemed almost like the ocean, especially now
when darkness was It reminded her strongly of the sea.
And yet it was very different. The formless prairie had
no heart that beat, no waves that's sang, no soul
that could be touched or cared. And then one more here,
but more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the
(12:17):
strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon
the minds of some. Many took their own lives asylum.
After asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once
been human. It is hard for the eye to wander
from skyline to skyline year in and year out without
finding a resting place.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Well, that sounds pretty extreme.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this, but
I think everyone can. Certainly, if you have any familiarity
with the literature, you can definitely pick up on Gothic
tendencies in this writing. Really latching onto this idea. I
referenced our recent Weird House cinema selection in the Mouth
of Madness earlier, and these passages could very easily be
(13:03):
passages that Sutter Kane has written about. You know, the
void opening up in Monsters, spilling out of it. You know,
it's that level of darkness.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I don't know what the author's intention here is, whether
it's to actually project these characteristics onto the landscape, or
to do what sometimes happens in fiction, which is to
show what are really characteristics of the human character of
the character, and they are reading their own psyche onto
(13:32):
the landscape. It might not actually be something that is
the landscape's fault, if that makes any sense. It's the
person is having feelings and they're looking at the world
around them, and they see their feelings in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah. Again, it's been too long since I read it
to provide full context here, but it's my understanding that
most of these ideas are centered in this particular character,
and that it's not present in other characters. So I
think it is very character focused here.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
So there are other examples from this book. I might
come back and read another line from it. But all
of this effectively underlies the idea that there was something
about the landscape or the contrast of landscape, combined with
isolation and the severity of frontier life that could lead
to mental breakdown in some and the topic seems to
(14:22):
have entered the larger American consciousness in eighteen ninety three
three via the paper or the publication The Isolation of
Life on Prairie Farms by E. V. Smaali sm A L. L. E.
Y published in the Atlantic and still available on the
Atlantic's website. You can pull it up. I think there's
a paywall if you want to read it in full,
(14:44):
but you can also click and look at a scanned
version of it as it printed. And that's how I
read it.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Read it in full.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This individual, EV Smally was an American journalist, editor, and
Republican political writer, closely tied at the time to US
President James A. I'm going to read a few samples
from this just to give everyone the vibe. Okay. It
more or less begins with the following In no civilized
country have the cultivators of the soil adapted their home
(15:12):
life so badly to the conditions of nature as have
the people of our great northwestern prairies. Okay, Yeah, And
from there he goes on to argue that the like
there are some there's some arguments here that I don't
think really stand up to close scrutiny, including the idea
that the European peasant. He refers to the quote European
(15:32):
peasant as a type of person who lived a life
of joy and social interaction and that on the and
that prairie dwellers essentially had none of this and were
basically doomed. Here's another passage. An alarming amount of insanity
occurs in the New Prairie States among farmers and their wives.
(15:54):
In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnished the
largest contingent to the The reason is not far to seek.
These people came from cheery, little farm villages. Life in
the Fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh well, I don't know if there's like actual experiment
to back this up, but it seems plausible to me
that loneliness and isolation could be a major contributor to
people having psychological problems.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, and that is certainly a possibility here. Like, one
of the realities is that you did have these homesteaders
going out living in very isolated circumstances and living a
hard life in an environment that they were not accustomed
to different environmental factors that we'll get into here. So yeah,
(16:44):
I want to stress that, even though I'm having some
fun with the way that this is written, and also
certainly singling out that this is a paper that made
a big impact on how people thought about prairie madness. Yeah,
not everything in here should just be dismissed. Like there
are some possible connections to be made here.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, I mean, like it even strikes me as possible
to pick up on something I was saying about the
characters in that novel that one could easily read psychological
difficulty stemming from, say, loneliness and isolation. Could you know,
take those problems and interpret them as problems related to
(17:22):
the landscape, when really maybe the landscape doesn't have that
much do with it. It's just like what you're looking
at while you're feeling the fact that you don't have
any friends and haven't seen anybody but your husband and years.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You're a few more quotes though,
from this paper quote the silence of death rests on
the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds.
And then here's one more. There is but one remedy
for the dreariness of farm life on the prairies. The
isolated farmhouse must be abandoned, and the people must drawl
(17:56):
together in villages. The peasants of the Russian steps did
this century years ago, and so did the dwellers of
the Great Danubian Plane. And so he ultimately positions isolated
life on the frontier plane as standing in just stark
opposition to sanity, to intellectual development, and just the rational
progression of society. So he's not the final word on
(18:18):
all of this. And there have been some papers that
have really gone into this and looked at it in
different ways, looking at it as a literary trope, looking
at it and as it may connect to sensory deprivation
and so forth. I was looking at a particular paper,
This is Unsettling Landscapes, Prairie Madness and Eco Gothic Themes
(18:41):
in US Plains Literature, published in Great Planes Quarterly from
twenty nineteen by Vanessa stein Rotter, And in this she
points out that prairie madness is of course a recurring
theme in the fiction and poetry of the US Great Plains,
and the author stressed various ways that the feature of
the plain's environment stabilized non native settlers sense of place
(19:03):
and control. So she points out that this was of course,
again not a medical phenomenon, This was not a scientific term,
and she also citing the work of Sarah Brooks. Sundberg
points out the cases of white female settler mental and
or emotional decline in the prairie might not have actually
been that widespread. But even though we see this all
(19:25):
the time with things, even though there may not have
been as many cases of it, it became an idea
that was difficult to dispel. It became a popular way
of thinking about life on the prairies because again, outside
of the actual environments of people living out there, you
had people, say, reading that article in the Atlantic or
reading poetry and fiction that drove home this Gothic idea,
(19:47):
and therefore it becomes very difficult to shake, and it
just becomes a staple of fiction and nonfiction writings of
the time about the Prairies.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
How prevalent we think a problem is often has little
to do with the raw numbers of how often it's occurring.
Often it has more to do with like how sticky
the idea is? Is it like really interesting or scary
or captivating to the imagination.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
In some way? Right?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
And of course we see a more pronounced version of
that when things become actual social panics, you know, so
for instance, satanic panic, the idea there's the satanic forces
at work in the world today. We've we've done episodes
about this before. In this case, I don't think that
prairie madness ever reached a level of true social panic,
but it just becomes this sort of sticky idea.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So, the author here points out that fiction writers were
especially drawn to the idea because of those terrific Gothic undertones,
as well as quote its potential to engage larger, often
gendered anxieties or feelings of powerlessness within restrictive social and
cultural roles.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
So, and I think there's a case to be made
that that's maybe what we see in and Giants in
the Earth. You know, it's not just about spooky landscape
making people feel spooky, but maybe getting into some of
these deeper concepts. Steinroder focuses on the landscape's role in
the scenario, but points out that other scholars have examined
the importance of gender and family relationships, domestic violence, and
(21:19):
cultural and physical isolation that are often bound up in
the scenario. So again, any as we've been alluding to
any given potential case of prairie madness, any individual experience
that could be chalked up as being prairie madness. They're
going to be, They're potentially all these other factors as well,
and again just potentially a hard life as well. I
(21:40):
was reading some of the settler accounts of how frightening
prairie fires could be. You know, we touched on that already,
just the idea that like a fast moving fire could
just rip across the prairie.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
And as we talked about in the last episode, fear
of these prairie fires and what they would bring the
led to attempts by European American settlers of the planes
to suppress naturally occurring prairie fires to stop them from spreading,
which actually ended up being very harmful to the prairie ecosystem.
You know, the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains more
(22:19):
often intentionally both used intentionally set prairie fires in some
cases for like the management of bison prey and things
like that, and also allowed them to occur more, which
was much healthier for the prairie because, as we know,
the natural plant balance depends on the fires.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
So.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Steinroder again focuses on the landscape's role, and I'm just
going to boil like our key findings down here are
key arguments, and that is that the features of the
landscape can destabilize one sense of control. It can make
it feel like you are not a complete autonomous agent
in this kind of humanless wilderness. That and that also
(23:11):
it can just be very difficult to just comprehend the
landscape around you, that there's something ineffable about it, and
that that can can also feel kind of crushing.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Now, I think the same could probably be argued about
various other landscapes, and you know, you could probably apply
this to things that we might think of as the
opposite of the prairie, like the mountains. But still, I
think it's an interesting argument.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think she's acknowledging all these other factors and also
the idea that there may have been far fewer cases
of this than we actually think. But the landscape definitely
plays a role either in the cases or our idea
about these cases. I want to turn to another paper
I was looking at here. This one's by Alex d. Veles,
titled The Wind Cries The Effect of Soundscape on the
(24:02):
Prairie Madness Phenomenon. This is from twenty twenty two in
historical archaeology, and this one basically talks about the possibility
that you could have specific details of the sounds of
the prairie that could have been like a catalyst for
(24:24):
prairie madness, so something in those howling winds, for example.
There's a paywall in this particular paper, but James Gaines
wrote a good piece about it for Atlas Obscura the
same year, and I recommend that as well. Okay, so
veils examined human hearing patterns and spectral data on Great
(24:47):
Planes soundscapes. Now, to be clear, these are like contemporary soundscapes,
and one of the things that is outlined in that
Alice Obscure article is that you know, it would have
been different back in these days. We changed the environment
quite a bit. So it's possible that, you know, what
he's studying here, wouldn't you know, one hundred percent be
(25:07):
the environment that the settlers found themselves in. But any
rate examines these things, ultimately proposing that affected settlers might
have suffered from misophonia or hyperacusis, thus making them more
sensitive to environmental sounds and with both conditions worsened by stress. Again,
stressful environment potentially in and of itself, not counting social factors,
(25:30):
and you know in the author also links some of
this to some of the symptoms described in the literature
on prairie madness, such as in the extreme's depression, insomnia,
irrational behavior, and so forth. So the focus here was
on low frequency environmental noise, which can potentially overstimulate the
nervous system in certain individuals, as well as those continuous
(25:54):
or supposed to continuous roaring winds out across the prairie.
And as points out that every landscape that humans live
in has plenty of sounds for us to hear, but
that in cities these sounds are more diverse and essentially
become a kind of white noise. I think a lot
of us that live in cities we can speak to this.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
You just get used to the sort of bustle of
say a large urban environment, and a lot of it
fades into the background. Yeah, I mean you still there'll
be things like horns and so forth. It still can
get your attention and throw you off, but for the
most part, it all just kind of becomes the background noise. Meanwhile,
on the planes, especially in these historic settings, there's less
(26:38):
background then, and the sounds that do exist. They coincide
with a sensitive range of human hearing that the brain
pays more attention to interesting, so gains in that Atlas
obscure piece on This also cites Adrian K. C Lee
and auditory brain scientists at the University of Washington who
said that the sound environment reminded them of since redeprivation
(27:00):
chambers as well as anechoic chambers zero echo chambers. And
these are cases where we have sonic environments that have
been engineered in a way that they can cause the
brain to quote naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning
up or down the volume to better distinguish what's going on.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
I don't know how well validated this is, but I
at least recall reading anecdotal reports that anichoic chambers can
make people feel very uncomfortable. Yeah, like going in them
after a while, Like the sound environment is literally unnerving.
People don't like it, and it makes them feel weird
and they.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Need to leave.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, so this level of weirdness could potentially creep in.
You start hearing all sorts of things that interfere with
your slumber. Really almoso kind of induced misophonia. So you know,
you might be hearing the sound of like, you know, insects,
or the wind you know outside, like you know, hitting
parts of the external structure of the house, that sort
(28:00):
of thing. So, you know, I think it is it's
an interesting idea. I think, you know, that we do
have to remind ourselves not that we shouldn't place too
much emphasis on a singular type of stimuli. And I
don't think that's ultimately what the author, the original author
was arguing here, but they were just saying, look, here's
just one potential piece of the puzzle that could have
(28:21):
played such a factor. And the winds, you know, absolutely
could have been a factor. We touched on the prairie
winds already in this series. The winds can be seasonally
quite intense, especially in March and April, but also anytime
you have temperature contrasts driving large scale weather systems across
the plains, and the natural habitat again offers virtually nothing
(28:43):
in the way of wind breaks. So you'll find localized
areas of higher wind in the United States and Canada
and certainly during pronounced storms, but on a statewide level,
the Great Planes represent the largest continuous windy environment due
to these just vast, unobstruct did flat terrains, and that
would have especially been the case historically before these landscapes
(29:06):
were reduced. Though again we have to remind ourself of
the subjective nature of such things. So turning back to poetry,
I just want to present two examples of authors describing
prairie wind. The first is from Giants in the Earth
that I already referenced.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Barrett, can I guess this passage is going to be
not a fan of the prairie wind.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, especially since it concerns the same character. That's a
good bet.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Barrett could not go to sleep for a long time
that night. At last, she grew thoroughly angry with herself.
Her nerves were taught as bowstrings. Her head kept rising
up from the pillow to listen, but there was nothing
to hear, nothing except the night wind, which now had
begun to stir. It stirred with so many unknown things.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Okay, so not.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
An endorsement of the prairie wind. But then I want
to read just a couple of stanzas here from Prairie Winds,
a poem by Helena Coleman, who lived eighteen sixty nine
through nineteen fifty three, a Canadian poet, and you can
look this up online. This poem is available in full
at all poetry dot com. I love all things that
(30:18):
God has made that show his ordered care and might,
But most I think I love the wind that blows
at night. It holds so much mystery, like that in
mine own restless heart, brother to me and well beloved,
O wind thou art, So here we is a divine
(30:39):
wind on the prairie, inspiring wind on the prairie, as
opposed to the night wind that contains unknown threats. So again,
it's also very subjective and then can be tweaked. It
e's a direction with the language, with the poetry.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I like how both of them appeal to the mystery
in the wind, except in one case the mystery seems
threatening and the other case the mystery is I don't know,
so the divine possibilities unknown.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, And I do want a flag too that in
these various discussions of prairie madness that you find, sometimes
they're talking about the roar of the wind, the sound
of the wind, and other times you're talking about the
silence of the great plains. So I don't know. I
guess there is kind of a maybe it's both of
those working together, you know, where you're maybe having these
contrasts where you're like, how can this place be so
empty and so loud, and then later it feels silent
(31:29):
as well. So I think all of this is fascinating.
I don't think any of it suggests like an equation
for prairie madness that you know holds one hundred percent true.
But we can identify these various the various themes that
become popular about it, and these infectious thoughts regarding prairie madness,
and we can identify some of the factors that may
have played a role in any actual historic examples where
(31:55):
people's mental state was pushed in a negative direction, maybe
in part because of the landscape or because of the
other details of the environment. Yeah, I know that we
have no we have We probably don't have anything like
a true pioneer of the of the of the frontier
prairie out out there listening that can chime in here.
(32:16):
But I'm sure we have some listeners who moved to
the Great Plains from other areas, maybe lived in more
isolated locations, who can maybe speak to a little of
this or certainly can apply their own experiences to these
examples of prairie madness, and you can give us a
little field report. Yeah, I did not experience anything like
(32:39):
prairie madness when I in my very brief experience as
a tourist checking out the prairies. I just I found
it all fascinating. Maybe a little hot at times, it's
very sunny out there, but yeah, I didn't feel anything
like prairie madness.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Well, I'm glad to hear that. Are you ready to
talk about the tangent I went on for this episode?
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah? Yeah, what have you got for us?
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
So I got sucked into a little geological or you
might even call it a topographical mystery related to specific
prairie landscapes, and that is the mystery of the so
called Mima Mounds, named after the Mima Prairie in southwest
Washington State, which is now a protected area at US
(33:36):
National Natural Landmark. So the word Mima Spelledma originally comes
from the language of the Shahalis tribe, in which mima
means newness, as in something that is new and is
related to or at least sounds like a word in
the same language that.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
Means to be surprised.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
I was reading about this in multiple sources, but I
especially want to shout out. So I was looking at
some like technical papers and stuff, but I want to
shout out a short informational booklet I think, mostly geared
towards students, put together by the Washington Geological Survey, which
is great to look up if you want to see
illustrations and you want easy to understand explanations of the
(34:17):
main theories behind these formations. So what are the Mima mounds?
A mundane way of putting it is that they are
little hills, lots of little hills crowded together. Now, initially
that probably doesn't sound very intriguing or mysterious, but I
think you will immediately grasp what is interesting if you
(34:40):
look at a picture of them. So, Rob, I've got
some pictures for you to look at in the outline.
Here this first one. In the outline, you can see
the nice green landscape, but all of these hills. This
is a photo from one of the sites in Washington State,
and what we see is a vast field of several
square miles full of little hills, each between two and
(35:03):
seven feet tall and between eight and forty feet wide,
covered in prairie grass and flowering herbs, and occasionally with
little trees or shrubs growing on them, but mostly not
mostly just this grassy landscape with these basically evenly spaced
little hills. These hills sometimes get called soil pimples or
(35:26):
even goose bumps on the earth, and that comparison makes
even more sense if you look at them from above
from imagery that's created using aerial photography or other top
down imaging methods like lidar from above and rob I've
got a couple of images of this that you can
look at in the outline as well. We'll describe these
(35:47):
for people listening at home. So the first one is
a photograph taken from above, and then the second one
is a lidar image.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
And looking from above when.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
You're not distracted by other surface features like plants or buildings,
you know what it looks like To me? It looks
like the skin of a beaded lizard. It really does, yes,
So the mima mounds are squeezed together into the landscape
in a way that feels both regular and irregular. Irregular
(36:18):
in the sense that they are not in rows that
line up or anything like that. It's not a repeating pattern,
but they feel regular in the sense that they are
crowded together without significant gaps, and the spaces between them
feel like they are confined to a regular, very small size.
It looks kind I was trying to think of an
(36:40):
analogy to picture. It looks kind of like what would
happen if you got a bunch of different but similarly
sized coins and you put them all down on a
table lying flat, and then you push the mass of
coins together from the outside of the of the mass,
so that this pile of coins has like or no
(37:00):
space in between the coins, but they're not overlapping.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, yeah, I get what you're laying down here. Yeah,
something about just you know, how tightly compact everything is,
like the bumps or mounds or not uniform in their
size exactly, but yeah, they seem to there is this
feeling that they are bunched together.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Now another thing is if you're thinking hills, you might
be getting the wrong idea because these do not have
the long, rolling, natural feeling of hills in the traditional
sense like you would see in the you know, the
foothills of a mountain range or you know, most naturally
occurring hills. Something about them, maybe the way that they're
relatively small and.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Tightly packed together.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
It feels unique, unique from most hills. And yet they
are not totally unique as features or geological formations. If
you dig them up and look inside them, they are
these small piles of silt, sand, and pebbles, and similar
patterns of small hills and mounds, sometimes with similar constituents
(38:09):
inside them, also called Mima mounds. Even when they're not
inside the Mama Prairie region, or called Mima like mounds,
these similar mounds can be found in other places in
North America and even on other continents. So there are
a bunch of different places beyond the Mama Prairie where
you will find Mima like mounds. And there's still debate
(38:31):
about some of these formations. We actually don't know if
they are all truly the same type of feature with
the same underlying cause, or if they're only superficially similar
goosebumps in the earth with different causes. Now that brings
us to the question of what is the cause? How
were these hundreds of little mounds formed? And we still
(38:53):
don't know. This is an open scientific question. And I
thought it might be interesting to do a brief look
at few of the competing hypotheses. I can't promise I've
captured all of the hypotheses in circulation today, but I
think I've got the main ones that are out there
now and have been out there in the past.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
But to be clear, UFOs write out non ufis.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Obviously, some people are going to say that anything that
looks weird or interesting, and these do look weird and interesting.
Somebody's going to say, yeah, that's the that's crop circle type.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
Thing, landing zone. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Maybe this is where the Aliens they were going to
build some pyramids, but they gave up early.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
But yes, the ufologists are going to be on this,
But no, that is not That is not a good
theory in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And then at the same time, we shouldn't, like surface level,
confuse these with nouns and like the mound builders and
mounds elsewhere in the America, is that it seemed to
have definitely had an origin in human construction by indigenous peoples.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
No, from what I was reading that they do not
seem to have major characteristics of mounds built by human
and so human construction is not one of the leading theories,
at least in any of the sources I was finding.
People may have thought that a long time ago, but
not in modern science. So let's go through some of
these hypotheses about how they were formed. One is the
(40:16):
so called sun cup hypothesis. This was originally proposed by
a geologist named J. Harlan Bretts in the year nineteen thirteen.
Bretts specialized in the geological history of the Pacific Northwest,
and he studied how the landscape had been shaped by
glaciers and by glacial outburst floods. A glacial outburst flood
(40:39):
is a flood caused when a glacier lake suddenly breaks
free of its containing structure. Essentially, there's a natural dam
of some kind, maybe made of ice or of earth,
that gives way, and then this huge lake of glacial
meltwater is released onto the lands below. And so the
sun cup hypothesis goes like this. Thousands of years ago,
(41:02):
the surrounding area, especially this big vast landscape just north
of the Mima Prairie, was covered in a glacier, and
the Mima Prairie itself became blanketed in a thin sheet
of ice and snow, and the sun shined down on
these thin sheets of ice and snow in the relevant
(41:23):
areas and melted them in irregular patterns called sun cups.
You can actually watch sun cups form on patches of
snow melting in the sun today. There are these irregular
patterns of differential melting that look kind of like inverse goosebumps,
little depressions or cups crowded together like a random honeycomb pattern.
(41:47):
So Rob, I've got a picture for you to look
at in the outline here. But folks at home, you
can google sun cups in snow if you want to
see it. You've probably seen something like this yourself before.
Maybe a little of shaded patch of snow or something
thing lingers for a while, it gets beamed on by
the sun over and over, partially melts and then refreezes,
that kind of thing, and you get these these little
(42:10):
these patterns of cups and depressions in the ice.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, if you live in areas that gets received snowfall,
then you've probably seen this before. You just didn't know
what it was called.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, So Brett's argued you had something like this happening.
This big layer of snow and ice over the top
of this prairie. And then water flowed over the top
of this ice that had had these sun cups forming
in it. So maybe this is from a you know,
maybe a glacial outburst, flood or something. You know, water
(42:40):
flows over the top, and as it flows over the
top of this ice, it deposits sediment such as silt, sand,
and pebbles or gravel in the cups, and this keeps happening.
Over time, the deposits in the sun cups build up
and become quite large. Then the landscape the ice melts away,
(43:02):
so the cups are now gone, leaving only the deposits behind.
So what had once been piles of sediment accumulating in
the bottom of these ice cups now become little hills
with no ice cups. One that I want to mention
that from what I can tell, is not really still
in the mix anymore, but it was historically important was
(43:23):
the frost polygon hypothesis. Apparently in the mid twentieth century,
it was a popular explanation to say that frost polygons
had formed the mounds, and the idea goes like this,
you have frozen soil that cracks in a polygon pattern.
You've again you've probably seen something like this yourself. Actually,
(43:44):
you may have seen images of polygonal cracking in dry
or frozen soil. You think about like soil that gets
wet and then gets parched and dries out, it cracks
in these kind of weird again, kind of honeycomb like pattern.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, this reminds me their actual There are these texture
paints you can get. These are used in the miniature
painting and all, where you lay this sort of thick
paint with like little grains in it. You lay this
out over like the base that a miniature like human
soldier is going to be standing on, and then as
it dries, it actually like breaks up like this. And
(44:21):
it's not necessarily like completely you know, you're not just
saying polygons necessarily, but the way it breaks up, you
get these little gaps and it creates this wonderful effect
where it looks like dried earth.
Speaker 4 (44:33):
Yeah, cool, cracked landscape.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So you can actually have a similar thing to that
happening with icy soil ice that you know, it freezes
and then it cracks and inside these cracks. The idea
wind with the frost polygon hypothesis. Inside these cracks they
would fill with rain water or maybe floodwater. They'd fill
up with water and then freeze again, and so the
(44:57):
freezing would cause the water track in the cracks to
expand each time, because water expands when it freezes, and
this would widen the cracks. So it freezes pushes the
soil away to the sides, and as a result of
this process you get like freezing and then warming, and
then the warming conditions would melt away the ice and
(45:17):
when it flowed away, it would leave these large spaces
in between rounded mounds that had been pushed up by
the expanding frost. Apparently, there was a big geological conference
in the eighties which examined this hypothesis and concluded that
it could not adequately explain at least some of the mounds.
So I think this is not a major contender for
(45:38):
the explanation anymore. Another idea is the vegetation anchoring hypothesis.
The Washington Geological Survey booklet calls this the runoff erosion
(45:59):
roof anchor hypothesis. But the common feature of these explanations
is that there are plants growing on the prairie and
the roots of these plants grip the soil and help
protect it from erosion, and the mounds in this hypothesis
would represent places where plant roots once held the soil together,
(46:21):
while channels were carved around the mounds by surrounding soil erosion. Okay,
then we get another hypothesis. This one's interesting gophers. So
in nineteen forty two, a couple of biologists named Walter
Dohlquest and Victor Scheffer proposed that it could have been
bioturbation by gophers. So how would gophers have built these mounds?
(46:46):
Don't they dig tunnels underground? How would that result in mounds? Well,
the idea goes like this. When gophers dig tunnels, they
displace soil. That soil has to go somewhere, so they
dig out cavities in the earth, and then they throw
the displaced soil into a pile behind them, and this
excavated soil gets packed into a big mound. And these
(47:08):
piles can actually they're not just waste. They can be
useful to the gophers because then when a rainstorm comes,
the gophers now have high ground they can retreat to
to get away from the flood. And if you study
gopher behavior. This hypothesis says gophers actually tend to space
their burrows a fairly reliable distance apart from one another,
(47:32):
though not in exactly like regular patterns or rows. And
this spacing could match up roughly with the spacing and
irregular arrangement of the Mima Mounds.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Okay, so the idea here being yeah, that the Mima
mount spacing is a visual representation of gopher territories.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Yes, and I believe this hypothesis is still in the
mix as well, could be gopher related. Another hypothesis is
glacial outburst flooding. So it's worth mentioning. I think I
said this a little while ago, but the Myma Prairie
is right at the southern edge of where a giant
glacier reached down to about sixteen thousand years ago, and
(48:13):
some researchers think that the Mima Mounds could have been
formed by here. This concept is coming back a glacial
outburst flood from the glacially damned lake known as Lake Carbon.
So around this time this Lake Carbon somehow spilled out
of its containment, it flooded the landscape, and as it
(48:34):
did so, it picked up tons of volcanic rocks and
sediment from the Cascade Mountains and washed them downstream, leaving
them in piles along the path of the flood. Now,
what would be the evidence that the mounds could come
from this event? One thing cited by that Washington Geological
Survey booklet is that you've got mounds in a place
called Rocky Prairie upstream from the area of the Mima
(48:58):
Prairie upstream in the what this flood zone would have been.
And these mounds have more volcanic rocks and bigger rocks,
and then the Mama Prairie mounds downstream have smaller rocks
and smaller, finer sediment. And that pattern, you know, the
bigger rocks upstream, more volcanic rocks, and the smaller sediment downstream,
(49:19):
that would fit with a flood formation mechanism. Also, the
mounds tend to be stretched or elongated parallel to the
direction that this water from the flood would have been flowing.
Though from what I'm reading, I think it's possible that
a glacial flood like this could have shaped mounds, even
if it wasn't the thing that originally formed them.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Okay, one more.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Idea, this is the earthquake hypothesis. This one appeared more recently.
It was put forward by a geologist named Andrew Berg
in nineteen ninety and to illustrate the idea behind it,
you can start with an experiment. If you take a
flat surface like a table or a drumhead or anything
like that, and you spread out an even layer of
(50:03):
fine silt or sand on top of that surface, then
you make the surface vibrate. So maybe you hit the
table or the drumhead repeatedly with a mallet. Causing the
surface to vibrate, will tend to make loose sediment lying
on top of it arrange itself into interesting geometrical patterns.
(50:23):
You might have seen something like this if you've ever
watched these demonstrations of like a sound from a speaker
acting on sand on a flat surface, Like you can
play different frequency tones through a loudspeaker over a drumhead
like surface, and it will make the sand sort itself
into these fascinating geometrical patterns driven by the sound waves.
(50:45):
These arrangements tend to be caused by the interactions the
kind of resonance of different waves going back and forth,
and you get these places where the waves, you know,
they sort of line up and they form these standing peaks,
and then also place is where they cancel each other
out and create these valleys. Anyway, Berg proposed that earthquakes
(51:07):
in the past had caused a similar thing to happen
with loose soil on top of the Mima Prairie. So
interesting idea there too, And ultimately, from what I can tell,
this really is still genuinely a mystery.
Speaker 4 (51:21):
It is not solved.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
Each hypothesis I think has its own defenders and advocates,
but there is not agreement within the scientific community or
the communities involved that like which one is the best explanation.
So this made me curious, like, if you're out there
listening right now, you're a geologist or somebody with some
other relevant expertise, and you want to write in about
(51:43):
which hypothesis seems strongest to you and why, please do
get in touch. Our email is contact at stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
You know, I was looking at this booklet you referenced earlier,
the one for students, and I really enjoyed that the
different hypotheses are presented by a talking gopher name Goodwin,
and good one is very very clear that these are
presented in no particular order of likelihood, so that you
can decide this is a very balanced gopher. And I
(52:12):
appreciate even though one of the ideas concerns gophers, and
you know, you would otherwise be led to think, well, good,
one's going to want to really push the the one
that champions his own species abilities. But no, he's calling
it right down the middle.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
I was thinking that exact thing.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
It's like, oh, we want to have a talking gopher,
but that's going to make it seem like the gopher
hypothesis is the real winner, and we.
Speaker 4 (52:35):
Don't want to imply that. So we've got to say,
you know, we're not favoring any one of these.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
But which one illustrates the easiest, which one potentially speaks
to children better? You know this is this is the
one to go in. So yeah, totally the right direction
for the booklet. Well, that's fascinating. Yet I was not
familiar with these these particular mounds. I've not traveled to
this part of the country before. But if I if
I make it out that way, I'll have to check
(53:01):
these out.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
Well.
Speaker 3 (53:02):
As I said, they're not only in southwestern Washington. There
are Mama like mounds actually in many places throughout North America,
and there are similar formations on other continents as well.
So you can look up maps of Mama like mounds,
you know. There there are places you can see them
all over different regions of the prairie. There's some like
in Texas and other places farther in the Northwest Prairie.
(53:26):
So yeah, there you can look for things like this
in lots of places.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Huh.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
You know.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I just pulled up a map of where one finds
Mima mounds throughout North America, and there are there. They
are in place that you can find them in California.
You can find them in Arizona, various other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana.
So yeah, they're they're out there. I just need a
I need a I need to put them on the itinerary.
Speaker 4 (53:52):
I guess. Yeah. I'd like to see some too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
All right, Well, I think that's all for this episode
on Prayer. We're going to gohea and close out this
this episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out
there again. Anything you have to contribute regarding these topics,
any field reports, be it mound based or prairie vibe based.
You know, certainly write in and we would love to
(54:16):
hear from you, and you know, we'd like to use
at least some of our listener mails in future listener
mail episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You generally
do about one of those a month, maybe sometimes two,
depending on how much, how much is coming in and
what sort of buffers they need to put into the schedule.
Let's see. As always, we would just remind everyone out there,
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
(54:37):
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (54:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(55:36):
H
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome this Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we are back with the second part in our
series on the Prairie, the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America.
This subject was inspired Robbed by your recent family visit
to Colorado, spending some time in the western Prairie. I
guess this is in the region just before the landscape
(00:36):
turns into the rocky mountains. I couldn't remember if you
mentioned last time. Did you see bison on your trip?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
We did. Yeah, at the Arsenal, we saw some bison.
Like I say that, that area has a number of
bison and there's a lot of bison conservation that is
focused there, and so we got to drive through that
area and we got to see the bison, not super
close because they're going to do exactly what they want
to do, but we still got to see them at
(01:02):
a distance, which was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It's not a petting zoo there, right right.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
This is not one of those places where you hold
potatoes out your window the livestock comes over. No, No, they
do what they want and if you are close enough
to see them, and then you're lucky.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
So in the previous episode of this series, we talked
about the definition of our prairie and its similarity to
other ecosystems like the step. Prairies are relatively flat or
rolling landscapes that are dominated not by trees and shrubs
but by grasses and flowering herbaceous plants called forbes, and
(01:40):
so one of the questions that we talked about in
the last episode somewhat extensively was why are prairies filled
with grasses and forbes instead of trees? What historically has
kept the trees out. The answer to this question turned
out to be kind of complicated, involving, but possibly not
being limited to factors of climate and rainfall, pressure from herbivores,
(02:05):
and very importantly, frequent fires, fires to which native grasses
and forbes are very resilient, while young trees and shrubs
are typically not. Of course, human behavior in recent centuries
has altered basically all of the factors that are upstream
of the natural plant balance, and as a result, North
America's prairies are seriously endangered. The vast majority of the
(02:30):
original Eastern tall grass prairie is already gone, as we
talked about last time. There are different ways of calculating
how much of it remains, but some estimates say like
four percent, others say less than one percent. It's mostly gone,
and so this is a very precious, endangered type of
landscape and there are ongoing conservation efforts to try to
(02:53):
return some of this landscape more to its original plant
balance and original ecosystem characteristics. After that, we went on
too a fascinating sort of historical niche subject about the prairie,
which was about grizzly bears, grizzly bears of the plains.
Today most people think of grizzlies as animals that live
(03:15):
exclusively in like remote mountain forests, but grizzlies used to
be apex predators of the prairie as well. And we
talked extensively about the journals of the Lewis and Clark
expedition in the early nineteenth century, which had lots of
encounters with prairie bears, and we analyzed at least one
of those encounters at length. We are back today to
(03:36):
talk some more. Now, Rob, I understand for today's episode
you got somewhat obsessed with prairie madness.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
That's right. The other topics have had quite an effect,
but this one will drive you absolutely mad.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I'd never heard of this, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I wasn't really familiar with it either, though it certainly
makes sense considering some of the things we talked about
in the last episode. On one hand, you discussed your
own personal response to the treeless openness of the prairie,
that it had maybe a sort of uncanny or even
threatening feeling to it, like, you know, too much space,
(04:12):
not enough trees.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, as I said in the last episode, I don't
like that I feel this way. I feel like I
want to I should be able to appreciate, you know,
the beauty of all different types of landscapes equally. But
for some reason, maybe just the environment I grew up with,
I do have a kind of bias or preference for
forested landscapes. And when there is not anything taller than
(04:36):
me vertically in an area and it's just you know,
vast open space all around, that does feel kind of
exposed and vulnerable and uncomfortable to me. I need tall
things around me, I think, And I don't know, maybe
this is something I could get over one day, spending
more time in the prairie.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
But I do have that tree bias.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I think, well, this, I think this is going to
arguably play the scenario here. But another thing that I
think plays into the scenario that we touched on last
time is how we have a lot, a great deal
of writing and poetry about the about about the planes
the great American prairies. Particularly, we talked about the words
of William Cullen Bryant, the poet who described this sense
(05:20):
of awe at beholding the prairies. And yeah, I think
both of these examples steer us naturally into discussion of
prairie madness, sometimes called prairie sickness, and so forth. And
I do want to stress at the outset here. This
is not a scientific term. This is not a medical term,
and it is primarily reported as a phenomenon of the
(05:42):
nineteenth century, and specifically in cases where you had European
and American homesteaders, American homesteaders from the East who ventured
out onto the prairies, you know, trying to you know,
creating a new life, grabbing some land, you know, trying
to make a lot life out there, who then experienced
(06:02):
an array of psychological symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, behavioral changes,
and in the extremes, even violence in response to the crushing, vastness,
the open landscape and the howling wind of the prairie.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Now, based on what you were reading, would you say
that this is something that is probably culturally contingent. You
mentioned it's among like European American homesteaders, European colonizers basically
in the prairie landscape. It's not something typically reported by
like indigenous peoples of the prairies.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Correct, And that is very important to note, Like there's
been indigenous people living on the prairies for more than
ten thousand years, so this is not something that they experienced.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
And so probably also not something that's like an objective
human body response to the prairie landscape. It's probably more
like a conditioned cultural type of response.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Right, if you fly into Denver, people will warn you
about the altitude difference, but nobody's going to warn you
about prairie madness because it's not really a thing in
terms of it's not something that is going to just
objectively be a factor in anyone's life. And again, it's
really mostly talked about within this particular historic context and
(07:21):
among particular people who were venturing out into this landscape.
And there are a number of other factors that are
involved here. So the explanation for what's going on or
allegedly went on here have more on that in a minute,
and is that you could basically underline by two examples
that we've already touched on. First, the poetic awe of
(07:44):
the prairie, of which there are many examples, and this
awe kind of finds its dark reflection in the fiction
and nonfiction of the time that cast the prairie is
something ominous and unnatural. Part of that is just sort
of the power of poetry and literature. If you're going
to describe a landscape, you know you're going to lean
into one direction or the other. Is it awesome and
(08:07):
does it make you feel like a god? Or is
there something creepy about it? It makes you feel less than
you know? Both There are you know, potentially rewarding directions
to go in in definite choices in any given work
of fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, I think every landscape on earth has this this
dual quality. I mean, is the forest a soothing, calming,
shady landscape, where you are, you know, covered nicely in
these calming greens, or is it a spooky place where
you hear sounds that echo between the trees and maybe
spirits are trying to lead you off the path.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, and kind of going into something we talked about
last time. I feel like, and this is highly subjective,
but I feel like the desert environments they tend to
speak more clearly on this way, and it's like, oh,
it's a land of death, but it's alive, you know.
It seems like the back and forth there's a lot
more balanced. Prairies can maybe I'm just making them the
personal argument here that they can maybe be a bit
(09:07):
harder to wrap your head around because they're not barren.
They are full of life. But then there is the
more or less flat topography and some other factors environmentally
that we're going to get into here. And then the
other factor is there was this frequent observation that these
lands were fundamentally different compared to the lands that homesteaders
(09:29):
called home, either in the eastern United States or elsewhere
in Europe and on the literary front, some of the
some really famous examples of this, and some of the
most famous examples stem from Oliovog's nineteen twenty seven novel
Giants in the Earth. This is a book that concerns
(09:51):
pioneer Norwegian immigrants in the Dakota territory, with the character
Barrett Hansa particularly experiencing literary, very prairie madness. Joe, have
you ever read this book?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I had to read it in junior high or high school,
and this is one of those books that was assigned
to me, and I do not think I give it
a very dedicated reading. I remember virtually nothing of it
except for the you know, the the obvious that it
concerned no actual giants in the earth or no actual
FLM crawling out and attacking anyone.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
So I really false advertising.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
One star false advertising, I guess if you're in you know,
junior high or high school, well whatever age I was.
But looking back on it, and you can find the
full text online and you can, you know, find it
in print very easily to get a copy of this book.
But there are some beautiful passages that deal with this, again,
particularly concerning the character Barrett, and it's it is telling
(10:52):
that she's the one that experiences it because a lot
of the alleged cases of prairie madness are very gendered
in their general focusing on the housewife in a given scenario.
So I'm going to read a few passages from giants
in the earth. After they had bustled about for a
little while, the others left her. The moment they had gone,
(11:13):
she jumped up and crossed the tent to look out
the door. How will human beings be able to endure
this place? She thought? Why? There isn't even a thing
that one can hide behind. Her sensitive, rather beautiful face
was full of blank dismay. She turned away from the
door and began to loosen her dress. Then her eyes
fell on the center pole, with its cross piece hung
(11:34):
with clothes, and she stood a moment irresolute, gazing at
it in startled fright. It looked like the giants she
had read about as a child. For a long while
she was unable to banish the picture from her mind.
And then here's some more that gets I think, gets
back to the landscape. The broad expanse, stretching away endlessly
(11:55):
in every direction, seemed almost like the ocean, especially now
when darkness was It reminded her strongly of the sea.
And yet it was very different. The formless prairie had
no heart that beat, no waves that's sang, no soul
that could be touched or cared. And then one more here,
but more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the
(12:17):
strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon
the minds of some. Many took their own lives asylum.
After asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once
been human. It is hard for the eye to wander
from skyline to skyline year in and year out without
finding a resting place.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Well, that sounds pretty extreme.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this, but
I think everyone can. Certainly, if you have any familiarity
with the literature, you can definitely pick up on Gothic
tendencies in this writing. Really latching onto this idea. I
referenced our recent Weird House cinema selection in the Mouth
of Madness earlier, and these passages could very easily be
(13:03):
passages that Sutter Kane has written about. You know, the
void opening up in Monsters, spilling out of it. You know,
it's that level of darkness.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I don't know what the author's intention here is, whether
it's to actually project these characteristics onto the landscape, or
to do what sometimes happens in fiction, which is to
show what are really characteristics of the human character of
the character, and they are reading their own psyche onto
(13:32):
the landscape. It might not actually be something that is
the landscape's fault, if that makes any sense. It's the
person is having feelings and they're looking at the world
around them, and they see their feelings in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah. Again, it's been too long since I read it
to provide full context here, but it's my understanding that
most of these ideas are centered in this particular character,
and that it's not present in other characters. So I
think it is very character focused here.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
So there are other examples from this book. I might
come back and read another line from it. But all
of this effectively underlies the idea that there was something
about the landscape or the contrast of landscape, combined with
isolation and the severity of frontier life that could lead
to mental breakdown in some and the topic seems to
(14:22):
have entered the larger American consciousness in eighteen ninety three
three via the paper or the publication The Isolation of
Life on Prairie Farms by E. V. Smaali sm A L. L. E.
Y published in the Atlantic and still available on the
Atlantic's website. You can pull it up. I think there's
a paywall if you want to read it in full,
(14:44):
but you can also click and look at a scanned
version of it as it printed. And that's how I
read it.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Read it in full.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This individual, EV Smally was an American journalist, editor, and
Republican political writer, closely tied at the time to US
President James A. I'm going to read a few samples
from this just to give everyone the vibe. Okay. It
more or less begins with the following In no civilized
country have the cultivators of the soil adapted their home
(15:12):
life so badly to the conditions of nature as have
the people of our great northwestern prairies. Okay, Yeah, And
from there he goes on to argue that the like
there are some there's some arguments here that I don't
think really stand up to close scrutiny, including the idea
that the European peasant. He refers to the quote European
(15:32):
peasant as a type of person who lived a life
of joy and social interaction and that on the and
that prairie dwellers essentially had none of this and were
basically doomed. Here's another passage. An alarming amount of insanity
occurs in the New Prairie States among farmers and their wives.
(15:54):
In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnished the
largest contingent to the The reason is not far to seek.
These people came from cheery, little farm villages. Life in
the Fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh well, I don't know if there's like actual experiment
to back this up, but it seems plausible to me
that loneliness and isolation could be a major contributor to
people having psychological problems.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, and that is certainly a possibility here. Like, one
of the realities is that you did have these homesteaders
going out living in very isolated circumstances and living a
hard life in an environment that they were not accustomed
to different environmental factors that we'll get into here. So yeah,
(16:44):
I want to stress that, even though I'm having some
fun with the way that this is written, and also
certainly singling out that this is a paper that made
a big impact on how people thought about prairie madness. Yeah,
not everything in here should just be dismissed. Like there
are some possible connections to be made here.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, I mean, like it even strikes me as possible
to pick up on something I was saying about the
characters in that novel that one could easily read psychological
difficulty stemming from, say, loneliness and isolation. Could you know,
take those problems and interpret them as problems related to
(17:22):
the landscape, when really maybe the landscape doesn't have that
much do with it. It's just like what you're looking
at while you're feeling the fact that you don't have
any friends and haven't seen anybody but your husband and years.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You're a few more quotes though,
from this paper quote the silence of death rests on
the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds.
And then here's one more. There is but one remedy
for the dreariness of farm life on the prairies. The
isolated farmhouse must be abandoned, and the people must drawl
(17:56):
together in villages. The peasants of the Russian steps did
this century years ago, and so did the dwellers of
the Great Danubian Plane. And so he ultimately positions isolated
life on the frontier plane as standing in just stark
opposition to sanity, to intellectual development, and just the rational
progression of society. So he's not the final word on
(18:18):
all of this. And there have been some papers that
have really gone into this and looked at it in
different ways, looking at it as a literary trope, looking
at it and as it may connect to sensory deprivation
and so forth. I was looking at a particular paper,
This is Unsettling Landscapes, Prairie Madness and Eco Gothic Themes
(18:41):
in US Plains Literature, published in Great Planes Quarterly from
twenty nineteen by Vanessa stein Rotter, And in this she
points out that prairie madness is of course a recurring
theme in the fiction and poetry of the US Great Plains,
and the author stressed various ways that the feature of
the plain's environment stabilized non native settlers sense of place
(19:03):
and control. So she points out that this was of course,
again not a medical phenomenon, This was not a scientific term,
and she also citing the work of Sarah Brooks. Sundberg
points out the cases of white female settler mental and
or emotional decline in the prairie might not have actually
been that widespread. But even though we see this all
(19:25):
the time with things, even though there may not have
been as many cases of it, it became an idea
that was difficult to dispel. It became a popular way
of thinking about life on the prairies because again, outside
of the actual environments of people living out there, you
had people, say, reading that article in the Atlantic or
reading poetry and fiction that drove home this Gothic idea,
(19:47):
and therefore it becomes very difficult to shake, and it
just becomes a staple of fiction and nonfiction writings of
the time about the Prairies.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
How prevalent we think a problem is often has little
to do with the raw numbers of how often it's occurring.
Often it has more to do with like how sticky
the idea is? Is it like really interesting or scary
or captivating to the imagination.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
In some way? Right?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
And of course we see a more pronounced version of
that when things become actual social panics, you know, so
for instance, satanic panic, the idea there's the satanic forces
at work in the world today. We've we've done episodes
about this before. In this case, I don't think that
prairie madness ever reached a level of true social panic,
but it just becomes this sort of sticky idea.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So, the author here points out that fiction writers were
especially drawn to the idea because of those terrific Gothic undertones,
as well as quote its potential to engage larger, often
gendered anxieties or feelings of powerlessness within restrictive social and
cultural roles.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
So, and I think there's a case to be made
that that's maybe what we see in and Giants in
the Earth. You know, it's not just about spooky landscape
making people feel spooky, but maybe getting into some of
these deeper concepts. Steinroder focuses on the landscape's role in
the scenario, but points out that other scholars have examined
the importance of gender and family relationships, domestic violence, and
(21:19):
cultural and physical isolation that are often bound up in
the scenario. So again, any as we've been alluding to
any given potential case of prairie madness, any individual experience
that could be chalked up as being prairie madness. They're
going to be, They're potentially all these other factors as well,
and again just potentially a hard life as well. I
(21:40):
was reading some of the settler accounts of how frightening
prairie fires could be. You know, we touched on that already,
just the idea that like a fast moving fire could
just rip across the prairie.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
And as we talked about in the last episode, fear
of these prairie fires and what they would bring the
led to attempts by European American settlers of the planes
to suppress naturally occurring prairie fires to stop them from spreading,
which actually ended up being very harmful to the prairie ecosystem.
You know, the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains more
(22:19):
often intentionally both used intentionally set prairie fires in some
cases for like the management of bison prey and things
like that, and also allowed them to occur more, which
was much healthier for the prairie because, as we know,
the natural plant balance depends on the fires.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
So.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Steinroder again focuses on the landscape's role, and I'm just
going to boil like our key findings down here are
key arguments, and that is that the features of the
landscape can destabilize one sense of control. It can make
it feel like you are not a complete autonomous agent
in this kind of humanless wilderness. That and that also
(23:11):
it can just be very difficult to just comprehend the
landscape around you, that there's something ineffable about it, and
that that can can also feel kind of crushing.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Now, I think the same could probably be argued about
various other landscapes, and you know, you could probably apply
this to things that we might think of as the
opposite of the prairie, like the mountains. But still, I
think it's an interesting argument.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think she's acknowledging all these other factors and also
the idea that there may have been far fewer cases
of this than we actually think. But the landscape definitely
plays a role either in the cases or our idea
about these cases. I want to turn to another paper
I was looking at here. This one's by Alex d. Veles,
titled The Wind Cries The Effect of Soundscape on the
(24:02):
Prairie Madness Phenomenon. This is from twenty twenty two in
historical archaeology, and this one basically talks about the possibility
that you could have specific details of the sounds of
the prairie that could have been like a catalyst for
(24:24):
prairie madness, so something in those howling winds, for example.
There's a paywall in this particular paper, but James Gaines
wrote a good piece about it for Atlas Obscura the
same year, and I recommend that as well. Okay, so
veils examined human hearing patterns and spectral data on Great
(24:47):
Planes soundscapes. Now, to be clear, these are like contemporary soundscapes,
and one of the things that is outlined in that
Alice Obscure article is that you know, it would have
been different back in these days. We changed the environment
quite a bit. So it's possible that, you know, what
he's studying here, wouldn't you know, one hundred percent be
(25:07):
the environment that the settlers found themselves in. But any
rate examines these things, ultimately proposing that affected settlers might
have suffered from misophonia or hyperacusis, thus making them more
sensitive to environmental sounds and with both conditions worsened by stress. Again,
stressful environment potentially in and of itself, not counting social factors,
(25:30):
and you know in the author also links some of
this to some of the symptoms described in the literature
on prairie madness, such as in the extreme's depression, insomnia,
irrational behavior, and so forth. So the focus here was
on low frequency environmental noise, which can potentially overstimulate the
nervous system in certain individuals, as well as those continuous
(25:54):
or supposed to continuous roaring winds out across the prairie.
And as points out that every landscape that humans live
in has plenty of sounds for us to hear, but
that in cities these sounds are more diverse and essentially
become a kind of white noise. I think a lot
of us that live in cities we can speak to this.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
You just get used to the sort of bustle of
say a large urban environment, and a lot of it
fades into the background. Yeah, I mean you still there'll
be things like horns and so forth. It still can
get your attention and throw you off, but for the
most part, it all just kind of becomes the background noise. Meanwhile,
on the planes, especially in these historic settings, there's less
(26:38):
background then, and the sounds that do exist. They coincide
with a sensitive range of human hearing that the brain
pays more attention to interesting, so gains in that Atlas
obscure piece on This also cites Adrian K. C Lee
and auditory brain scientists at the University of Washington who
said that the sound environment reminded them of since redeprivation
(27:00):
chambers as well as anechoic chambers zero echo chambers. And
these are cases where we have sonic environments that have
been engineered in a way that they can cause the
brain to quote naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning
up or down the volume to better distinguish what's going on.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
I don't know how well validated this is, but I
at least recall reading anecdotal reports that anichoic chambers can
make people feel very uncomfortable. Yeah, like going in them
after a while, Like the sound environment is literally unnerving.
People don't like it, and it makes them feel weird
and they.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Need to leave.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, so this level of weirdness could potentially creep in.
You start hearing all sorts of things that interfere with
your slumber. Really almoso kind of induced misophonia. So you know,
you might be hearing the sound of like, you know, insects,
or the wind you know outside, like you know, hitting
parts of the external structure of the house, that sort
(28:00):
of thing. So, you know, I think it is it's
an interesting idea. I think, you know, that we do
have to remind ourselves not that we shouldn't place too
much emphasis on a singular type of stimuli. And I
don't think that's ultimately what the author, the original author
was arguing here, but they were just saying, look, here's
just one potential piece of the puzzle that could have
(28:21):
played such a factor. And the winds, you know, absolutely
could have been a factor. We touched on the prairie
winds already in this series. The winds can be seasonally
quite intense, especially in March and April, but also anytime
you have temperature contrasts driving large scale weather systems across
the plains, and the natural habitat again offers virtually nothing
(28:43):
in the way of wind breaks. So you'll find localized
areas of higher wind in the United States and Canada
and certainly during pronounced storms, but on a statewide level,
the Great Planes represent the largest continuous windy environment due
to these just vast, unobstruct did flat terrains, and that
would have especially been the case historically before these landscapes
(29:06):
were reduced. Though again we have to remind ourself of
the subjective nature of such things. So turning back to poetry,
I just want to present two examples of authors describing
prairie wind. The first is from Giants in the Earth
that I already referenced.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Barrett, can I guess this passage is going to be
not a fan of the prairie wind.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, especially since it concerns the same character. That's a
good bet.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Barrett could not go to sleep for a long time
that night. At last, she grew thoroughly angry with herself.
Her nerves were taught as bowstrings. Her head kept rising
up from the pillow to listen, but there was nothing
to hear, nothing except the night wind, which now had
begun to stir. It stirred with so many unknown things.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Okay, so not.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
An endorsement of the prairie wind. But then I want
to read just a couple of stanzas here from Prairie Winds,
a poem by Helena Coleman, who lived eighteen sixty nine
through nineteen fifty three, a Canadian poet, and you can
look this up online. This poem is available in full
at all poetry dot com. I love all things that
(30:18):
God has made that show his ordered care and might,
But most I think I love the wind that blows
at night. It holds so much mystery, like that in
mine own restless heart, brother to me and well beloved,
O wind thou art, So here we is a divine
(30:39):
wind on the prairie, inspiring wind on the prairie, as
opposed to the night wind that contains unknown threats. So again,
it's also very subjective and then can be tweaked. It
e's a direction with the language, with the poetry.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I like how both of them appeal to the mystery
in the wind, except in one case the mystery seems
threatening and the other case the mystery is I don't know,
so the divine possibilities unknown.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, And I do want a flag too that in
these various discussions of prairie madness that you find, sometimes
they're talking about the roar of the wind, the sound
of the wind, and other times you're talking about the
silence of the great plains. So I don't know. I
guess there is kind of a maybe it's both of
those working together, you know, where you're maybe having these
contrasts where you're like, how can this place be so
empty and so loud, and then later it feels silent
(31:29):
as well. So I think all of this is fascinating.
I don't think any of it suggests like an equation
for prairie madness that you know holds one hundred percent true.
But we can identify these various the various themes that
become popular about it, and these infectious thoughts regarding prairie madness,
and we can identify some of the factors that may
have played a role in any actual historic examples where
(31:55):
people's mental state was pushed in a negative direction, maybe
in part because of the landscape or because of the
other details of the environment. Yeah, I know that we
have no we have We probably don't have anything like
a true pioneer of the of the of the frontier
prairie out out there listening that can chime in here.
(32:16):
But I'm sure we have some listeners who moved to
the Great Plains from other areas, maybe lived in more
isolated locations, who can maybe speak to a little of
this or certainly can apply their own experiences to these
examples of prairie madness, and you can give us a
little field report. Yeah, I did not experience anything like
(32:39):
prairie madness when I in my very brief experience as
a tourist checking out the prairies. I just I found
it all fascinating. Maybe a little hot at times, it's
very sunny out there, but yeah, I didn't feel anything
like prairie madness.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Well, I'm glad to hear that. Are you ready to
talk about the tangent I went on for this episode?
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah? Yeah, what have you got for us?
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
So I got sucked into a little geological or you
might even call it a topographical mystery related to specific
prairie landscapes, and that is the mystery of the so
called Mima Mounds, named after the Mima Prairie in southwest
Washington State, which is now a protected area at US
(33:36):
National Natural Landmark. So the word Mima Spelledma originally comes
from the language of the Shahalis tribe, in which mima
means newness, as in something that is new and is
related to or at least sounds like a word in
the same language that.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
Means to be surprised.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
I was reading about this in multiple sources, but I
especially want to shout out. So I was looking at
some like technical papers and stuff, but I want to
shout out a short informational booklet I think, mostly geared
towards students, put together by the Washington Geological Survey, which
is great to look up if you want to see
illustrations and you want easy to understand explanations of the
(34:17):
main theories behind these formations. So what are the Mima mounds?
A mundane way of putting it is that they are
little hills, lots of little hills crowded together. Now, initially
that probably doesn't sound very intriguing or mysterious, but I
think you will immediately grasp what is interesting if you
(34:40):
look at a picture of them. So, Rob, I've got
some pictures for you to look at in the outline.
Here this first one. In the outline, you can see
the nice green landscape, but all of these hills. This
is a photo from one of the sites in Washington State,
and what we see is a vast field of several
square miles full of little hills, each between two and
(35:03):
seven feet tall and between eight and forty feet wide,
covered in prairie grass and flowering herbs, and occasionally with
little trees or shrubs growing on them, but mostly not
mostly just this grassy landscape with these basically evenly spaced
little hills. These hills sometimes get called soil pimples or
(35:26):
even goose bumps on the earth, and that comparison makes
even more sense if you look at them from above
from imagery that's created using aerial photography or other top
down imaging methods like lidar from above and rob I've
got a couple of images of this that you can
look at in the outline as well. We'll describe these
(35:47):
for people listening at home. So the first one is
a photograph taken from above, and then the second one
is a lidar image.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
And looking from above when.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
You're not distracted by other surface features like plants or buildings,
you know what it looks like To me? It looks
like the skin of a beaded lizard. It really does, yes,
So the mima mounds are squeezed together into the landscape
in a way that feels both regular and irregular. Irregular
(36:18):
in the sense that they are not in rows that
line up or anything like that. It's not a repeating pattern,
but they feel regular in the sense that they are
crowded together without significant gaps, and the spaces between them
feel like they are confined to a regular, very small size.
It looks kind I was trying to think of an
(36:40):
analogy to picture. It looks kind of like what would
happen if you got a bunch of different but similarly
sized coins and you put them all down on a
table lying flat, and then you push the mass of
coins together from the outside of the of the mass,
so that this pile of coins has like or no
(37:00):
space in between the coins, but they're not overlapping.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, yeah, I get what you're laying down here. Yeah,
something about just you know, how tightly compact everything is,
like the bumps or mounds or not uniform in their
size exactly, but yeah, they seem to there is this
feeling that they are bunched together.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Now another thing is if you're thinking hills, you might
be getting the wrong idea because these do not have
the long, rolling, natural feeling of hills in the traditional
sense like you would see in the you know, the
foothills of a mountain range or you know, most naturally
occurring hills. Something about them, maybe the way that they're
relatively small and.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Tightly packed together.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
It feels unique, unique from most hills. And yet they
are not totally unique as features or geological formations. If
you dig them up and look inside them, they are
these small piles of silt, sand, and pebbles, and similar
patterns of small hills and mounds, sometimes with similar constituents
(38:09):
inside them, also called Mima mounds. Even when they're not
inside the Mama Prairie region, or called Mima like mounds,
these similar mounds can be found in other places in
North America and even on other continents. So there are
a bunch of different places beyond the Mama Prairie where
you will find Mima like mounds. And there's still debate
(38:31):
about some of these formations. We actually don't know if
they are all truly the same type of feature with
the same underlying cause, or if they're only superficially similar
goosebumps in the earth with different causes. Now that brings
us to the question of what is the cause? How
were these hundreds of little mounds formed? And we still
(38:53):
don't know. This is an open scientific question. And I
thought it might be interesting to do a brief look
at few of the competing hypotheses. I can't promise I've
captured all of the hypotheses in circulation today, but I
think I've got the main ones that are out there
now and have been out there in the past.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
But to be clear, UFOs write out non ufis.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Obviously, some people are going to say that anything that
looks weird or interesting, and these do look weird and interesting.
Somebody's going to say, yeah, that's the that's crop circle type.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
Thing, landing zone. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Maybe this is where the Aliens they were going to
build some pyramids, but they gave up early.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
But yes, the ufologists are going to be on this,
But no, that is not That is not a good
theory in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And then at the same time, we shouldn't, like surface level,
confuse these with nouns and like the mound builders and
mounds elsewhere in the America, is that it seemed to
have definitely had an origin in human construction by indigenous peoples.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
No, from what I was reading that they do not
seem to have major characteristics of mounds built by human
and so human construction is not one of the leading theories,
at least in any of the sources I was finding.
People may have thought that a long time ago, but
not in modern science. So let's go through some of
these hypotheses about how they were formed. One is the
(40:16):
so called sun cup hypothesis. This was originally proposed by
a geologist named J. Harlan Bretts in the year nineteen thirteen.
Bretts specialized in the geological history of the Pacific Northwest,
and he studied how the landscape had been shaped by
glaciers and by glacial outburst floods. A glacial outburst flood
(40:39):
is a flood caused when a glacier lake suddenly breaks
free of its containing structure. Essentially, there's a natural dam
of some kind, maybe made of ice or of earth,
that gives way, and then this huge lake of glacial
meltwater is released onto the lands below. And so the
sun cup hypothesis goes like this. Thousands of years ago,
(41:02):
the surrounding area, especially this big vast landscape just north
of the Mima Prairie, was covered in a glacier, and
the Mima Prairie itself became blanketed in a thin sheet
of ice and snow, and the sun shined down on
these thin sheets of ice and snow in the relevant
(41:23):
areas and melted them in irregular patterns called sun cups.
You can actually watch sun cups form on patches of
snow melting in the sun today. There are these irregular
patterns of differential melting that look kind of like inverse goosebumps,
little depressions or cups crowded together like a random honeycomb pattern.
(41:47):
So Rob, I've got a picture for you to look
at in the outline here. But folks at home, you
can google sun cups in snow if you want to
see it. You've probably seen something like this yourself before.
Maybe a little of shaded patch of snow or something
thing lingers for a while, it gets beamed on by
the sun over and over, partially melts and then refreezes,
that kind of thing, and you get these these little
(42:10):
these patterns of cups and depressions in the ice.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, if you live in areas that gets received snowfall,
then you've probably seen this before. You just didn't know
what it was called.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, So Brett's argued you had something like this happening.
This big layer of snow and ice over the top
of this prairie. And then water flowed over the top
of this ice that had had these sun cups forming
in it. So maybe this is from a you know,
maybe a glacial outburst, flood or something. You know, water
(42:40):
flows over the top, and as it flows over the
top of this ice, it deposits sediment such as silt, sand,
and pebbles or gravel in the cups, and this keeps happening.
Over time, the deposits in the sun cups build up
and become quite large. Then the landscape the ice melts away,
(43:02):
so the cups are now gone, leaving only the deposits behind.
So what had once been piles of sediment accumulating in
the bottom of these ice cups now become little hills
with no ice cups. One that I want to mention
that from what I can tell, is not really still
in the mix anymore, but it was historically important was
(43:23):
the frost polygon hypothesis. Apparently in the mid twentieth century,
it was a popular explanation to say that frost polygons
had formed the mounds, and the idea goes like this,
you have frozen soil that cracks in a polygon pattern.
You've again you've probably seen something like this yourself. Actually,
(43:44):
you may have seen images of polygonal cracking in dry
or frozen soil. You think about like soil that gets
wet and then gets parched and dries out, it cracks
in these kind of weird again, kind of honeycomb like pattern.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, this reminds me their actual There are these texture
paints you can get. These are used in the miniature
painting and all, where you lay this sort of thick
paint with like little grains in it. You lay this
out over like the base that a miniature like human
soldier is going to be standing on, and then as
it dries, it actually like breaks up like this. And
(44:21):
it's not necessarily like completely you know, you're not just
saying polygons necessarily, but the way it breaks up, you
get these little gaps and it creates this wonderful effect
where it looks like dried earth.
Speaker 4 (44:33):
Yeah, cool, cracked landscape.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So you can actually have a similar thing to that
happening with icy soil ice that you know, it freezes
and then it cracks and inside these cracks. The idea
wind with the frost polygon hypothesis. Inside these cracks they
would fill with rain water or maybe floodwater. They'd fill
up with water and then freeze again, and so the
(44:57):
freezing would cause the water track in the cracks to
expand each time, because water expands when it freezes, and
this would widen the cracks. So it freezes pushes the
soil away to the sides, and as a result of
this process you get like freezing and then warming, and
then the warming conditions would melt away the ice and
(45:17):
when it flowed away, it would leave these large spaces
in between rounded mounds that had been pushed up by
the expanding frost. Apparently, there was a big geological conference
in the eighties which examined this hypothesis and concluded that
it could not adequately explain at least some of the mounds.
So I think this is not a major contender for
(45:38):
the explanation anymore. Another idea is the vegetation anchoring hypothesis.
The Washington Geological Survey booklet calls this the runoff erosion
(45:59):
roof anchor hypothesis. But the common feature of these explanations
is that there are plants growing on the prairie and
the roots of these plants grip the soil and help
protect it from erosion, and the mounds in this hypothesis
would represent places where plant roots once held the soil together,
(46:21):
while channels were carved around the mounds by surrounding soil erosion. Okay,
then we get another hypothesis. This one's interesting gophers. So
in nineteen forty two, a couple of biologists named Walter
Dohlquest and Victor Scheffer proposed that it could have been
bioturbation by gophers. So how would gophers have built these mounds?
(46:46):
Don't they dig tunnels underground? How would that result in mounds? Well,
the idea goes like this. When gophers dig tunnels, they
displace soil. That soil has to go somewhere, so they
dig out cavities in the earth, and then they throw
the displaced soil into a pile behind them, and this
excavated soil gets packed into a big mound. And these
(47:08):
piles can actually they're not just waste. They can be
useful to the gophers because then when a rainstorm comes,
the gophers now have high ground they can retreat to
to get away from the flood. And if you study
gopher behavior. This hypothesis says gophers actually tend to space
their burrows a fairly reliable distance apart from one another,
(47:32):
though not in exactly like regular patterns or rows. And
this spacing could match up roughly with the spacing and
irregular arrangement of the Mima Mounds.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Okay, so the idea here being yeah, that the Mima
mount spacing is a visual representation of gopher territories.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Yes, and I believe this hypothesis is still in the
mix as well, could be gopher related. Another hypothesis is
glacial outburst flooding. So it's worth mentioning. I think I
said this a little while ago, but the Myma Prairie
is right at the southern edge of where a giant
glacier reached down to about sixteen thousand years ago, and
(48:13):
some researchers think that the Mima Mounds could have been
formed by here. This concept is coming back a glacial
outburst flood from the glacially damned lake known as Lake Carbon.
So around this time this Lake Carbon somehow spilled out
of its containment, it flooded the landscape, and as it
(48:34):
did so, it picked up tons of volcanic rocks and
sediment from the Cascade Mountains and washed them downstream, leaving
them in piles along the path of the flood. Now,
what would be the evidence that the mounds could come
from this event? One thing cited by that Washington Geological
Survey booklet is that you've got mounds in a place
called Rocky Prairie upstream from the area of the Mima
(48:58):
Prairie upstream in the what this flood zone would have been.
And these mounds have more volcanic rocks and bigger rocks,
and then the Mama Prairie mounds downstream have smaller rocks
and smaller, finer sediment. And that pattern, you know, the
bigger rocks upstream, more volcanic rocks, and the smaller sediment downstream,
(49:19):
that would fit with a flood formation mechanism. Also, the
mounds tend to be stretched or elongated parallel to the
direction that this water from the flood would have been flowing.
Though from what I'm reading, I think it's possible that
a glacial flood like this could have shaped mounds, even
if it wasn't the thing that originally formed them.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Okay, one more.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Idea, this is the earthquake hypothesis. This one appeared more recently.
It was put forward by a geologist named Andrew Berg
in nineteen ninety and to illustrate the idea behind it,
you can start with an experiment. If you take a
flat surface like a table or a drumhead or anything
like that, and you spread out an even layer of
(50:03):
fine silt or sand on top of that surface, then
you make the surface vibrate. So maybe you hit the
table or the drumhead repeatedly with a mallet. Causing the
surface to vibrate, will tend to make loose sediment lying
on top of it arrange itself into interesting geometrical patterns.
(50:23):
You might have seen something like this if you've ever
watched these demonstrations of like a sound from a speaker
acting on sand on a flat surface, Like you can
play different frequency tones through a loudspeaker over a drumhead
like surface, and it will make the sand sort itself
into these fascinating geometrical patterns driven by the sound waves.
(50:45):
These arrangements tend to be caused by the interactions the
kind of resonance of different waves going back and forth,
and you get these places where the waves, you know,
they sort of line up and they form these standing peaks,
and then also place is where they cancel each other
out and create these valleys. Anyway, Berg proposed that earthquakes
(51:07):
in the past had caused a similar thing to happen
with loose soil on top of the Mima Prairie. So
interesting idea there too, And ultimately, from what I can tell,
this really is still genuinely a mystery.
Speaker 4 (51:21):
It is not solved.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
Each hypothesis I think has its own defenders and advocates,
but there is not agreement within the scientific community or
the communities involved that like which one is the best explanation.
So this made me curious, like, if you're out there
listening right now, you're a geologist or somebody with some
other relevant expertise, and you want to write in about
(51:43):
which hypothesis seems strongest to you and why, please do
get in touch. Our email is contact at stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
You know, I was looking at this booklet you referenced earlier,
the one for students, and I really enjoyed that the
different hypotheses are presented by a talking gopher name Goodwin,
and good one is very very clear that these are
presented in no particular order of likelihood, so that you
can decide this is a very balanced gopher. And I
(52:12):
appreciate even though one of the ideas concerns gophers, and
you know, you would otherwise be led to think, well, good,
one's going to want to really push the the one
that champions his own species abilities. But no, he's calling
it right down the middle.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
I was thinking that exact thing.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
It's like, oh, we want to have a talking gopher,
but that's going to make it seem like the gopher
hypothesis is the real winner, and we.
Speaker 4 (52:35):
Don't want to imply that. So we've got to say,
you know, we're not favoring any one of these.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
But which one illustrates the easiest, which one potentially speaks
to children better? You know this is this is the
one to go in. So yeah, totally the right direction
for the booklet. Well, that's fascinating. Yet I was not
familiar with these these particular mounds. I've not traveled to
this part of the country before. But if I if
I make it out that way, I'll have to check
(53:01):
these out.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
Well.
Speaker 3 (53:02):
As I said, they're not only in southwestern Washington. There
are Mama like mounds actually in many places throughout North America,
and there are similar formations on other continents as well.
So you can look up maps of Mama like mounds,
you know. There there are places you can see them
all over different regions of the prairie. There's some like
in Texas and other places farther in the Northwest Prairie.
(53:26):
So yeah, there you can look for things like this
in lots of places.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Huh.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
You know.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I just pulled up a map of where one finds
Mima mounds throughout North America, and there are there. They
are in place that you can find them in California.
You can find them in Arizona, various other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana.
So yeah, they're they're out there. I just need a
I need a I need to put them on the itinerary.
Speaker 4 (53:52):
I guess. Yeah. I'd like to see some too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
All right, Well, I think that's all for this episode
on Prayer. We're going to gohea and close out this
this episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out
there again. Anything you have to contribute regarding these topics,
any field reports, be it mound based or prairie vibe based.
You know, certainly write in and we would love to
(54:16):
hear from you, and you know, we'd like to use
at least some of our listener mails in future listener
mail episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You generally
do about one of those a month, maybe sometimes two,
depending on how much, how much is coming in and
what sort of buffers they need to put into the schedule.
Let's see. As always, we would just remind everyone out there,
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
(54:37):
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (54:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(55:36):
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