The Trouble With Tumbleweed

Bouncing across a scene, tumbleweed established the Wild West as Western. But more than just prompts, 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 the 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 tumbles rolling across the West in search of empty land to colonize are as iconic, Lee West as Westerners West earning 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. Once tucked, humble becomes 210 a tongueless. The American interior has vast swaths of land, and after a tumble terrain takes over, 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. Though a tumble drift looks like a brown snowdrift, this snow is full of thorns.

If you're thinking of a rose, think again. On tumbles, it's all thorns, brittle to break off in your skin or horse skin, where it can fester. Clearing tumbleweed isn't just painful but also infuriating. The tumbleweed drift is both bouncy and sticky. You're going to have to fork them one at a time—tedious at best, Sisyphusian at worst. You might want to use industrial equipment, but be careful—tumbleweed are shockingly flammable, dry and airy, still branch dense. They aren't min-maxed kindling; they 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, tumbles don't need two to tango. A lone tumbleweed can foot pollinate itself, so that single missed seed will grow up to be a tumble and 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 1800s, and the start of Westerners West earning, 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 grow tips on how best to do that, along with collecting seeds and samples from the new continent.

This is how all was normal until one day a letter arrived for DOA: "Hey, there's this tumble and weed giving us some trouble; can you come take a gander?" 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, wanting tumbleweed "kill on sight," aka prickly thistle, aka Callie tranches, 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 tumble seed probably came to arrive in South Dakota, on perhaps a single farm, to start the infection—which grew worse by the year.

The Department of Agriculture's efforts to stop it were way too much land, far too few people. Worse, this new land was tumble-topia and still is. See this round of rectangle states? It's the Great Plains, the budding the great American desert—an enormous stretch of land, flat, open, windy. South Dakota's neighbors had no chance, nor neighbors' 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—daunting over the mountains, west and east to establish themselves in every spared 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 that's why humble weed 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 the 1900s to 20 hundreds, still trying to rid America of the weed. But so far, without success. That is the trouble with tumbles.