Bouncing across a scene, tumbleweed establish the Wild West as Western.
But more than just props, tumbleweed are real and tumbleweed are alive.
Well, they were alive.
Each tumbleweed starts as a tiny seed on the craggy landscape.
Putting down roots, up branches, opening flowers,
and, through the miracle of life, birthing seeds.
Itty bitty baby tumbles-to-be.
Now, dropping these seeds straight down
won't give the tumble tots their best head start,
so what's a parent plant to do but sacrifice their life for their children?
To intentionally starve themselves, to die, and to dry,
to catch the wind, to shuffle off this mortal coil,
to bounce across the land, to chance their children to find fertile ground,
to root, to sprout, to grow, to flower, to continue the circle of life.
It's beautiful, really.
These humble tumble rolling across the West
in search of empty land to colonize
are as iconically West as Westerners westerning.
Because neither are natives.
Before the 1800s there were no homesteaders and no tumbleweed in the West.
Tumbleweed are an invasive species, and a deeply unwelcome one.
It's time to get real about the Trouble with Tumbles.
Now, you might be thinking
If the West is mostly empty and tumbleweed arrived and survived...
What's the big deal? They're kind of nice.
And you know what, you're right, kind of.
Tumbles are like snow, a little is charming.
But a lot is a problem.
And a lot a lot, dangerous.
Tumbleweed stick to things, and each other.
One stuck tumble becomes two, ten, a tumulus.
The American interior has vast swaths of land,
and after a tumble terrain takeover,
one big windstorm can drown a village under thousands of the things,
with people quickly finding their roads,
and vehicles, and even homes inaccessible.
If you've never seen tumbles on the move,
or the aftermath of that, it's unreal.
And though a tumble drift looks like a brown snow drift,
this snow is full of thorns.
If you're thinking of a rose, think again.
On tumbles, it's all thorns.
Brittle to to break off in your skin, or horse-kin, where it can fester.
Clearing tumbleweed isn't just painful but also infuriating:
a tumbleweed drift is both bouncy and sticky.
You're going to have to fork them, one at a time.
Tedious at best. Sisyphean at worst.
You might want to use industrial equipment, but be careful.
Tumbleweed are shockingly flammable.
Dry and airy but still branch dense they are min-maxed kindling.
A tumbleweed will go up in flames way fast and burns way hot.
More on that later.
But even if you manage to clear the town
and all the open land around the town,
a single missed seed contains the next tumble torrent.
For while many plants use flowers to attract bees
to cross-pollinate and reproduce, not tumbles.
Their flowers have nothing for bees.
Instead exploding pollen directly into the wind
(hope you don't have allergies)
to cross pollinate.
And tumbles don't need two to tango. A lone tumbleweed can fu-pollinate itself.
So that single missed seed will grow up to be a tumblin' weed
containing tens of thousands of seeds,
hundreds of thousands if it gets large enough.
A single tumble tumbling to town one year
leaves a tumble trail the next,
and an exponential explosion thereafter.
And then there's the danger to agriculture.
Which brings us to the start of this.
A time before tumbleweed in America.
And a time before homesteading.
It's the 1800's and the start of Westerners westerning.
Building their first farms and tiny towns.
Growing enough food to feed the adolescent nation was vital.
Nearly everyone's job had to be farming.
And the newly created Department of Agriculture had the job
of writing pro-tips on how best to do that,
along with collecting seeds and samples from the new continent.
Which is how all was normal, until one day a letter arrived for DOA.
(as South Dakota) Heeeeeey, there's this a tumblin' weed giving us some trouble.
Can you come take a gander?
(as Grey) And so she did.
Arriving to find South Dakota in bad shape.
A weedy infection rapidly developing, damaging the food supply.
These new weeds stole ground nutrients for themselves
before crops could even be planted,
or they would grow in between crops choking them out.
During harvest they hurt the draft animals
and clogged or broke the newly mechanized farm equipment.
Early estimates were crop losses of 20% because of the tumbles.
DOA tried to constrain the situation using education:
Wanted: Tumbleweed.
Kill on sight.
AKA Prickly Thistle
AKA Kali Tragus
AKA The Wind Witch
AKA The Russian Thistle.
This, by the way, is the motherland where the species is native.
And from where crop seed contaminated with tumbleseed probably came.
To arrive in South Dakota on perhaps a single farm to start the infection.
Which grew worse by the year.
And the Department of Agriculture's efforts to stop it were futile.
Way too much land. Far too few people.
Worse, this new land was tumble-topia (and still is).
See this run of rectangle states?
It's the Great Plains, abutting the Great American Desert.
An enormous stretch of land: flat, open, windy.
South Dakota's neighbors had no chance, nor neighbor's neighbors.
From patient zero: BOOM!
By the turn of the century, the tumbleweed infection covered the interior,
eventually spreading north to Canada and south down to Mexico.
America's mountains were a barrier for a while,
until tumbleweed hitched a ride on the
trains that had freshly connected the continent,
jaunting over the mountains west and east
to establish themselves in every spare pocket of empty land.
Oh dear.
But it gets better.
Back to fires, specifically prairie fires.
A nice big field of dry wheat is just begging to burst into flames.
The only early tech to stop fires was to build fire breaks,
physically stopping the flames with neat, straight,
vitally empty stretches of land the fire could not cross.
But more perfect tunnels for tumbles you could not make.
Even if the fire breaks were kept clear,
fire makes its own wind, sucking in cold air from
ground level to blow out hot, up and over.
Thus, transforming tumbles into fireballs to breach the break.
So started the first volley in the War on Tumbleweed.
But for the Department of Agriculture
to eradicate the infection from the interior farmland and towns
where they did the most damage
would mean not only catching every weed and seed
across a third of a continent
with the cooperation of two annoyed international neighbors,
but also finding every patch of infection across the mountains in the other two thirds.
An impossible task.
So, uh, that's why tumbleweed are still here.
And have been around for so long and in such numbers.
People forget there was ever a before time.
But not the United States Department of Agriculture.
From the 1800s to 1900s,
to 2000s, still trying to rid America of the weed.
But so far without success.
That is the trouble with tumbles.
[playful country rockabilly music continues]