Before European Settlers pushed into this area, the dominate land cover in the High Island Creek Watershed was part of the extensive North America tall-grass prairie. At one time as the greatest stretch of grassland in the United States, the prairie once extended from the Appalachians in the East to the Rocky Mountains in the West, from Texas northward into southern Manitoba. Three types of prairie made up the North America grasslands - tall-grass prairie, mixed prairie and short-grass prairie.

Tall-grass prairie is known for its diversity of flowers and grasses, as well as adopting to periodical drought conditions. To get a handle of the amazing characteristics of the tall-grass prairie, you need to look underneath the surface. A single square yard of prairie plants can have roots measuring 20 miles in length. By creating this complex system of sod, plants grow roots several yards deep to get at the stored water of earlier rainfalls.

American Indians lived off the prairie with its combination of mammals, in particular the Bison and edible and medicinal plants. Fire was a major factor in how this landscape maintained it's prairie characteristics. "It is a spectacle one is never tired of looking at: half the horizon appeared like an advancing sea of fire, with dense clouds of smoke flying towards the moon, which was then shinning brightly," wrote George W. Featherstonhaugh in 1835.

European settlers turned this complex system upside down by plowing up the prairie to plant crops like wheat and corn. "Such soil, only to sink the plow into it, to turn over the sod - and there was a field ready for seeding," recorded one early settler.

Today little of the native tall-grass prairie exists, with less than 5% in the High Island Creek Watershed. After being plowed up or converted into pasture, less than 4% of the original grasslands remains. In Minnesota, the prairie once covered 18 million acres compared to only 15,000 acres today.