The rich and complex story of one of the most astonishing alterations of nature in human history is told in this film. Prior to Euro-American settlement in the 1820s, one of the major landscape features of North America was 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie. But between 1830 and 1900 – in the span of a single lifetime – the prairie was steadily transformed to farmland. This drastic change in the landscape brought about an enormous social change for Native Americans. In an equally short time, their cultural imprint was reduced in essence to a handful of place-names appearing on maps.