grama

To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama...the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews. Its other name is “buffalo grass”; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the most nutritious varieties of cattle fodder, and for hundreds of miles the emigrant drover’s only dependence.