The film's opening prologue: This is a record of land . . . of soil, rather than people -- a story of the Great Plains: the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grass lands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada . . . A high, treeless continent, without rivers, without streams . . . A country of high winds, and sun . . . and of little rain . . . By 1880 we had cleared the Indian, and with him, the buffalo, from the Great Plains, and established the last frontier . . . A half million square miles of natural range . . . This is the picturization of what we did with it.