The vanishing prairie/priairie golf; The cowboy way or 'City Slickers'?

[RJ_Daley]

While contemplating Adam's post about the Prairie Club and the bagpipers, I started surfing the subject a wee bit to explore the subject.  Of course, we've had this discussion before related to golf course development in the outer zones of our national treasured  undeveloped land, within enclaves of local provincial custom and culture.  No doubt there will always be a clash of those urban business and professional warriors seaching for an "unplugged" get-away, and those few but noble local residents of the 'fly over' natural environs who live in a dwindling lifestyle culture that seems to them to be vanishing more each year.  I stumbled into an artilce written by a heretofore unknown to me "golf writer" Ray A. March, with the overall theme and a portion of which looks directly at the clash of the phenomenon of prairie golf with cowboy culture: 

http://www.greatbasinweb.com/march/golf_and_cowboy.html

As I wrote on Adam's post about Prairie Club, I was enthusiastic about the idea of bringing a faux cowboy entertainment culture to the overall experience of one's stay at the Prairie Club.  And, as I said there, it sort of occured to me while sharing an evening of a few hard drinks and firepit sitting with some fellow "city slicker" friends at Sutton Bay. 

But, writer March really gets into the otherside of the culture clash.  If you take time to read it through, I must say that I personally fall within the bounds of the thinking Stewart Udall expressed.  I think a great need exists to preserve or pay reverance to 'the cowboy way', and more to the point, the hard earned values of the land stewartship lessons that springs from the western prairie culture ranchers.  Yet, unrelenting presssure to provide the 'faux cowboy experience" via a familiar vehicle of most 'city slickers' being their golf, has come to the west in forms of Sand Hills GC, Rock Creek, BallyNeal, now Prairie Club, and more to come.  They join the more egregious (to the western land preservationists) whole-golf community enclaves of second homesites, and mega development.  Personally, apparently like Udall, I think there has to be a tolerance and respect to balance the two semmingly incompatible cultures. 

If I read Dr. Trimble correctly in my one chance to meet and talk to him, I think he had this Udall sort of compromise of cultures and using some of the land to preserve the greater amount of the natural environment in mind.

[RJ_Daley]

Excerting a bit from March's article:

I (March) am listening for clues, symbols of unrest that will give meaning to the issues of today, not yesterday. And then he (Michael Martin Murphey) sings his protest song.

Ride rangeland rebel
Ride over the land
Ride to beat the devil
Ride for your own brand
Now gather around cowboys
Saddle up a good horse
And ride for your land
Before it’ll be a golf course
Before they tear down the mountains
And cover the trail
You won’t find the bean counters
When the banks start to fail

Murphey closes his performance with a light humored reference to his willingness to sing more “songs of sedition,” and the audience laughs just as lightly and he exits stage right.

Now gather around cowboys
Saddle up a good horse
And ride for your land
Before it’ll be a golf course

Ride for your land before it’ll be a golf course. Is this blasphemy? Anarchy? No, it’s a metaphor for verse with a ring of truth that a cowboy singer feels deep down. Golf and the land. We’re losing our land, not just our rangeland but our open space, our foothills, our shorelines, our natural grasses, trees. All ours. Golf has become synonymous with greed, and here’s a cowboy who sees the truth in the metaphor. On the inside cover of Murphey’s “Cowboy Songs Four” he expands the obvious in his protest song.

“The rebels of the range always deal with the same problem. Outsiders move in with a different agenda, often ignoring the needs of the ecosystem. We must resist the temptation to sell out our rangelands for short term greed. The rangelands’ health depends on adequate numbers of grazing animals. Cattle are the only animals capable of grazing in significant numbers in the foreseeable future, although bison are slowly on the rise. Subdivisions are ruining the range. Trophy homes in resorts sit empty most of the time, creating a ghost town atmosphere.”

Later Murphey goes on to say he is a golfer himself.  But, there is the angry side of the arguement of golf develpment on the western prairie.  And, therein is the conflicted man himself.  Murphey speaks later of the difference in the "golf community" taking up so much land and resources of homesites and space, compared with the "muni" located in a western town enviroment.

Once again, I fall within the compromise position I read into Udall's statements.  Places like SHGC, BallyNeal, Dismal River, Prairie Club are pushing the space and resources of a bit of a seaonal self contained community which go beyond the meager needs of the 'muni' model.  Yet, there are jobs provided to some extent, and if one of these projects fail, and the land reverts back to grazing, aside from the cottages and clubhouses, will you even know a golf course was out there? It is not like they are spilling oil or toxins.  (no, I don't believe that the inputs of the golf course have any long term environmental effects on that ground water or in any other way)

Anyway, on a rainy day, this is golf stuff I was thinking about, while contemplating my favorite golf area, and the choices and possibilites offered there, while trying to be sensitive to the real culture that existed long before a golf ball was ever sent flying across the priairie.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Anyway, on a rainy day, this is golf stuff I was thinking about, while contemplating my favorite golf area, and the choices and possibilites offered there, while trying to be sensitive to the real culture that existed long before a golf ball was ever sent flying across the priairie.

How far back will you be going RJ? 

[RJ_Daley]

Jim, I once read somewhere that a fellow was going through some old original sodbuster's farmstead or ranch sheds in Nebraska where it was documented that among the old found stuff were artifacts brought by that original sodbuster on his wagon train immigration to the priairie.  There within his stuff, was a golf club identified and authentically dated circa 1860s Scotland crafted.  I think the sodbuster was one of those Kearney Irish Alps guys.  And, I'm pretty sure he pre-dated Mr. Youngscapp as the golf vanguard of Nebraska, by a few years. 

[Ken Moum]

RJ,

I spent 23 years working, living and recreating less than 30 miles from Sutton Bay. I even spent many hours on the public land above and adjacent to where the golf course is now located, hunting geese, grouse and pheasants.

My in laws are almost all in the ranching business in western South Dakota.

And all i can say is that you've been fed a myth.

Ed Abbey had it right in his essay "Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats," 25 years ago:

The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. - Edward Abbey, Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats - Cowboys, Ranchers and the Ruin of the West, Harpers 272 (January 1986)

That was originally delivered as a commencement speech at the University of Montana. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10932

I love my inlaws, they are damned good people.  I respect them for their ability to survive in a part of the country where most of those city slickers you're talking about would die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the first winter. I know that they care a lot about wildlife, and wild lands, but the simple fact is they and their neighbors have never had the wherewithal to actually do much of anything except take every last bit of juice from the land.

When it doesn't rain--which is all-too common--they graze their land, and any public liand they have access to, into submission. They are not unlike the superintendent at a ultra-high-end facility who is forced by circumstnaces to overwater, over apply plant protectants, and generally foul things up.

Our western plains have wildlife and water and in spite of the cowboys, not because of them.

One more quote from Abbey:

Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared,
disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.

I realize that doesn't have squat to do with golf on the prairie, but it's one of my favorite quotes of all time.

More germane to your point, golf--and such other activities--might be one of the things that will prevent all that territory from becoming Buffalo Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Commons).  I was in SD working for a resource management agency when the Poppers first espoused the idea, and you'd have thought they had suggested making the Great Plains a toxic waste dump.

Today, when the only way most of the ranchers can survive is by plowing up vast acreages of grasslands, or sending their wife to a job in town, or by having thousands of acres of Federal lands that they pay almost nothing for, maybe a golf course isn't such abad idea.

K

[Ryan Farrow]

RJ,

Have you watched the documentary on HBO called Gasland?  I have read quite a few articles about the affects, or lack there of, of golf courses and the groud water/environment. As the Mid West continues to boom with natural gas wells, a golf course might seem like a welcome relief to some. It amazes me to see the scrutiny a golf course project incurs but the biggest offenders are all too often ignored. That is, untill people find out the water coming out of their faucets is extremely flammable. I would venture to say that the majority of population in the US would say golf courses have a greater negative impact on the environment than drilling for Natural Gas.

Now wouldn't everything be a lot easier for the golf industry if the Bush administration exempted golf courses from the Clean Water act, just as they did for Natural Gas Drilling and "Fracking".   


As far as the cowboy culture goes, we lived and worked on the ranch while building Rock Creek Cattle Club. There definitely was some resentment in the community about the outsiders coming  in, and there have been a few articles written about the topic specifically. We experience the same thing while working in China. But it seems the people who actually work on these projects and pour in their sweat and tears are really proud of what they built. I'd like to think that these developments help everyone in some way or another. I certainly don't think it is just the "elite" who benefit from a golf course project..... if it did, then I don't think I would still be working in this industry.

[Jason Hines]

Ted is here to save us from ourselves....

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004041411_tedland29.html

[Ken Moum]

Ted is here to save us from ourselves....

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004041411_tedland29.html

Hell, someone has to buy it... At least he wasn't planning to plow it up and plant subsidized wheat on it.

IMHO, the biggest problem with the Californication of the Great Plains is that folks like Turner think they can lock gates that have been open for a 100 years.  Out there, sometimes the only way to get someplace--like your land--is on a two-track trail across someone else's land.

K

[Jason Hines]

Ted is here to save us from ourselves....

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004041411_tedland29.html

Hell, someone has to buy it... At least he wasn't planning to plow it up and plant subsidized wheat on it.

IMHO, the biggest problem with the Californication of the Great Plains is that folks like Turner think they can lock gates that have been open for a 100 years.  Out there, sometimes the only way to get someplace--like your land--is on a two-track trail across someone else's land.

K

More power to him and his neighbors, it’s up to them, not us what they do with their land.

You cannot plant wheat or corn in the sand hills, the seedlings get sawed off with blowing sand when they emerge.

At least that is what I was told as a young whipper snapper going to and from bag pipe lessons in Central Nebraska.   (sorry, stole that from a different thread)

[RJ_Daley]

Ken, Ryan and Jason, thanks for engaging in the discussion.  You all make some great points for me and others to consider. 

Ken, I would say that I don't exactly subscribe to any particular myth that I'm aware of...    Unless you are referring to what I felt was the best approach suggested to bridge the gap of preservationists and the western priairie golf development folks, which was described obliquely by Udall as I read March's article.  I get how you wrote of "some" ranchers and long time land owner/ agricultural interests of those areas talking out of two sides of their mouth about preservation while their own practices are detrimental.  Yet, I also got the distinct impression from Dr. Trimble, that he was keenly aware and sensitive to those very issues.  I'm of the understanding that Mr Youngscapp is also well informed and considerate to those issues.

For instance, as a practicle matter, they had to have barbed wire separating pastures on his land where Prairie Club would be in part sited.  But, they rotated the grazing with care and conservationist considerations, did not burn the vegitation out.  In my limitted tour of his land, and with my limitted actual understanding of the practices and effect they employed, I did not see anything on Trimble's land to suggest mismanagement or over use.  When I was there at the height of the drought, the pastures looked healthy and not burned out to me.

Yes, I see the feed lots dotting the area (can't hardly have a cattle grazing industry out there without them, I don't believe), and they have a defininte detrimental effect with stink and runoff to the extent the sandy nature of the area doesn't perc the material.  I"m sure not an expert in the groundwater long term effect, but am given to suspect that the deep sandy nature of the area is an adequte filter.  I sure could be missinformed on that.  As for the golf impact, going back to the old New England ground water studies, I'm of the opinion that the impacts are and were overstated in the 80s, and those studies sort of brought more understanding than fear to the discussion.  Certainly, western sand hills deep sand profiles far outpercs and cleans than the New England nature of soils.

When we are talking about the typical grassland prairie, I don't think that siting some <100 acres under actual turf managment at one of these courses as significantly harmful to the 100s of 1000s of those srrounding acres.  I generally understand the use of the aquafer capacity, but also think that a high cap ag well on pivots uses the same general amount as one course, and there are a whole lot more of them than praire golf courses.  With all the recent rain, water levels in the aquifer will return from the periodic drought episode, it seems to me.

If good rationale can be demonstrated to the hard core western land and culture preservationists, I think the Udall sit-down and discuss the merits of compromise is the inevitable way of the future policy making in this region.