The Great Plains

The plains were home to many nations: farming peoples such as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara in earth-lodge villages along the Missouri, and the Pawnee, Omaha, Osage, Kansa and Wichita further south, while the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and Kiowa became mounted bison hunters after horses spread north from Spanish New Mexico. French traders founded St. Louis in 1764, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred the area to the United States. Lewis and Clark set out up the Missouri in 1804 and wintered among the Mandan in North Dakota.

Missouri entered the Union as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and Kansas became a battleground between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in the 1850s. Wagon trails to Oregon, California and Santa Fe began around Independence and Westport, now part of Kansas City. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the railways brought farmers, and the slaughter of the bison herds and a series of wars broke the Plains nations. The Black Hills, promised to the Lakota by treaty in 1868, were seized after gold was found; the US Supreme Court later ruled that the taking required compensation, but the Lakota have refused the money awarded. The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation is one of its darkest episodes.

Oklahoma was Indian Territory, where the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole were forcibly resettled, before land runs opened it to settlers from 1889. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 destroyed the Black district of Greenwood, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s drove many families west. The Brown v. Board of Education case, which ended legal school segregation in 1954, began in Topeka, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people.

This is farm and small-town country, where county fairs, rodeos, church suppers and high-school sport hold communities together and a wave from passing drivers is still common. German, Scandinavian, Czech and Irish settlers left their mark; German-Russian Mennonite immigrants brought winter wheat to Kansas, and Mennonite and Lutheran churches remain strong. Iowa's caucuses give the state a role in presidential politics, and Nebraska is the only state with a single-chamber legislature.

Native nations are a central part of the region. Oklahoma is home to 38 federally recognised tribes, including the Cherokee Nation, headquartered in Tahlequah, and in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Muscogee (Creek) reservation had never been dissolved for the purposes of federal criminal law. The Lakota reservations of South Dakota, including Pine Ridge and Rosebud, hold powwows through the summer.

Music has deep roots: Kansas City jazz, with Count Basie and Charlie Parker; St. Louis blues; the ragtime of Scott Joplin in Sedalia; and western swing from Tulsa. Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. College football is followed with devotion, from Nebraska's Memorial Stadium to Norman, Oklahoma, and August brings the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to the Black Hills.

About 21 million people live in these seven states, many in a handful of metropolitan areas. Oklahoma City, with about 700,000 residents, is the largest city; Kansas City has around 510,000 and a metropolitan area straddling the Missouri–Kansas border, while St. Louis has about 300,000 in the city proper but a much larger metropolitan area. Omaha, Tulsa, Wichita, Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Fargo are other important centres.

Agriculture dominates the land: Iowa leads the nation in corn and raises more hogs than people, Kansas is known as the Wheat State, and Nebraska and the Dakotas raise cattle, soybeans and wheat. Wind turbines now line many ridges, and Iowa gets a large share of its electricity from them. Oil and gas matter in Oklahoma and in North Dakota's Bakken field. Omaha is home to Berkshire Hathaway and Union Pacific, Des Moines to insurers, and Wichita to aircraft makers.

Farming is increasingly mechanised and consolidated, and many rural counties have been losing people for decades while meatpacking towns attract immigrant workers. Drought, the falling water table of the Ogallala Aquifer and deep poverty on some reservations are long-running concerns.

Kansas City barbecue is the regional emblem: slow-smoked meats under a thick, sweet tomato and molasses sauce, with burnt ends — the charred tips of smoked brisket — as the signature. St. Louis has its own list: toasted ravioli, which are breaded and fried; thin, cracker-crust pizza topped with Provel, a processed blend of cheeses; gooey butter cake; frozen custard; and grilled pork steaks. The city is also the home of Anheuser-Busch.

German-Russian settlers brought the runza or bierock, a bread pocket filled with beef, cabbage and onion, to Nebraska and Kansas, along with North Dakota's knoephla, a creamy dumpling soup, and South Dakota's kuchen, a custard-filled fruit cake. South Dakota also claims chislic, fried cubes of meat on skewers, and frybread, a Native American staple, is its official state bread. Iowa is known for sweet corn, breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches and loose-meat sandwiches of seasoned ground beef.

Oklahoma's official state meal includes chicken-fried steak, a breaded and fried beefsteak with cream gravy, alongside fried okra, barbecue pork, cornbread and pecan pie. Steaks from grain-fed plains beef, bison burgers and walleye from northern lakes appear on menus throughout the region.

South Dakota's Black Hills hold Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the Crazy Horse Memorial still being carved nearby, the bison herds and Needles Highway of Custer State Park, Wind Cave National Park and the old gold town of Deadwood. To the east, Badlands National Park's eroded ridges line the Badlands Loop Road, with Wall Drug just outside. North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, with Painted Canyon and the cowboy town of Medora, preserves the badlands of the Little Missouri River.

Nebraska's Sandhills, a vast area of grass-stabilised dunes, cover the north-centre of the state, while the Platte River hosts spring crane migration and the pioneer landmarks of Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff rise in the west. Omaha has the Henry Doorly Zoo. Kansas offers the Flint Hills and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, cowboy-era Dodge City and the Brown v. Board of Education site in Topeka. Iowa has the Field of Dreams film site at Dyersville, the Amana Colonies and Effigy Mounds on the Mississippi bluffs.

Kansas City has the National WWI Museum and Memorial, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the jazz district of 18th and Vine with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. St. Louis has the Gateway Arch, Forest Park and the Missouri Botanical Garden, and southern Missouri the Ozarks and Branson's theatres. In Oklahoma, Route 66 runs through Tulsa and Oklahoma City past the round barn at Arcadia; Oklahoma City has the National Memorial and Museum, Bricktown and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and Tulsa the Greenwood Rising history centre. The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge lies to the south-west.