Early settlers to Illinois, in an attempt to describe the unfamiliar terrain they were encountering, referred to it as a sea of grass with pretty flowers. Today, Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area serves as testimony to the prairies that once covered nearly 60 percent of the state. Located in Grundy County, Goose Lake Prairie is approximately 50 miles southwest of Chicago and 1 mile southwest of the confluence of the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers. More than half of Goose Lake Prairie is a dedicated nature preserve, protected by law for future generations from any change to the natural environment. In addition to furnishing a look into Illinois past, the prairie provides important nesting habitat for endangered or threatened species of birds, such as the upland sandpiper and Henslows sparrow. History Goose Lake Prairie was sculpted by glaciers. The flat landscape with its clay-based soils was formed as the last vast sheets of ice melted more than 14,000 years ago. The area became part of a continuous grassland that stretched from Indiana to the Rockies. At one time, well over half of Illinois was covered with prairies, earning it the nickname of The Prairie State. Goose Lake Prairie, whose original 240 acres were purchased by the state in 1969 and which now totals 2,537 acres, is the largest remnant of prairie left in Illinois. Buffalo, wolf and prairie chicken once inhabited the area that is now Goose Lake Prairie. Mound-building groups of Native Americans lived northwest of the area in what is now Morris. Tribes of the Illini confederation intermittently inhabited the area, hunting and planting corn, squash and beans. They and other Native Americans, including the Potawatomi led by Chief Shabbona, existed with the land, making few permanent changes. Settlers, relying on the land for their livelihoods, made drastic changes to the area: they planted trees to serve as windbreaks and fences for their farms; in an effort to gain more farmland, they drained the 1,000-acre Goose Lake into non-existence; they removed the underlying clay, first to make pottery and jugs and later for fire brick; they mined coal beginning in the 1820s and in 1928 began strip mining the land.