Prairie Cordgrass

Prairie cordgrass, when young, is good grazing for livestock, and it is also acceptable for hay, if cut before the tough stems form. Older plants are too tough to be used for forage.

Many writers have described the sharp teeth along the margins of the leaves. John Madsen, in Where the Sky Began, said the serrations had “a stiff wire edge like a good butcher knife. Before I learned to wear gloves while cutting mature sloughgrass for dog bedding, I used to wonder who was harvesting whom.” He continued, “When cured, however, it’s useful for livestock bedding because it doesn’t break down easily. I’ve never found anything better for a dog kennel. All in all, useful stuff.”

Today, people cultivate prairie cordgrass in rain gardens or near ponds and in places where they want to prevent erosion, such as on wet slopes and along streams. This tough native grass forms large colonies and holds the soil well.

With only a little practice, you can learn to see this species from a distance. Early prairie settlers knew that if prairie cordgrass was growing in an area, then that area was prone to flooding, and the heavy, wet soils beneath the cordgrass would be unsuitable for plowing. People driving wagons avoided places where they could see cordgrass growing, to avoid squishy wet soils that could bog down their wheels.

Prairie cordgrass, however, was very useful for settlers. In addition to using it as livestock forage and hay, they learned from Native Americans how to use cordgrass for thatching roofs and keeping the rain off of haystacks and corncribs.

Perhaps the most important use for prairie cordgrass was for human habitation. In the middle of the once-vast, treeless expanse of America’s Great Plains, pioneers had very little wood for construction. Many people built homes out of prairie sod, and cordgrass sod was a favorite: it forms a dense, interconnected mass of tough, woody rhizomes. Settlers cut the sod into 1-by-2-foot rectangles and used these like adobe bricks to construct homes with weatherproof walls two feet thick. These were cavelike and cool in the summer and insulated enough to retain heat in the winter. The pole-framed, lightly sodded roof was often finished with a thatch of cordgrass. The sod houses, or soddies, of the early prairie settlers are a memorable chapter in American history. When trains arrived, people had access to lumber, and new sod construction ended. But people still lived in them into the 20th century, and some examples still survive; some are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Missouri author Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of living in a sod home in the 1870s in her autobiographical novel On the Banks of Plum Creek. She described that home, located near Walnut Grove, in southwestern Minnesota, calling it a "dugout." She does not specify that prairie cordgrass was a major component of the sod home, but the species is common in Minnesota and was probably among the plants whose tough root systems created the front wall and roof of the home.

In lands with very few trees, what did the early prairie settlers use for fuel? They (or, more likely, their children) twisted the tough, woody stalks of cordgrass together into bundles and burned these in stoves for cooking and warmth. In cold northern states and provinces, the toughest and woodiest prairie grasses were stockpiled for possible use for winter heating.

Researchers are studying prairie cordgrass as a possible source for biofuel.