The buffalo roam again
Buried deep within America's empty heartland lies North Dakota: remote, inhospitable, a state in crisis. But as its human inhabitants give up on the plains and move out, the original settlers are on their way back. Matthew Engel reports

Outside the town of Rugby, North Dakota, just south of the Canadian border, is the geographical centre of the North American continent: the very middle of middle America. This is not a region that easily lends itself to extremes or superlatives. But North Dakota does boast the World's Tallest Structure, the KVLY-TV tower near Blanchard, which is more than a third of a mile high. And on a hillside at New Salem, it has the World's Largest Holstein Cow - a statue, you understand. ("Enjoy the view from New Salem Sue.") And on a bluff by Interstate-94 at Jamestown is a similar statue: the World's Largest Buffalo, 26 feet high, weighing 60 tonnes, and positioned in a way that suggests it is about to dump the World's Largest Buffalo Dropping in the direction of passing humanity. This might be appropriate because something remarkable is going on in North Dakota, perhaps the least-known but most troubled state in the union.

A century and a quarter after the white man colonised the place and drove the native Americans and the buffalo to the edge of oblivion, the roles are being reversed. The Europeans are facing extinction, and the ancient inhabitants may reclaim the land. The great cinematographic story of the American west has reached its end and is being rewound. From here, the inexorable spread of white people across this land now looks less like Manifest Destiny than a failed experiment, a brief historical aberration, what the geographer Frank Popper calls "the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history".
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