Angry Sky

The little windmill in the corner of every Western painting did as much to settle the plains as the railroad did. Away from the rivers there was grass but no surface water, and a ranch could only run as many cattle as it could water. The self-regulating windmill, patented in 1854, turned itself into the wind and pumped groundwater all day with nobody tending it. By 1900 there were hundreds of thousands of them.

The animals in the foreground are pronghorn, the fastest land mammals in North America, able to sustain around 55 miles an hour. They are much faster than anything now alive that hunts them. Biologists think they are still running from the American cheetah, which died out ten thousand years ago.

Lightning, a windmill, pronghorn scattering. The whole high plains in one storm.