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Lecture three addressed European exploration of the plains. Starting with Spanish explorers, moving to French and American exploration, and finally British-Canadian explorers on the plains. Each nationality had a different reaction to the plains. The Spanish felt at home on a land that so much like Spain’s, but the plains didn’t hold what they were looking for (mineral wealth). The fur trading French wanted to cross the plains, but had no desire to settle in the Great American Desert.

Lecture three also covered the ever popular Corps of Discovery, exploration by Americans into what had once been French land. Each explorer or group of explorers had different reactions to the land. Zebulon Pike described it as “like the Sahara of Africa,” and it was, supposedly, the explorer Stephen Long who coined the phrase “the Great American Desert”. Little attention was paid to the plains, other than by traders just passing through, until the Canadian discovery of fertile land in the northern plains.

The other day at work, I was asked to help our office’s German intern think of a better word than “wilderness” to describe North Dakota. One of the GRHC’s employees had argued with him that North Dakota was not a wilderness, but he insisted that while duck hunting the weekend before he had been in the wilds of this state. In the heat of the argument he shouted, “North Dakota is a desert!” Which everyone laughed at, but got me thinking.

At the end of lecture three, we were introduced to the idea that maybe when the plains were called the Great American Desert, it was referring to how “deserted” it was not physical features. And maybe this is what my German intern friend was thinking when he called North Dakota a wild desert. While hunting, he had most likely walked a long distance seeing little other than grass, fields, ducks, and the others he was hunting with. He saw North Dakota as deserted, similar to what early explorers had also seen.