Most of us can remember the school maps of our own youth, showing a vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great American Desert," which was considered hopeless for any human industry, but much of which has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the globe.
Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which carried the first idea of their infertility.

When the first settlers of Illinois and Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of timber and prairie lands.

Thinking the prairies worthless--since land which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops--these first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms.

The prairies were long in settling.

No one then could have predicted that farm lands in that region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or better, and that these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would, in a few generations, be studded with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the world.
But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri, found valueless the region of the Plains and the foothills, not so the wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than science records.