The prairie grasses also withered under the onslaught of larger and larger herds of grazing cattle. Whereas the earliest settlers had had to plant their crops in the alluvial lands around the rivers and creeks, the steel plow, developed by John Deere in the 1840s and 1850s, freed them to cultivate the prairies. The grasses and other vegetation that had been on the prairies, so deeply rooted that they were virtually invulnerable to the plows the early settlers used, had started to lose their grip on the land.
Newspaper Archive Colorado County, Texas.
