Away
from the streams, sloughs, and the marshlands, on the drier parts of
the San Joaquin Valley floor, was the vast Valley Grassland plant
community, the California version of our nation’s Midwestern
prairies.
Away
from the streams, sloughs, and the marshlands, on the drier parts of
the San Joaquin Valley floor, was the vast Valley Grassland plant
community, the California version of our nation’s Midwestern
prairies.
These grasslands were very attractive to European settlers who used them first for cattle and sheep grazing, then for dry land wheat farming and later for irrigated agriculture.
The original Valley
Grassland was covered with clumps of native bunch grasses - wild
ryes, bluegrass's, melicgrass, needlegrasses, deergrass and perennial
bromes. Their tall stems would turn green each spring and seeds
ripened on the summer-gold plants. These drought-resistant grasses
were grazed by the wandering herds of pronghorn antelope and tule
elk. Kangaroo rats, mice, gophers, ground squirrels, birds and
insects harvested their seeds.
The domestic sheep brought by settlers favored the bunch grasses and cropped it short in their typical manner of grazing. The bunch grasses suffered from the concentrated grazing and trampling of sheep and cattle herds and were not able to compete with the European annual grasses accidentally brought to California by Spanish explorers. The annuals grew quickly and produced many seeds that did well in the soil disturbed by the hooves of domestic stock. These new plants often had barbed seeds and were carried by animals; in this way new colonies could get started in the open spaces that existed between the clumps of native grasses.
By the late 1800s, all of the original bunch grass land was gone from Kings County. A few remnants are preserved in other parts of the state.
Native wildflowers grew in great abundance in the grasslands. Owl’s clover, cream cups, bird’s-eye gilia, popcorn flowers, lupine and poppies made dazzling spring displays of color that were noted by the earliest visitors to the San Joaquin Valley.
With the demise of the
grasslands, the competition of European grasses and weeds, and
plowing for crops, the native wildflowers were greatly reduced on the
floor
of the Valley.
There are patches of alkaline soil on the Valley floor that are home to a plant community called Alkali Sink. Only plants that can tolerate its special soil conditions can grow there. Saltgrass is one; various saltbushes (Atriplex) and plants with names like seep-weed, iodine bush and alkali heather are others. Some of this alkali sink plant community can still be seen in Kings County.
Jack rabbits, ground
squirrels, kangaroo rats and other rodents, doves, horned larks,
meadowlarks, lizards and snakes were common animals of both grassland
types. Hawks, eagles, falcons, ravens, burrowing owls and coyotes
hunted these smaller animals. Birds and insects adapted to these dry
lands were abundant. For the settlers, some of these animals were
pests because they competed with the farmer f
or
his crops. Jack rabbits were hunted and trapped in large 
numbers
for many years.
Pronghorn antelopes, which numbered more than one million in 1850, were hunted for the market and the last one in the San Joaquin Valley was killed in the 1920s. Tule elk, the largest grazing animal in the Valley, declined from 500,000 in the 1850s because of the hide and fur trade, market hunting, diseases from domestic livestock and removal by settlers. Several herds exist on refuges. They are all descendants of the single remaining pair found in Kern County in the 1920s.
(Among
the sources used were: Bakker, An Island Called California and
Holing, California Wild Lands.)
Text and photo acquired by: Joyce Hall
