Steppes

No, this is not a misprint. This post isn't about steps, staircases, or steps to complete a task.

Instead, steppes are wide open spaces where important things happen.

So let's take a deep breath, and enjoy the great outdoors and the beauty of the steppes.

Steppe on over

A steppe is a flat, wide-open space that is too dry to be a forest but not dry enough to be a desert. Away from lakes or rivers, the only plants are grass and small shrubs.

Steppe of Patagonia, Argentina by James Cadwell.^*

So what was it like to live on the steppes? The wide-open land promoted a nomadic life, with communities that followed the movement of the animals they hunted. Because of this, they became experts with the horse, many being able to shoot an arrow while riding. This made them hard to defeat until the invention of the gun.

To be sure, steppes are hardly a household term, but they are found worldwide and play an important role in history and our lives today. A couple of the more well-known examples will help make the point.

The great American steppe

The first is the steppes of North America, usually called the prairie.

In the early days of the westward expansion, pioneers saw this great steppe as a great nothing, a "great American desert" to get through on the way to a good place along the Pacific coast, California or Oregon. In time, these steppes (aka, the prairie) were found to be excellent farmland. Much of this has become known as the "breadbasket" of America and, indeed, the world.

This prairie is vast, stretching along with the height of the United States and into Canada. Here it's known as the Canadian Prairies.

Map of the Great Plains

Like other steppe-dwellers, the native tribes living here before the arrival of white settlers (the Comanche, Crow, Blackfoot, just to name a few) wandered with the herds and were excellent at using horses.

The Eurasian steppe

This steppe stretches along the southern part of Russia, starting in Europe and going across Asia.

The turquoise-blue shading shows the steppe.

The animals here are primarily small critters, but there can be bigger ones, including bison and the Tarpan – an extinct type of horse.

Photo of last known Tarpan, taken in 1884.

These wide-open spaces have played such a huge role in history. From here we get the Huns, a fierce tribe that learned on the steppes to be expert horsemen. Their skill on the horse meant they could literally ride around the foot soldiers they fought with. When they encountered the Romans, they were just as successful on the battlefield as they were at pillaging Roman villages.

Painting depicted the Huns by Rochegrosse. (with some slight editing)

These steppes also provided a good defense for Russia with its vast openness and brutal winter. Both Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th found sending armies across the steppes incredibly difficult. Men in their German Panzers (tanks) remembered getting mentally worn out with the absolute boredom of the land. Day after day, they saw nothing but the same flat, open land followed by more of the same flat, open land.

It's a great natural defense, a big, flat castle.

Indeed, life is interesting. One usually thinks that the course of human events depends on the laws passed by congress or discoveries made in labs somewhere. While all this is true, don't discount the role wide open spaces play.

Great books

Little House on the Prairie

This classic children's book series is bound to entertain the whole family with life on the prairie (steppes) of frontier America. Not quite an autobiography; instead, it's a semi-fictionalized story of her life.

*Shared through creative commons license 4.0.

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